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Firefly
A friend of mine bought me the complete "Firefly" DVD set a couple of weeks ago, and Lut and I finished watching the last episodes today.
As we were watching the "Making of" bit from the special features, Lut looked over at me. "Why was this show cancelled?"
"I don't know! I've been wondering that too."
"Stillborn" is the word that keeps popping into my head about this series, although that's not fair -- because for a show with only fourteen episodes to its name, it's remarkably mature.
About two years ago, Lut and I started buying the DVD sets of Babylon 5 seasons. As we were watching the first season, the reasons that I hadn't gotten into the show until the second season all came back to me. There's a roughness to the early episodes of Babylon 5. Some of the actors don't yet seem to fit their roles, or know what their characters are like. Some of the plots for episodes are cheesy or fluffy.
Firefly had none of these problems. The acting is excellent across the board: I beleived in the characters and found them engaging and interesting in different ways. The ensemble has nine people, all of them with distinct personalities and motivations. And they all work right from the pilot. It's not like, say, "Farscape", where Lut and I rented the six-episode sampler from the first season and very nearly quit after the third episode.
The show did have some problems, from my perspective. One: it's non-stop trouble life-threatening danger for the characters. If it's not one thing, it's another, and it's life-or-death in every single episode. Much as I enjoy action, I found the formula got wearying: characters get into trouble, risk death, and get out again in the space of 42 minutes, every time.
Second, there's some of that TV-show sense of "nothing ever changes", so I know that these ongoing characters aren't going to die no matter how bad things look, and that other characters probably are because they're not regulars. Every problem starts and ends in the space of the same episode.
There is continuity from one episode to the next. Some characters recur, problems that they have in early episodes come back to haunt them later, relationships and characters develop and change over the course of the fourteen episodes. It's clear that Joss Whedon meant to create an overall story arc and to make revelations about the various characters over the course of the whole run. He didn't have the time to develop it that he wanted, but the seeds are there. I can't help feeling, though, that the series suffered from an overabundance of transitory "we need a plot for this episode" situations and problems. I would've liked to see more of the secrets and motives behind the characters revealed, and a lot more could've been done if they hadn't been so tied to making each episode its own self-contained work, with no requirement for seeing prior ones, and almost everything needing to be neatly wrapped up and restored to "normal" before the end of the episode.
Still, I don't mean to be too hard on it. Firefly's first fourteen episodes are much better than Babylon 5's or Farscape's. The dialogue is snappy and entertaining, the characters are fun and well-played, and lots of the scenes are memorable, including some delicious send-ups of common action-series tropes. Both the show and the setting have a very unique flavor to them: it's got similiarities to other shows, but it's definitely its own distinct series. It's a cross between a Western and science-fiction show, and as anyone who's read Heinlien knows, this works very well indeed. The Western-frontier feel comes from having the characters travel between various planets on the fringes of settled space, and the whole feels plausible, not contrived at all.
Overall, I highly recommend it, and am looking forward to seeing the movie when it comes out in September. The boxed set is something like $36 from Amazon, which is pretty good for eleven hours of solid entertainment.
As we were watching the "Making of" bit from the special features, Lut looked over at me. "Why was this show cancelled?"
"I don't know! I've been wondering that too."
"Stillborn" is the word that keeps popping into my head about this series, although that's not fair -- because for a show with only fourteen episodes to its name, it's remarkably mature.
About two years ago, Lut and I started buying the DVD sets of Babylon 5 seasons. As we were watching the first season, the reasons that I hadn't gotten into the show until the second season all came back to me. There's a roughness to the early episodes of Babylon 5. Some of the actors don't yet seem to fit their roles, or know what their characters are like. Some of the plots for episodes are cheesy or fluffy.
Firefly had none of these problems. The acting is excellent across the board: I beleived in the characters and found them engaging and interesting in different ways. The ensemble has nine people, all of them with distinct personalities and motivations. And they all work right from the pilot. It's not like, say, "Farscape", where Lut and I rented the six-episode sampler from the first season and very nearly quit after the third episode.
The show did have some problems, from my perspective. One: it's non-stop trouble life-threatening danger for the characters. If it's not one thing, it's another, and it's life-or-death in every single episode. Much as I enjoy action, I found the formula got wearying: characters get into trouble, risk death, and get out again in the space of 42 minutes, every time.
Second, there's some of that TV-show sense of "nothing ever changes", so I know that these ongoing characters aren't going to die no matter how bad things look, and that other characters probably are because they're not regulars. Every problem starts and ends in the space of the same episode.
There is continuity from one episode to the next. Some characters recur, problems that they have in early episodes come back to haunt them later, relationships and characters develop and change over the course of the fourteen episodes. It's clear that Joss Whedon meant to create an overall story arc and to make revelations about the various characters over the course of the whole run. He didn't have the time to develop it that he wanted, but the seeds are there. I can't help feeling, though, that the series suffered from an overabundance of transitory "we need a plot for this episode" situations and problems. I would've liked to see more of the secrets and motives behind the characters revealed, and a lot more could've been done if they hadn't been so tied to making each episode its own self-contained work, with no requirement for seeing prior ones, and almost everything needing to be neatly wrapped up and restored to "normal" before the end of the episode.
