The One Reason I'm Glad Firefly Didn't Get a Second Season

My roommate had "Shindig" on yesterday (for those of you who don't remember Firefly episodes by title, it's the one where Mal and Kaylee go to the fancy party and Mal winds up getting into a swordfight over Inara). It's a pretty good episode, because any episode with Badger is a good episode and Mal gets in a great line towards the end ("Mercy is the mark of a great man...and I'm pretty good. Well, I'm alright.") But watching it reminded me of something that bothered me about Firefly, and something I suspect would only have bothered me more as the series went on if it had gone on.

Specifically, it was the interactions between Mal and Inara. This episode had it worse than others, because it was a very Mal/Inara-centric episode, but it was there any time the series focused on these two characters. Namely, Mal had absolutely no respect for Inara as a person, despite the fact that he really wanted to sleep with her, and he treated her terribly. Really terribly. All the time. And the series wanted me to think it was cute.

"Shindig" had a perfect example. After Mal decked Atherton Wing, Inara's escort for the evening, he was put into quarters until the duel. Inara met him there and told him, in no uncertain terms, that his "defense" of her "honor" was unasked for and unwanted...and then proceeded to try to teach him the basics of surviving a swordfight anyway, because she wasn't mad enough at him to want to see him dead over it.

Mal's response: "They teach you that in whore academy?"

Inara's response: "You have a strange sense of nobility, Captain. You'll lay a man out for implying I'm a whore, but you keep calling me one to my face."

Mal's response: "I might not show respect to your job, but he didn't respect you. That's the difference. Inara, he doesn't even see you."

Now the problem here is obvious: Mal's line of reasoning was obvious self-justifying BS. Inara has never been portrayed as stupid, nor has she been portrayed as limited in her options through circumstance. She is never portrayed as being coerced into the role of Companion, either. (Which may be worth discussing another time, but for the moment, let's put "Companions can always choose their partners and are well-respected and never suffer social stigma for their work" deep down in the same Well of Uncomfortable Truths as "For a universe that's supposed to be half-Chinese, Firefly sure doesn't have any Asians.") Everything about the character suggests that her current lifestyle is an informed, intelligent choice. For Mal to say, "I don't respect your job, but I respect you," is patently and self-evidently false, because it implies that he doesn't respect her decisions or her ability to make them, but that this shouldn't in any way be taken as an insult. Which, pull the other one, it's got bells on.

The scene still works, primarily because both of the actors play it smarter than the script. But when you look for it, this kind of thing pops up all the time in the series. In "Out of Gas", when we see the characters' first meeting, one of Inara's baseline conditions for renting the shuttle is that he not come in uninvited. Every time Mal burst in on her, it wasn't a wacky neighbor intrusion like Kramer on Seinfeld. It was a deliberate violation of her explicitly-stated boundaries. That's not "cute", that's creepy and stalkerish.

Mal was possessive, he was controlling--he might not have been sleeping with her, but he was damn well going to carp and moan and complain and passive-aggressively punish her every time she slept with anyone else. He didn't respect her boundaries, he didn't respect her choices, and frankly, given that actions speak louder than words, he didn't respect her. And Inara knew it.

And the series was clearly trying to portray this as "cute", and bringing these two together as a couple. And call me crazy if you will, but I don't think that the showrunners were going to bring the two of them together by having Mal realize that he was not only out of touch with his culture's views on sex work, but that he was also being a possessive jerk who needed to grow up and respect Inara's boundaries, right to make decisions about her body, and decision-making abilities. No, I think it was more likely that Inara was going, at some point, to realize that her sex work was Hurting The Man She Loved and give it up in favor of heteronormative monogamy and slut-shaming. (As a message sent by the series, that is. I don't think that was going to be her new career path.)

It would have been a disaster. It would have retroactively made Inara stupid and Mal cruel, tossing out two interesting characters solely for the sake of a lousy OTP between two people who were, as they were then-currently written, disastrously bad for each other. It was much better to have her leave the way she said she was going to, so that at least Mal could stew in his entitled manchild BS for an undetermined period of time. So in that respect, as much as I loved the series, I'm glad Firefly was cancelled.

(And I'm also not sad about losing Tim Minear's planned episode where Inara kills a bunch of Reavers by tricking them into gang-raping her poisoned vagina. But that's another day's rant.)

Why I Love My Job

I was asked to write the following quiz up by my boss, to distribute to the new hires. Let me repeat that: I was asked to write this by my boss, to distribute to the new hires.


in1. My ideal spaceship is:
a) the size of a small city, and capable of traveling at Warp 9
b) able to make the Kessel Run in less than two parsecs
c) blue, rectangular, and bigger on the inside
d) like a leaf on the wind; watch how it soars
e) don't know/no opinion

2. Who would win in a fight between these characters?
a) Kirk
b) Luke Skywalker
c) River Song
d) Buffy
e) Um...you know these are all fictional characters, right?

