Hmm…it occurs to me that for most folks, traveling in corridors is vastly preferable to not doing so. If you’re in a corridor and something goes wrong, help will be on the way fairly soon. If you’re taking the most direct path from planet to planet (which varies depending on the moment of departure and arrival), when things go wrong you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere.
And you could accomplish the corridor-travelling, I’d think, by having several “meetup” points. Travel to the meetup point, go along the corridor till you reach a meetup point close to your destination, and then go from the last meetup point to your destination. This would greatly increase the safety of interplanetary travel for most folks, I’d think.
And along that vein, we’re not sure whether or not thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of miles are really “all that far apart” in the techno-'verse. A powerful enough radar could conceivably see several light-minutes around a ship in space.
Like Orual, I like this episode the least of them all. Too much happens merely because It’s In The Script, especially the survivor “coping” by becoming a Reaver and Mal predicting it.
Still, there’s lots to love. “Her legs, and where her legs meet her back. Actually, that whole area.”
As for the Reavers, I was going to say that being “insane” doesn’t necessarily rob you of intelligence, planning, or even a social network. They could just divide the world into “us” and “them,” and any “them” is the equivalent of cattle. People do it often enough in the real world. However, this doesn’t explain why they would blithely run a ship with an unshielded reactor - that does seem to imply a much less organized type of insanity. So, I dunno.
I still have a problem with this. Suppose the derelict ship was going along the corridor, and Serenity follows later. Once the derelict ship is attacked, it should either keep going along the corridor under it’s own inertia; or miss a course change, and go out of the corridor; or be sent off course by an attack, also making it leave the corridor. Any of those things would mean Serenity would not find it.
It seems like it would take a great deal of precise course correction to place the ship stationary relative to the corridor, but not drift. (And as you go on to say, the corridor shouldn’t be consistent, anyway.)
I’ll buy this is how the Alliance ship (looking for the derelict) found them. But it’s not how Serenity found them - they ran over someone in the proverbial interstellar crosswalk, not found them on their radar where they’d run off the galactic bypass into a gravity ditch.
I guess the best I can come up with is that the Reavers carefully put the ship where someone was likely to come across it, to trap them. Which first, is a reach not supported by what we see on screen (though consistent with it), and second, implies a lot more thought from the Reavers than seems consistent.
Two things: first, the “corridor” would likely be quite large. We’re still not sure what the scale of the Firefly 'verse is, but it could be as large as a lightyear across. If the Reavers didn’t just kill the engines but also countered the ship’s inertia, it might take years for the ship to drift out of the corridor, and hence out of sensor range for passing ships.
Secondly, the Reavers specifically left the ship there as a trap. A trap’s no good if no one ever comes by to find it, so they likely set the ship to drift down the corridor, not across it.
I’ll second what other have said about Reavers, i.e. we don’t actually know anything about them for certain, except that they like to kill people in horrible ways and that they have no concern for personal safety (piloting a ship with an unshielded core, or whatnot, from the pilot.) Where they came from, how they create other Reavers, how their society functions, how they function as individuals, why they do what they do… all we know about any of that is what other characters in the show have said, and it is not at all clear that they actually “know” anything, and aren’t just repeating folklore and urban legends. Although Mal’s info does seem at least more reliable than the Alliance’s info.
I like to think that the Reavers came into exsistence because someone exploring out on the edge of explored space found… something. Something very, very old, and not at all human. Something that they can use to make others into more things like themselves. Yeah, I know, one of the charms of Firefly is that there are no aliens. Personally, I would allow a one-time exception for an alien species that has been extinct for at least one million years. Preferably longer. Ancient, dead alien civilizations are one of my favorite sf memes, when done properly, and I’d trust Joss to do it up right.
I don’t know if all of this comes from the first three episode, so here’s my take on why Mal knows about Reavers:
I think Mal is a high-functioning Reaver. If you listen to all the things he says about them, about how looking into the emptiness of space has changed them, about how that ship is where the survivor is going to be living for the rest of his life, and compare those things to everything Mal says about the battle of Serenity Valley (“once you’ve been to Serenity, you never leave it”), they’re pretty much the same. Mal looked into those ships landing at the end of the battle and lost everything he had. He is only able to function because he has surrounded himself with people who have all the parts he is missing, and he is only able to express those things when he’s around people–happiness, compassion, curiosity. All the times that Mal is left on his own to pilot the ship or look for something or go somewhere, his face shuts down and he stops emoting anything at all until he’s around people again, and then, as soon as he has somebody to relate to, he lights up like a christmas tree.
Keep in mind that I haven’t seen the movie so if I get a lucky guess it’s not a spoiler.
