Firefly

No, I haven't.I'll look it up.What do you like about it?

Mal really isn't "Captain Hardass".Wash is goofy, but why the hell are he and Zoe together?I would never describe Zoe as "sassy". In fact, she's the hardest hardass on the ship, even over Mal and Jayne.Book is the biggest mystery. Is he really a man of God or not?As for their race, I really didn't pay much attention to that.Kaylee is completely unashamed about sex, eating, and pleasure in general, which is refreshing to see in a female character on TV.Anyway, please realize that Whedon shows typically take a good two or three seasons to really get going because he believes in taking his time to reveal his characters slowly and let the relationships develop. There is generally a huge Arc story line that gets moved along in most shows, but not all. He gave a million hints about the characters' pasts in Firefly that would have been explored in, say, a year or two.And the ship looked stupid??? What, it didn't look all shiny and "high-tech" enough?Whedon's shows consistently earn high marks from critics and have extremely devoted fan bases. Can't say the same for the Battlestar Galactica TV series.Anyway if you didn't like Buffy much, then I can't help you.If you don't know great writing, acting, framing, and a show that takes it's time developing real and complex characters, then I don't know what to say.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 04-25-2005 08:24 PM

Were you aware that the Serenity trailer is being played before The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy?...and what's with Crashfrog? I thought he had some taste.

[qs]Weren't we just talking about what an asshole he is to Inara?[/quote]

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Aren't we, as the audience, rooting for him to say what he says?

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Um, no. Not me, anyway. I always want him to be nice to her, because he is clearly in love with her.

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To urge her to leave the prostitute's lifestyle so that she can settle down with him?

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The thing is, Inara would never do that. She's far too good at what she does, and enjoys her work, and likes the lifestyle it affords her. She likes high society and is an independent person. She is uninterested in a relationship but keeps being drawn to Mal anyway.

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Isn't that rather the point of the unresolved sexual tension between them? To say "look, if she didn't insist on being a prostitute, she could settle down with this nice guy." Like I've said I find it a bit preachy.

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Mal isn't a "nice guy", and exactly where are they going to "settle down" to? He's a pirate, remember. She's the one with the legitimate, lucrative profession. She would have to support him if they "settled down".This message has been edited by schrafinator, 04-26-2005 06:38 PM

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Now on topic...I really don't think Kaylee is as open and carefree as she is stupid. Ok, maybe she's more like an idiot-savant. She can fix the ship, but when it comes to anything else she's like a semi-retarded 13 year old.

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No, I think she's more akin to a girl from an extremely small, poor, rural community without TV.Remember, the communities on some of these planets are basically subsistence farming villages. The area Kaylee came from is not quite as primitive as the community in the episode "Safe", but you get the idea. Don't expect her to be as sophisticated as any modern 13 year old.She is certainly naive and inexperienced and lacking in education, but not stupid.

YOU DIDN'T WATCH DISC THREE???Ariel, Out of Gas, and War Stories are, hands down, three out of the four best episodes of the whole series, with Objects in Space being the fourth.

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That's something else I didn't really like about the series, that I like in BG - no overarching continuity. Just about everything is solved in the 40 minutes. I had absolutely no indication that I had missed anything at all aside from one episode where they refer to the demise of a certain villian, and some scenes in the "Making Of" featurette that I totally didn't recognize.

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I find it amazing that you think this, but then again, if you have never watched a Whedon show faithfully for more than the first couple of seasons, I can understand why you might think this.Whedon is totally "Mr. Arc" in all of his TV series. He was constantly fighting with Fox TV about the fact that all of his episodes didn't "explain everything". The thing with Firefly is that it's 14 episodes of a show with 9 characters. There's only so much Arc that can be done, especially the teasing, little by littel way that Whedon likes to reveal them. Like I said, Whedon's shows generally get really great in the third and fourth seasons, when you've got a good handle on what's going on with everybody and the characters have had a chance to develop.If you haven't seen Ariel yet, then I won't spoil it for you, but that is a major Arc-revealing show.

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What was with the bounty hunter? He's asked "are you Alliance?" and he's all like "am I a lion? Hrm, never thought of myself as a lion, but I suppose you could..."

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He was crazy. I kind of figured he was a sociopath and a sadist, who liked fucking with people. I also figured that he had been flying around all by himself for a very long time and therefore had gone rather psychotic. Kind of like Tom Hanks' character in Cast Away, except bad. Like he has been inside his own head, by himself, for so long, he's not sure what is reality and what is his own internal dialogue or construction when he actually interacts with real people. That's why he goes off on those stream of consciousness, philosophical rambles; this is what he does most of the time, by himself on his ship, in his head.

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Much like the doctor guy, my reaction to that scene was "WTF?

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Well, right. I thought he was just supposed to be really odd, but also super intelligent. I've known some super intelligent people who were also extremely strange.

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Is this supposed to pass as comedy? Or what?"

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Oh, not really, because Jubel is so frigging menacing and stone cold.

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Like, what was up with that episode? It just didn't work for me, or I wasn't on the same level or whatever.