3. Which is cooler?
a) a phaser
b) a lightsaber
c) a bow tie
d) a wooden stake
e) an electric guitar

4. Vampires are:
a) aliens that draw the salt out of human bodies
b) dark Jedi that feed on the Force
c) fish people with perception filters
d) soulless monsters that drink human blood (with two notable exceptions)
e) sparkly and popular with teenagers right now

5. The handiest tool in the universe is:
a) a tricorder
b) an astromech droid
c) a sonic screwdriver
d) another wooden stake
e) a Swiss army knife

6. Telepathy is possible...
a) sure! Lwaxana Troi has it!
b) With the Force, young Padawan, all things are possible.
c) Yes, but don't make a habit of it.
d) Yes, but it drives you insane. (Unless you live on a spaceship.)
e) No. Don't be silly.

7. The scariest thing in the universe is:
a) the Borg.
b) the Death Star.
c) a Dalek.
d) a giant snake that used to be the town's Mayor.
e) a king cobra.

8. When someone dies...
a) You have to return their body to their home planet.
b) They get a blue ghost body.
c) They regenerate.
d) Joss Whedon marks another notch on his writing desk.
e) Let's not discuss that at work, shall we? It's a very serious topic.

9. A good length for a series is:
a) Seven years.
b) Three movies. That's where they should have stopped.
c) Fifty years and counting.
d) Seven years. You hear that, FOX? Not one, not two. SEVEN.
e) I don't know, it depends on the series. Which one were you talking about?

10. The best movie ever made is:
a) Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
b) The Empire Strikes Back.
c) Doctor Who and the Daleks.
d) Either Serenity, Cabin in the Woods or Avengers. Don't make me choose!
e) Citizen Kane.

What Haunts Me About Firefly

We all know what 'Firefly' is about, right? Mal was one of the Browncoats, who fought a failed war against the Alliance and, after it was over and his cause of freedom was lost, he went out to the frontier to live free like a person oughta. The Alliance and "civilization" are slowly encroaching on his wild frontier, but he's determined to defy them any way he can.

It's a great story, one that feels authentic because it is authentic. Joss Whedon took his inspiration for his "space Western" by transplanting a lot of the causes of the original "Wild West" to a different setting. The original American frontier got its reputation for lawlessness due to an influx of Confederate veterans who felt frustrated and bitter living in the Reconstruction South. They migrated westwards, where they used their military skills to carve out a living however they could. Until, of course, the federal government moved west as well, taming the new frontier.

So the Browncoats are basically the Greybacks. Which is what haunts me...because Joss Whedon never really says why the war started. What was the cause the Browncoats fought for? Mal and others say that the Alliance "meddled", but that was the basic attitude of most slaveowners as well. Mal certainly doesn't seem to show any socially unpopular attitudes--he's friendly to Book, to River, to pretty much everyone as far as a misanthropic cynic like him is capable of being friendly--but what did he stand for? What made the Alliance say, "No. This cannot be tolerated, not in a civilized culture"?

I wonder. And I wonder if maybe Joss Whedon didn't intend me to wonder, just a little.

Fun Fact!

"You know, in certain older civilized cultures, when men failed as entirely as you have, they would throw themselves on their swords," from the movie 'Serenity', is a great thing to say to someone right after they tell a joke that bombs.

"You are a sad, strange little man and you have my pity," from 'Toy Story', also works, but is gender-specific.

Storytelling Engines: Firefly

(or "The Real World Tells Stories Too")

(And a hearty "welcome back!" to all the Joss Whedon fans who visited my blog!)

Whenever people try to describe Joss Whedon's 'Firefly' to someone who hasn't seen the series yet, the inevitable term they use is, "It's a Western in space." Which is true enough as far as it goes; any series that has an episode with the heroes smuggling cattle to another planet definitely earns the title "Western in space" pretty definitively. But when he came up with the idea for 'Firefly' and its storytelling engine (TV series are always very concerned with storytelling engines, because TV series look at 100 episodes as a minimum benchmark for success), Whedon didn't just decide to combine the tropes of the Western genre with the tropes of the science-fiction genre. He used the reality of the American frontier, rather than the fiction of the Old West, as his model to create a storytelling engine.

Noticing how involves a quick history lesson. What we think of as "the Old West", with gunslingers and bank robbers and grizzled settlers and sheriffs who were the only law in their town and madams with a heart of gold, et cetera, was a product primarily of the Civil War. There was settlement of the West prior to the Civil War, of course, but when the Confederacy collapsed, many of the former Confederate soldiers who didn't want to live under a government they'd just spent four years fighting drifted westward, where the United States' authority was minimal and they could use their military experience to make a living in a lot of not-particularly-legitimate ways. This meant living a lot rougher, but again, four years of being in a war had left them with different standards as to "civilized life" than the average person.

