Firefly

[howeird]

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?

The cast:
Nathan Fillion	Capt. Malcolm 'Mal' Reynolds
Morena Baccarin	Inara Serra
Adam Baldwin	Jayne Cobb
Ron Glass	Shepherd Book
Summer Glau	River Tam
Sean Maher	Dr. Simon Tam
Jewel Staite	Kaywinnit Lee 'Kaylee' Frye
Gina Torres	Zoë Warren
Alan Tudyk	Hoban 'Wash' Washburn

Firefly is about a group of former revolutionaries who have their butts kicked by The Alliance at the battle of Serenity Valley. They acquire a Firefly-class transport spaceship, name it Serenity, and use it mostly to rob from the Alliance and sell to the black market. The script alludes to occasional forays into legal trading, but the first three episodes only show their crime spree. Legal trading doesn't make such good copy.

Capt. Mal runs the ship, Fillion does an acceptable job of Harrison Ford cloning. There's even a scene in the third episode which reminded me of that Indiana Jones classic where he throws down his bullwhip and shoots the guy with the scimitar. Except in Firefly there was no whip or sword. Same feel to the scene, though. He's the Strong Silent type, only with more lines.

Inara is a professional "companion", aka high-priced hooker. She rents the Firefly's shuttle, and uses it as her boudoir both when aboard the ship and when out on one of the planets, entertaining customers. Baccarin is incredibly beautiful, and has the kind of class and demeanor one would expect of her character.

Jayne represents the Boy Named Sue of the crew. He's the ugly, mean professional hit man type, and Baldwin has him down to a T. The character is smart enough to be thoroughly scary.

Shepherd Book, a Man of the Cloth who says he's two days out of a life in the monastery, is awfully tolerant and worldly, so who knows? Mystery abounds in the series' characters. I like it. Glass hauls out his best Morgan Freeman for this role, with a hint of Lou Gosset Jr.

River is this genius psychic psychotic woman-child whose brother Simon has rescued her from a Bad Place the Alliance was holding her to experiment on. Lines in the script prepare us for a true genius hidden behind her nightmares, but unfortunately we see 99% nightmares in the first episodes. Glau is amazing in this role, but I want to see more bursts of genius. Her brother Simon, a medical doctor on the run, is one of the weaker characters. Maybe it's the way Maher plays him, maybe it's because Whedon got up one morning and said "we need some vehicle to get River on board Firefly" and created Simon as an after-thought, then decided to keep the character because every tramp transport needs a highly-trained third-in-his-graduating-class trauma specialist in their infirmary.

Zoe the Warrior Woman is basically a black Buffy the Vampire Slayer except she plays second fist to Mal. She's on all the "away teams" and does a little too much javelin-catching for my taste. Torres is very good in the role of fighter, but needs to work on her sexy side. She has some great lines aimed at husband Wash, but the delivery is not as seductive as the words are. Wash is the weakest character, and I think it's a combination of the writing and the acting. Tudyk has a look of lost in the big world some of the time, and as pilot I would have hoped for more strength in his part. On the other hand, how boring would it be if all the characters were stronger than dirt?

Not on the main list, but who impressed me very much in the "Bushwhacked" episode was Doug Savant, playing Commander Harken, the commander of the Alliance ship/fortress. Imagine a young Jean-Luc, and remind yourself that although in Firefly The Alliance are the bad guys, Picard works for The Federation which is their analog. I've seen him as Tom in Desperate Housewives and the difference in characters is extreme. His part is written from the point of view that a highly intelligent man is doing the best job he knows how for a cause he knows is right. It's just that in this version of the space universe, the rebels are sympatico, not the Feds.

Yes, I skipped Kaylee. I wanted to save her for last because I think she's the center of the show, no matter how few and far between her lines are. Staite is adorable. Her smile just lights up my heart. She gets many of the best lines, but it's not the words as much as the attitude she brings to them. As ship's mechanic, she's the polar opposite of Scotty - you'll never hear her "doing the best I can, captain". More likely to hear Mal suggest she figure out how to invent the hyperspace drive, and she'll smile and say something like "That's such a shiny idea, captain, I've always wanted to invent one of those".



