I just finished watching Firefly the television series on DVD. I wanted to see the series before watching Serenity, the movie based on the series.
The series reminds me of a westernized Star Trek. There’s a ship, named Serenity, that takes the cast from one adventure to the next on a series of different planets. The crew consists of a fantastic pilot (Alan Tudyk) named “Wash”, the saucy muscle (Gina Torres) named Zoe, a trigger-happy meathead (Adam Baldwin) named Jayne, a naive engineer (Jewel Staite) named Kaylee, an uptight doctor (Sean Maher) named Simon, the doctor’s mysterious sister (Summer Glau) named River, a preacher with a hidden past (Ron Glass) named Shepherd Book, a high class concubine for hire (Morena Baccarin) named Inara and a witty captain (Nathan Fillion) named Malcolm Reynolds. You can draw several parallels between Firefly characters and Star Trek characters.
But the twist is the western settler feel to several of the planets. The series is set in a time where outworld planets are being colonized. You get a sense that civilization on these planets is somewhat primitive for being set in the future. But it’s done in a way that actually works. There’s train heists (just like in a western) but the train hovers off the ground instead of riding on a steel track. Each series the crew of Serenity is usually tasked with saving some imperiled people on one of these planets. Or they spend some time dodging the Alliance who are looking for Simon and his sister River while learning more about what was done to her.
Several of the cast are unknown to me. I recognize Nathan Fillion but I couldn’t tell you why. Adam Baldwin was the infamous Animal Mother in Full Metal Jacket. Ron Glass played Detective Ron Harris on Barney Miller.
I really enjoyed the television series. Now I wish it hadn’t died. Hopefully the movie will be a good extension of the series. There’s really a lot of loose ends left after the first 14 episodes, presumably because they were hoping to have several more seasons to develop everything. What little I’ve heard about the movie seems to indicate that Serenity aims to tie up some of those loose ends.
There’s been other sci-fi where colony planets subsist on much lower then state-of-the-art technology with some explanation of why that is so. It’s less applicable where, it seems, in the Firefly universe all of the colony worlds are in the same solar system and they appear to have constant-boost ships.
Without highly portable fabrication facilities, you’re stuck bringing what you can carry. It’s not enough to get an entire population started, so aside from a seed of technology, mostly you have to work from what you can wring from the planet.
Until the colony world produces enough to be worth the advance world’s while, it can’t afford to buy the advanced technology and people are too busy staying alive for quite a while to build the advanced fabrication plants which have a long build-to-payoff cycle.
This idea doesn’t seem entirely consistent the Firefly universe Tthis idea works better with sublight cryo-or-generation ships and colony worlds spread across light-years — thus moving goods is really expensive and generally not worth it except for high-value-to-mass goods.
Firefly takes place in a single solar system which can be transitted in (it seems) a few weeks at most with the constant-boost gravity-controlled ships they have. It’s harder to justify the colony worlds having more primitive tech in that case — perhaps less of the tech, but why is it also more primitive?
Nevertheless, I really enjoyed the series and the movie.
Why is it that science fiction dweebs can never seem to suspend reality and just enjoy the story?