But he knew about them. If not an Operative, he would have been very highly placed, indeed.
There’s way more evidence to corroborate Book as an operative than Principal Snider as a vampire. A lot of people have already mentioned the evidence such as his skillful use of firearms, the deference show to him by the Alliance upon reading his indent card, the comment from Jubal Early, his knowledge of the ways of the underground or criminal element, etc. Sure, there may be other explanations, but that shoe (ex-operative) fits the evidence.
Contrast: did we see Snider only at night or indoors? No, he is seen in broad daylight early after his character appears. Did he have a pasty complexion? No, he actually looks pretty ruddy. It was possible he was a demon, but again: no evidence. That shoe doesn’t fit.
Well, we finally got an answer. Book wasn’t an Operative. He was:
A deep (very deep) cover mole for the Browncoats who infiltrated the Alliance a decade before the war started. He fed information to the Browncoats, and personally led an entire Alliance task force into an ambush that cost them thousands of lives. When he was tossed out of the Alliance military (literally!) he joined the monastery.
Cite?
For a short period of time, ending with… er… Dr. Mathias falling all over himself.
Serenity - The Shepherd’s Tale, a comic book written by Joss and Zack Whedon that came out last week.
The Shepherd’s Tale. Now available from Amazon. 
Reviews at Amazon are mixed (one fer/one agin). Do we get Amazon click-through fees if we buy it clicking through?
So is there an explanation for why Book was still able to con the Alliance military into giving them medical care & releasing them in “Safe”? Surely they didn’t let him keep his ID when they tossed him out?
Actually, they did. When they tossed him out, they literally tossed him out.
Ah. So coincidentally his Alliance Military ID Number was 2079460347 ?
It’s a really well-written, well-drawn, and generally well-done piece. However, it doesn’t really jibe with the canon of the show. There’s no reason at all that his Alliance ID would have gotten them admittance to the medical ship, much less the instant respect and deference that he was shown. If anything, it would have been the opposite. It hadn’t been that long since the incident described in the comic, and word would have spread. Book would have been notorious.
It also doesn’t really explain how he knew so much about who the Operative was and how he worked.
I enjoyed reading it, but it left me a little cold.
I don’t think that’s really true. I count nine main characters: Mal, Zoe, Wash, Jayne, Kaylee, Simon, River, Book, and Inara. Of those, Only River and Book have mysterious pasts. Mal clearly knows what Zoe did during the war, and vice versa; I doubt Zoe has many secrets from Wash; and Mal & Zoe don’t make any fuss about talking about their pasts to the others. Book was the only one actively keeping secrets; and River was simply nuts.
I don’t think we can draw any conclusions about Book’s past from that, as it’s seen through River’s eyes, and she isn’t well. It could be that she was reading his mind, and he was thinking “I don’t care whether River is innocent; she is clearly traumatized and in need of help and love, and I will do my best to provide it for her.”
Pretty sure it wasn’t directed at River, and it sure as hell wasn’t kindly. He was snarling, “I don’t give half a hump if you’re innocent or not. So where does that put you?” It’s very much akin to Dirty Harry’s infamous little speech.
I want to say, since he was joking and smiling with Jayne while she saw that, he secretly loathes Jayne and would put a bullet through his skull given the chance, regardless of whether or not he’d actually committed any crimes. But it’s still a weird line that’s not easy to interpret.
Eh - River isn’t well, but nor do we ever see her to be wrong on a question of fact. She doesn’t always respond to her perceptions rationally, and she’s got little emotional self-control - but she reads Jayne, Inara, and Mal extremely well (that is, consistently with what we know of their characters). It would be odd if her perception only became blurry with Book.
I’d also point out that, while we see River do a number of very strange things, and her thought processes are clearly disjointed, she actually doesn’t seem to suffer from auditory or visual hallucinations. I can’t think of a single point in the series or movie where she responds to “internal stimuli” (hallucinations). She’s panicked and talking to herself when she’s taken out of cryo in the pilot - but that’s portrayed as the result of disorientation, which is totally understandable both as a result of her brain damage and the cryo itself. And the one time anyone ever flat-out asks her if she’s hearing voices or seeing thing (in the movie), she dismisses the suggestion with an expression of utter ridicule.
For that matter, not only is River not suffering from hallucinations, she isn’t even delusional. It isn’t paranoia when they’re really after you, and they really are after River. Even her attack on Jayne appears, in context, to have been the result of some sort of mind-reading - she knew he was plotting betrayal, even if only subconsciously, and reacted inappropriately.
None of this is to minimize that River is very ill - but if she managed to control her symptoms well enough to tell me that “such-and-such is a threat”, I’d take her as seriously as anyone else.
She does believe a pistol to be a stick at some point.
Isn’t it? Made of metal rather than wood, sure - but it’s sort of sticky. And that whole sequence, with River seeing the ship as a living wood - well, a running theme of the show is that Serenity is a living home, a character in its own right. River’s take isn’t wrong, just badly maladjusted for safely living on the ship.
ETA: Eh, nevermind. Fine, River’s nuttier than a sack of peanuts that’s been appointed Professor of Nuttiness at Oxford’s School of Nutty Studies - but in the scene we’re talking about, I still contend that we were meant to think “She’s seeing Inara clearly … seeing Mal clearly … seeing Jayne clearly … she’s probably seeing Book clearly.”
I’ve known more than one former intelligence officer – spies, translators, even a couple of interrogators. Funnily enough I seem to end up running in their same social circles.
None of them really seem to have any qualms about what they did before. But most of them realize that not having any qualms about what they did before is aberrant. All of them did unpleasant things for the military. Some of them went on to do unpleasant things as civilians. And at least one is actively worried that he might be psychotic (or psychopathic, one of those).
I haven’t read the comic but I’d guess that this last is part of what drives that – he despises Jayne because he recognizes what he is and he fears himself because he doesn’t know whether he’ll do anything about it or what he’ll do when he does.
She says, “It’s just an object. It’s not what you think.”
That is, the others see a threatening deadly weapon. She sees an object that doesn’t have any meaning.
Slight hijack, but wouldn’t worrying that one is a psychopath be pretty inconsistent with psychopathy? Psychopaths are either certain they’re normal or indifferent to the possibility that they aren’t.