WORDS Alex Ball
Joss Whedon once said of Firefly, that of his creative works, it was the source of his greatest joy, but also his greatest pain. Fans of the regrettably cancelled 2002/2003 space western will immediately recognise and echo this sentiment. Whedon pitched the show originally as “nine people looking into the blackness of space and seeing nine different things.” In the end, it only ran fourteen episodes, but that was enough to create a colossal following over the years, as devoted to the show as the actors were.
We are in the year 2517. Whedon was interested in showing what the lives of those who had lost a civil war were like, living on the fringes of society, portraying their experiences of the blackness of space. The crew of Serenity are just trying to get by, day to day. No job can be overlooked, whether legal or illegal: they need the money. As Malcolm “Mal” Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), the captain of the ship says, “no matter how long the arm of the Alliance might get, we’ll just get ourselves a little further.” The Alliance were the victors of the war, a totalitarian government fused from the two surviving superpowers of the United States and China. Whedon combined the past with the future, and this future is a melting pot of culture. East and West are elegantly blended; the characters speak in English, but occasionally in Mandarin, and as they travel the fringes of space the societies are recognisable at once medieval, western, Japanese, Chinese .
But at the heart of this show is not the exploration of the galaxy. It is not simply these men and women taking on jobs to make some quick cash. At its heart is love – these characters have been looking for a home for so long, some lonely or rejected, others searching for something, but not sure what it is they are searching for, and others simply running away. Mal is our dour but loving captain, Jayne the selfish mercenary who does secretly care, Wash our sarcastic pilot and married to Zoey, second in command to Mal. Shepherd, a man of God, is the ship’s conscience. Simon is the polite doctor. River, Simon’s brother, a tortured psychic, Kaylee our bubbly engineer, and Inara, a “companion” who has rented out a room on the ship. Joss in his writing gets to the heart of these characters; in the screenplay for “Out of Gas” he describes how Kaylee looks at Simon in her “Kaylee-ness.” A perfect description for such a love-filled person.
At the heart of Firefly, and the heart of Serenity, are these people: a family. All of these characters have come together, searching for a home. As the show progresses, we come to realise, as do they, that they might just have found what they were looking for their entire lives. In “Out of Gas,” where the life support on the ship is damaged and the characters must flee the ship, we see flashbacks of Mal meeting each of the crew members, and for the first time meeting the ship, Serenity. “Yes sir,” a voice across the episode echoes, “you buy this ship, treat her proper, she’ll be with you for the rest of your life.” The ship is old, but it is a home to these people, and the show is about the family of friends that live there.
The opening theme shows Serenity (the ship) flying over a group of horses, and Whedon stated that for him, that captured the essence of Serenity, the mix of past and present. But humanity is the same, there’s just more of us in more places, exploring the galaxy. It is a show about endurance, freedom, love. The opening theme song repeatedly has the line, “you can’t take the sky from me” which illustrates one of the central themes of the show.
Being cut after fourteen episodes, the series is an unfinished tale. Whedon had many plans for what would happen down the line, and although a film was done to wrap up the show’s core plot, it left a bitter hole in the hearts of many fans, and despite the wishes of many, it is unlikely we will see a reboot. We will never learn of the secrets of Book’s past, the future of blossoming romances, or any more Chinese swears…
The show and its ship will remain with us forever, as it will for the characters and actors that portrayed them. Nathan Fillion said of his co-stars that he had never been happier in his life than when making Firefly, and the love that the actors had for one another in the making of this classic, shines through on screen, a family both in reality and fiction.
