Firefly [tv show]

I had watched some of the episodes in the past, but this week I deceded to watch the series from start to finish.

So last night I finshed all the episodes and I play to watch Serenity and watch a documentary on Netflix. Yet I feel like I can talk about what I though now having seen teh show itself.

[SPOILER ALERT]

I'm not going to say much, but again I will point out...they show is old and I will probably spoil something....so stop reading now if you have not yet.

I think the show was merely, okay. Yeah, sorry super fans I think the show was merely okay and not really worthy of all of the reverence.

Quick overview:

THE GOOD

- Charcacters are good, everyone got a fair shake of storyline and each part was pretty well acted by the actors.

- Overall idea of half A-Team, half Star Trek Enterprise is a good one.

- Story arc for season was pretty good, that is tough when given one season

- Ship is cool, other ships are cool, some of the tech shown is interesting

- Speaking Chinese...I liked that they committed to it too (It needed more of that)

- Jayne Cobb— the mercenary is great. (I guess the real actor is about as big of a real dick as Jayne...but what can you do.)

- They punch people A LOT. A lot of characters are unrepentant jerks which is refreshing...no lesson learned.

THE BAD

- Ugg Space cowboys! I can see a QUARTER OF THE planets looking old west....but 90% of them? Yuck!

- Mal's six shooter is dumb...good god do I hate the adherence to space cowbody shit. Have projectile weapons, have energy weapons, have whatever...but backoff with the ol' west theme.

- The damn doctor comes from an Alliance planet why does HE dress like ol' doc from Little House on the Prairie? If anything needed to change it was that each planet needed to look different, different customs, different dress (or undress). Stop with the "ol west" thing being drilled down so hard.

- Inara Serra—the Companion would have told the captain she likes him. Its is in her nature to be that open, even if it is not in his nature. The struggle should have been she likes Mal, but he cannot get over that she will be with anyone she likes - non-monogamous.

I liked the show, but good god did they waste some potential with some of it. It is a shame ist only got one season, and even more of a shame that there were no networks willing to fund it or sell their rights...or whatever the hell needed to happen to get it off teh ground again. I think that is water under the bridge a decade later - I don't really see any way to get back even 1/2 of the cast to do anything.

The biggest issue with the show is yet again we have non-sci-fi writer producers making sci-fi. Jesus christ are most people in Hollywood behind on what is real tech vs possible future tech. This becomes and issue because you have people like Whedon saying, "nothing will change in the future: technology will advance, but we will still have the same political, moral, and ethical problems as today" the key is LIKE not the same - LIKE.

The issue here is for any civilization to be at the point where Firefly is the basic sciences of that age would make death, aging, cloning, robots, AI a near inevitability. To kill someone in the future you would have to literally chop their head off, take that had and vaporize it, or toss it into space never to be found. DEATH is the same...how, why, when you die is different. You can't use 1970s storylines in a 2270 world. You can do a story on death, but what death means, how it happens, why it happens, all the different ways to die (physical death, brain erasure, non-backup of brain, destruction of memory, etc) will be different.

The most frightening part of current science fiction TV is most the writers and produce are dealing with story lines that still adhere to a 1960s view of the future. If you are making a new sci-fi show for 2015 about 2115 you simply cannot ignore nano-tech, AI, extended life, cloning, brain copying, suspended animation, brain to brain encrypted telepathy, augmented reality interactions with ALL devices from a keyboard to a sex partner, new diseases, AND the very fact that it would be HARD to die if you are close to the right tech and have the right amount of cash.

In 100 years I would literally have to vaporize you, and then hunt down all the copies of your brain (to erase them). So getting shot in the heart or head 2115 is not really any more life threatening than breaking your arm. Vaporizing you whole body COULD BE about as inconvenient then getting in a survivable traffic accent that puts you out of commission for 18 months. As the said in the Pricess Bride :"Miracle Max: Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive."

so it sounds like you have a problem with writers of scfi more then this show...

i mean your bad section felt mainly like a bunch of random nitpicks

there are certainly problems with the show but the ones you pointed out are the definition of asinine

It was my favorite show for a good long time. About time for a rewatch, I'm curious where it would stand a couple years after my last viewing.

