[QUOTE=brujaja]
MacTechI find it very humorous thinking how he must have sounded in the first minute or two of pitching it to the network execs: “It’s a western. … In outer space.”
Uh-huh.
[/QUOTE]
[post=7059944]Fox Network Executives In The Screening Room[/post]
Stranger
[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
???
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?)
[/QUOTE]
In Sicily I saw a man leading a donkey that was pulling an electric cement mixer.
[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
[post=7059944]Fox Network Executives In The Screening Room[/post]
Stranger
[/QUOTE]
That was an excellent summary of Fox execs.
I think the older exec’s father must have worked for NBC in 1967-69. “Wow this show has really dedicated followers but we hate it. Lets move it to the dead zone before word of mouth makes the show popular.”
[QUOTE=Subway Prophet]
Why are all the hardware, costuming and sets from Americana circa 1866?
[/QUOTE]
They’re not. There’s a heavy Eastern influence too (especially noteable with the upper crust). Plus there’s the “modern” stuff that Jayne and Kaylee mostly wear, like camo, t-shirts and cargoes.
[QUOTE=Subway Prophet]
carnivorousplant touched on this a bit when she wondered where the 1911-style semi-autos are. Great Equalizer-style revolvers seem to be standard again.
[/quote]
Only for some people, like Mal and the like. I take it to be fashion - Mal certainly used other, much more modern guns in the pilot. I take it you haven’t encountered Vera yet? Or the laser pistols, or the non-lethal police guns?
[QUOTE=Subway Prophet]
Is the Companion’s industry well-respected or not? It seems she’s treated like royalty and given special privilege, all in recognition of her job title… so why is “whoring” such a crass insult?
[/quote]
Because she isn’t one, and plain whores do still exist. See “Heart of Gold” for more on this dynamic. They do play with the ambiguity inherent in the situation, for instance that young client in the pilot episode and his comment about short-timing. So, outwardly respected, but still…
[QUOTE=Subway Prophet]
Why is the Shepherd still on the ship? He bribed his way on with fresh strawberries, but this isn’t likely to go far with our mercenary captain. He almost seems to be part of the crew - so what’s his job? Everyone else is on the ship because they provide a valuable service (e.g. doctor) or because they pay the rent (e.g. the Companion).
[/quote]
He did say he had a little money when he first came aboard, plus we’ve seen him assisting the doctor, helping Kaylee (better than Jayne) and fighting, too. Kneecapping, to be precise. Plus, I think he also fulfils the same diplomatic role as the Companion does - some places might be more likely to let you land if there’s a Shepherd on board to do the weddings and baptisms and the like.
[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
[post=7059944]Fox Network Executives In The Screening Room[/post]
Stranger
[/QUOTE]
That’s funny, only…
[nitpick] Fox produced Buffy and owns the franchise, so it’d read better if the young exec were saying “Wheadon’s made a ton of money for us”.[/]
Anyway, I’ve never seen Joss quoted as saying this, but I bet he’s read a lot of Heinlein and especially The tale of the adopted daughter from Time enough for Love.
[QUOTE=Subway Prophet]
This dig bug me, too. Even if he was paying rent, I wouldn’t imagine Mal being comfortable with a preacher on board, if if Book knows that God ain’t welcome.
He may not be older, but it seems he’s much more experienced than his foes. Or at least more so than his foes give him credit for.
I also agree about the hate for Jayne. My first time through I thought, “ha ha, in my bunk” but after watching a few more times, Jayne is a fucking asshole.
Jayne betrays & shoots his boss in Out of Gas (“How big a room?”), sells out Simon & River on Ariel, and Mal still trusts him? Seriously, didn’t him or Zoe have another old war buddy they could trust?
Ms. Baccarin has made me cringe a few times. Stunningly beautiful, but not quite made for quick Whedon-like dialogue.
**Troy **- Jayne wasn’t a war buddy. The first time Mal meets him is shown in Out of Gas. I’d bet anything that Jayne was no Browncoat. he wouldn’t fight if he thinks he could lose. “I’ll kill a man in a fight. Or if I think he’s gonna start a fight.”
