Favorite part of the episode that I didn’t notice until the commentary pointed it out: Wash flying the ship by ggesturing emphatically, because his chair had been moved so far back to get him in frame that he couldn’t reach the wheel.
I love that part. 
I believe on the commentary for “War Stories,” Alan Tudyk comments that (not a plot spoiler at all, just something funny, but we haven’t gotten there yet, so box it is) …
No matter what Wash is going to do, he almost always flips the three switches over his right shoulder. He doesn’t do it every time, really, but he does it often enough that you wonder what the hell those switches are for.
I thought they said that they’d intended to CGI a steering-mechanism in, but they forgot to do so, so he’s just pantomiming here. It cracks me up every time I see it: it’s otherwise such a tense scene, and here he’s being a complete goofball.
Daniel
No, that’s what makes it so funny! You can see the out-of-reach wheel when the camera pulls back, and they mention that no one had noticed Alan didn’t have anything in his hands. Hee.
I suspect he has his insurance agent on speed dial.
I never noticed the pantomime wheel through many viewings until I saw them mention it in the commentary. Now I never miss it.
–Cliffy
I keep trying to make a decent post in this thread, and it never works out. I either ramble incoherently, or say nothing of consequence.
Take 3:
A great introduction to the series. It would’ve been even better if we could’ve, ya’know, seen it first. 
Unfortunately, a lot of the more suspenseful parts of the plot gets spoiled after you’ve seen the other eps. “What’s in the box” isn’t that big of a reveal (compounded by the fact that River’s character shot in the credits is her in the box and Fox advertised her as “the girl in the box”, even after bypassing the pilot episode). And then there’s the whole group dynamic: who’s good and who’s bad is pretty vague in the pilot. And the whole “Kaylee’s dead” isn’t nearly as poignant (and the crew laughing in the bridge not quite the same) since you know she’s around later. Having her in the credits wouldn’t be any comfort to big-time Joss fans. The pilot for Buffy was supposed to have Xander’s friend Jesse in the opening credits (if I’m remembering the commentary for that ep correctly), and he got vamped and staked pretty quick. Doyle got killed off after 9 episodes on Angel.
Gah, gonna get off that “why didn’t they show the pilot first” track or I’ll never stop. Needless to say, I somewhat envy people who came into the Firefly 'verse through the DVDs so they can see stuff in the intended order.
I think my favorite parts of this episode is how they kept throwing up these little things to play with the viewer’s expections. A sign for “Good Dogs”, then a camera pan down to meat on a grill. “Someone’s gotta make an honest living” cutting to Inarra doing her business. Kaylee’s awed expression at Book’s payment, later revealed to be fresh produce. Crates of treasure revealed to be bars of food. And it’s not in a “Haha, fooled you!” manner, just “things are different out here”. Well, that and the “Good Dogs” gag was funny.
About my only disappointment is that this episode seems a bit light on the comedy. Or maybe it’s just more spread out (since it’s a longer run time). “And we shall call it…this land”, “Pain’s scary”, Zoe’s dry comments on Mal’s plans, and Book’s “sin and hellfire, one has lepers” are all excellent in their place, but the later episodes tend to have 50% comedy, 50% character drama, and 50% plot suspense (because it’s just that good). They probably wanted to ease into it, make sure it was seen as “western/sci-fi with some funny stuff” rather than “a comedy about cowboys in space”.
Commentary stuff:
I’ll see your “Wash flying without touching the controls” and raise you an “Inarra flies her shuttle with the control yoke upside down” (when she leaves her latest client to meet Serenity at the docks). Although depending on how the thing’s actually wired, in “reality” it could be argued that it wouldn’t matter. I think it’s cool that Joss and Nathan point out these little flubs. Maybe they just wanted to ease into the funnyness. They more than made up for it in the Train Job’s joke about terrifying space monkey’s. Just remembering it (and Mal’s semi-serious face) makes me crack up.
And it looks like Mal’s nickname from “Shindig” stuck {mentioned in this ep’s commentary, but spoiler boxed anyway}: “Captain Tight Pants” kept splitting his seams during filming of the opening battle. I think the reason I like the commentary tracks on these DVDs so well (especially when it’s just cast or cast and Joss) is that it’s like a couple of friends sitting on my couch just shooting the breeze.
Um, I must’ve accidently moved the cursor. The “ease into the funniness” bit after Inarra’s flight yoke was supposed to be in the previous paragraph. That’s what I get for switching between windows mid-stream, I end up typing in the wrong place.
A spoiler
question
in reference
to a comment
made
regarding
the movie.
If it is in a single solar system, why the hell do they use the irritating term " 'verse"?
I think they refer to “the verse” , because everyone know that they are a very long way from “Earth that was”.
