True, I think a used-car (used-flyer) lot would have been more realistic. Still, in present day America, would it be that difficult to find a van in a junkyard that can be fixed up in a day or two?
What bothered me more was the design of the ambulance - why is it designed to carry stretchers outside the fuselage? Shouldn’t the EMTs be able to work on the patient during flight? And I wish they put more effort into making those stretchers rather than using off-the-shelf Thule rooftop luggage boxes.
In the junkyard looking for helicopter parts, Wash picks up a compression coil (the part that broke in Out of Gas), gives it a disgusted look, and tosses it. Heh. Does he know what it is? If so, why don’t they take it?
Interesting contrast in the fight scene where Simon and Jayne take out the Feds to escape. Jayne – big, noisy, flailing fight, ending with opponent dead. Simon –quietly takes down his opponent, using his knowledge of pressure points, but doesn’t kill him. Although really, that knee to the throat looked pretty cold. I like that it harks back to a Simon we haven’t seen a while – the guy who bartered for passage with Kaylee’s life and doped Jayne rather than let him assume control of Serenity. Also, Simon really delivers the smackdown to the bad doctor and again to the Fed holding them with his “important people don’t do fieldwork” speech. It’s interesting to see Simon in his element – I hope we see some of this in the movie.
Jayne’s Blue Sun T-shirt has already been mentioned. I think this sets off River more than his knife fidgeting, since Jayne is constantly fidgeting.
I think it was news to Jayne when the captain told him the betraying Simon and River was the same as betraying him – note his question to the Fed in the pilot “Does helping you mean turning on the Captain?” In his head, I think Jayne was going to return to the ship with his reward, everybody was going to smack themselves for not realizing the golden opportunity they’d missed, and they’d all live happily ever after, isn’t Jayne great. Jayne thinks he’s the hero of the story.
In “Safe,” Jayne returns Simon and River’s things and make an effort to cover up his pilfering. It’s played as a joke, but interesting that he even bothers, since Jayne could probably just intimidate Simon into not mentioning it to the Captain. Kind of a nice payoff here, where Jayne flat out says that he does care what everyone thinks of him, and it saves his life. As if by wanting the rest of the crew to think he is a good man, he can actually be one.
The Confrontation Scene, as noted in several other posts, is brilliant on all sides. I think one of my favorite things about it are the walkies. I love the added layer between the two men, the way it gives Mal a bit of distance from what he’s about to do, and the business of holding it while he talks. For some reason, the way Mall puts it down gets me – he had been holding it rather loosely, but he suddenly palms it into the window with such disgust – it’s great.
The Bluesome Twosome are scary, but the dishwashing gloves are really dumb looking. I wish this effect had more going for it. They are at their most evil when they kill the unconscious guy. Despicable, and like Dobson’s braining Book in the pilot, it makes them utterly unredeemable from that point on.
However, I do think the ep has a major plothole with this idea that a perfectly serviceable helicopter can be made in a couple days out of spare parts, and be a good enough copy that no one will notice it. And, with the Alliance being so uptight, wouldn’t all the medivacs have some sort of registration or callsign and have to radio ahead before showing up at a hospital with a couple of bodies?
Which would make sense, except this is a very inefficient junk yard. There are enough working parts sitting around in it to construct a fully operational helicopter on a day’s notice!
That’s a good point, but brings up another problem: if they’re lying around junkyards, why are they venturing into space without a spare? They can’t be too expensive if you can swipe them out of salvage yards.
BTW, Has anyone looked at both episodes to be sure they really are the same part?
I agree that her slashing Jayne across the logo on his shirt was significant, but we only know that after the fact. To this point in the series, IIRC, nothing specific has been mentioned concerning Blue Sun having anything to do with River, only oblique hints given such as signage and the gloves of the Blue Hands dudes. Thus I stick by my contention that the scene was designed to lead us to think initially that it was Jayne’s fiddling with his knife that set River off.
Hey, those mooks on Junkyard Wars did stuff like that all the time.
(El-Kabong is apparently blissfully unaware of my tendency to latch onto a throwaway joke and logic it to a pulp.)
But on Junkyard Wars, the goal is to build something that does XYZ without regard to what it will look like. Building an actual replica of something that not only works as advertised but is a good enough copy of the original to fool people who see them is another kettle of fish entirely.
Point taken about the presentation of the Blue Sun incident, but at the time the episodes were airing, it was just at/after this incident that the audience started to notice the connection between River and Blue Sun, and actively watch for Blue Sun appearances. I think this is how it was meant to play.
Well, some junkyards have specialties. That is, batches of things get to be wrecked there. And truthfully, fleet vehicles tend to be wrecked in batches, being clapped out rather than destroyed.
So, could you get an ambulance that worked for a few hours out of a junkyard like that? Sure. Not one that’d be new, not one that’d be all that safe, but I’d suspect it’d be possible to grab a 300k chassis and keep it going for one last trip.
Well, one time I got stranded pretty badly when my car lost an oil plug. I bought spares the very next day. If I were driving along a week later and found another spare oil plug for my car – after I already paid good money for two spares – then I would probably give it a look of disgust, too. Then again I’m probably overthinking it.
