Like the others, I found these ‘faults’ to be among the best features of the series, and far more realistic than other science fiction shows.
First, FTL is fantasy. I know it’s a necessary science fiction convention to make plots work, but that doesn’t change the fact that everything we know about the universe today tells us it’s impossible. So I much prefer a ‘universe’ which is actually in one large planetary system so you can dispense with FTL.
How did they get to that system initially? I would assume the equivalent of generation ships. The Firefly universe has technology that allow for constant-acceleration drives, which makes transit distances between planets a matter of days and weeks instead of months. Put that drive on an interseteller ship, and you would be able to achieve significant fractions of the speed of light. If we assume that the Firely solar system was only a handful of light-years away from Earth, then the travel time might be a couple of decades, with relativistic effects causing the passengers to see it as a passage of maybe months to a couple of years.
As for using regular guns, that also makes sense to me. Handguns are a very efficient way to project energy at other things. Why change? In any event, the Firefly universe has lasers, but the few times they’ve been shown they’ve proven to be of very limited ability and with relatively few shots before the charge runs out. And so expensive only the wealthiest own them.
The backstory for the series is that these are all people that came from “Earth-That-Was” – when mankind ran out of room and resources in our home system, one or many multi-generation ships came to this new system, terraformed planets, and settled in.
It makes perfect sense to see things as they might have looked in the Old West, because the people on the outer planets are in the same position as the guys who braved the Oregon trail: there are only a limited number of resources that can be put on ships. Inner planets – those settled the longest – have had time to develop their own mining and manufacturing resources, and can zip around in hovercars. On the outer planets, there simply aren’t enough hovercars, nor fuel, to make them practical for everyone to have.
Horses find their fuel on the ground and can make more horses relatively easily.
So the outer (more newly settled, anyway) planets and moons will have odd mixes of technology and primitive methods of doing things.
Well, that explains his motives for staying on the ship, but doesn’t explain why the ever-so-pragmatic Captain doesn’t abandon him on the Saloon Planet for being a freeloader. I would have expected him to have picked up a token job by the third episode. Hell, just one scene with him in the kitchen wearing an apron, or in the engine room wearing a grease-covered hat and holding an inanimate carbon rod in place for Kaylee, would have sufficed.
River has this problem too, come to think of it. The only thing keeping her on the ship is her brother’s very marketable skill with the band-aids.
Yes, generation ships were used to get to The System. We are not told whether they went fast enough to compress time. But The System (I don’t know the official fannish name–I’m winging it here) had been located from Earth & it looked like a worthwhile gamble.
So, no FTL–but had Artificial Gravity been mastered? A couple of generations in free fall would have produced people who could not survive on a planet. Gravity manipulation would also explain why all the terraformed worlds & moons seem to have Earth-normal gravity. And why people weren’t floating around in Serenity on Out of Gas–the gravity & emergency lighting stayed on. (Not to mention that floating around in the ship would have been expensive to film. And floating around in the dead black of space would have been impossible to film!)
There had been no contact with Earth since the original settlers left. Had things just kept getting worse? Had the planet blown up entirely? Or had things somehow gotten better? Nobody knew. “Earth That Was” simply referred to the Earth that had been left behind.
Lack of alien life? In the whole galaxy, there might well be some sort of life–but distances between promising worlds were huge. And alien life might actually be “alien”–not just humanoids with weird foreheads. Philosophically interesting, but hardly a source for snappy dialog & character development. Besides, Whedon had already “done” weird foreheads.
How had the generations passed their time on the trip from Earth? Working to keep the ships going, raising some food to supplement the fake stuff. Educating the children, keeping culture alive. I’m sure all the artistic works of mankind could be enjoyed by the travellers. But–since “wide open spaces” were especially attractive to those cooped up inside ships–Westerns were quite popular!
Even more likely, they just froze the passengers for the journey, like Simon froze River when he smuggled her onto Serenity.
They don’t make it explicit, but I think he was paying for his room and board the entire time. The strawberries aren’t what got him on board. Mal took on passengers in the first place because he didn’t have enough money to buy fuel for his ship, and while strawberries are nice, they don’t power a spaceship. I’m pretty sure he was also forking over some dough on a regular basis, same as Inara. As you pointed out, River gets a free ride because Simon’s medical skills are so useful, but also, because sheltering her is a way for Mal to put his thumb in the Alliance’s eye.