Serenity introduces a theme we’ll see again in Firefly: Faith. In the first ten minutes, we watch Mal lose (or have taken from him) his faith in God, the cause he’s put his life on the line for, himself, and his fellow man. When next we see him, he’s a broken and bitter man.
But he’ll get better. He finds a new cause, a new fight (besides just survival). He’s built himself a new family, but in this episode he’s not too warm to them. How Mal claws his way back up, how he gets his faith (not necessarily in God, but in everything else) back is the central character arc in Serenity.
It’s odd that Joss Whedon, a rather open atheist, writes so well about faith of all types (Jaynestown is a wonderfully balanced religious parable, but we’ll get to that), when many other shows, even schmaltzy Christian ones, either botch or do so poorly.
Also, I gots tickets to see Serenity. Go me.
Oh, being that he’s an intelligent guy looking at it from a reserved distance, it’s not surprising at all. 
I’ve said exactly the same thing. What struck me most is that the women in Firefly are absolutely archetypical Heinlein females. Smart, snappy with a comeback, deadly, and with a very strong sex drive. The ‘frontier’ aspect is also a very common Heinlein theme (See - “Tunnel in the Sky” for high tech society sending men on horseback to other planets - also “Between Planets”, “Farmer in the Sky”, “Starman Jones”, and I’m sure a number of other books that describe frontier settlements).
In addition, the concept of a ‘companion’ caste of high class, well respected prostitutes is a common theme in Heinlein’s books.
Heinlein would have loved Firefly.
It’s not clear to me watching the first show what size the Firefly 'verse is. If they have faster-than-light travel, a lot of stuff stops making sense (running into other ships in deep space, sending out radio beacons for help, etc). But if it’s interplanetary flight only, everything makes sense. Two ships leaving a planet at the same time for another planet will travel in similar transfer orbits, making encounters more likely. Radio beacons can work. The universe is small enough that people can run into each other over and over again.
And there seem to be a lot of occupied moons. My guess is that the ‘core worlds’ are the inner planets, and the ‘outer rim’ is composed mainly of terraformed moons orbiting various gas giants and other larger planets. The Firefly universe is therefore in a single solar system. Whether that’s our solar system or another they travelled to initially, I don’t know. I would suspect the latter, or you’d think that some moons and planets would retain their original names (and we’d see common sights like the rings of Saturn or the great spot on Jupter).
So I’m thinking that somewhere along the way, after the Earth was ‘used up’, a fleet of interstellar ships was sent out, looking for systems to colonize. They found one with a whole bunch of candidate planet and moons, and set about terraforming them, perhaps with self-replicating robots or something. Then when the system was ‘ready’, an exodus took place.
Does that sound right to you?
I think you’re spot-on with this.
The Cockney sounding crook from some episode or other is on Medium now.
I originally came to this series mainly because of the intriguing sci-fi premise, having never seen any of the actors in anything I could remember and knowing next to nothing about the Joss Whedon Cult. I’d seen a few eps of Buffy but aside from sparking a few carnal fantasies involving Sarah Michelle-Geller and Alyson Hannigan it never did a whole lot for me. Firefly, however, had me gobsmacked with its quality and story potential pretty much from the git-go, despite the mangled airing schedule.
I saw “The Train Job” first, like most people, but had read about the unaired pilot, so I wasn’t totally at sea as to what was going on. I think it’s one of the best installaments of the series, actually, and I’ll be happy to discuss it next week, but having now viewed “Serenity” at least five times, I’m utterly baffled as to what Fox thought they would gain by showing that other ep first. “Serenity” seems to do pretty much everything necessary to kick off a series about an unfamiliar take on a future civilization, and with a large cast of regular characters: starts with a bang, displays a series of vignettes that strongly establish the personalities of the principals, and sets up a world rich in possibilities that could be more fully explored in future eps. Frankly, it’s just about a master class in how to kick off a series, IMO.
Beyond that, not showing the pilot first makes a complete balls, IMO, of one of the vital components of the story, the arrival of Book, Simon and River’s aboard Serenity and the details of how these smart but painfullly unworldly (well not so much Book, as later becomes apparent) individuals plausibly end up part of this crew of roughnecks, whores and thieves.
There are so many things I love about the series, and all of them are here right from the beginning: the realistic moral ambiguity of nearly all the characters, the rich characterizations (consider both Badger and Patience, who manage to put across absolutely indelible impressions with just a few lines of dialogue each), the brilliant wordplay, Greg Edmonson’s music (some of the best scoring I’ve ever heard for television), Zoic’s innovative, well-integrated, special effects, and perhaps most of all, Whedon’s clear intention to repeatedly smash though cliches of who is hero and villain, and overturn what is “supposed” to happen in a conventional story arc.
