Just a dissenting voice to say that I loved 2001 and don’t find it boring at all. I will say this, though: it sure helps to see it in 70mm. The quality of color and detail gives the film an extra visual impact that serves it well. I think it’s an amazing film.
Anyway, back to FF: yeah, this episode is great, and for all the reasons people are mentioning. I love how Mal points out how much he really is not like the wannabe space pirates, and would not have done what they tried to do.
I can’t wait for the movie!
… still waiting, but fidgeting impatiently.
…
There’s gonna be a lot of fidgeting until September gets here. sigh
A couple of things - first, the gun is not just a BAR. It’s got all kinds of electronic gizmos on it. Who’s to say that it doesn’t need air to fire? Maybe it’s got a wind/pressure sensor that allows it to adjust its aim for windage and air resistance, and a vacuum screws it up.
But the other point is that this was not a result of laziness on the part of the crew. Their “expert” blew it. Joss actually thought enough to wonder, “will a gun fire in a vacuum?” so they called the technical expert and asked him, and he said it wouldn’t. Thus the spacesuit. So a technical error was made, but even knowing nothing about what happened during the shoot you can easily and plausibly make the case that perhaps some futuristic guns won’t work in a vacuum without invoking the issue of oxidizers being in the propellant.
But you know what? Just the fact that we’re reduced to having to discuss potentially inaccuracies like this simply means that Firefly is more realistic than another other TV science fiction in memory. Do you apply this much scrutiny to, say Star Trek? What with the phasers, and ‘photon torpedoes’, and warp drive, and matter transmitters, and sound in space, and subspace communications, and aliens that breed true with humans, and a society that makes no damned sense at all?
Firefly’s universe makes sense. It’s well thought out, and consistent. The characters in it behave consistently based on their social standing and the rules of their society. Occasionally the creators slipped up, because they’re not perfect. But even when you do, you can tell they were trying. In ‘Out of Gas’, the episode we’re discussing, Kaylee didn’t fix the ship by ‘re-routing power from the ship’s batteries through the engine’, or by ‘creating a space-time flux’ and using it to get the engine running, or by climbing in a tunnel and touching a sparky probe to some wires. The part broke, and couldn’t be fixed. So they were going to die.
Or maybe, just maybe, Jayne was an idiot. I know, I know, shocking idea that Jayne could be wrong.
I don’t really understand that particular nitpick. People obviously make mistakes; if someone as technically familiar with guns as Joss’ weapons expert made the mistake, why is it so far-fetched to believe that Jayne might have made the same one?
Joss obviously didn’t have a weapons expert. A freshman physics student wouldn’t make that mistake. Jayne might be stupid, but Mal has a military background and would know better. It’s particularly annoying in that the show otherwise had good physics; the above mentioned soundless space, this might be a spoiler
Serenity and the drifting ship rotating in relation to each other and one mentioned above that I particularly like; the engines burn to leave orbit, but stop when Serenity leaves orbit.
Concerning engines/fuel in between planets, there is some sort of FTL or near FTL going on the travel between planets in the life time of a cow. Well, in days or weeks instead of years. I guess they have an energy source that makes very quick acceleration/decelleration possible.
Nah. Any constant-acceleration drive that can accelerate at a significant fraction of one ‘G’ can go anywhere in our solar system in a matter of days, or weeks at the most. In fact, the scale of Firefly seems just about right to me. They flit between moons in hours or days, and from one world to another in days or weeks. Seems about right, assuming some constant-acceleration drive. It also explains what happened in ‘Out of Gas’ - as soon as they lost the engine, they entered an elliptical orbit and would no longer make it where they were going. As Kaylee said, “If the engine stops, we’re drifting.”
The only thing that they’ve gotten wrong was the time it takes for ships to pass each other, like the Reavers passing by in the Pilot. If they were really on an interplanetary trajectory that takes days or weeks, they’d pass other ships in the blink of an eye. Joss has admitted that that was a flaw in accuracy, but necessary for dramatic purposes. He needs to be able to ‘run across’ other ships to move some plots, so we have to accept that the scale changes in those scenes. Or if we want to get really geeky-explanatory about it, we could suppose that ships automatically slow down to a crawl when in proximity of other ships. But that would need a big honkin’ deceleration and doesn’t really make sense.
I posted "futuristic BAR because the first time I saw the episode it looked like a BAR. The next time I saw the gizmos. It looks more like an AK, actually.
Good arguement, but your Lord and Master admits on the DVDs that it was a mistake.
Hell, yes. Do you scrutinize Buffy?
Yeah, black powder next to hovercraft, FTL and no cell phones. How many hundred planets and habital moons in a single solar system? And boy, do I hate River shooting folks with her eyes closed.
OK, that’s just 'cause you pissed me off. I figure they had FTL, maybe only the alliance ships have it, found the one in a million solar system and moved everyone there in some unafordable, government FTL convoy. No wonder you’d fight a civil war over it rather than just move on.
