The Browncoat Revolution

It’s been a while since I sat down and watched Firefly. That’s not because I think it’s a bad show; quite the opposite. The series features some of the best characters and world building I’ve seen in sci-fi. It’s a smart and snappy show that clearly had a lot of people, in front of and behind the camera, that loved what they were doing. It has (or, at least had) a thriving fanbase who talked about being “Browncoats” (the heroic rebels from the series), and these fans awaited any new bit of story or content that came along, from the one movie, Serenity, to the comics that followed, novels, an RPG, and more.

No, the reason why I’ve shied away from Firefly for so long, and I’m sure other fans of the series have as well, is because of one man: Joss Whedon. As has been publicly discussed before, including a few times on this site, Whedon is a piece of shit. The one-time celebrated writer-director, who launched Buffy the Vampire Slayer and then went on to find massive acclaim with the usually successful The Avengers, essentially ensuring that the Marvel Cinematic UniverseWhen it first began in 2008 with a little film called Iron Man no one suspected the empire that would follow. Superhero movies in the past, especially those not featuring either Batman or Superman, were usually terrible. And yet, Iron Man would lead to a long series of successful films, launching the most successful cinema brand in history: the Marvel Cinematic Universe. came to be, had at one point been considered a true hero of the geek community. He was seen as a feminist, writing strong female characters and creating great stories for them.

But then his ex-wife revealed that he was a cheater and a liar, and then many of the actresses he had worked with, including some who, at the time, had been underage, also revealed that he had been a creep on set, that he had been emotionally abusive and generally awful to them. It took the luster off his career, with his fans going back to his works and seeing all the places where his seemingly strong female characters on well-written shows were really masking awful, creepy things under the surface. And there was Dollhouse, which was a whole other level of creepy and misogynistic.

Firefly was a show I loved when it aired, getting a brief, truncated season of 14 episodes before FOX pulled the plug because it wasn’t a hit with audiences (a decision they later regretted when it was far too late). I’ve gone back and rewatched the episodes (and the movie) a couple of times over the years, but I set them aside at a certain point because, with everything that came out about Whedon, I wanted to try and preserve what I liked about the show in my head without being forced to think about how awful Whedon was. But you can only avoid something for so long, and I knew one day I’d review the whole franchise for this site.

And here we are, taking a dive into the series nearly ten years after Whedon was exposed as an awful person and, well, I can’t say that all my fears about the show were allayed. The premiere episode of the series, “Serenity”, is a perfect pilot for Firefly, showing us all its strengths as well as the weaknesses in Whedon’s storytelling. It sets up great characters, a solid world, and space-faring adventure quite unlike the stories told in Star TrekOriginally conceived as "Wagon Train in Space", Star Trek was released during the height of the Hollywood Western film and TV boom. While the concept CBS originally asked for had a western vibe, it was the smart, intellectual stories set in a future utopia of science and exploration that proved vital to the series' long impact on popular culture., Star WarsThe modern blockbuster: it's a concept so commonplace now we don't even think about the fact that before the end of the 1970s, this kind of movie -- huge spectacles, big action, massive budgets -- wasn't really made. That all changed, though, with Star Wars, a series of films that were big on spectacle (and even bigger on profits). A hero's journey set against a sci-fi backdrop, nothing like this series had ever really been done before, and then Hollywood was never the same., and their ilk. It’s more in line with The ExpanseThis series is set in a future where humans have colonized the Solar System, but then have to contend with alien tech that upends their whole civilization., with a small crew on a small ship, working at the edge of space against threats much bigger than themselves (and it predated that series by nearly almost a decade). It’s fantastic… but also just a little bit flawed.

The series focuses on the crew of the Serenity, a Firefly-class vessel captained by Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion). As revealed at the start of the series, Reynolds was a sergeant in the Independent army, fighting against the Alliance during the Unification War. The Independents lost, and Reynolds, along with his loyal second-in-command Zoe (Gina Torres), went off on their own to find a way to make it in space outside the control of the Alliance. With their vessel, and their crew – Alan Tudyk as pilot Hoban "Wash" Washburne, Adam Baldwin as hitter Jayne Cobb, and and Jewel Staite as engineer Kaywinnet Lee "Kaylee" Frye, they run jobs and stay just far enough outside the law so as to stick their eye in the Alliance whenever they can.