As for Mal keeping on Book and Jayne, I think if he’s had you on his ship, he feels responsible for you. Once you’re crew, you’re part of him and he’s lost enough buddies that he can’t let go of anyone who might be able to claim that tie. Even that screw-up kid in “The Message”. He still took care of him in the end.
StG
Joss Whedon wanted Jayne to be a total asshole. He wasn’t supposed to be a loveable rogue, he was supposed to be an unloveable asshole.
The only trouble is that Adam Baldwin is such a likeable guy that he constantly undercut Jayne’s complete douchebaggery.
As for why Mal doesn’t chuck Jayne out the airlock, for all Mal’s surface cynicism he’s an idealist. He can’t resist the notion of reforming Jayne. And besides, in a fight it’s good to have a stone-cold killer like Jayne at your side.
[QUOTE=StGermain]
**Troy **- Jayne wasn’t a war buddy. The first time Mal meets him is shown in Out of Gas. I’d bet anything that Jayne was no Browncoat.
[/QUOTE]
He wasn’t. In “Train Job,” when Mal starts a bar fight on Rememberance Day, Jayne doesn’t help out because, “I didn’t fight in no war.”
Watching Jaynestown at work (I’m taking a late lunch) and I’m absolutely LOVING the scene where River’s editing and FIXING Book’s bible, absolutely hillarious scene, and River’s right, the bible IS broken, needs a definite proofreading and errata-checking job, very sloppily edited book, that is
Okay, I guess River DOES have her charms in her lucid moments (her Cockney accent in Shindig was amusing too)
Wait 'til you see her in War Stories.
My take on Jayne is that Zoe and Mal could find another good hand that they could trust in a fight, and they’d probably have done that before they ran into Jayne if that was all that they needed. But, for all his asshole-ness, he is VERY good at what he does -
[spoiler]not just fighting, but tracking, (the skill that Mal just heard about when he made the offer, and that we’ve never really seen in action otherwise, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t come into play. He brings other practical values to the table - probably knows some good criminal contacts even if he wasn’t leading his old gang, and his survival pessimism does come in handy for the rest of them - witness the grenade stuff in the Big Damn Movie.
Of course, it’s arguable that all of these things can be outweighed by a penchant for treachery, but Mal obviously thinks that he can keep Jayne in line, or at worst, catch the true double-cross before it’s too late.[/spoiler]
[QUOTE=chrisk]
But, for all his asshole-ness, he is VERY good at what he does -
[/QUOTE]
Community Relations Officer.
Please give me a cite about the tracking. Which episode?
Thanks!
[QUOTE=carnivorousplant]
Community Relations Officer.
Please give me a cite about the tracking. Which episode?
Thanks!
[/QUOTE]
[spoiler]Jayne’s flashback in Out of Gas.
Jayne: “Found you easy enough, didn’t I?”
Mal: “Yeah, you did… How much they paying you, anyway?”[/spoiler]
Also, now that I come to think about it, in “Serenity” (not the movie), Jayne’s the guy who sneaks up on the ridgelines and takes out Patience’s snipers.
[QUOTE=Miller]
He wasn’t. In “Train Job,” when Mal starts a bar fight on Rememberance Day, Jayne doesn’t help out because, “I didn’t fight in no war.”
[/QUOTE]
Yet he sometimes wears a jacket with enlisted chevrons on the shoulder (The self-same Train Job was one I think but I’ve lent by disks out). He was neither Browncoat or Purplebelly during the Unification War but does have some sort of military experience. Perhaps he was in the militia of a planet that stayed neutral, or did his stint and got out before things got ugly.
Ah, that would be Zoe. Some time back there was a thread, “Who’s got your back?” where folks would input their favorite fictional character. My nominations were Jayne for marksmanship, Zoe for wet-work.
Whedon said Jayne was his go-to character for saying out loud what’s on everyone’s mind.