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

Comments

[scendan.livejournal.com]

You're not the only one a bit unnerved by the term "Browncoats." In fact, I had to train myself not to say, "BrownSHIRTS"...which, of course, is NOT the image I want evoked in my mind when thinking about that series. I don't know why he chose a term that makes at least some of us think "SA." Urk.

As for ethnicities, I don't know WHY there are no (or few...but I think no) Asian characters in the series. The Chinese is in there to imply that--way way back when in Earth That Was, the main surviving political factions at the time of the diaspora (or whatever it might be called) were United States (hence the sort of "country/folk" soundtrack, which really grew on me), and China (hence, the slang and some of the clothing and decor).

I'm playing Kaylee in our presentation at Comic-Con this week. :)

[scendan.livejournal.com]

And thanks for the kind compliment! I feel a bit long in the tooth for Kaylee, but think she's adorable. :)

[howeird]

I'm playing Kaylee
Of course. That photo of you in her jacket pretty much screamed that if you weren't, then you should be. Have a blast in SD, I wish I could spend some vacation time, but have to save up in case I decide to have my innards remodeled.

Chinese
Yes, the concept is well-established in sci-fi writing that Japan (William Gibson's Neuromancer) or Russia (A Clockwork Orange) or Germany (Harry Turtledove's alternate histories) becomes the dominant power and everyone speaks at least a spattering of that country's language. In real life it has turned out to be English, but times change.

However, in Firefly it's all gratuitous. Sure, Kaylee looks great in that Chinese brocade jacket, but that's the only costume sop to the theme. Think about foreigners you know who speak English. It's the common words and phrases, like yes, no, hello, goodbye, and oh shit which they continue to say in their native language. Those are the phrases I would expect to be hearing from the crew. But instead we get some relatively complex and uncommon phrases, some of which I don't catch at all, and some are along the lines of "what's that doing there?" and "wait here". Unfortunately for me the DVD does not translate those, and when I turn on the subtitles, when anyone says something in Chinese all the subtitle says is "[Chinese]". That's not helping. I guess it's time for the visit to the [yurk] browncoats page to find the list of phrases.

Another amusing thing about the Chinese is they are not using tones. Wash at one point says "what's that?" and with the tones he used he actually said something about his mother. I'm not hearing tones from any of them.

Sound track
I sure hope it doesn't grow on me, I would have to scrape it off with my woad stick.
:-)

[scendan.livejournal.com]

I agree some common terms in Chinese would've been good, too. Although I was amused by what I presumed to be mostly swearing. And yeah, in the cast commentary they talk about how NOT good at the tones they all are, and laugh about it. Sounds like they all tried their best, but...pardon the pun...fell a bit flat there.

Humph. I LIKE the soundtrack. It just involves a bit of cognitive dissonance at first. ;)

[skydancer.livejournal.com]

You can find the Firefly Pinyinary here. They seem to use Chinese primarily for three purposes... Endearments (mei mei), Swearing, and Emphasis.

It's not so much that these are ethnic Chinese still using their native language in a primarily English-speaking culture. Rather it is that there has been a significant merger of the cultures. Notice that many of the characters have Chinese derived names. Simon and River Tam for example. Inara uses a variant the Chinese tea ceremony in her work. The logo for Blue Sun--some multi-planetary organization--is both English and Chinese.

[howeird]

Thanks for the pointer. I took a look at that excellent site and I see what the trouble is: Someone is ignoring the KISS rule. Those of us who are multi-lingual expect that lapses into a native language or a merged language will be single words or short phrases. What Firefly does is inflict long, erudite phrases where a normal human being would just say "oh shit!".

I was listening for that classic phrase "Ai-yah!" all through the first DVD, and never heard it. I see in the web page that it was used a couple of times, but buried in a phrase like "go shit on my head".

Wash's pronounciation was so poor that I didn't catch any of those words, even though I would have understood that particular phrase if it had been said halfway correctly. I'm talking enunciation here, not tones. One more reason to have someone in the cast who is actually Chinese. The more I see the complexity of the phrasing, the more this annoys me.

Looks to me like Joss just likes pretty Chinese things, so he chose that theme and carried it past its logical conclusion. Ai-yah.

[howeird]

Your teeth don't look to be any longer than hers. :-)

Besides, it's attitude more than chronology that matters.