Huh. Seems I was wrong about the unlikeliness of an enlisted officer becoming comissioned. I still believe it was an error, though.
Thanks, cplant; Sam.
“His…freaking ship” is a dilapidated barge crewed by a bunch of misfits that have no relation to his life as a soldier and, except for Zoe, weren’t even in the war. What’s your point?
And you can believe I’m arguing for whatever reasons you may wish but this isn’t Serenity and you aren’t River: ESP doesn’t work in the real world.
Oh, I think it was an error too. Either that, or the ‘Captain’ bit referred to his being captain of Serenity. In fact, doesn’t he have a captain’s license? I believe he’s had to show it in the past.
More likely, when the screen display was added in post-production, the Fx guy who made it just screwed up.
Saw the movie. It rocked, pretty much.
I’m sad and upset about Book and Wash, though Book doesn’t surprise me at all. His future character arc was entirely visible even in the Firefly series: he was the man of belief who filled the hole in Cap’n Mal’s life, and that was his strength. Had the series gone on, filling that role of being a rock of moral belief was Book’s ongoing job. In the movie, he filled his role and then, with nothing much else to do (in this movie, at least) Joss had him offed.
Obi-Wan Kenobi syndrome, this is. The mentor has no part in the final space battle, so the writer goes for broke, Obi-Wan imparts words of wisdom and dies. And then, if he’s lucky enough to write the sequel, the writer says, “Jesus! What’d I do that for?”
Wash was pretty much the same thing, but he upset me a lot more. I can think of a dozen good reasons why Zoe needed her husband to die in order to create a more interesting character journey for her. Zoe had no arc: torn between duty and love, acting the stern warrior, never changing. Wonder Woman cajun-style. The death of her husband gives her another note to play (should there be a sequel) and possibly introduces some character tension: Zoe would very likely turn to somebody in comfort, and it may be Mal (which creates an interesting triangle possibility with Inara) because it’s not likely to be Simon or Jayne. Good, good reasons for her character to develop.
I just can’t think of any good reasons why it should’ve been Wash that died to make her arc happen, that’s all.
Okay, Wash didn’t have anywhere else to go, either. There was no foreseeable journey for him, though he did fill a critical role of non-violence and irreverence and he was … civilized and intelligent and caring in the way no other character was. His physical role on the ship as pilot was redundant in a way, because having Wash as the pilot sort of marginalizes the Captain’s own in-combat contributions, but his emotional role can’t be filled by anybody else.
For the sake of Zoe’s development, I can see it. I think losing Wash is too high a price to pay to see her develop further.
Except do you remember, in “Out of Gas,” where Zoe’s in the sickbay, unconscious and clinging to life? Mal grabs Wash and slams him up against the bulkhead, to get him away from Zoe’s side and back to work.
The Mal we see at times in the movie isn’t any harder on his crew than that.
Heh, I had an almost identical reaction. Not that I think Joss should have seriously done this, but you can almost see the Reavers saying to themselves “Hallelujah! We have found our Great Goddess!” Then again, being Reavers, perhaps their idea of worship is to launch human wave attacks so that they can all die at Her hands in fitting sacrifice.
At the very least I do think it was the end of Mal’s war (and Zoe’s). In the scene that was aired in the true pilot, they’re told there will be no air support, and that they’re to “lay down arms”. Then we see the Alliance fleet coming in. In the deleted scene(s) from the DVD set, it’s made clear that the only things that happened to Mal after that was that he sat there on the rock for awhile longer watching even more of his men die until the Alliance finally got around to deigning to accept their surrender. After Serenity Valley I think the only thing left of Mal and Zoe’s military careers was maybe a spell in a POW camp.
I don’t see it as low at all. We’re not talking about an empire - they’re not going around taking planets. They’re just raiders that kill in such a way as to warrant widespread rumors and fear. They don’t need to be taking out ships left and right for the rumors/fear to spread like that, people only need to hear a story or two before they become real boogeymen.
So, really, 300 of them would’ve been more than enough.
It was among the stuff they stole in Ariel. When Simon is going through his plan, he specifically pulls out a jar of that chemical and calls it a common immuno-booster.
Big implausibility that I’m surprised no one has mentioned:
30 Million people die on a planet and no one even knows about it? These people would’ve had families, friends, business contacts… there would’ve been no way to cover up their deaths without some sort of explanation. Of course, you could say that the terraforming system went whacko and poisoned them all, but people would remember a tragedy on that scale. No one would be saying “Miranda, huh?”
Maybe she is.
And maybe there’s something they’re still not telling us about Reavers…
Nah. ; )
Well, once they did break through the SEP field surrounding the planet and remembered it, they did mention “something about a terraforming failure”. Though when they said it, I figured they thought maybe the terraforming plants started pumping out deadly poisonous Volcanifumes or something, rather than that Pax stuff.