For the record, if I had ever been stranded in space for lack of a compression coil, I would keep a spare in my locker, clean it up, and give it to Kaylee for a birthday present. I would also get her a bonnet or something, so she didn’t think I was just giving her shit for letting Serenity break down.
Imagine a modern analogy: you go to a junkyard and find this ambulance sitting around. You paint a private logo on it (Haniver’s Hauling) and buy a civilian emergency services radio on the black market. Sure, nobody’s going to believe that it’s one of these, but you could still get into a local hospital and drop off a few bodies, provided you were dressed right and talked the talk. Also, repairing an older model might be significantly easier than repairing a new model. If you assume they fixed up an old one that was only a little broken, which somebody had labeled not worth the trouble, then it seems more plausible.
Same with computers - our gov’t throws out (!) “working” computers every month, or sells them to the highest bidder, just because they’re too slow. Sure, they work, but they aren’t good enough to keep in service. Do they end up on junk piles? Yep. Do they end up in my spare bedroom? Yep.
This was the first episode I watched. A friend turned me onto the show the week it aired. It’s odd how different the show looks when you start with this one. Simon has -always- been competent and in-charge. Jayne has -always- been an incompetent weasel. In fact, the second part stuck with me, and it took me until Jaynestown to have any sympathy / liking for the character at all.
I agree that I’d hoped to see Simon ‘in his element’ a bit more. The fish-out-of-water thing is a nice hook, but if he’s always that, it makes him something of a ‘useless’ character.
Bingo. Joss says as much in one of the episode commentaries- as far as Jayne is concerned, there’s only one BDH and that’s him.
If it helps any, I’m pretty sure they’re latex laboratory gloves, not dishwaving gloves. The glove + suit combination gets that mixture of “mad scientist” and “evil corporate stooge” across without stating it outright. I agree that the idea of villains walking around wearing blue gloves all the time is kinda hokey, but I rationalize it by thinking of these guys as obsessively clean. No need to physically touch the inferior non-psychic humans and risk getting your hands dirty, eh?
I was also thinking that the gloves seem to be made of something that protects them from whatever the gadgets are that they use to kill people with. Makes the gloves less dumb. But maybe I missed something. (I really find it hard to watch those parts of the episode…)
Well, that doesn’t really fit either, because the border planets are starved for technology. If building a helicopter/ambulance was so easy, you’d think they could make a pretty good living raiding junkyards, building flying ships, and taking them to border worlds where they would just die for a flying ambulance.
Let’s face it - the whole ambulance thing has to be overlooked. It’s not really plausible, and it doesn’t make sense that they could afford to just build an ambulance like that as part of a caper. And note that we never see the thing again. They didn’t take it somewhere and sell it that we know of. It was just a throwaway plot device. It’s the only part of this episode I would have changed.
[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
If building a helicopter/ambulance was so easy, you’d think they could make a pretty good living raiding junkyards, building flying ships, and taking them to border worlds where they would just die for a flying ambulance.
[QUOTE]
Perhaps hauling that much mass from the core worlds to the border worlds is too costly. I know a potter who had to pay a trucker $200 to deliver $50 worth of clay.
I could get a junker running in Dallas for a couple of hundred bucks, but getting it to Boston would cost a couple of thousand.
Which would explain why the core worlds would junk a beat up ambulance with a hundred thousand metaphorical miles on it. With paint and an engine block yanked off another metaphor, this one a Chevy in the junkyard it would be good for another run to and from the hospital.
Well, you’ll notice that Simon is in his element whenever he’s in the sickbay. The only times he is not the lord of his realm are when Jayne or, interestingly enough, River, are in there and being uncooperative. Jayne usually because he’s a jerk and just doesn’t like Simon, River because she can’t control herself. Everybody else acts as subordinate to Simon in that room, even the Captain in the pilot ep when he very much was not liking Simon.
Other characters have that dynamic happening in other rooms too, ie: Wash on the command deck, Inara in her shuttle, Kaylee in her engine room. Not clear to me if Jayne, Book, Zoey, Mal, or River have their own domains on the ship or not.
Dang, I find that I come late to these threads, most of what I’d like to say have been said. I’ll add a comment about Simon.
Simon is smart, but you can tell he’s led a technical life. He comes up with the plan - and it’s a good one - but in his mind, he thinks the important thing is getting them to act like EMT’s. He goes over and over a complicated litany of medical terms that are easy for him, but foriegn to the crew. Do they need it? No - they could have just counted on the beauracracy. “Take 'em to the morgue.”
On the other hand, a really vital part of this was being able to salvage an ambulance. I’m not as sceptical as some of the previous posters about coming up with the ambulance, but consider: if they couldn’t have, what would they have done? That seemed like a pretty weak link to the caper.
Simon in his element - real Shiny. You can also see River’s fear about being in a hospital, and then it seems like nothing compared to her raw terror about seeing Blue (hand) Man Group.
I guess this was the “interesting day” that Jayne alluded to, when the money was good enough (see Serenity).
Definitely something is up with Inara. I wonder if Mal caught it, or was too preoccupied coming up wth what to do about Jayne. They didn’t show anything, and I guess we don’t have anything else to go on, now.