OK, so there are a few little things that aren’t totally plausible: that a culture can manage the incredible energy expenditure necessary to terraform a couple dozen planets and moons but can only afford to land people on them with “a few hoes and spades, maybe a herd”? That three little boxes of protein can generate enough cash to keep a ship the size of Serenity flying lengthy interplanetary routes for a month or more? That the I.A.V. Dortmunder, or the Reavers’ vessel, surely moving at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour, would drift slowly past Serenity like sailing ships meeting on the open ocean? That five hundred years from now, people will revert to speaking and dressing as though they were in 1870’s Kentucky (well, except for Wash’s Hawaiian shirts and Inara’s decidedly Eastern wardrobe)?
Oh, well, in the end I don’t make all that much of it, because within the parameters of Serenity’s 'verse, they seem to make a reasonable degree of logical sense, and, well, because it’s all so very, very pretty.
I’ll conclude by gratuitously listing a few of my favorite things about this episode:
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The way Nathan Fillion establishes his fairly complex character, though all the little bits of business in the pre-credits battle sequence and his nuanced behavior towards the different members of Serenity’s crew;
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The hilariously daft bit early on with Wash and the toy dinosaurs;
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Zoe’s sawed-off lever-action rifle (if it wasn’t probably totally illegal I’d rush right out to Gander Mountain, lay down the cash for a 30-30 Winchester Model 94 and find someone who could make me a duplicate);
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Pretty much every single word that comes out of Jayne’s mouth;
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The way the Reaver’s ship has one engine that doesn’t work very well in atmo and thus puts out a heavy smoke trail that just happens to make it all the more menacing.
Whew, sorry for the word hemorrhage. I’ll break off now.
I think SA television did a good thing by showing these in DVD order. Go Us!
Of course, there was precious little advertising, so of all my friends who are fen, only my wife and I got to see it. Luckily, most of the rest are Buffyverse fans, so convincing them that they wanted the DVDs was easy.
Anyway - greatest pilot ep, ever!
Knew Mal from comedy “Two Guys and a Girl”, so wasn’t sure how he’d do in genre stuff (we got last season Buffy after Firefly), knew (and loved) Jewel Staite from teen drama “Higher Ground”, and knew (and loved) Wash from “A Knight’s Tale”. Recall seeing Simon in some Latino drama series?
Anyway - what an ensemble cast they and the rest make. Such seemless interaction, and Nathan Fillion is a great Captain. I know the comparison gets brought up a lot, but he really is everything Han Solo was, and so much more, and so well-acted. I love that he just blows the cop away without a thought, with a “I don’t have time for this” attitude.
In fact, is it my imagination or does he use variants of that expression a lot in the series? Sort of his version of “I’ve got a bad feeling about this”
It never stopped you before!
I think you’re probably right, but the only reason the “inter vs. intrastellar distances in Firefly” debate isn’t one of the major nerdpocalypses like “the Enterprise-D vs. the Millennium Falcon” or “Mike vs. Joel” is that not enough people watch Firefly.
–Cliffy
I think the reason this isn’t debated more is that the characterization is so much richer, and more important, with Firefly, that it’s possible and indeed desirable to ignore the technological furbelows of the genre. The point is to concentrate the people living in it - which is, I think, part of why the independents ape the old west - it is, in part, intentional nostalgia, a la Cowboy Bebop.
For example, it’s not important to know if it’s possible for the radio beacon to work due to FTL travel, because it is there not to be a cool plot-propelling widget, but to establish that Mal is a strategic thinker.
Also, Serenity doesn’t have any photon torpedoes.
Damn yokels can’t even tell a transport ship ain’t got no guns on it…[/Jayne]
Fashion tends to be revived in cycles. The 80’s are back and it seems hard hair is yet again the thing to have among young women. I’m glad I’m too old for young women, because hard hair… :shudder:
Terraforming a planet doesn’t make it a ready planet. Bringing a Buick wouldn’t make sense if there aren’t any expressways, or, um, roads. What little civilization there is aggregates around the spaceport, which naturally becomes the hub for trade and politics on the new world. On also has to consider why anyone would move there. Population pressure back home, the hope for a better life, food shortage or persecution? Tack your pick. The people who come and try to make a living as farmers aren’t gonna export food back home, they’re gonna eat the food themselves and maybe sell the surplus to the Blue Sun corp.
Which in turn has mines, controlls trade, charges a fee for any ship that uses the docking facility. Maybe superconcentrated food protein indeed is a very valuable commodity in this Verse. Tenderfoots fresh off the boat won’t have a ready crop and this food might sustain them for a year and is part of the package they pay for when contracting to be homesteaders.
And considering how fashoin is recycled, it’s not hard to iumagine that when these people look back at a distorted version of the history of the Old West, they tend to look more at tv shows like Maverick and less at Deadwood, emulating and idealizing how things could be, and saying that if those people could manage a civilized life 600 years earlier, then they can damn well do it in the present of the narrative.