First, is there anyone else who thought the in media res story structure compounded with the (multiple) HUGE ADRENALINE SHOTS TO THE HEART were Tarantino/Pulp Fiction homages? Maybe it was just me…
Second:
There’s a reason he dosen’t have a fancy-schmancy blood stockpile, but it might be a spoiler…
WARNING: I don’t know how to do the nifty Black Spoiler Box of Doom (which dosen’t work in Opera, anyhow), so beware the impending spoilerish info!
No, Really!
Okay, so, as ya know, he’s on the run with his sister. We’ll see, whenever FOX has the good sense to play the actual pilot to the series, that he came to be on Serenity in a rather hurried fashion, and is making do with supplies that were already present in the infirmary, and not the super-fancy future-medicine stuff that he’s used to.
My only nitpick, and it’s pretty minor, would be that Serenity ought to hold more than three hours worth of air. A ship that size, I’d think it would be quite some time before any one was bothered by life support shutting down.
Anyhoo…I had my son with me on Friday, so I was a bit distracted by parenting duties while the show was on, and coudn’t pay proper attention at some points.
Would someone be a dear and fill me in on the details of Jayne’s deal for turning on his old boss and hooking up with Mal? Something about a better percentage and a nicer room?
I think much of the oxygen was consumed by the fire, and still more of the air was expelled into space when they opened the doors to expel the flame, leaving much less breathable air than might be expected in a ship of that size.
The fire effects were pretty interesting; the shot of the flames cork-screwing out the hangar doors was neat. I never thought about what it would look like for fire to get sucked into a vacuum. Any physics buffs have an idea as to whether they got this right? I suspect they may have, because I feel like it should equate somewhat with water going down a drain, which, we all know, spirals. But would the fire go clockwise or counterclockwise? Ow, my brain!
While I’m at it: My prediction for This Week:
River finally starts speaking sensible english. Simon has nursed her back to mental health, and now that she’s done speaking in metaphors, boy, that girl has no fear! She’ll tell the crew exactly what she thinks of them. Jayne gets the sharp side of her tongue (no “good boy” and belly rubbing for him, sad to say), Inara suffers a string of epithets, and Mal - well, suffice it to say, he ends up sobbing in a corner. How to curb this monster?? Stay tuned to find out.
Water goes down a drain because of gravity. Gary Powers, the U2 pilot held captive in the USSR tried to determine which hemisphere he was in by watching the direction of water in a drain.
Unless they are using the Jayne School Of Physics, the flames would not spiral like a drain.
I’m definitely not Mr. Physics, but one of the ways that artificial gravity is generated in SF is through centripedal force, right? Maybe part of the ship spins, and everyone stands against the hull. If this is the case, could that have led to the fire tornado?
Could be, I think there has to be a lot of mass involved though.
And if Serenity were rotating and from our perspective not, then the fire wouldn’t rotate either…unless it lost momentum as it left the ship…my head hurts again.
BTW, the Captain refers to “My boat”. Is Serenity smaller than 100’?
Conservation of angular momentum. If the air inside the ship has a net rotational vector (and with the fire churnking things up, you probably would), then if you caused it all to be pulled together into a small stream that can fit through some doors it would spin faster, just like a skater spinning and then pulling in his or her arms to spin rapidly.
Once it goes out the back, there is no atmosphere or gravity to stop the rotation. So you’d get hot, bright gas spinning in a vortex just like you saw, and then rapidly expanding and cooling after a short distance, just like you saw.
My guess is that they got it as close to right as you can get without actually modelling the behaviour scientifically. At the very least, it’s a good supposition of what would happen.
The man was in a different position: he was behind while she was kneeling. crickets
Actually, he was in a different position, from Mal’s point of view. He was supposed to be fixing the engines but was shagging intead. From Mal’s point of view, Kaylee was just another girl and didn’t have anything to be doing on board. It’s not like Mal can bust her (proverbial) balls for being lax in her duties on Serenity, but he can certainly get after his engineer.
By saying the black spoiler box doesn’t work, I presume you mean highlighting the text doesn’t allow you to read the black on black text. There is a way around this problem. To the left side of the screen, immediatley above the webpage being viewed (by default), there are four icons; a lock, a camera, a page, and a printer. The third one from the left (the page looking button) will override background and font types specified by the webpage. Text will become 12 point black Times New Roman and the background will be plain old white, thus the test in the spoiler box is readable at all times, not only when you highlight it.
I like how they mix Chinese and English in the dialogue.
And yes, parts break and so forth. It looks like that big spinning thing was an interstellar drive, so no way to cannibalize it from the shuttles (I assume the shuttles do not have interstellar capability). This part is believable.
I have trouble believing that the pirates who shot Mal would not have tried harder to get his valuable ship. I can think of several ways for the pirates to safely reboard if all they need to get past is a single bleeding human on a cripped, weaponless ship without life support stranded in lonely part of space.
Although I don’t think it really contradicts The Controvert’s point, I didn’t really get the impression that the people with the part were professional full-time pirates, so much as they were another hardscrabble crew like the crew of Serenity, only less ethical. We’ve seen Serenity’s crew be involved in some pretty blatantly illegal things, and not just cutting corners on paying tariffs on cargo, either–outright larceny and robbing a train, for example. But they clearly are trying to hang on to some sort of standard of ethics. If they fell a little further, though, they might be pulling stuff like outright piracy of another ship in distress. Anyway, although it’s still a bit of a stretch, if the other crew weren’t actually professional pirates, they might have been squeamish enough about the whole thing to begin with that running into resistance convinced them to just cut their losses and salve their consciences and let the poor bastard have his damned part. If the other guys had been real pros, I suspect they wouldn’t have let Mal stop them that easily.
Judging from the little I’ve seen of Serenity’s exterior (I’ve only seen 2 eps because of scheduling conflicts) it looks like the shuttles have their own docking bays/entrances.
Which means that yes, the crew with the murderous captain could have forced their way inside another route had their really wanted to.