Yeah, those aren't very good criticisms. The problem with the show is that it's all hat and no cattle, as far as I'm concerned. Lots of potential, but it never achieved it. Would it have if given the time? Quite possibly. What's there on celluloid isn't enough, though. It's an appetizer with no main course.

I think the reason why we only see low-tech planets is because Mal avoids Alliance owned space. When we do visit the Alliance owned planets, its a stark contrast to the places the crew usually goes to.

The six-shooter is very Mal, just as Serenity is. He expresses his disdain for high-tech, which is what the Alliance embraces.

Simon already sticks out like a sore thumb. River doesn't help him keep a low profile. He'd stick out even worse if he walked around looking the part. He is a wanted criminal.

The only criticisms I can muster on such a short lived series is that it was a bunch of neat concepts that never got time to get fleshed out. That, and the show needed to stick to Cantonese or Mandarin. I could understand Serenity's warning messages in "Out of Gas" but everything else? Not a clue.

I didn't care for the horses. I'd wager it's easier to maintain something like an ATV over a horse. But, you can eat the later.

I tried to watch it once. Got like five episodes in and quit as I thought it was kind of terrible.

Firefly is good and gets better as it goes, though the best character other than Mal is Christina Hendricks. The movie is kind of ridiculous but still entertaining plus the villain won best actor last year. I imagine it would have had like 3-4 good seasons and then gone downhill.

i thought the movie was very good, especially since at the time there was very little space sifi going on

but your opinion invalidates mine so im f*******

=p

Pretty much what I would have said. I just want to add that it is in Inara's trained nature to be that way, but Mal is the only one who can break through all of that.

I just really hate the old west as sci-fi fare. Like I said, I LIKED the show so most of my criticism will be small stuff of course. If I hated the show, I'd have more to say about what I didn't like, right. I like the show, but for me the ol' west crap was super heavy handed.

And, yeah, they shoudl have had that back on the air less than a year later...but now ten years in I can't see any reason to restart. I'd rather have a new show with Nathan Fillion and Jewel Staite...hell add Christina Rene Hendrick, Summer Glau and Ron Glass too. Any of those folks would be welcome in a new sci-fi show.

What we really need is for HBO to do something on the scale of Game of Thrones, but with science fiction. HBO could afford someone like a Neal Stephenson, Elizabeth Moon, Chrales Stross, David Marusek, or David Brin; and when you have that you can take what they wrote as books to make a show.

Ya, I was never a big fan of Firefly. I prefer SG-1 and Farscape.

Mostly SG-1. I have every episode of that show and all the movies. That's my personal choice for geeky sci fi show I love. It was because they used real world military tactics and Richard Dean Anderson's character suffering from PTSD and the mythology mixed with aliens, and... oh man. I'll just go on and on about that amazing show.

I actually didn't grow a bigger appreciation for Farscape until recently, but I think that show is underrated. At the time I watched it fairly casually and actually Firefly came out around the time Farscape ended.

I love the hell out of Firefly, but I'm glad the fans have finally let it go. A lot of your complaints are pretty nitpicky. It was a space western, but had too much western in it... a silly complaint. It's tonally very similar to other Whedon shows and I believe if it had more time to breathe it could have been his best show. Whedon has never been one to shy away from fantasy/sci-fi silliness, but he always knows when to up the drama. Very few shows have been able to marry that stuff as well as Firefly, Angel and Buffy. Even the later parts of Dollhouse stopped being an absolute bore and started showing real promise.