Still, I don't mean to be too hard on it. Firefly's first fourteen episodes are much better than Babylon 5's or Farscape's. The dialogue is snappy and entertaining, the characters are fun and well-played, and lots of the scenes are memorable, including some delicious send-ups of common action-series tropes. Both the show and the setting have a very unique flavor to them: it's got similiarities to other shows, but it's definitely its own distinct series. It's a cross between a Western and science-fiction show, and as anyone who's read Heinlien knows, this works very well indeed. The Western-frontier feel comes from having the characters travel between various planets on the fringes of settled space, and the whole feels plausible, not contrived at all.
Overall, I highly recommend it, and am looking forward to seeing the movie when it comes out in September. The boxed set is something like $36 from Amazon, which is pretty good for eleven hours of solid entertainment.
no subject
And I'm sure you're right about Whedon having a plan for a long term overall story line - that would be like him. And I'm sure if they'd given him 6 or 12 episodes warning before cancelling it - he could have wrapped up his storyline (albiet shorter than he would have liked) within that time - alas he got no notice at all.
I think that's why releasing the movie was so critical. It's been a long time since I looked forward to a movie release this much!
no subject
Saving up my nickles
The show did have 3 glaring weak parts, from my perspective.
For one, the pilot episode was really important to get the feel of the show. I think to someone coming in without seeing the pilot, there would always be a lot of nagging questions about what is going on. Unfortunately for the show, the Pilot was not aired untill late in the season(episode 10 or so). After the decision to can the show was made. I think that if it had been shown as was intended in the sequence, the show could have gone for at least 2 seasons.
Secondly, implausible space travel. While it isn't neccessary to understand the technology involved, there should be some idea of what is going on. As I understand it, the producer never really thought things through on this front. Even making a comment about not having decided if they have faster than light travel. Lots of fans try to come up with justifications for it, like a series of close solar systems all terraformed. But in the end, none really work for me. I think here was a failure in vision, it's hard for people to imagine themselves in a fictional universe without some idea of how things work.
Lastly, a nagging itch for me was always why the heck Jayne was on the ship. He just did not fit in with the other charectors, and there was no way I could see the captain hiring him. Jayne was an interesting charector in that rather than having the "former outlaw scum reformed" he was the "current outlaw scum who is being reformed", it was fun to watch him grow and yet to keep sliding back to his old ways. Still, it never made sense for him to be there untill "Out of Gas", when it all clicked into place.
Of course, the whole 'western in space' theme doesn't work logically. It really makes no sense for people to regress to a former time period in the future like that. But I can accept that as part of the culture for the movie and just enjoy it(why can I accept that but not the lack of an idea of how space travel works? I dunno. I think it's that it is easy to look at it and work out how to game in that universe with the western theme, but trying to figure out how to get charectors from point a to b is hard without having a definition of where A and B are in relation to C and how the charectors go there).
In any case, I'm waiting for the movie with baited breath.
Firfly wiki
Was a great source for me to learn about Firefly.
Re: Saving up my nickles
It does hinge around a basic premise of "life is cheap" and that there are more people in the galaxy than it's worth the trouble of educating or doing anything for. People who it might be worth dropping in the middle of nowhere with virtually nothing, and letting them do whatever they can.
But right now on this planet there are millions of people living in near-stone age conditions. That there'll be millions of people still living well below the peak of technology thousands of years from now doesn't strike me as unrealistic. :/
Re: Saving up my nickles
And I agree with you: the presence of high technology does not mean that ALL things shall be at this high level of technology. I don't buy the Star Trek conceit as inevitable, that EVERYBODY will have access to mind-numbingly high tech, save for those religious zealots who choose NOT to use it, "just because".
Anyway, as far as this series goes, I really wanted to like it. In fact, there are certain elements about the setting that appeal to me. The only trouble is that I strongly disliked most of the characters. After watching a few episodes, I picked up on the "metagame" fact that things were going to "reset to zero" by the end of the episode - save for certain "series-arc" thread elements - and this only intensified my annoyance. If they were actually mere mortals, and maybe at least one of their number would actually DIE, what with all these "life-or-death", "million-to-one odds" situations, I might suddenly have a little more sympathy ... but it felt too much like the typical, "The universe is on their side, because THEY'RE THE HEROES," never mind if they're a bunch of crooks.
At least, insofar as the "hired hand" guy went, he was unpretentious. He was pretty straightforward about his mercenary ways; as for the rest, there was just something about the attitude that rubbed me the wrong way.
no subject
That reminds me of a contigency problem for me. To explain the prevelance of slug throwers, they came up with the justification that the alliance outlawed laser weaponry to the populace. However, all the flashback scenes to the war they use slugthrowers - both alliance and browncoats. You'd think that the alliance would pull out their heavy weaponry at least to put down a rebellion. And I just wonder at the thinking of the browncoats:
General:"We won't submit to being ruled by the alliance!"
Aide: "Sir, I've got soem contacts in Gli-Tech. They tell me we could pick up 1000 laser-carbines from them if we need em."
General: "Oh no, we couldn't do that, it's against alliance laws. We have to use slugthrowers instead".
no subject
One minor nitpick, perhaps, is the possibility of character death. Joss isn't shy about killing off major figures - although he has a bad(?) habit of bringing 'em back again. ;-) It would not surprise me to lose one of the cast - although probably not for some time.
Always glad to see other folks hopping on the Browncoat bandwagon, particularly before the movie release. :) As for me -- I wanna be Zoe when I grow up!
no subject