I chose Objects in Space, Out of Gas, and War Stories. I wouldn’t have chosen OIS before I watched Whedon’s commentary; that commentary has spoiled me for nearly any other DVD commentary. It’s motherfucking literate.
That’s kinda what I said the first time I saw Buffy: “My God, this was written by an English major!” 
“Do I deconstruct your segues?”
Joss has a way of taking just what you expect and turning it sideways. Almost until the end, I believed River had become one with the ship.
Agree with most of the people on the top picks. I must say it was one of the most unique Sci-Fi shows ever on TV. Who would have thought of a Space Western?! (Joss Whedon is the only answer to that question.) Really much better than 99% of the dross on TV.
If the poll had asked for just two episodes, it would have been very easy for me – “Out Of Gas” is pretty much the beginning and the end for me, and “Ariel” is right behind it. But I had to pick a third one, which took some thinking. I eventually went with the otherwise little-loved “Heart of Gold.”
I became a fan only recently. I’ve only seen each episode (and the movie) once.
I love every minute of it, from beginning to end (?)
I’m not much of a Whedon fan at all, but thought Firefly was a good show that had potential to be one of the most fun hours of TV a week, should it have continued.
But I do know that Heart of Gold was a horrendous episode, and Objects in Space was amazing TV, which was followed up with well in the movie Serenity.
I went with Objects in Space, Out of Gas, and War Stories as my top three. Ariel is jut a hair behind War Stories. After that, you can put them all in pretty much any order you want, with two exceptions: The Message goes second to last. It’s pretty good, but doesn’t feel as tight as the rest of the series. And Heart of Gold was pretty mediocre, and not just by the standards of the show. It felt like an early Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. The solar-powered whore house might have looked good on paper, but on screen, it looked like a half-finished suburban development in Orange County. The bit with the laser pistol and the hovercar bugged the heck out of me, too. I may be reading too much into the scene with the laser, but I got the impression that they were trying to show that rich guy up as a sucker for relying on a laser pistol, instead of good old-fashioned gunpowder. Which is dumb: being the one guy with a laser weapon in the middle of a gunfight ought to be a damn-near insurmountable advantage. But, the good guys need to come out on top, so one way or the other, Mal has to beat the guy with the laser pistol. Similarly, having Mal on horseback catch up with a guy in a landspeeder was just stupid. One of the major themes of the setting is that these people on the frontier have to make do with ancient technology because they’re too poor to afford high tech. This episode seems to be saying they use ancient tech because it’s better than the modern stuff.
Objects in Space, Ariel, Out of Gas. DAMN fine TV.
I never really liked Jaynestown. Beyond the joke of having Jayne as a hero, there wasn’t much there. The one thing I really, really hated was the young guy who did a superman leap in front of Jayne to take the buckshot for him. Run in front of him, push him aside, but it just looks really stupid and implausible to have someone extend their arms and fly parallel to the ground, and arrive just at the moment when the bullet was going to hit the intended target.
Heart of Gold deserves more love than it’s getting. The interplay between Mal, Nandi, and Inara is the highlight of that episode - I don’t really care if the rest of it works, that alone was worth the price of admission. Just wonderful work done by all three. Plus, Melinda Clarke is awesome. And beautiful. Beautifully awesome. Besides,
Wash (to Jayne): “Would be you get your most poetical about your pecker.”
Wash (to Kaylee): Were I unwed, I would take you in a manly fashion."
I just love the dialogue and the characters in Firefly. Adam Baldwin will NEVER have a better role than Jayne. His gruff, violent mix of simple practicality and stupidity with that subtle undercurrent of longing to be more than he was. . . Baldwin took that opportunity and ran with it. His role on *Chuck *seems cartoonish by comparison (and I like that show). For that matter, none of the actors are likely to top what they had in that show. More money, fame, success, yeah, but they’ll not top that opportunity to develop fascinating, compelling characters backed with wonderful writing.
I don’t get the huge love for Objects In Space. I find Jubal Early just intensely annoying, not quotable. I wanted him messily dead as soon as I saw him in action. I do like the bits with River wondering round the ship and the opening shot.
My votes:
Out Of Gas - *this *is the greatest episode of any TV series, ever.
Ariel - just classic caper stuff, wonderful, sudden verbal body horror “They cut into her brainThey did it over and over” and then sooo tense with the HoB guys. And the ending with Jayne in the airlock was great.
Trash - again with the capers, triple-crosses and bonus Christina Hendricks, it was either going to be this or War Stories.
Bravo OP.
Almost the exact same ranking as me, and with many of my favorite lines included. And with good thoughts about each episode.
oh, nm
No votes for “Safe”? (Well, I didn’t either.) One of the more overtly Western episodes, cattle drive and gunfight and all. “She’s our witch!”