These semi-lawless veterans flooded into an already not particularly lawful part of the country that was still awash with gold prospectors and settlers who were also leaving the civilized parts of America for their own reasons (the Mormons also moved west into Utah during this period.) This created an unusually anti-authoritarian, sometimes violent society...one which was within the borders of the United States, and which the federal government had to tame if they wanted to truly become a continental government. (And one which, arguably, they never managed to completely conquer--many states in the western part of the US remain firmly libertarian and anti-authority, although the streak seems to have been put to positive uses for the most part.)

So this was the model that Whedon used for 'Firefly'. The conflict between the Sino-American Alliance and the "Browncoats" (and note that Whedon has always been vague about the exact causes and ideals of the Browncoats--Mal, of course, simply says they were for "freedom", but just about everyone thinks they're fighting on the right side) is an analogy for the Civil War, and Mal is one of the many disaffected veterans of that war who moves out to the frontier. The societal model for 'Firefly' feels real because it is real. It's got the kind of logic that's been tested by history. Writers should never feel afraid to borrow from history, because it's the only kind of plagarism that audiences admire. *rimshot*

Other elements of the Western in 'Firefly' are born out of economic logic. Sure, you could probably use a futuristic hover-buggy to ride around in, but if fuel is short, a horse is cheaper to feed. Laser pistols? A fancy toy for the rich, and a bullet kills just as sure as amplified and focused light. Why build tables out of wood instead of synthetics? Because it's cheap and plentiful and we've been working with it for the entire length of human history, and we know how to do it. The tropes of the Western aren't just there because Whedon thought they would look cool, they're there because they make sense within the story. (The only real "Western trope" is the idea of the Reavers as frontier savages, and Whedon deliberately subverts the idea in order to avoid the uncomfortable subtext of racism that's frequently present in Westerns.)

I've talked a lot about storytelling engines in this column (mainly because that's what it's about), but 'Firefly' does remind us that one of the quickest, easiest, most reliable storytelling engines comes from the world around us. Because the world is always full of stories, more than can ever possibly be told.

Theodore Geisel's 'Serenity'

When River fights with Reavers, it's a River-Reaver battle.

When she cuts them with a cleaver and she hits them in the liver, it's a River-Reaver-liver-cleaver battle.

And when River fights with Reavers with her Reaver-liver-cleaver and she hits them in the liver and she slaughters them like cattle, it's a River-Reaver-liver-cleaver-cattle-battle.

Then she says, "Our fight is done sir, you're dead so I think I've won, sir."

(Next time on Theodore Geisel Theatre, we present "Theodore Geisel's 'X-Files'. "If sir, you sir, want to chew sir, on the black goo Krycek knew sir, do sir!")

Getting an Idea Out of My Head

As is usual when I have what I think is a really great idea that I have no way to convey to the people who could do something about it, I'm just going to blog the idea and hope that someone who has some power to do something about it sees it. It's sort of like setting a bottle adrift at sea, except that that a bottle adrift at sea has less chance of being found by a person who was really just looking for porn sites.

So, with that in mind, and hoping that Joss Whedon Googles his own name just to see what people are saying about him (I can't be the only person who does this), I suggest:

A Firefly line of novels.

Seriously, the movie apparently didn't do enough business to bring out another $25 million film, and that seems to be the end of it...but unless I've been lied to repeatedly by a variety of different publishers, authors of TV tie-in books don't get paid 25 million dollars. I think that there's definitely a devoted following of the series that's willing to shell out regular dough for a series of decently written books, and that it could be sustained as a profitable line. And one of the advantages of writing a book based on a TV series is that TV series are designed as "story machines"--ie, the setting and characters are meant to generate a large number of story ideas, just because they need to have a large number of stories over the lifespan of the series.

So. Let the word-of-mouth campaign spread from this tiny little blog, read by a bare minimum of people (and probably fewer since I post so infrequently now.) Let it become a vast tide of public opinion which will reach the ears of publishing houses everywhere. Firefly: The Novels! Or Serenity Joss Whedon Nathan Fillion Universal ...let's see, what other keywords would get me hits?

Right. Hot Asian shaved.

Spoiler-Free Review: Serenity

So they do the thing, with the--the zoom, and the whoosh, and the big--omigod, and they--oh, wow, and the bit with the fight, and when the guy does the--and that scene where Mal--it was SO COOL!

It's not the kind of movie you can give a spoiler-free review of. Go. See it for yourself. I'll just give you one line as a bonus.

"Doctor, I'm taking your sister under my protection here. If anything happens to her, anything at all, I swear to you I will get very choked up. Honestly. There could be tears."