What did you guys think of this series? I liked it, I mean, I like Scifi and I thought this was pretty good. I laughed out loud about 6 or 7 time watching "Our Mrs. Reynolds". So that's pretty good, I mean, it shows something was starting to come together. Too bad it was axed. Maybe instead of goign with Fox they could have went with the SciFi channel?
yeah, I was watching the last Firefly episode and then went to the Wiki page and I was shocked that Fox dumped the show before they even got to the episode :S I couldn't help but think - Fox you suck. I wonder - does Fox actually serve a positive societal purpose? meh.....
The western theme seems strange. They obviously didn't have a big budget. There's a couple of average episodes. The one with the prostitutes finishes like a really bad episode of the A team. However if you look past the negatives and get a few episodes in then its actually a good show. The dialogue is good and the characters are interesting. I borrowed the dvds and enjoyed it so much more the second time around. Out of Gas was probably the best episode. Michael make sure you watch Serenity if you haven't already.
I thought it sucked. The writing was weak, special effects, which were very few, were not great, acting was mediocre. Compaired to other Sci Fi series this one wasn't as well done, to me, and should have been cancelled...which it was after one season.
FOX made the incomprehensible decision to broadcast the episodes out of order, which often made the story impossible to follow, since they would refer to things that had happened in previous episodes that no one had seen yet. That made it sort of interesting to watch in a disjointed "Memento" kind of way, but it definitely didn't help its popularity. Of course since they constantly shuffled the air time around and preempted it for sports broadcasts, often when the episodes were aired out of order people weren't even sure whether or not they had just missed the previous episode. They also had a chronic problem of ruining what were supposed to be surprises with the advertisements for upcoming episodes. It seems like FOX went out of their way to do everything they could to keep people from liking it.
It was an okay shw, but seriously overrated by many of its fans. It's great strength was its dialogue--like a sort "The West Wing" in space. The characters were really very shallow. Mal was the deepest one and managed that mostly because he was a clearly plagiarized copy of Han Solo. Cynical, itinerant, picaresque space pirate with old west overtones and a heart of gold usually kept well under wraps, who has ongoing troubles with his criminal employers, strong affection for and personification of his ship, and a mutual romance with a woman well above his low social standing but with whom their requited love can only be expressed in the form of traded insults and constant bickering. If you believe Han shot first, then the only difference between the two is Mal's old timey vocabulary (in the future, evidently, we will all revert to use words like "reckon" and "pardner" because the educational system has broken down ... though not so much that we do not know the speech patterns from the 19th century west (or at least the cowboy and TV portrayals). I suppose Mal is more likely than Han to be places as the butt of a physical joke by the writers. I think those indignities are more of a writing decision than a character trait though. There's not much depth to the other characters. Jayne: greedy, unscrupulous and dumb, but tough fighter Zoe: Loves her husband Wash, but is mostly defined by her soldierly sense of duty as Mal's lieutenant. Wash: Wisecracking pilot who is married and loves his wife; slightly cowardly at times. Shepherd Book: The ship's pastor (which all that entails) with an unrevealed secret past as a badass. Kaylee: Ingenue prodigy with talents for fixing engines and for remaining naive and awkward. Inara: Loves Mal, but dares not get too close. Why? No real reason save that Leia didn't. Simon: Is just trying to protect his sister, but also develops feelings for Kaylee. He keeps his distance from her, because she distracts him from protecting River (which makes more sense than Inara's non-reason). River: Whimsically crazy, untill she's not and starts killing people, then whimsically crazy again, no character needed. Obviously I could go into more detail about each one, but mostly by listing the events in which those characterizations arise and the specifics of how they manifest. On the characters, I would grant that has the series survived, they likely would have been more fleshed out over time, much as were Whedon's Buffy and Angel characters. Still, given the large cast in each series, the characters mostly had to stick to their "default" persona's and jettison complexity. There wasn't enough time for everyone to be fully well-rounded every single week. The overall universe takes some disbelief as well. They have a solar system with "dozens of planets and moons"...and they are all Earthlike. Terraforming was involved, but that is a lot of planets, and a lot of them are way further out from the central star (without significant temperature variations or changes in the levels of light they receive.) Okay, so it's "magical" terraforming. Why did some of the the ones at the edge revert to old west-style technology though? It makes no sense to mine vast quantities of metal, for example, and then go to the trouble of laying down train tracks, and building trains. You have spaceships that are ridiculously faster and require no train tracks. Why not have a culture more reminiscent of early 20th century Hong Kong? or 19th century China (Per below)? They occasionally throw some Chinese into their speech because China was a superpower on "Earth that was" for a wile. Makes good sense. Where are the Chinese characters? There are none. China was evidently a superpower with no population, or at least none that survived. Even the "Tam" family appear to be of European descent. The Reavers appear to roman about killing people. I assume they eat them because these people do not have jobs. One wonders who repairs and refuels their ships given their activities. Since they never eat anything but human flesh (it seems) who fixes their plumbing when the toilets get backed up from the all meat diet? Worse, in the movie it seems that many of the Reavers simply hover over the planet Miranda...where do those Reavers get their food from? It seems to me that the Reavers (especially over Miranda) would only be a threat for a year, tops, and then they'd be crazy people on broken ships that are either starving to death or eating each other (and either way kills them off). In reality I think the Reavers were conceived of as "monsters" and so no thought was put into the question of how they mange to survive given the day to day necessities of living beings. Some of he stories were passably good. Some were less so, like the train robbery. Overall the plots were acceptable and often rescued by the dialogue. It is a show that certainly had enough potential to have perhaps grown into to something great and deep, but I don't think it every truly did.
