'You Can't Take the Sky From Me...'

I loved the show Firefly. Sue and I got the DVD boxed set for Christmas, and watching all of the episodes (three of which never aired, one I'd missed) made me realize how great a show it was. But rather than simply rave about something again, I thought I'd examine why I thought it was so good.

British writer Ramsay Campbell, in his introduction to the first of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing collections (a birthday present worthy of a rave all its own) made the point that good comics would not be so noteworthy, except that they have traditionally been pretty terrible as far as the writing went.

In other words, to produce noteworthy quality, you just have to run faster than the other guy running from the bear. (Two guys in the woods are being chased by a bear. One guy says, "Do you think you can outrun a bear?" to which the other replies, "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you.")

Moore's Swamp Thing (and his other comic work -- Watchmen, From Hell, and so on) does indeed stand out, because they took the comic book medium to places it had never been. It expanded reader's horizons, and thus our expectations. Frank Miller did the same with his run on Daredevil, The Dark Knight Returns, and more. He changed the way we read comics. (As an example, no one before Miller had used captions to portray the main character's thoughts. Before him, writers still used thought bubbles. Now, captions are a comic standard.)

But sometimes, something comes along that embraces its own medium. It doesn't break new ground so much as it takes the old ground and makes it the best it can be. This, I think, is what creator Joss Whedon did with the short-lived series Firefly. He took the idea of episodic television and all the aspects of that medium and made them all work perfectly. (One can argue that he did the same thing with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Not being a fan of that show, it's difficult for me to comment. While I can appreciate some of the crafting of the characters and plots, the show was often too melodramatic for me, and dipped too far into camp and humor for what I wanted from the show.) I respect someone who really understands the medium he works in, and uses it well. That's why I don't mind at all if when moviemakers, when adapting a book, make needed changes to produce a better film. (I know it's sacrilegious of me to say, but the scouring of the Shire would have been a terrible and awkward ending for The Return of the King movie, despite how wonderfully it ended the book.)

Specifically, what I mean regarding Firefly is that Whedon developed a concept that worked best when seen in one-hour chunks, over time. The idea of a spaceship crew going on missions, rather than dealing with some epic plot, fits perfectly into the media of television. The writers crafted the pacing of the show's acts so well--in particular the "mini-cliffhangers" and plot twists that came at the end of each act -- that it almost seems a shame to watch the show without commercials, as you do when watching it on DVD. The pacing is so perfect that it almost seems right to have to wait three minutes to find out what happens next.

From left: Jayne, Inara, Kaylee, Malcolm, Wash, Zoe, Simon, Shepherd, and River

But you can't talk about Firefly without talking about the characters. Joss Whedon gave us an almost absurdly large cast, because we would then never have to watch the same characters saying or doing the same kinds of things over and over -- or worse, becoming mere caricatures of themselves.

Each character on the show was defined deftly -- and quickly. As viewers, we understood each character shortly into the first episode. We learned to like or dislike them as appropriate -- allowing the writers to play with our understanding and our likes and dislikes as the show went on. In the second, third, or ninth show, we weren't busy still learning what each character was about (as happens on poorer shows).

And the characters all fit together like a puzzle. So many shows start with some interesting character dynamic, almost always based on conflict or romantic attraction, but once that situation is resolved, the show becomes less interesting. Firefly had so many characters, and each interacted with the others in such interesting ways you weren't going to tire of the interactions quickly.

For example, it seemed that everyone hated Jayne (the "muscle" on the show), and he gave them good reason. He was fairly despicable. But the Captain Malcolm Reynolds respected him (although he didn't trust him), and eventually the Shepherd (the resident preacher) got along with him all right. We got to see a good side of Jayne, or at least the potential for one, particularly in the episode "Jaynestown." Then Jayne betrayed Simon (the doctor) and River (his troubled sister) for the reward money on their heads. Who would have guessed he would go so far as to become what we would normally consider a villain? Jayne failed in his attempt, and in the end was actually embarrassed about it. Mal's recriminations (and later, to a lesser degree, a confrontation with the doctor) showed him that what he did was wrong. We could see it happen. In an interesting case of watching a character grow over time, if the show had continued we might have seen him grow to respect all the other characters. From the viewer's point of view, in just half a normal television season, we saw the character go from unlikable good guy to bad guy and back to likable. Most characters don't develop that much over the course of an entire multi-season run, and certainly not in so believable a way.

It's really in its characters' relationships that the show shined brightest. There were not one but two possible "love interest" relationships, to a powerful sibling bond, a strong and healthy marriage (something you don't see all that often on television), two old war buddies, characters with mysterious backgrounds, and more. In just a few episodes, these became characters you felt you knew and wanted to hang around with. Again, embracing the medium, Whedon created characters that we actively wanted to spend an hour with each week, for as long as they would keep coming.

The setting, of course, deserves some mention as well. We were given a strange future setting where American and Chinese cultures had mixed in interesting ways. (The characters all swore in Chinese, first of all.)

The show seemed determined to not be typical science fiction. The dialog went out of its way to avoid words like "space," "spaceship," or even "ship" (preferring "sky" or "the black," and "boat"). Things seemed antiquated as well as futuristic in a mixture that, at least in the 13 episodes we have, never grew tiresome. In fact it was always fascinating to get drawn into the show's "Western" feel, only to suddenly realize that the doorway leading into the old-fashioned ballroom had a high-tech scanner set to detect weapons. It was a jarring juxtaposition that never felt as though we'd seen it a hundred times before.

It was interesting to see the fusion of two oh-so-familiar genres (Westerns and space opera) become some new and interesting. When I first watched, I had heard about this fusion, but shrugged it off. I'd read all my life about how Star Trek was "Wagon Train to the stars," and Star Wars was a Western, and so I just didn't expect the level to which Whedon would take the idea -- characters who speak in a Western vernacular, in cowboy hats, train robberies, settlers, and so on. Perhaps it was a bit jarring at first. But if you gave it a chance, you saw that it really worked. The whole thing could really be wrapped up in a single image, played amid the show's opening credits every week: a herd of mustangs running across the landscape with a spaceship zooming behind them.

So why, if the show was so great, did it get canceled so quickly? There were lots of excuses and explanations, but I have my own theories. I suspect, for example, that the network executives overrated the pull of Joss Whedon's name. While "Buffy" had become something of a phenomenon, the truth was, the show never had spectacular ratings. That show's success came in its fervent fan base -- not as large as the viewership for say, Friends, but probably a lot more loyal and a lot more willing to buy merchandise. That audience's loyalty had been built over years, one episode at a time, and Firefly was never given that chance.

Mostly, though, I think the show was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Had it been on a smaller network (UPN or WB), it probably would have been better appreciated. Had it not come on Fox, when Fox was in the middle of reality-show success, it would have been given a chance. Reality shows are incredibly cheap to produce (the main reason there are so many of them despite the fact that most don't have great ratings or advertiser support), and I'm sure that a nine-cast-member show with great sets and decent special effects was not.

There's talk of a Firefly movie, now, and apparently it's all the more likely because the DVD set was somewhat successful. However, the idea doesn't thrill me. Oh, I'll happily go see it and I'm sure I'll enjoy it very much, but in my mind it's no better than getting one more episode. Firefly was carefully designed to take advantage of the television medium, and that's where it belongs.

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