But the good old-fashioned, mechanical firearms that Mal and crew use aren’t literally guns like ours, right? They’re just reminiscent of archaic weapons, because good design principles remain as SenorBeef says. So they have some sci-fi energy element working as well. I don’t think the Big Damn Heroes are carrying outmoded weapons because they can’t afford better. They’re spacefarers, they pull capers! They’ve got the pieces they want when it comes to fighting.
Which reminds me: I always thought Zoe’s sawed-off lever-action rifle was the coolest weapon ever (yep, even more than “Vera”).
My votes were for Out of Gas, Objects in Space, and War Stories as the top three, followed closely by Serenity, Ariel, Our Mrs. Reynolds, Trash, then all the rest. I like the comedic elements fine, but my temperament drew me more toward the darker episodes, and the top three all had some serious weight to them.
I’ll throw a little love toward the oft-maligned The Train Job. While I agree that Serenity made a much better pilot, the pre-credits scene in the bar was brilliant (“say, that coat’s a sort of brownish color”) and considering TV budget limitations, the FX, particularly the maglev train, were really well-realized. And it’s got the engine scene, one of the greatest bits of cliche-breaking in TV history.
The theatrical film, while at least giving the storyline some sort of closure, simply doesn’t work for me. Seems to rush through the plot, the characterizations seem like caricatures of the ones we came to know in the TV eps, and although I understand Wedon’s penchant for bumping off main characters, the character deaths in this one seemed gratuitous and ham-handed.
I voted before I read the thread. Reading people’s arguments for various episodes, I’ve had my mind changed at least four times. Great, great series. Objects in Space is a clear number 1 for me, but I think all the others are tied for 1a.
I wouldn’t say it means you have poor taste, but I’m pretty astounded that it’s such a clear number one for most people. I liked it a lot, but it’s borderline top three at best. The “I’ve melded with the ship” stuff didn’t work for me at all.
I always kind of figured Serenity was Whedon’s plan for Firefly: Season 2 and instead of being told over 22 episodes, it got crammed into a two hour movie.
I also think it suffers from losing most of the western elements which, to be fair, makes sense given that it’s much more alliance-focussed.
No, I’m pretty sure they are good old fashioned mechanical firearms. And that’s part of the charm of the show. Those horses out on the outer planets aren’t gee-whiz hovering space horses either, they’re just regular old horses. Because without the wealth and the technological support, old things work. All you need for a gun is some ammunition and some basic cleaning supplies. All you need for horses is a place for them to graze. Whereas the high tech stuff is available, but requires way more infrastructure and money. People on the frontier are poor and the infrastructure is poor. Maybe the some critical projects like rail between cities would have some high tech stuff, and maybe some very rich people could afford some goodies, but the common folk are poor and require rugged, low tech tools. In contrast to the inner planets, which is full of flying cars and all sorts of sci-fi. That’s the genius of it.
I mean, the 1911 pistol is 100 years old, and yet it’s still widely used and as useful as it’s ever been. In 500 years, an AK-47 will still go bang and be useful, so why not use it in the right situation?
Every time you see them actually using the weapons, they function like plain old guns. It makes sense that they’re plain old guns. The only people who seem to disagree is the sound department.
Totally ruins the aesthetic, makes no sense (exactly what are those charging sounds doing if the guns are just firing bullets?), and bugs the hell out of me.
They’re sci-fi energy bullets.
Eh. I could easily buy that traditional (read: “modern”) firearms design principles are still, by and large, dominant in the outer colonies, but it beggars belief that some basic new ideas wouldn’t have been incorporated over 500 years.
It’s like saying that the musket was a pretty solid way to blow holes in people, why doesn’t the Army still use them rather than all this newfangled automatic weapon nonsense. You can clearly see those classic design principles just fine in modern rifles. Show a 1700s minuteman an AK-47 and he’d say, “Oh yeah, that’s a gun.” But technology does move forward, and I love how Firefly shows that while also emphasizing that some things won’t change.
You don’t need a space horse because all the advantages of a horse are already there (specifically, it’s reasonably fast, replicates itself, and provides a handy source of food if you’ve run out). But I doubt that firearms manufacturers of the 'Verse are still churning out rifles and pistols circa 2011. Even if the guns look and operate roughly equivalently to those from “our” era, it makes perfect sense to me that MegaSmith & NanoWesson would have incorporated all manner of updates under the hood. And by the time of Firefly, many of these updates would seem old-hat.
IOW: I always felt that the guns used by the Serenity crew perfectly convey the idea that these are guns built centuries in the future relative to us as viewers, but which aren’t the fancy-schmancy top-of-the-line gizmos used by the Alliance military (or as Jayne might say, “Xi niao high-tech Alliance crap!”).
I tossed in a vote for Heart of Gold. That episode really feels like one of the stories Woodrow Wilson Smith might have shared with a nurse on a lonely sleepless night.