Well, I always give a series a full season to see if they can pull it together. I agree with a lot of what you wrote, although, I really would have liked to see the River character developed. Also, in interview Whedon sounds like the people at Fox sucked. Oh, he didn't say it, but he was hinting at it. He said he wanted a 2 hour start because the characters and universe were going to be deep and they/it needed 2 hours to flesh it out. He was told no. Then he said Fox would call on Friday and say get us the next episode Monday. And there was always a sense of being dumped at any moment. Not a good environment to work in. Plus added to what you said, it's like Fox just don't care at all. I just wonder if he had went with the SyFy channel maybe he'd have had more support? Lastly, yes, the characters were not great, BUT, I seriously got some good laughs out of a couple of eps and one of them I laughed my arse off. This tells me it was starting to click. Oh well. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Maybe they should have made an epis that started "When FireFlies ATTACH" next on Fox.
A friend of mine introduced me to this series around the time the movie came out on DVD (Serenity). I liked how everyone was human and how they showed the evolution of culture and language. True, it is a little cheesy but I can live with that. My personal favorite is 'Jaynestown' mainly because of the mirror it holds up to humanity. If you hadn't seen the movie yet then you really should. From start to finish you get to see River in all her elegance. It has the same cast and chemistry as the series. As far as Fox goes, remember how they canceled Family Guy. They figured that mistake out only after Cartoon Network aired the reruns. Unfortunately most of the cast to Firefly has moved on to new things so I don't think a comeback is in the cards. We can only enjoy what we have.
Whedon hated the Inara character, and only included her in the show because FOX executives insisted on having a "sexy space hooker" character to round out the troupe of criminal misfits. Whedon was involved in a running battle with the network to get rid of her, which is probably the real reason why her relationship with Mal never went anywere; Whedon didn't want to do anything that would cement her as a permanent part of the show. He also tried to subvert the "space hooker" thing by making her into more of a space-geisha. Although I agree that within the story their failure to get together seems pretty inexplicable, especially given their characters - Mal doesn't seem like the sort of guy who hesitates to go after something he wants, and she's hardly shy...
I liked Mal.. best of all. He sometimes seemed too good to be true, and in a cheesy way, it was ok.. I would have liked to see River and Zoe develop more as characters and as foils to Simon and Mal, our two main protagonists.
Zoe could have been developed, but again the show suffered from Buffyism. There were too many supporting characters to make them all complex. The best they could have done given a one hour format is slowly add backstories, and they could be more complex in the backstories (as they tried with Jayne somewhat in Jaynestown). At the end of the day, the captain was the main character, he could have been made complex (to a similar extent as Buffy was). I don't see what they could have done with River. She was so random when crazy that (unless they changed that) what could they do?
River was an enigma.. and we saw that through her crazyness. But her relationship with Simon and the others was never really explored, Other that "Here is her sister, and here are some flashbacks to prove it".... Then there was the whole thing with them being kidnapped together.. and it was about her crazyness again, nothing much revealed about their relationship.
Pandaemoni - I have a feeling that nothing you watch you would consider to ever be all that good. Could the characters have been "deeper" - yes - but bear in mind that this was series 1 and only 14 episodes. They need to be initially "shallow" for people to be able to understand them - and only then do you introduce the other dimensions to their character. By that I mean that you initially portray their primary character and then add to it otherwise you run the risk of confusing people early on. Compare Firefly to, say, Star Trek: Next Generation... and Firefly has characters far more fleshed out and interesting. ST is what I would call shallow, not Firefly. And I think your analysis of the characters is rather simplistic. Yes - all characters can be defined simplistically in a sentence, or a few words. But you miss out so much. I would argue that all the characters were complex - but all did of course have primary motivations. You have focussed on the primary and failed to see the depth, or just chosen to ignore it. The characterisation is there... and it is clear that there was still so much more to discover from them. In terms of characterisation I felt it did more in 1 series than the majority of long-running shows do in their entire life. As for the other issues - you can either allow your disbelief to be suspended (it is afterall a science-fiction show and not science-fact) or nitpick and convince yourself you don't like it. I personally go with the former - and find myself enjoying it immensely.
Interesting comparison, I would argue that ST is more about the Star Trek universe, and Firefly is about that particular crew. ST has the backing of the other spin offs and can rely on DS9 for character complexity..
I liked Firefly and own the entire series on DVD. I don't think it was the greatest sci-fi show ever, but I thought the episodes that were made were pretty decent and that the show had a lot of potential. The characters of any show that lasts a dozen episodes will probably seem a bit shallow. There wasn't time to get into what made them who they were.
Sure, but you would need to compare the 14 EPISODES of Firefly to 14 SERIES of Star Trek (TNG + DS9) to get the same level of quality with which to compare. IMHO, no sci-fi series has managed in 14 episodes what Firefly managed in terms of characterisation.
Now that was a shallow show almost as bad as the next movie. They had some incredible good story lines like forcing a terminator to primarly live in stead of terminating things, the bossy mom that should have ended in conflict with john and him leaving and skynet apearing in cellphones and blackberries ordering kills using human hitmans. But none of these where worked out satisfactory
