I have never seen an episode of “Firefly,” but finally saw “Serenity” this past weekend. I’m not (and never have been) a major sci-fi buff, but I enjoyed the movie quite a bit.
I’m not sure if this has been addressed in the TV show, but…
How smart are the Reavers supposed to be? Presumably, since they were human before the “Pax” gas was introduced into their atmosphere, they could have retained all their previous intelligence while becoming vicious, cannibalistic rapist-murderers. And presumably, a Reaver who had been a pilot of engineer in his previous life could still retain his knowledge and skills.
But it’s hard to picture… are “people” who live to rape and devour other sentient beings REALLY content to do menial work on board their spaceships? Are such monstrous brutes REALLY capable of living in peace and cooperative harmony with other such monstrous brutes?
Do they breed? If so, who’s doing the baby/child care and nurturing?
Have these questions been answered? Or am I just taking the movie waaay too seriously and giving these things far more thought than Joss Whedon has?
It was a giant plot hole and showed some (extreme) laziness in writing re the conceit that feral insaniacs would be piloting spaceships. It was about a bad as the Trek STNG episode with the mentally slow/retarded aliens that go around stealing other peoples technology to make themselves smarter.
Hey, they just wanted to make it go, cut them some slack.
But, yeah, while the Reaver origin story was interesting, they simply don’t make sense as characters. They’re rather like the rage-zombies from 28 Days Later - there wasn’t any point fretting about them spreading around the world when anyone exposed turns into a mindless savage within seconds. There’d be no way of transmitting the disease beyond the British mainland because anyone on a plane or boat would go nuts, expose everyone else, and then none of them would know how to finish the trip to Europe. They be all spew-and-growl while the plane augers in and the boat circles until it runs out of fuel.
It’s zombies, people. If’ you’re gonna attempt a serious approach to the idea, you have to recognize the limitations, i.e. piloting a spaceship isn’t something a berserker would be particularly good at.
I’m not attempting to hand-wave sloppy writing or poorly thought-out plot devices, but there’s a couple of simple explanations.
The Reavers have only been around for about 10 - 12 years. No need for a “breeding population” of Reaver Moms raising little Reaver babies. It’s not entirely inconceivable that the Reavers would have died out on their own eventually, although the series did seem to imply that new Reavers were being made out of certain victims. Whether this would have been enough to sustain (or even grow) the Reaver population is unknow.
The Reavers need not always be in full-out “Kill/Rape/Eat” mode; they may only go into such a frenzy the way a shark does when feeding.
The thing that causes me to seriously adjust my “Suspension of Disbelief” filter to “Way Fucking High” is that the Reavers still have the “Us vs. Them” filter working in their brains. That is, they don’t seem to mindlessly attack one another, only non-infected humans.
Of course, no one knows exactly how “The Pax” affected the brains of the population of Miranda, just the symptoms: catatonia and rage. Who knows what biological and social filters got screwed up by the Pax.
The episode “Bushwhacked” from the series is the only one to deal with the Reavers, and what I took from that episode was that the Reavers worked from a kind of crazed, depraved, almost diabolical intellect. Think of an amalgam of every seial killer that ever existed, hopped to the gills on crank.
IOW, it implied (to me, at least) that the Reavers did operate at a higher level than just “Kill/Rape/Eat.” As such, higher skills (piloting, engineering, other technical skills) could still be present, as well as group cooperative behavior.
Of course, in addition to being frenzied berserkers, they’re clearly obsessive-compulsive. Why else would a particular group chase Serenity all the way to the planet’s surface (right through a major space battle) and keep after them despite being gunned down and then hacked down? Geez, step back and take a breather, willya? What’s the deal, they tasked you and you must have them?
Well, they were operating without Reactor Shielding. Not sure what Reactor Shielding is. Could be a forcefield, could be some bigass lead plates that their engineer left off because he couldn’t be assed to bolt them back on when he was done reversing the polarity of the neutronium percolator. Or whatever it is that NukeEs do at work.