[QUOTE=DesertDog]
Yet he sometimes wears a jacket with enlisted chevrons on the shoulder (The self-same Train Job was one I think but I’ve lent by disks out). He was neither Browncoat or Purplebelly during the Unification War but does have some sort of military experience. Perhaps he was in the militia of a planet that stayed neutral, or did his stint and got out before things got ugly.
[/QUOTE]
Or maybe he just took it off of someone he killed because he liked the look of it. It’s the sort of thing he’d do. I disagree with Lemur866 that Jayne is supposeed to be a detestable duchbag; he’s supposed to be a douche on the surface and still kind of a sociopath even underneath, but he clearly has a certain moral code to him; he doesn’t kill or torture out of entertainment, but he’ll do it for profit. Jayne is basically a guy that apparently learned early on to take care of himself (and his mother) at the expense of everyone else, and almost completely lacks any social graces, but he still seeks some kind of approval (hence his airlock plea for Mal not to let the others know of his betrayal, his fear of River exposing him, and his procurement of apples for the crew).
As for why Mal keeps him around even over explicit objections of his crew and passengers–because he’s very, very useful at the sort of thing he does, plain and simple. He may be crude and detestable, but he’s also effective and decisive in battle, and he takes orders well, as long as they don’t conflict with his own self-interest.
Stranger
Plus he’s a great character to have as a writer, for reasons in addition to him being the character who can “say out loud what’s on everyone’s mind.” Someone who is a self declared self interested asshole who may or may not have a heart of gold, who may betray the team or who may come through for the team at any time, is an interest-grabber every time. Especially in the hands of a writer like Whedon who is prepared to go a lot further down the “does betray the team” path than most writers, thereby keeping you on the edge of your seat as to whether said asshole will or will not do so.
Jayne is like a less intellectual version of Avon, in this respect.
[QUOTE=Lemur866]
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.
[/QUOTE]
The thing is, Firefly does go out of its way to work gravity control into the show. There are entire estates floating in the sky on one planet, remember? But you’re right that it’s hard to write anti-gravity coherently into the show. If estates can hover, why do spaceships need reaction drives? You can always fanwank some answer to this (“The only kind that will fit into a spaceship can’t be used for propulsion - only for local fields”). But then you just run into more inconsistencies somewhere else.
Time travel has the same problem. The minute you allow it, you start asking, “hey, why did they go to all that work when they could have just moved back in time and stopped it from happening?”
As for the western garb - That doesn’t seem that far-fetched to me, in the sense that those clothes were extremely utilitarian, the materials were durable, etc. If you’re not going to use expensive modern materials, you might just decide you like the fashion - which was also influenced by the needs of frontier society.
Tim Minear, one of the writers for Firefly and a friend of Joss, is a big Robert Heinlein fan. This universe is very Heinleinian. Heinlein wrote one story (“Tunnel in the Sky”) about a society in which the need to colonize other worlds brings back a frontier mentality and even the clothing and styles. People in the book ride Conestoga wagons through dimensional gateways that put them on worlds they then colonize. The hero even eschews fancy laser guns in favor of a knife.
In “Time Enough for Love”, Heinlein expounds on this again - even in a highly technological age, settlers and pioneers will have a mix of old and new technology. Trucks wear out and need fuel - Horses replicate themselves and eat grass and grain. Six guns can be smithed with low technology, and ammo can be made on site, other than cartridge casings. If a laser weapon malfunctions, the spare parts are a long way away.
You take with you what you can repair yourself. With the outrageous cost of transport, better to raise your transportation at your destination. Leather is durable and can be sewn and mended with a needle and thread. Etcetera.
All of these choices would lead to a universe remarkably like the Firefly ‘verse’, where planets which trade and have a little extra income have a mix of high and old technology, the rich planets look like a supermodern earth, and the poorest planets are stuck with a non-technological existence.
[QUOTE=DesertDog]
Yet he sometimes wears a jacket with enlisted chevrons on the shoulder.
[/QUOTE]
I saw a teenager wearing a German army jacket at In’n’Out last Sunday, but I don’t think that means he was on leave from the Bundeswehr.