Serenity (Open spoilers a plenty! You've been warned!))

Cafe Society
81

Oh! I had one of those too.

OK, I don’t recall the specific wording from the pilot so I can’t really comment on that aspect, but for the rest I think your critique is wrong. To break out River, Simon spent a great chunk of his personal fortune developing the contacts he needed to get her out. Presumably this took a period of months, during which time he was able to formulate his plan. Recall from “Ariel” that with even a short time to plan, Simon can come up with a highly organized scheme to take down an Alliance hospital and get River in the imager. Surely with even more time there’s no doubt he could have put together his plan for extracting River. As for his being a “cunning master of disguise,” in “Jaynestown” he had zero time to prepare and was in a role (mud buyer) with which he had absolutely no familiarity. When extracting River, he was in the role of an Alliance medical person, a role he knew intimately, and his “disguise” consisted largely of an overcoat.

82

Er, I apologize for calling Sengkelat “SenegalKat” in the above post. I’ve always read the user name as “SenegalKat” and I don’t think I’ve ever quoted him before and I didn’t use the reply button on his post…

No disrespect intended.

83

I think that it’s not so much that he decides the goal isn’t worth it, it’s that he realizes that his goal and the Alliance’s goal isn’t the same. The Alliance doesn’t care about creating a “perfect world,” they want to create a “perfectly controlled world.” They don’t want a utopia, they just want to make sure they are always in charge, no matter what. The Operative may still believe in his goal, but now he knows that working for the Alliance is not going to bring it about.

84

If he’d died during descent, how would the rest of the crew survived? His death worked dramatically because it came just after he proved his absolute worth as a pilot: anyone else at the controls, and Serenity would have been a smoking crater. He gets them down safe, and then dies in the pilot’s seat: a perfect death for a perfect pilot.

85

No, this was one of the things she read from the minds of the “key members of Parliament”. Recall in one of the later episodes of Firefly that River was able to percieve the crew members’ secrets.

86

During the series, it was never made clear if River was psychic, or just delusional (or both). I liked it better vague, and would have preferred it if psychic abilities remained as much hokum in the Serenity 'verse as in ours.

87

I think I did too. But the movie makes it fairly explicit in retrospect that she was doing something along those lines.

88

Airline pilots routinely die during crashes that passengers survive. Why would his piloting the boat exempt him from death during descent?

His death while in the air or bouncing along the ground would have been more dramatic because he, the pilot, killed himself while allowing everyone else to live. He’d have died in his seat with everyone safe, just the same.

As is, it was as cliched as if the timebomb you thought you had defused suddenly started counting down again. It was lame.

89

That was in reply to Miller, obviously.

90

True. He does show us in Ariel that he can be a criminal mastermind given plenty of time to plan it out. But my critique of the retcon is more simple than that. Simon spent most of his time on the series (weeks or months in their time) trying to figure out what it was that The Alliance did to his sister. That was his whole raison d’etre. Now we’re suddenly supposed to accept that he did know all along what they did to her because he had a detailed conversation with one of her captors, but somehow forgot about it? Or what? And why would he neither use nor share that safeword with the crew for all the times in the series when River’s behavior was inconvienent, injurious or downright life-threatening? If I was Jayne, I’da brought up that kitchen knife incident again!

91

We had 3 Mals, a Zoe, and 4 Jayne hats. Also, at least 5 “Joss Whedon is my master now” shirts, and 3 “Live Life with Blue Sun” shirts.

92

See, this is why I hate it when science fiction movies play fast and loose with reality in the hope that no one will no better. I’m sure there are lots of people now who think a ‘nebula’ is a dense cloud that ships can vanish into and out of, like they did in Serenity and The Wrath of Khan.

In fact, Nebulae are light-years across in size, or we couldn’t see them from earth. Over a distance of a few hundred thousand miles, you could be right inside a nebula and never know it. In the darkest, thickest ones perhaps distant planets might look slightly hazy.

And anyway, if a nebula were anywhere near that dense, those ships would have been pulverized going through it at interplanetary speeds. After all, a cloud is made up of particles, and hitting a particle of anything at 50,000 mph is not good for you, let alone a whole cloud of them.