Trouble comes their way when a job goes south. The goods they were hired to collect are marked for the Alliance and too hot to sell. Plus, an Alliance cruiser spotted them and, while the registry for the ship wasn’t detected, the Alliance knows a Firefly-class ship is out in the sector, doing lawless things, which puts extra heat on the crew. They are forced to pick up passengers to help keep the lights going, and those passengers – Carlos Jacott as Lawrence Dobson, Ron Glass as Shepherd Book, and Sean Maher as Simon Tam – might just have secrets of their own. All of this has to be balanced while the crew looks for a buyer for their stolen goods that won’t get them too shot up in the process.

“Sereniity” is a solidly built, smartly conceived pilot episode. It has a lot it has to establish, not just from the characters and crew but the whole background and set up for the world as well. It has to get us through the loss of the Unification War, the setup for the ship, what the Alliance does, who the characters are, what big threat (the Reavers) exist out in the world, and just how dangerous living on the outskirts of civilized space can be. It’s a credit to Whedon as a writer that he found a way to take all those elements and condense it all down, cohesively and effectively, into a two-hour pilot that absolutely moves. It’s fantastic.

With that said, there are certain aspects of the series that are already questionable from the outset. For starters, the show has strong male leads in all the key roles, from the captain to the goofy pilot and the comedically dark (and stupid) muscle, but the women on the show aren’t as universally well crafted. Zoe is the strongest female member of the crew, but this episode doesn’t exactly give us a lot about her character that lets her stand out. She’s Mal’s second-in-command, and she’s presented as a strong warrior, but there isn’t much to her character yet that exists outside of the captain, or her husband Wash.

Kaylee has a little more in the way of character development. She’s the engineer for the ship, and she’s shown to just have a way with machines, like they talk to her. She’s capable in a way more engineers in sci-fi shows aren’t shown to be, able to skip all the technobabble and just get down to business. At the same time, though, the show treats her like she’s a delicate thing that has to be protected. A major interaction comes halfway in the episode when Jayne is picking on her and Mal steps in to make it stop. Kaylee could have been written as someone that could defend herself, but Whedon had the captain handle it instead, which is… a choice. Especially when, at other times, Kaylee seems to have some fire in her belly so she should be able to handle herself.

Of course, the most questionable choice would be to include Inara, the companion, in the show. For a series that depicts space as a kind of sci-fi Western (since 1850s tech, like horses and carriages and trains would be easier to set up than anything more advanced on backwater planets) it’s natural that there would be ladies of negotiable affection. But not only does Whedon have one of these ladies be a major player in the cast, but he then casts a rather strong, male gaze towards her. She’s shown in states of undress in the episode more than once, and sometimes the show lingers far longer than might be seemly, especially when it doesn’t have this gaze for just about anyone else. One could say Whedon’s desires were showing.

That doesn’t get into the new characters added to the crew, either, although we can discuss them more in the full season review so that, just in case you haven’t watched this series before you aren’t spoiled by all the twists and turns of the pilot. The show, and the season to come, have plenty of surprises still in store, and watching the characters, crew and passengers, learn to work together and become a team is part of the fun of this season. The show doesn’t quite go the direction you’d expect from its setup, and that shows just how much depth was possible with the series just from the pilot alone.

What’s crazy is that after it was filmed FOX decided they didn’t like the pilot and they made Whedon film another. That second episode, “The Train Job” was technically aired first even though it continues plotlines and character moments from the pilot episode. “Serenity” didn’t air until three months later, out of order when the show was already basically out of luck and staring down a cancellation order. Episodes were broadcast out of order, despite the tightly constructed narrative of the series, and it almost felt like FOX was actively out to get rid of the series as fast as possible.

Likely it was just too weird of a fit for the network. FOX didn’t know what they had on their hands and didn’t want to bother airing it as intended, and that led to the quick termination. It’s a credit to the production team that the show continued to live on with fans, to the point that a second chance was given to resurrect the show and continue it onwards… at least with one movie. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. The fact is that this pilot shows just how good the idea for Firefly was and, even with Whedon’s quirks as a lecherous piece of shit, the series was strong enough to work on its own. If only the network could have been convinced to let it air as intended, who knows how well it could have thrived…