When I started this blog, I promised myself that “Thou Shalt Not Whine” was going to be part of my guiding philosophy. I sat down thinking about composing some of my thoughts on Philippine television, but that would have gutted the guiding philosophy.
Instead I grabbed the the first DVD that caught my eye and slapped it in the player. As the rabid "Browncoats" out there have already guessed, that DVD was Firefly.
There are just so many elements of Firefly that appeal to me. Most of these are found in other shows that I enjoyed growing up. Josh Whedon did a great job of bringing them together for me, and apparently a legion of fans, but unfortunately not for the Fox Network brass. But then again, those are the same folks who don't have the decency to cancel an atrocity like American Idol (Thou Shalt Not Whine).
I think I was overseas when Firefly originally aired. I “discovered” the show myself while surfing for free movies on Hulu. The first “episode” I saw was the Serenity movie. For those who don't know the Firefly story, the movie was produced after the series was canceled. It was the only time that a series was canceled after a single season and then made into a big budget motion picture.
Unfortunately for me, the movie was made for fans of the show, and I was brand new to the Firefly universe. Of course I wasted as little time as possible learning my way around!
In the Firefly universe, humankind has spread beyond Old Earth, and has terraformed and colonized several planets and moons in a single star system. There is an overbearing authority known as the Alliance apparently made up of what if left of the United States/Europe and China. The Alliance holds all the power on the densely populated central planets, but just like the American Frontier, the further you get from authority, the wilder and woollier things can get.
Firefly is a class of cargo carrying spaceship which bears a striking resemblance to the eponymous bug. In the show, this particular Firefly,the Serenity, belongs to Captain Malcolm Reynolds, a veteran of the losing side of the Unification War. Serenity is crewed by a small band of misfits whom Captain Mal has come to trust, perhaps even love. Like any of literature's great command figures, Mal is loyal unto death to his trusted crew.
One of the threads that runs through Firefly that I find interesting is the veterans of the losing side. I joined the Navy several years before the War On Terror, when Vietnam was still a relatively fresh memory. A number of my college buddies had served on the line in Cold War Europe and Korea. I don't want to imply that these were defeated warriors by any means, but they didn't carry the “flush with victory” bravado that Gulf War vets wore so easily. (Even us Navy pukes who did our best to stay near the air conditioner.)
Another element that is appealing to me is that Serenity belongs to Mal who uses it to escape escape the constraints of civilization. This isn't because he's an outlaw (he is, of course, but an outlaw of the most noble sort). Mal eschews civilization for the same reason the Cowboy Myth is so powerful, the need to breathe free air.
This brings to mind Capt Adam Troy from the old TV series, Adventures in Paradise. This show was even before my time, but it helped feed the dream of getting a boat, setting sail for the south seas, and escaping the troubles of the everyday world. Part of the dream the eventually brought me to the Philippines.
Finally there is the character River Tam, played by Summer Glau. River was a child prodigy who supposedly made her older broth (who graduated at the top of his medical school class) look like “an idiot child”. River and her brother are on the run from the Alliance after they conducted unnameable experiments to her brain. It is implied that the experiments were intended to create a perfect assassin.
The Alliance's treatment of River is the ultimate symbol of the evil at the heart of the Alliance, and perhaps even overgrown civilizations everywhere. This means that we get to see Summer Glau being graceful in gauzy dresses and combat boots. That alone should have been enough to get Firefly a second season. Summer Glau in various states of dress and undress was about the only thing that made The Sarah Connor Chronicles worth following.
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