Firefly has a ridiculous amount of well thought out characters that I assume would have grown and grown as the show went on. You even saw glimpses of a lot of that stuff, and they unfortunately had to waste a lot of it to tie up loose ends in Serenity. Firefly was a Sci-fi, space western and to complain about it being exactly what Whedon set out to make is like watching Doctor Who and complaining he's not a real doctor.

sg1 is about as vanillia as it gets

farscape is cool

Don't usually get involved in criticizing criticism but damn duder you are wildly off base.

First of all, Firefly ended in 2003, it didn't start in 2015.

:P

Jokes aside!

who in the world do you think you are? :D

You have 0 (ZERO) idea what the future is going to be like. Just because there could/may/likely will be nanomachines, suspended animation, etc, doesn't mean there *will* be. 100 hundred years from now no one knows what could happen to tech. Are you right that sometimes it doesn't make sense that we have TECH A but not TECH B? Yes. But mostly you are just making assumptions about future tech. And you want every writer, ever, who'll ever write a Sci-Fi to make the exact same assumptions? Does this really seem like it would lead to better, more interesting sci fi?

I mean this in a very friendly way, but this is one of the wrongest things I ever read in my whole life.

You're right that there's a sad lack of hard sci fi, but this is not the way to go about a change methinks.

Plus everyone knows that in the future Old Tech is the only way to get around New Tech, so six shooters are super useful. :D

All that said and done... Firefly? 6/10.

Buffy is way better.

buffy season 1? no way

as a whole of course, but I prefer angel

@monkeyking1969: It's Sci-Fi. The point is to explore the unusual. It doesn't all have to be realistic. What you dislike about Firefly is what many of it's fans, myself included, like so much.

And, considering how many NATIONS are poverty stricken on this planet, I think it's pretty realistic that in the far flung future where planets are commonly populated, many of them be total shitholes with only a few of the advantages of the future. They took that likely outcome in a direction based on their own artistic interpretation. You may not like it but to call it "bad" is pretty unfair. It's just not to your taste. It's all very intentional, from the lack of or even disdain for the modern technology of the era, to the cowboy-esque fantasy that characters like Mal obviously thrive off of.

All of the wild west stuff is in stark contrast to the extremely sterile, high tech Alliance stuff. All the stuff you want is there, but many of the characters that the show focuses on shed that technology because they don't like the freedom they feel they would have to sacrifice to make use of it.

Sci Fi is usually used to stage current issues in an unfamiliar backdrop. It doesn't need to be realistic, just have elements that are relate-able.

I also think your concept of what will be possible or what the world will be like in 100 years is a bit off.

Firefly/Serenity are two of my favorite pieces of Sci-Fi. They are trashy, fun, and have a hell of a lot of heart and character. Joss and his crew are very talented at covering a wide range of situations. Some episodes (Out of Gas comes to mind) are incredibly tense and dark. Others are just kind of goofy, such as the revelations about Jayne's past. And the relationships between the crew members keep things interesting. Every one of them is likeable in a very different way. They're often used to various ends. There isn't really a "comic relief" character, because any of the characters can play that part. The characters manage to do a lot, something I feel like is missing from a lot of shows these days. Each character is just a concentrated element of a formula that rarely changes.

You don't have to like it, but it'd be unfair to say that it fails in some way just because you don't like the aesthetic or mood it goes for.

I actually really love Buffy seasons 1 and 2. Didn't originally but the more I rewatch the show the more I do. The last season is the one I hate.

Angel is awesome also but I find the editing jokes in Buffy much funnier. Angel is more consistent but for me the highs weren't as high.

@geraltitude: yeah i deff agree about angel being more consistent but it true that it doesnt have quite as many highs as buffy

I just enjoy the core cast of angle much more ( angel, gunn, Wesley, librarian chick whose i forget) along with smaller characters like lorne and evil/good lawyer guy.

You mean Fred aka Winnifred! Babe librarian who was a slave in an alternate dimension (amazing 2 parter). Yeah that crew is pretty awesome. Wesley's arc is pretty amazing all in all. I just never liked Cordelia, though she's a part of Buffy too.

Outside of characters I usually just enjoyed Buffy's Monster-of-the-Week episodes more, but man that Angel episode where he becomes a muppet is amazing.