The Reavers work best the less explanation you give them. Their best episode arguably was the pilot ep, where we never got to see them at all, only how people reacted. ie: Jayne, who was willing to get into a suicidal gunfight over not being paid for a job, was about ready to piss himself and run at the mere suggestion that Reavers might be somewhere in the general vicinity. And that none of the smarter more balanced characters like Mal or Zoe seemed to have any problem with him having that reaction (aside from Zoe’s “You’ll scare the women.” dig at him.)
That said, I loved the whole treatment in Serenity, because it was just cool, right down to the ballet-fight between Reaver and the Rivers. Er… River and the Reavers. Really, a lot of the sci-fi-er stuff on the show (like River being turned into a telepath, or something) didn’t make sense if you leaned in to squint at it, but then again, it’s a show where smuggling cattle by spaceship is a very profitable pasttime, so just sit back, drink your Mudder’s Milk, and enjoy.
I took it in as that the Reavers were a current issue, but not something that was going to last forever. A temporary, if frightening phenomenon. They filled the role of scary monsters/ pirates / evil pretty well for the stories told, and like **Raguleader **said they worked better as a plot device than as actual characters.
I’ll bet at Alliance halloween parties at least half of the attendees showed up dressed as Reavers.
And remember what Mal and the crew did to the Serenity to get her looking like a Reaver ship. It wasn’t all cosmetic. It sounded like they had to make her only barely capable of flying. Of all the ships in the Reaver belt, very few looked spaceworthy. Most looked like empty hulls.
I’d guess that most reavers fly about as well as my four-year old on a Wii.
The idea seems to be that they are so committed to rage and violence, they can even organize themselves to create more chaos.
:sigh:
Yes, Joss Whedeon left the Reavers a bit underdeveloped. Then again, it was supposed to be more slowly developed than it was.
By the way, watch Firefly on DVD. It’s worth it. There is another plot hole regarding how much knowledge Simon has about River’s abilities, but that one is acknowledged by Whedon as a victim of cramming 2 seasons of story into one movie.
The Reavers are smart enough to set booby traps that caught the crew of Serenity off guard in one of the episodes. Reavers aren’t stupid, just because they’re crazy berserker cannibals.
Maybe they or their ships come from a race of advanced beings, and their starship technology includes AI and though-driven interfaces that let the Reavers guide a ship without needing to know the nuts and bolts.
Not in the Firefly universe. No advanced aliens (also, no AI), and the Reavers are clearly flying around in (old, beat-up, downright dangerous) human-built ships they’ve gotten ahold of somehow.
I’d say that when it comes to AI, the jury’s still out, though we’ve seen no particular evidence of them so far in the series. A few brilliant AIVAS (artificially intelligent voice address systems) on the core planets would definitely seem to fit in with the Firefly verseview as far as I’m concerned. Maybe one is in use at the Academy, for instance.
Walking and talking battledroids are less likely. (Very simple menial mechs in the houses of the rich and powerful could go either way.)
Y’know who the Reavers remind me of, a little? The denizens of the Sargasso Asteroid in The Stars My Destination. Okay, they don’t behave the same, but I guess I like the idea of tribal savages in outer space.
(Wonder if Joss Whedon ever read that? Probably not a big reader. I think the show suffered a bit from his lack of familiarity with the past 80 years of written science fiction, as well as his admitted cluelessness about actual science. Still a good show.)
No aliens at all, apparently: A carnie claims to have a genuine alien on display, but it’s just an upside-down cow fetus. The verdict’s still out on AIs, though: Mr. Universe’s girl robot might have been what we would call an AI, and would almost certainly have been smarter than any computer we have now.
On the other hand, he had the good sense to know his limitations. Ever notice how few measurements or units we hear on the show? We’re never told any distances between worlds, and only rarely travel times. We don’t know what year it is. We don’t even know what units are being used for the money, most of the time. And other details like the fuel used by the ships are also scant. All that says to me that Whedon knew the sorts of fans that he’d be drawing, and that if he gave too much information he’d screw up, and we’d catch him in a miscalculation.