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I needed to watch it a couple of times, and watching the commentary helped some, too.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 04-26-2005 10:04 PM

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Yeah, he didn't really sell "menacing and stone cold" to me.

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You didn't get that from his very first interaction with a crew member? Don't you remember the scene with Kaylee?

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Except for the pilot it's a series of 13 mostly standalone episodes, like Star Trek TNG was, like most shows are.

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Except that you haven't seen Ariel yet, and you've only seen 10 out of the 14 episodes! That means you have yet to see almost a quarter of them.Did I mention that Whedon typically reveales his Arcs very, very slowly?Knowing this, I wouldn't expect to get more than 5% of the "big" plot Arc in the first season. That's what Ariel is. Like I keep repeating, Whedon's shows need about 3-4 seasons to really get going. That's like 40 episodes.Also remember that the Arcs in Firefly were mostly character Arcs instead of plot arks, but that doesn't make them any less engaging and important.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 04-27-2005 07:25 AM

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They might well. And I'll push Trash, the episode Schraf left off her list of awesome episodes. It's the one where Saffron shows up again.

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Yeah, Saffron.No shit you think it's one of the best episodes.

Well, yeah, that's why Crash needs to see Ariel.

Oh, I'm such a pathetic fan that I knew this a long time ago.Of course, what we REALLY want is for some TV executive to see the movie and say, "Hey, this would be a GREAT concept for a television series! Let's go give Whedon a 8 year contract and full creative freedom!"

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Also, can we all stop pretending that we don't already know River's little "secret"? I was onto it in the first episode. They were making psychic ninja assassins for the government.

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Sorry, I had no idea until War Stories.

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Every show they stop at some random planet, with no indication of the spacial relationship to the last one, and every planet looks like someplace in northen California.)

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Well, you have core planets that are civilized and rim planets which are not.And why does it matter what the relationships are between the planets. I could care less about that.Oh, and you forgot about their trip to the cold, snowy planet in "The Message", and also their visit to the muddy, swampy planet in Jaynestown. Also please recall that the planets are "terraformed" which I took to mean that they were somehow engineered to make habitable to humans. Lastly, what kind of budget do you think he had, anyway? It's not like he could go on location to a jungle or the antarctic or something.

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He needs to be a lot less stingy with the plot. The way he does it, it's obviously a cynical technique to get the studios to sign for subesquent seasons.

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I think Joss underestimates his audience. We can handle a lot of plot, a lot of things happening per episode. We're intelligent people.

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Well, if you give a lot away at once, then there's less chance for misdirection.And besides, there's a lot to be said for drawing out fun over a long time, revealing mystery bit by bit.Why don't you ask Mrs. Crashfrog about that? If you had watched Buffy or Angel you would realize that Whedon is "Mr. Revelation" and "Mr. Misdirection". He is notorious for unexpected twists and turns in the plot that come when you least expect them, especially for the season ending epidoses which usually result in major "Shit, holy crap, can you believe that. OH, NO?!" moments.OTOH, Whedon was constantly under pressure by the studios to make Buffy and Angel less Arc driven and have many more stand-alone episodes, so your accusation that he is "being stingy" with the Arc plot is really not accurate, because making lots of stand-alone episodes was the opposite to what Whedon probably wanted to be doing.Remember, Firefly is one half of it's first season.Go rent Season 4 of Angel and see if you have any idea what is going on in most of the episodes.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 05-01-2005 11:04 AM

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Core of what? Rim of what?

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We don't know yet.(first half of first season is all we got)They make reference sevral times to "Earth that Was", but this is never explained, except in a commentary in which it's mentioned that Earth is "post-apoctalyptic" and uninhabitable.

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Ha ha! Conveinient, that. Much like the invisible, omnipresent "universal translators" of Star Trek et al. Oh, well. I'm hardly in a position to complain about the reality of making TV shows.

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Yeah, just like all space shows or movies have some kind of convenient technology to mimic Earth's gravity inside a spaceship.Exactly.

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Nonetheless it's things like this that I think the fans ignore or conveiniently forget when they breathlessly exclaim that Firefly is some kind of revolution in TV sci-fi. It's just more of the same, to me.

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I don't think that Firefly is a revelation to the "sci" part of sci-fi, and I am sorry if I ever gave the impression that I thought it was.I really don't think that the sci-fi part is the point. It's the characters, relationships and the plot ark that are the point, with just enough special effects and action to make things fun.

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I was certainly entertained, though. It was well worth the rental fee, and I'll probably catch the movie.

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Oh, btw, sorry that it took me so long to get to this. There was a big fire at my apartment building and the wife and I are temprarily homeless. Luckily we're well-insured so we should be fine. Probably not going to be posting here much for a week or two. Take it easy! (And get renters insurance if you rent and don't have it. It only takes one douchebag messing around with a candle to burn out your apartment.)

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Got the insurance, got the fire-proof valuables box, got the escape plan for us and the kitties.How is the home-finding and/or clean up going?