TV #40 of 2021:

Firefly, season 1

Firefly casts a long shadow in fan circles for its notoriety as the classic case of a TV show unjustly canceled before its time. The litany is tediously familiar at this point: Fox executives didn’t understand the thing, aired the episodes all out of their intended order (scrambling the ongoing storylines and pushing the pilot that theoretically introduces the characters and premise eleven hours deep), and then pulled the plug when audiences didn’t seem into it either. The series later gained a cult following, a passion made resonant by the program’s own portrayal of heroes defeated in a massively uneven conflict in the backstory. For self-styled Browncoats, it’s all too easy to identify with those figures and to read the domineering Alliance that coldly stomps all dissent as a metaphor for the network that couldn’t see what was special within its grasp.

It’s been a while since my last rewatch, and I was surprised by how well everything holds up — with a few important caveats discussed below — almost two decades on. A lot of science-fiction claims to be of the ‘space western’ variety, with Star Trek even pitched initially as “Wagon Train to the stars,” but Firefly embraces that notion to the extreme, smoothly translating all sorts of cowboy tropes and institutions into the speculative genre setting. Saloon fights, cattle rustlers, train robberies, and beyond: if you could see it in a story of the Wild West, it wouldn’t be out of place here. That concept lends a very distinctive atmosphere to the piece as well as some meaningful considerations of civilization versus the frontier, and there’s no effort to be coy or ironic about it at all. These folks are just straight-up postbellum mercenary travelers, who happen to live on a 26th-century spaceship. It’s an earnest and oddly refreshing production choice.

The core cast members are pretty excellent too, and the writing finds creator Joss Whedon at his most hilariously quotable, charming us with witty repartee and outlaw hijinks on nearly a scene-by-scene basis. And even in its truncated form, elements of compelling serialization had already begun to appear in the narrative, with personal arcs and recurring guest roles that further flesh out this fictional reality. It’s a strong run despite the imposed limitations, and one that likely could have blossomed into something grander had it only been given the chance.

On the downside, there are two major issues and one minor one in the text that feel both more glaring and more damaging with the benefit of distance. The first concerns our central protagonist, Captain Malcolm Reynolds, and how he treats his love interest Inara Serra, the high-status escort who occupies a smaller shuttle off the ship. Mal is clearly conflicted in his feelings, but that doesn’t justify his abrasive entitlement or slut-shaming, wherein he literally calls the companion a whore over her repeated requests not to. On a similar note, the worldbuilding itself is frustratingly appropriative, painting a hybrid East/West culture for humanity’s future and dropping Chinese code-switching into everyone’s dialogue… but then having essentially no Asian presence on-screen besides a few isolated faces in crowds. And while less problematic than those, it’s also not great how the ‘lost cause’ rhetoric from people who recently came out of a big civil war inherently draws parallels between the Serenity crew and defenders of slavery back on earth.

It’s possible these aspects would have been tweaked and softened in additional installments, of course! (Although recent accusations of Whedon’s predatory and abusive behavior on his sets don’t exactly give me hopes in that regard.) But the problems are baked into the version of the season that we’ve got, as is the abrupt non-ending that leaves so many plot threads dangling. A big-budget movie sequel and subsequent comic books would go on to offer a degree of closure, but to consider this title by itself is to see a flawed masterpiece: a project that deserves neither its original fate nor the sterling reputation it maintains in certain quarters. It’s a tantalizing what-if as much for the missed opportunities when it was cut down so soon as for the even better product it could have been with a bit of light tinkering.

[Content warning for gun violence, body horror, medical experimentation, and threat of cannibalism and rape.]

★★★★☆

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