The science and technology in Firefly is utter nonsense. (The economics don’t make a lot of sense, either; flying a cargo of live cattles between moons?) But that’s okay, because the writers never take the science seriously; they never resort to technobabble solutions to resolve a plot complication, unlike certain other franchises. When the characters get into trouble, it is their wits–not their ability to come up with a new magic particle that will allow them to go back through time or phase through solid matter–that are exercised, and often imperfectly. The characters themselves live on the margins of a mega-system spanning civilization; they can’t call Starfleet for backup, and don’t generally have fancy indistinguishable-from-magic gizmos or rely on gimmicky alien characters with unlikely capabilities to save the day. The writers, in fact, kind of mock the (pseudo-)science that is too often used as a deus ex machina plot resolution in most space opera. The technology for them is utterly mundane:
WASH: Psychic, though? That sounds like something out of science fiction.
ZOE: We live in a space ship, dear.
WASH: So?
It’s lines like that that make the show so watchable, and distinguish it from less interesting, formulamatic space opera.
Yeah, I get the impression that the terraforming process wasn’t gentle on the planets’ ecologies, and probably wiped out a lot of alien life to make the worlds habitable by human standards.
Further fanwankery here, and I’ve only seen the two episodes that deal with Reavers (I just finished episode 7 IIRC)… but if there was alien life that was ecologically compatible with humans, it would likely be different enough biologically to be highly toxic and/or psycotropic. The Reavers’ community seems to suffer a madness that is highly contaigous, almost as though violent physical contact transmits a strange parasitic disease to the survivors. I’m thinking a mind-altering bug something like toxoplasma, but with a different transmission vector. Not sure if this is how the story will go with the Reavers, though…
ETA: Why, yes, in fact I do enjoy mindless technobabble. Why do you ask?
Gravity is the bane of science fiction TV shows. The trouble is, showing zero gravity is right out. It can’t happen for budgetary reasons except for the occasional wire-fu ETA. So your spaceship always has to have 9.8m/sec^2, same as all your asteroids, all your moons, all your planets. And occasionally throwing in zero-g is worse, because all that does is highlight how often you DON’T show zero-g or low-g.
So since it’s impossible to show realistic gravity or lack therof, you just ignore it. You could claim that this is because the ship has artificial gravity, but then you get situations where the ship loses power, yet somehow the artificial gravity still works. And then you’ve got to explain how this antigravity works, and why you can’t use antigravity to solve hundreds of engineering problems.
Better to just ignore the issue. Gravity just always works onboard ship, and there’s no fictional reason given for why, because the real reason is that the show is shot on Earth. Providing an explanation just highlights how flimsy the explanation is.
They find out how useful he is in the fifth episode so it’s a good thing Mal didn’t kick him out by the third. And River is very efficient, to the point of being spooky, in regards to dealing with intruders when her training kicks in.
Not one more sip of that single-malt you got at the Dopefest until you apologize for this…this…slander! You, sirrah, have just insulted the woman I love! My seconds will be calling.
She’s a beautiful woman, to be sure, but…not a great actress, and unfortunately cast into a part that requires a lot of nuance and breadth to avoid being a cliche.
I still haven’t opened that Scotch, either. I keep waiting for a special opportunity that would justify it (i.e. I don’t want to guzzle it down as I fall asleep watching The Third Man). But when I do, I’ll be sure to drop a note of thanks.
He presumably pays his way beyond fruits, but I’m not sure how. I think at some point he mentions that the crew asked for Book to stay on and keep their ship more civilized; this is obviously a flimsy excuse for letting Book stay because Mal wants to keep him on (if he didn’t want Book on board, Book would not be on board), but we don’t necessarily ever learn Mal’s motivations. Later on Mal learns things about Book that probably drive Mal’s opinion even further towards “keep him around”.
Remember that the ship’s captain was an infantry sergeant and dealt with the very young and the very foolish for the better part of a war. So perhaps Mal feels older… or it could also be Mal’s way of overcompensating for what he perceives as a weakness – he does that a lot. Joss would re-write any dialogue that didn’t fit a character in a heartbeat; it’s one of the things he is really insane about.
Joss wrote it, and nobody told him “it’s got to go.” In this way (unfortunately like G. Lucas) some of Joss Whedon’s worst ideas get precedence over his crew’s good sense. Not many though.
I would have expected him to have picked up a token job by the third episode. Hell, just one scene with him in the kitchen wearing an apron, or in the engine room wearing a grease-covered hat and holding an inanimate carbon rod in place for Kaylee, would have sufficed.