I think the Reaver “society” isn’t one. They’re kind of a like a self-perpetuating virus. That’s how they ‘reproduce’. Besides that, just because Reavers are a bunch of bad ass psychotic mass-murderers doesn’t mean that they’re animals. Why can’t they fly a ship?
Even if they are seen (when face-to-face), if we assume that they’re totally mad killers that doesn’t mean they’re ALWAYS like that. Maybe they are somewhat normal up until it’s feeding time and then they go into a frenzy.
As for the Reavers running into an Alliance ship, well, that’s like wondering what would happen with a bunch of Cannibal Headhunters in the Pacific. Sure, if they jump a cargo freighter or a pleasure yacht they’ll cause a lot of misery. Jumping a battleship that can see them coming, however, is a totally different story.
(poof) Reavers vaporized long before they make it into boarding range.
This is also one of my least-favorite episodes. Frankly, the Reavers don’t work for me. I don’t buy that men just go mad when they see horrible things done. We have plenty, and I mean plenty of examples of men who have seen insanely horrible things happen, and they didn’t turn into Reavers. Plus, how many can there be? If it’s insanity, would two Reavers give birth to a little Reavlet? Or would it be a normal little kid wondering why Mommy and Daddy have safety pins in their faces and split tongues?
And if they don’t procreate, how the hell do they maintain their population? Can recruitment be THAT good? And bear in mind that they fly around ‘without core containment’, which is ‘suicide’. So apparently they don’t live too long.
I love Firefly, but I think it would have been a better show without the Reavers. Unless, of course, there’s more too them than we know, and the backstory was cut short by the evil that is FOX.
The Reavers fill the same spot in Firefly that Indians do in many older westerns: strange, alien boogeymen that seem uncomprehensible but demonstrate the savagery and evil that men are capable of without the influence of civilization. They’re the polar opposite of the Alliance, but even more horrifying. Now, they may not make much sense as a real culture, but I still dig them for the artistic point they make. Plus, I like a good boogeyman. I think Reavers play a big part in Serenity (the film). Ask me about them again friday.
Of course, Reavers lack the cultural baggage of Indians. Since they aren’t a proud and culturally rich people being genocided by land-grabbing Europeans, we can let them be monsters and madmen guilt-free. The same’s true for the Independents, which are Confederates without all the nasty slavery and racism. Firefly lets liberals play at being gun-toting anti-government outlaws guilt-free.
I think that the reavers also play a part in the story as a comparison. Several times Mal and company are “bad guys” compared to the laws (such as they are). By having the reavers, or worse guys such as Niska, it also leaves space for Mal and company to be morally better than others. This gives the writers a lot of dramatic room for character movement by having them be morally ambiguous.
If there were no unambiguously bad guys, I think Mal and company would come off looking worse, somehow.
Maybe the Reavers are like Viking berserkers. Every now and then they get together to blow some shizzle up, but for long stretches of time they’re just farmers, fishermen, and, uh, nuclear physicists.
Okay, what I ADORE about this series is how it takes actors you’ve never heard of (ie: Inara and Kaylee) or, unfortunately, HAVE heard of (Mal, jayne, and Book) and somehow they manage to be terrific actors. I was never a big fan of “Buffy” and never watched “Angel” so I don’t know if it is Whedon and Minear’s scripts or what. All I can saw is that “Buffy”'s scripts never seemed to push people this far beyond their personal envelopes, but it might be that their envelopes were that much smaller.
I’ve seen interviews, though, where Joss talks of this show as if it were the love of his life. I hope it lives longer than I expect it to in its timeslot.
I’m just watching it now. Mal was also the only one who knew that the Reavers would likely booby-trap the ship the way they did, so he must have some real information about them.
A minor nit-pick I just noticed. I’m at the part where the head Alliance guy is interviewing the crew. The last thing he says is to Book is, “if they’re hiding anywhere on that ship, we’ll find them.” Then they cut to the ship being searched. They show the Alliance soldiers “searching” the ship. There are about eight guys around the dining room table. They’re turning over the chairs and looking under them. Taking plates off the table and looking under them. Grabbing the chairs again and looking under them again. Grabbing the plates again and re-checking under them.
And had the Alliance Crew taken Ship Searching 101, they should have found some evidence Serenity had nine people aboard not seven. Unless not only did Siman and River go outside the ship but all theire possesions and their cabin was cleaned to show no evidence of their presence.
There’s a long police tradition (at least in fiction) of harassing people under suspicion by making as much of a mess of their property as possible during a search. The troops were probably ordered to leave no stone unturned (nudge nudge wink wink) and thus did so.
