River is far from being my favorite character, but I’m impressed by what Summer Glau did with the part. My husband and I are both amused by her delivery of “I didn’t get you anything.”
I’ve watch the next 4 episodes of Firefly, they were mostly good, but I was left with a strong sense of WTF with the ridiculously complicated ship-stealing scheme of “Our Mrs. Reynolds”.
“If you take sexual advantage of her, you’re going to burn in a very special level of Hell. A level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater.”
Was a great line and delivered in a great way, but the episode was weak overall. I guess I give this episode a lot of credit for the great humor instead of anything resembling a plot. Jayne and his rain stick and then offering to trade “Vera” for Saffron was great.
Jaynestown was great, Adam Baldwin is the comic genius of this show.
So far River has proved much less annoying. Mal keeps making me think that Andy Travis has become a Space Rogue. I love Kaylee’s love of her ship, he engines and her mechanisms. She is a rarity in TV and movies, an engineer that acts like an engineer. I like her. Morena Baccarin is doing a good job in a role that could easily be annoying or just campy. I don’t dislike her character at all, and yet her character is similar to the hopelessly Queen of Sci-Fi angst, Counselor Deanna Troi of Next Gen.
Jim
No arguments there. I think Book is one of my favorite characters, and certainly one of the best representations of a religious person in SF to have shown up for ages.
I think that Our Mrs. Reynolds is one of the weaker episodes. I also have a question about one of the plot points with it: Do firearms based upon a sealed cartridge actually require an atmosphere to work in? The way it would appear to me, I’d have to assume that the necessities for combustion are already in the cartridge. Since the cartridge works by burning the powder in it, to provide a gas at such a high pressure and so quickly to force the bullet to actually move, I just don’t see where there’s time in the milliseconds between the primer being set off and when the bullet leaves the cartridge for more atmosphere to enter the cartridge to support combustion. Similarly, the way I understand it, the powder in the cartridge is all burned by the time that the bullet leaves the cartridge.
I know that I’ve seen movies where guns have been fired underwater, but I’d always assumed that was Hollywood - not because I doubted whether the cartridge would work, but because it would seem to me to be a good way to blow up the barrel of one’s gun by trying to fire it while the barrel is filled with an incompressible fluid.
Agreed. The scene wouldn’t work at all, if the audience weren’t already convinced that Jayne was an order of fries short of a Happy Meal, and someone who solves problems with violence first. (Maybe even second, too. Thinking is sure way down on the list.)
Again, agreed. This was actually the first episode of the show that I saw, and it still stands up for me even after having seen the whole series and gotten to know the characters better.
I’m really glad to hear it. Considering where you started with her that seems to me to be a big step up. BTW, did you like her scene with Badger in Shindig?
Damn, that reference took me much longer to get than it should have.
I can neither confirm, nor deny, having worked with Kaylee’s male counterpart in my Navy days. 
That was a good scene, but she will still channeling Lady Macbeth in her oration.
Snerk! I mentioned this observation to a friend last night and he laughed going, that’s not Andy, but I love Venus as Book. I looked at him to see if he was serious and it turned out he was. I had to explain that Book was Ron Glass, famous for being Harris on Barney Miller.
I think I was that male counterpart in my Navy days. Of course I was only an electrician, but several other EMs thought I was a little odd about my generators and switchgear. I learned the steam cycle and controls from the MMs & BTs in MMR3 and heating and cooling and diesels from the ENs.
Jim
Perhaps you were. I know I told more than one person to get out of “my engineroom” after they’d screwed things up before watch turn-over. (Yes, I could have made him keep the sack until he got things straightened up, but usually by that time I wasn’t eager to let him see what new errors he could introduce to the mix.)
They got burned a bit on that one. They were striving for as much accuracy as possible when they were making the show, and had all sorts of technical advisors looking at their scripts for them. One of their advisors told them that a gun wouldn’t fire in a vacuum, so they rewrote the script to add that detail in, trying to make it more realistic. Unfortunetly, their expert was totally wrong on that detail.
The writers consulted the expert and got misinformed, which they’ve openly acknowledged.
Or what **Miller ** said. Got a call and took to long to hit reply.
Miller, and Aesiron, thanks for explaining what happened.
“Mal keeps making me think that Andy Travis has become a Space Rogue”
Damn, that made me laugh.
