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The Best...space western

Nathan Fillion as Mal Reynolds in Firefly
  • Posted at 1:15pm
  • 09 June 2008
  • by LauraPledger-RT
  • 2 comments

Joss Whedon gave the world Buffy and Angel - and viewers took them to their hearts. He also gave the world Firefly - and viewers didn't care so much.

It's hard to see where Whedon went wrong in creating a series based around two former soldiers, who fought on the losing side of a bitter war, now trying to eke out an existence in a harsh universe. The writers told tight, exciting stories. The cast made light work of drawling cowboy dialogue that, though it used far more words than by rights a sentence ought to, sounded somehow ineffably casual and laid-back.

Other sci-fi shows invent words like "frell" and "frak" to allow their characters to vent their frustrations. Firefly was, unusually for a US series, always open about its bad language - everybody simply swore in Chinese.

If you found yourself in trouble, the crew of the spaceship Serenity are the people you'd want on your side. They may be a bunch of misfits, but as any sci-fi fan will tell you, the "outsiders" are the cool guys really. (Although I have to admit, I've yet to meet a sci-fi fan who would know what it's like to be on the "inside".)

Heading up the crew is Malcolm Reynolds, a man who's always in control of a situation (except when he's not). It never ceases to amaze me how many heroic characters in American TV and film are saddled with a name like Malcolm. It's on a par with going to the bother of dreaming up a psychotic killer, only to call him Nigel.

To solve the problem of the lead character sounding more like a weedy accountant than a flippant man of action, the captain is frequently referred to as Mal. This instantly renders him ten times sexier - though that might have something to do with the tight trousers he wears. Just as there's more than a touch of the Millennium Falcon about reconditioned rustbucket Serenity, Mal bears more than a passing resemblance to Star Wars's Han Solo. Presumably this goes some way towards explaining the series's popularity with women.

For a group of people who gravitate towards figure-hugging clothing, Mal and his crew manage to conceal a startling amount of weaponry about their trim persons. This comes in handy for each episode's firefight (as inevitable in Firefly as a car chase is in The Sweeney).

The fact that their enemies are exclusively human no doubt cuts costs in the make-up department. The Reavers were about as outlandish as the bad guys got on this show (and even they were supposedly only men who had been driven insane by the vastness of space). Much given to mindless violence and cannibalism, these "monsters" made few appearances in the series, for which viewers of a nervous disposition will be eternally grateful.

In the end, though, it wasn't the Reavers - nor even the fascist Alliance - that did for Serenity's crew. It was those ruthless studio execs at Fox, wielding their programming axe. And those of us privileged enough to join Mal and his friends on their travels can only take comfort in the defiant lines from the series' theme tune - "I don't care I'm still free/You can't take the sky from me".

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  • Posted on 30 March 2009
  • at 2:06pm
  • by Eleanor

I wish it would come back! I've introduced friends to it, who now hate me, because there's no real ending to it apart from the film. And Wash dies.

  • Posted on 20 June 2008
  • at 1:17am
  • by Tom

Firefly is without a doubt one of the finest television programmes ever made, and its a shame that it never had to chance to be shown on TV in the UK on a major channel. The key to it is undoubtably the characters - I can think of no other cast that works together as believably as Firefly's.

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