My partner and are having a disagreement about something that happened in the movie. I don’t know how to do spoiler boxes, so I’ll make a new post.
My partner reckons that Bush gets killed on the secret colony somehow, when it gets trashed. I don’t remember that happening at all. I thought they didn’t turn up their till way after. So did he or not?
Well, if your disagreement is that your partner says his name is “Book” and you say it’s “Bush,” your partner is correct.
It’s Book. Shepherd Book.
Book was killed by the Operative’s trashing of his colony, as part of the “If your quarry runs to ground, burn the ground…” strategy of catching Firefly.
D’oh! Of course it’s Book, what was I thinking!
Thanks, Bricker.
I’ve changed the title.
As for how to do spoilers:
{spoiler}text you want to hide{/spoiler}
only with [ and ] instead of { and }
In addition to Book’s retreat, the operative attacked several other sanctuaries used by the Serenity crew. Were these other places mentioned in the television series or were they just places that had been invented for the movie?
Invented for the movie, I believe.
Book was actually aboard Serenity during the show, so his colony being destroyed had a particular effect on the viewers, as we had a connection to him personally.
I think Whitefall was one of the colonies the Operative destroyed. That was Patience’s world in the pilot.
Hard to mourn too much for Patience, though.
Book is a stupid name for a character. Hey, he carries a book. And reads from the “good book”, hyuk hyuk. Was he named by Sarah Palin?
I always thought if the series had continued, we might have visited at least some of those places.
Maybe this is what the OP had in mind initially? Shepherd's Bush tube station - Wikipedia
I liked it. Always wondered if it was a deliberate reference to Harrison Ford’s character in Witness.
Firefly has some fun with character naming, like the captain, Mal (“Bad. From the Latin.”), Jayne (girly sounding name, not-so-girly guy), Simon Tam, perpetually the whitest guy in the room having an Asian surname, River’s name lining up nicely with how she flows from one state of mind to another at a drop of a hat.
I just figured maybe Shepherd Book came from a family tradition of clergymen, or that it was an adopted name to reflect his profession. Where do you suppose we got names like Smith, Fletcher, Hunter, etc.? Somewhere in their family history are smiths, fletchers, and hunters.
This is what I always figured. Book had so many secrets that him traveling under an assumed name isn’t too much of a stretch.
I’d grant that his name is convenient, but even if it is his real name it could still conceivably be a shortened version of an actual name, “Booker” or the like.
I think Badger’s zone of operations was also trashed by the Operative, wasn’t it?
And the actor who played Book has stated in an interview that that was, in fact, an assumed name.
I assumed it was a religious name taken when he took his vows. I assumed it was a standard thing for his order to take on fairly obvious names of the like.
Weedy said:
Serenity goes to Haven and chats with Book. Then Serenity cruises out to pick up Inara. After that, they receive a message from the Operative, and they return to Haven and find it sacked. That’s when Mal sets them out for Miranda dressed as reavers.
**Little Nemo ** said:
I’m pretty sure they were places in the series, people that Mal had dealings with. Not necessarily all sanctuaries, some were just people who did business with him. I don’t recall the place names offhand, but I did recognize a couple at the time.
Well they go to see Book twice, and he isn’t dying until the second time - that may be the source of your confusion.
Well there’s a whole bunch of evidence that Book isn’t his real name (and hey - Shepard is kind of euphemistic too for a preacher isn’t it?) - he clearly had ties to the government and maybe he was either high ranking military or an actual operative. A future graphic novel is supposedly going to reveal this…