Firefly

First of all, thanks to scendan for pointing me at this series. It is superb, excellent, exciting, well-acted, mostly well-written and mostly great special effects. I can see her playing Kaylee, the eternal optimist with some amazing non-traditional skills. And IMHO they are cute in the same kind of way.

I have two big gripes about the series, and one little one:

1. The (to me) jarring hillbilly fiddle music used between scenes. It's just so out of character for a deep-space sci-fi drama. Save it for Seinfeld. I hope Serenity found someone like John Williams to score for them, not Boxcar Willie.

2. Browncoats as the hero underdog revolutionaries. I grew up when Hitler's Brownshirts were still fresh in people's minds. Brown is traditionally the color of fascists, third world murder squads and minor league civil servants the world over, not to mention the US Army. Change them to Greencoats and I'd be a lot more comfortable.

3. Chinese. At random, unpredictable moments, the characters on the ship speak some not very standard Chinese phrases. None of them are ethnically Chinese. Most are white, two are black. None of the Bad Guys are ethnically Chinese - they are also mostly white. You would think that in a future where people are speaking Chinese phrases as if it was their native language, there would be at least one Chinese entity somewhere in the script. I speak about the 10 most popular Mandarin phrases, and have not heard any of them yet on Firefly. Something's wrong here. The producer's name is Joss Whedon. Joss is Chinese for "luck", but apparently his parents call him Joe, and he looks like this:

Until I got the DVD, I had been misreading his name as "Josh".


Other than that, I'm just shocked and amazed I had not heard a word about this beautiful show before. Where and when was it broadcast that I managed to miss it so completely?

( mini-review behind the cut )

Now I know what all the fuss is about...