So no brownies, then?
Ethics, schmethics. Niska has made it extremely clear that he strongly believes in following through on promises. His main muscle has made it crystal that he will be coming back to carry out Niska’s promise regarding Mal’s failure to hold up his end of the bargain. The guy is Niska’s best henchman; ergo if someone is coming after them anyway, might as well be Niska’s second best henchman.
H’m. Which reminds me, did they ever show what happened to the cooperative henchman? I suspect that if he went back to Niska, he ended up wishing he’d been kicked into an engine rather than going through what Niska would have done to him.
Engine…kick…vengeful…what?
Oh, never mind. You know where to find me.
Wife saw Sean Maher’s, as she describes it, “lack of nervous energy” right off and wanted to tell Kaylee she was barking up the wrong tree.
ETA: I haven’t asked her assessment of Nathan Fillion.
Firefly answer: Full well I do.
Those limits, I’m assuming, are somewhere beyond “shooting a cop in the face because he’s pointing a gun at a stowaway, let alone a member of his crew.”
Got it.
I don’t care, I just want some magic brownies that don’t make me need to tweak my insulin 
Well, on the one hand Niszka was demonstrably not impressed, not enough to refrain from capturing and torturing Mal when he had a chance to. So ventilating the knife guy didn’t carry the point across loud 'nuff.
On the other hand, note that it only happened after Mal & Co. pretty much stumbled right on top of Niszka’s evil overlord lair - but nobody actively came looking for them, no bounty hunters or the like. Well, not from Niszka anyway. Could be chunking that one ornery dude saved the lives of any amounts of hopefuls would have gotten a taste of Vera otherwise. Not that Mal particularly cares about that, I don’t think, but still.
Oh, and **silenus **? No engine grease all over her face. That’s a deal breaker :).
Well, it’s hard to set up a multiseason story arc where they keep coming up against Niska’s displeasure, when your series only lasts half a season.
I’d settle for some magical wish-granting planks.
Well, since the first henchman didn’t do anything but make threats, I’m guessing Niska wouldn’t want an underling presuming to decide on the specifics of the retribution for the boss. And Niska would want the money and the information. And refusing to take the money hadn’t worked too well. Aaaand, Niska’s only going to hear what #2 tells him. I think #2 is at risk just working for Niska, but isn’t at greater risk for delivering the cash.
I’ll be in my bunk, masturbating like a mofo.
You’re right. But it does get mentioned before OoG.
Yep. Kaylee complains about the compression coil in “The Train Job”.
I think one of the key points of the Serenity movie is that we see Mal increasingly in a really bad place - he kills two people (one guy before he gets taken by the reavers after the payroll robbery, and I think one wounded guy later in the film).
I can’t imagine the Mal of the TV series doing that.
By wounded guy, you mean the survivor of the Alliance ship that just massacred Book and everyone else at Haven and was probably planning to kill Mal and his crew if able, right?
… I’ll be under the engine’s big spinny thing.
We have no reason to think that Mal is a Kryptonian, or even Captain Hammer. Killing the fellow who had been captured by the Reavers was a genuinely merciful act. Not killing – to keep the stain of his blood of his hands – would have been not merely foolish but actively cowardly.