*sigh*.

Joss Whedon, please come back to TV.

He's currently lost in the mountain of money Marvel stuff is making.

It would be nice to see him return to TV, but I fear some of the old magic might be gone if you gave him a real budget.

The biggest issue with the show is yet again we have non-sci-fi writer producers making sci-fi. Jesus christ are most people in Hollywood behind on what is real tech vs possible future tech. This becomes and issue because you have people like Whedon saying, "nothing will change in the future: technology will advance, but we will still have the same political, moral, and ethical problems as today" the key is LIKE not the same - LIKE.

That's my problem with 90% of the sci-fi I come across, but I never expected anything special on that front from Whedon. To my mind where he excels is in the character department and Firefly didn't disappoint.

@geraltitude: yeah shes on person of interest which is a decent semi procedural

Also there's a reason i didn't mention Cordelia lol...

she was all right sometimes but the true shitty character of the show was conner

I would have watched Jewel Staite Firefly for another million seasons.

Firefly is one of the best shows I have seen (imo of course) and that's only from one season.

That's all I have to say about that.

I enjoy it a lot, despite it's problems. A couple of episodes are truly brilliant, though there are too many "old west, but this guy has a hover car" episodes.

It always felt like another season and it really would have matured into something great.

I think the "old west" theme works because it's in contrast to the Alliance, which does have space guns and lasers and all sorts of crazy shit. A six shooter might just be easier to make, find, buy and use than a laser gun. It's probably way cheaper too. I thought that whole aspect made perfect sense.

That said, when I first saw an episode of Firefly a few years ago I thought it looked like garbage purely because of the old west theme. I thought that was just really dumb. Finally it was on Netflix and I decided to give it another watch, and it all made sense.

I watched it all on Netflix over like three days, a while back.

It's a pretty good television show which had Nathan Drake in it.

No, the anachronisms are a big part of what made it a cult show despite of it's failings.

Some of the nails in the coffin where: the show was aired out of order and it was advertised as a comedy. This was made possible because of a few misconceptions made on how long it would last, making a lot of episodes be almost stand-alone anthologies rather than following a more cohesive plot.

Back in the day you could watch an episode of firefly and like it ( or not) But the problem was that in the case of almost half the episodes there was no compelling reason to watch the next one. Specially if that was your first episode (again, it was shown out of order, so I think your first episode at the beginning of the season was the 4th...)

As for the ones making it compelling, they where sufficient to make it a cult tv show and justify a movie just so fans would know what was the deal with River. For example.

I just don't like the idea that something is bad because it's not the same thing as everything else. When it comes to fiction that is....by all means, creators should go crazy with it.

I agree with that, it ended far too soon. I liked it, I just could never love it because of the over use of western crap. I miss having good sci-fi shows being made, but I think we always get too much or two little.

I think most Star Trek series last way too long. Stargate SG1 lasted too long then spun off too many shows - I could never get into them. BSG ended like crap with the last season tearing down what good will I had for it. Some of the shows that never catch on or where cut short like Sarah Connor Chronicles, Almost Human, and Defying Gravity were great. There is a lot of sci fie being made but I find teh trend of making post apocalyptic stuff is sort of missing the point of science fiction.

But truthfully, if you gave me a choice of one to bring back (Star Trek, Stargate, BSG or Firefly) I WOULD pick Firefly. Firefly is the most open ended for 'going anywhere' and 'doing anything', yet it is so new that it could be fixed unlike Star Trek. I truly believe Star Trek is SO important to Paramount that they fear screwing up more than making it better.

I enjoyed it well enough for what it is. Never really understood why some people thought it was quite so amazing though.

@jimbo: but it saved a bunch of kittens from the river, cured cancer and discovered where elvis and 2pac were hiding!

@azrailx: Ok yeah that is pretty good I guess.

This series was great. It certainly had some problems, but the chemistry between the characters was great and the setting was awesome.