It did strike me as weird that the planet would be so universally almost-forgotten, along with the fact that a planet “on the edge of space” (where the Reavers are generally accepted to come from) was apparantly so heavily developed.
Beef, while I agree that people would remember Miranda, as near as I can tell, they did remember it. Thing is, it happened just before a war, and the universe is extremely dangerous, and the Alliance’s cover story made sense, and the Reavers effectively prevented anyone from going to check up on Miranda. This may just be a case where none of our characters had family on Miranda, so they didn’t talk about it much.
On the other hand, Simon’s comment, “Am I talking to Miranda now?” was pretty stupid in that context.
They could’ve fixed it by having Miranda be a code-name for the planet, or even for the pacification program, and giving the planet a different common name.
Daniel
That’s not quite the case. When Miranda was mentioned, Mal knew about it. He said something like, “Miranda’s some sort of dead world. Terraforming didn’t hold or some such.” So people did know about it, and vaguely knew it was a dead planet.
And 30 million is a lot of people, but in a system with 70 populated worlds, maybe not so much.
Heck, the Boxing Day quake/tsunami may have killed 50,000 or more, but thirty years from now, who aside from those directly affected will remember the key details?
In any case, the Miranda disaster not being common knowledge doesn’t undermine the movie excessively.
Not really. It’s about context. Simon had no reason to connect Miranda with a planet. As far as he knew, Miranda was a person. Besides, I’d be willing to sacrifice any number of plot holes in order to get River’s arched eyebrow response to that question! 
Good points both. River’s expression was probably my favorite line in the movie, and shows one of my favorite things about Joss.
He’s usually great, but every now and then, he really falls into some cliche, or elicits some terrible acting from one of his cast, and I’m jerked out of the story to think, “Okay, man, you blew it there.” And EVERY SINGLE TIME he comes right back with a character mocking me for taking the cliche seriously. It’s awesome.
Daniel
When I heard rumors of some of the crew dying, I assumed that River would be among them. Because, assuming she got sane, she was simply far, far too strong a character for the comfort of writers. Super-genius IQ, that little eyes-closed shooting trick, the precognition/esp/whatever it is…
How do you make all that fit in with future plots?
How does Mal retain an edge that makes him remain the captain, if he’s always having to ask her if she’s got a better plan, or has a bad feeling or whatever? And one part of IQ is pure processing speed, you figure things out faster. So there there are in the middle of one of those reversals, like a betrayal: River should logically figure it out first, and be the first to know what to do to counteract it, and start doing it – taking time to explain it all to the Mal or the others first might be deadly, but OTOH, having a one othe crew preempt the Captain’s decision-maker status is a bad, bad thing.
Even if they restrain her a bit, logically she should edge into Zoe’s position of chief advisor/backup to Mal.
And now she has surpasses Jayne, too. Sure, he has simple physical strength on her (I assume) but she’s proved to be a hundred times his match at hand-to-hand combat AND is a scarily accurate shooter. What’s left for Jayne to contribute, except humping containers in the cargo hold?
And at the end it’s implied that she is going to learn piloting at super-fast speed. So much for Wash’s role, if he hadn’t died.
Heck, let her develop knowledge of engines at the same speed and she can replace the whole damn crew by her lonesome.
Really, the only reason I can see that JW let her live was that he believes there WON’T be any more Firefly. 
I don’t think that will be a problem. A simple fix would be to have River’s conditioning fade with time. A bit of exposition at the start of Serenity 2, with Simon explaining to Jayne that River’s abilities are fading back to near-normal so he doesn’t have to be afraid of her anymore. Let her keep what she learned during her programmed-time, but have the rest slowly revert to human-level. It would make a good running gag to have Jayne flinching whenever she does something near him, just out of reflex.
River as pilot is a good match. Even better is Zoe turning to Inara for comfort. Now that would be a triangle!
But if her Powers Have Faded? 
After the movie, I’m even more happy that Firefly died before River, the Musical or worse, River the Reaver Slayer
Powers may fade, but Knowledge is Forever.
*Once More, With River * would have been the best episode ever!
My point is that even a guy running a little fishing trawler in the Mississippi Gulf Coast is still a “Captain” even if he was a Private back when he was in the Army.
-Joe, the rearingist Admiral
I think they were trying to help the Reavers make the Mothership Connection.
Maybe they could have blamed it on Reavers?
Basically, make it the ‘First Big Reaver Attack’. You get to make a new big evil Boogeyman. Their first thing ever is an atrocity of 30 Million people.
“My God, if they can take out a big world of 30 Million…we need to increase defense spending, save the Core, and forget those Rim people! Aaaaah!”
-Joe