The worst thing about watching Firefly is you’re only seeing a small piece of it (even with the movie). Whedon did not write the show as a thirteen part mini-series. You’re seeing a bunch of characters and situations at the very beginning of a story that was probably intended to be told over several years. It’s most noticable with Book and River but all of the characters in the series are unfinished works in progress.
I borrowed the rest of the series and the movie from a friend last night. Turns out he loves the show and has it all. I guess I’ll be done by the end of the week.
Jim
Of course, the misinformation about the gun-in-outer-space thing led to a good enough line for it to redeem me: “See, Vera, dress yourself up. and you get taken out somewhere fun.”
And it struck me as in character that the crew might get that detail wrong. They have a lot of experience with guns, and some experience with going out into deep space in vacuum, but maybe the combination has never come up. They couldn’t just go onto the cortex and research it on the Verse Dope, because Saffron had fried their systems so that they couldn’t call for help. And everything was relying on that one shot, so they resort to a ridiculous precaution to make sure it would fire.
And, just to trot out my truly favorite line from Our Mrs Reynolds: “Well, my days of underestimating you have certainly come to a middle.” 
See, that whole scene never gave me problems: I suspected that 21st century guns should have no trouble firing in a vacuum, but Vera was so heavily tricked out and customized that when Jayne said “She needs air to fire,” I interpreted that to mean “The way this specific gun is configured, you need air for it to function properly”. We already know that there are projectile weapons, laser guns, sonic guns, and a whole host of other scifi and pseudo-western weapons, so I didn’t find it hard to believe that one class of weapon happened to need air to work.
Years of terrible shows have honed my suspension of disbelief to a fine edge though, so I have little trouble believing most things. 
That’s the thing - even though I was the one to bring up the mistake, it didn’t feel like a speedbump at the time I was watching it. It was something I considered after I’d seen the episode, not during it. And even as a mistake, it was played well enough that I have no trouble fovgiving it.
I was asking in the mode of, ‘Here’s something I saw, or read, recently, that I’ve got questions about. Anyone here know the Dope on this phenomenon?’
And, as usual, the Dope came through. Again.
Yeah, I’m not sure I believe that particular fanwank. The gun looks like and seems to function like a fairly traditional firearm, and the description Jayne gave of ‘her’ when offering her to Mal backs that up IIRC. Comparable weapons at this point in time could fire in a vacuum, despite the fact that there is almost no chance that functionality will be required.
Given that Vera came from a society where space travel is relatively common, and in the absence of any particular add-on that would sensibly require oxygen, I don’t buy it.
One possible variation on that, though - the Alliance might insist on ‘crippleware’ mods to heavy firearms simply to keep them from easily being converted into spaceship weapons, since there are a lot of ‘mal-contents’ who might want to pepper Alliance cruisers with bullets and hope that one of them causes a hull breach.
The easiest fanwank about the gun is simply that Vera is a very sophisticated long-range weapon, designed to be used on a planet, and therefore has various sensors that detect air pressure, humidity, and other environmental factors that affect a bullet’s trajectory, and auto-corrects for them. Put it in a vacuum, and the electronics stop working. Or read such crazy values that it becomes inaccurate.
Another fanwank I’ve heard previously is that all guns in the Firefly 'verse might fire caseless ammunition, which might require an oxygenated environment. Not sure if that is even true though.
Which doesn’t change the question of why old revolvers and lever-action rifles are suddenly modified to fire caseless rounds, and why caseless rounds were selected in a world where fighting in vacuum might take place, but whatever.
Caseless rounds still have their own oxidizer, so it’s not true. All bullet propellants and explosives have their own oxidizers, because you can’t extract the necessary oxygen from the air fast enough for an explosion.
Not to start an argument, but you also [post=9246165]seemed to think Call of Duty is fine for a 6 yr old[/post].
Really not meaning to pick on you specifically but I am little fascinated at the reasoned thinking in this thread on the subject but the same idea was almost laughed off in the video game thread.
Hmm, okay one last thought, as long as someone knowledgeable about firearms is here. On a recent Mythbusters, I saw the crew fire a Glock 9mm underwater–but they only got one shot off because the mechanism couldn’t cycle to chamber a new round. Apparently this is true of semiautomatic weapons that use escaping gases to power the bolt.
In vacuum, might you see a similar phenomenon? Could gases escape more rapidly in vacuum, resulting in insufficient force to cycle the bolt? Might Vera take one shot and jam?
I can’t remember if he just needed to make the one shot or if he had to hit two of the emitters… looks like its time for another viewing 