I made an actual real effort to watch it during the original airing. The first airing, Train Job, was mildly interesting in isolation but my friends and I felt it “gimmicky”, as a sci-fi “western”.
I recall that a few more episodes I missed because they were preempted by some other broadcast. Then I missed a time slot reschedule, and then only caught another episode before it was canceled since I wasn’t going to rearrange my Friday nights just to catch a “maybe” show. Fox couldn’t have made it more difficult to watch, it was straight up assassination of a promising show.
It wasn’t until getting a Tivo later, when it captured a marathon rebroadcast, that I watched it and fell in love.
The one thing that bothered me about Mal’s duel is how he fought it. If I were him, I would have thrown my sword in Wing’s face right at the start and then hit him with a flying tackle. A rapier is useless at grappling range, and there’s no way Wing could have won a down-and-dirty tussle against the Captain.
Nice strategy if it was really just Mal and Wing, but remember that they each had seconds, and there was a crowd of Persephone dueling society people watching. I have no idea if there were supposed to be ‘rules’ that Mal had to follow about proper dueling practice or he’d have been stopped, but it’s something to consider.
I’m thinking it was more of a “I can beat this guy at his own game,” thing, and that Mal’s own ego wouldn’t allow him to ‘cheat’ until it finally came down to a more brutal, life-or-death moment. Then he subconsciously realized that winning his way was better than dying according to ‘rules’ he very rarely listened to anyway.
I started watching the show the first airing after ‘The Train Job’, when my friend Rob showed me the ‘Give Niska his money… Darn.’ moment, which, of course, made me fall completely in love with the show.
My only regret over the lack-of-episodes is the lack of lore. I heard so many people after the movie came out say that Book ‘had’ to be a former Operative. I found that amazingly short-sighted. Sure, he might have been one, but (for instance) we say the supernatural guy is a vampire when all we’ve been shown is vampires, if that makes sense? I’d like to think Book could’ve been a lot of things we never got to see.
(As an irony: A week before Serenity opened, a friend of mine was the celeb liason at a sci-fi convention that many of the cast was at. He said he spent some time with Ron Glass and asked him if he’d be in a sequel if it was done. Ron, apparently, gave him a -very- dirty look. :smack: )
Alan Tudyk said at Dracon*Con last year that Joss has promised him that if they ever do a sequel, he’ll be in it. Maybe Ron finally worked out a similar deal.
My wife loves Buffy and Dollhouse and liked Angel. So I asked her if she had ever watched Firefly, no “What’s Firefly?” So I told her and her eyes got all crazy like. Then I told her I had it on DVD and she said “Then why aren’t we watching it RIGHT NOW!” So we watched the whle series in about four days of after work viewing. She LOVED it.
I cannot remember the names of the episodes, but there were a fes that really stand out for me:
Sneaking River into the hospital
The Captain trying to repair the ship alone
The Captian and the pilot get tortured