Besides, they didn’t call it a ‘Nebula’, they called it an ‘ion cloud’, which is just technobabble. That was another thing I disliked about Serenity. Firefly was much more careful about avoiding technobabble and inventing special space things as plot devices. It was what I hated most about Star Trek.

93

Amen, Brother.

BTW, did I ask why the reavers didn’t shoot River? :slight_smile:

94

And Captain Reynolds agrees with her about Inara, I believe.
But I digress. :slight_smile:
Rest assured, I shall chastise her for having divers opinions.

95

Re: Inara’s bow: Yeah, I was thinking “Ooh, toy tie-in.” I suppose it’s possible that she just happened to have one handy with her stuff, but it seemed kinda weird. That said, a bow and arrow does go along with her sort of Core World Style (Remember, the Core Worlds are a place where they do stuff like making chandeliers float for no readily apparant reason)

As for the final fight scene, it did seem like the majority of the characters were about to die. ie: Zoe gets wounded, I want to say Jayne got hit too. Kaylee takes the darts to the neck (and I was worried for a while that they might have been some kind of Reaver-juice filled darts that make you into a Reaver). And of course, when Simon is about to go into Turbo-Medic mode, he gets shot as soon as he stands up to get his bag (struck me as vaguely "We Were Soldiers"ish)

One thing that really bugged me in the movie was the lack of Chinese swearing (was there English swearing?)

Also, when did the Mule go from being an ATV to an industrial hovercraft? Maybe they hocked Jubal Early’s ship and traded up. Then again, they DID kinda blow up the first Mule, so maybe they decided to get something a bit cooler. And I’m trying to visualize the chase scene from the intro with the crew piled in the Mule’s trailer.

In Ariel, we saw that not only could Simon disguise himself rather well in a role that he had taken time to familarize himself with, but that he could be a prick towards the people he was fooling with ease. (Actually, he’s something of a prick in general when he doesn’t relax, so that might just be a character quirk rather than being part of any disguise).

On the note of Simon being given the briefing on the Alliance’s plans for River, it’s also possible he was lying the whole time about not knowing why they did what they did to her, believing that the crew would get overly freaked out and kick them off the ship/turn them in.

Assuming that Miranda is supposed to be on the edge of known space (since that’s the part of space where the Reavers are generally accepted to be from) it strikes me as odd that it was apparantly very highly populated and developed, almost seeming like a Core World. Then again, Persephone might look like that if it was a ghost town for 12 years (it was something of a Rim-ish world, and had it’s own developed Core World-ish parts)

Also, I like the new Fed grunt uniforms, less StarShip Troopers-ish, more vaguely Equilibriumish. I guess we can assume the Fed fleet won the battle against the Reavers after their initial suprise.

As for stuff not being realistic (such as the ion cloud around Mr. Universe’s planet), sometimes you just gotta go into Comic Book Science Mode.

Also, was anybody else vaguely disappointed that the pleasurebot wasn’t played by Sarah Michelle Gellar? Comon, it’s Buffybot in the 25th and a half century!

96

It wasn’t until I’d watched the series the second time that I realized that River’s “random” comments are never random. She’s just freely expressing something that other characters (or the audience) don’t recognize.

For example, in Objects in Space she complains that it’s “too crowded in here.” Turns out that’s because there’s more people on the ship than should be: the bounty hunter had just recently latched on.

In this case, it seems she’s channeling the 9th character: the ship itself. Serenity had just “swallowed a bug”: it opened up its cargo bay doors and had let in the hovercraft and reaver pod. :eek:

97

I noticed the firefly action figures of Jayne and Mal in the local comic shop. They look terrible. :frowning:

I just want a model firefly ship to put on my desk at work. Doesn’t matter if it’s the old one or the new one. That ship has an elegance that grows on you. Mal’s lines at the end were quite fitting: the first rule of flying is to do it with love.

98

Duh, because Jayne blew up all their bullets with his last grenade. :wally

99

I felt very “unsettled,” I guess you could say, when I left the theater. Don’t get me wrong – I loved the movie – but the deaths of both Book and Wash were a huge shock.

100

Yeah, the action figures look like they’re scared shitless.

I’d kinda like to have a model of the Alliance warship that Noname cruised around on.

Also, I didn’t think of this when making my previous post: Did anyone else notice that Trans-U ship from the pilot ep amongst the Reaver fleet?