Is "Firefly" overated or underated?

[stj]

Whedon has said in interviews that the Alliance isn't evil, it isn't Star Wars' empire. There are evil elements within it but he compared it to elements within the CIA or FBI who have been involved in dodgy activities. This doesn't, he reasons, make the whole USA an evil empire.

He has also said that Mal's views aren't his own and that if he met Mal, they probably wouldn't get on. Whedon is a moderate liberal, IIRC and he's compared Reynolds to an anti-government liberterian.

He has also been at pains to stress that while the Browncoats in FF were, like the confederacy, on the losing side of a civil war, they were not pro-slavery. The US civil war analogy is not an exact one.

First paragraph...The difference between what Whedon said and what he put on screen is the difference between his ambition and his talent. The Serenity movie is the summary of the entire series arc, and the Alliance is wholly evil, except for the parts that admire Mal.

Second paragraph...Libertarians have no political, social, economic or moral principles that make them anti-urban, pro-theft, despise whores, push helpless prisoners into jet engines, airlock employees or really pretty much anything that Mal does.

Third paragraph...the claim that the Confederates were not about slavery is not some delicious novelty proposed for purely innocent purposes by a creative Hollywood hack, er, writer/producer. In this very thread, there is the explicit claim that the slavers' revolt really was about freedom, albeit only "partly." Which is malignant BS. Nonetheless, this repulsive falsehood is a major part of many versions of right wing ideology. It sometimes seems that the major selling point for the burgeoning home schooling movement is that it allows home schooled students the mental freedom to rise above Yankee propaganda. The revisionist position incorporated into the premises of Firefly is very, very widely held, so widespread that no one even noticed the claim that the Confederates had some right on their side.

Moving on past this post, I have to add, Firefly/Serenity like that recent book by Dan Simmons, which starts off with the premise that Obamar really was a socialist who does end up leading the country into servitude to the Muslims. That was not just a cool idea, it was a political statement. Like Whedon, Simmons has denied actually agreeing with his fictional premises. Whether they are sincere is immaterial. Both are offensive.

If you want to see many of Whedon's themes done with real talent, watch the Ang Lee film Ride with the Devil. Mr. Lee too is one of those on the losing side of a civil war. In this movie you can see the equation of the winners with "totalitarians." The notion that improving things is agin human nature or God's will may be orthodoxy, but it is not the same thing as exerting an evil control over the essence of humanity. The melange of half-baked, disconnected notions and slogans in this view is nothing but ignorance and bigotry.

 

[TremblingBluStar]

The show was, clearly, making an effort to get viewers to empathize with the worldview embodied by Mal & Zoe ("can't take the sky from me") as opposed to the Alliance. While Firefly was very good at portraying shades of grey, it's simply wrong to assert that it objectively and equally portrayed the values of the Browncoats and Alliance.

We will just have to agree to disagree here. In my view, the show wasn't trying to espouse any view or way of life, whether from a main character or no, to be superior to any other. It would if Mal and Zoe's life were shown as being problem free or better than that of people on the core worlds, but the opposite was often true.

Like I said, life in the independent worlds was shown as harsh, and hardly free while life on the Alliance worlds was clearly shown to be easy, with technological comforts, and with no "evil" Alliance kicking down doors.

 

[Greylock Crescent]

You're right, why would a show, or any story, want to espouse a message that "harsh but free" is preferable to "comfortable but hardly free" lifestyle? I mean really, such a message would be singular in the history of storytelling! That certainly wouldn't be a show whose theme song has the lyrics:

Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don't care, I'm still free
You can't take the sky from me

 

[23skidoo]

Whether one likes Firefly or doesn't like Firefly is a matter of taste. For me, what turned me off Firefly was more the fandom connected to it. The show only had a dozen episodes yet the response was so over-the-top, as to come across as exaggerated. Let me explain why I feel that way.

Firefly came out at a time when the Star Trek TV franchise was dying. And I very much saw Firefly as receiving "transfer loyalty" from those who wanted something to latch on to as they abandoned Star Trek. Firefly is NOT alone in this. I feel both Farscape and Battlestar Galactica - the latter even promoted as anti-Trek - also benefitted from transfer loyalty. And they too had ultra-rabid fans, almost to the point of exaggeration. With Firefly it has always seemed exaggerated even further because it only had the dozen episodes or so, which as result gave it an air of martyrdom. This differed from BSG and Farscape which ran for several years.

Where I base my claim of "exaggerated transfer loyalty" is that certainly back in 2003 you took your life into your own hands if you criticized Firefly. I got flamed big time on this board when I tried to point out issues with the show, to the extent that I said to hell with this board for a number of months (this was coupled with the poisonous atmosphere created by those who felt anyone who liked Enterprise was an idiot). I also made the big mistake of pointing out, politely, that using the term "browncoat" to describe fans wasn't exactly the most politically correct choice of word (and if you have to ask why there's no point me explaining).

From a personal perspective, all I can say is Firefly features a cast made up almost 100% of actors I greatly admire and am fans of: Fillion, Glau, Baccarin, Torres, Glass, Staite - some of these folks I even knew of before Firefly, such as Gina Torres and Jewel Staite. I have bought full-season box sets of TV shows in which some of these individuals have appeared in one single episode. I'll watch anything Summer Glau appears in. Jewel Staite, bestill my beating heart. Nathan Fillion - a fellow Albertan - is one of the coolest guys on the planet. And I've been a fan of Ron Glass since Barney Miller was first run in the 1970s.

Yet, I find Firefly unwatchable. So go figure.

Incidentally, "transfer loyalty" isn't new (I don't know if that's term anyone else uses or not). I first encountered it when Babylon 5 first came out and people gravitated to it as an alternative to TNG and DS9, and I wrote a mixed review for my college newspaper and that got some guy (who I remember might as well have come right out of Big Bang Theory) getting so insanely angry he threatened to get Stracyzynski to sue me. That put me off watching Babylon 5 for 2 years.

Alex

 

[Set Harth]

The show only had a dozen episodes yet the response was so over-the-top, as to come across as exaggerated.

I've avoided certain films for years - usually until they appeared in some form on basic cable - for the same reason.

 

[Captaindemotion]

Third paragraph...the claim that the Confederates were not about slavery is not some delicious novelty proposed for purely innocent purposes by a creative Hollywood hack, er, writer/producer. In this very thread, there is the explicit claim that the slavers' revolt really was about freedom, albeit only "partly." Which is malignant BS. Nonetheless, this repulsive falsehood is a major part of many versions of right wing ideology. It sometimes seems that the major selling point for the burgeoning home schooling movement is that it allows home schooled students the mental freedom to rise above Yankee propaganda.

I have no problem with what you're saying here. I'm not in the 'let's respectabalise the Confederacy' camp at all and don't accept the view that the Civil War was really about 'states' rights.'

But for heaven's sake, FF is a fantasy. Whedon just wanted to focus on the people that history and destiny pass by - not a flagship like the ENT or the BSG. He wanted to focus on the people struggling to survive. He could have easily suggested the losing side in the Irish civil war or the War of the Roses as his comparison. But because he's American, FF was an American show, going out primarily to an American audience, he used the analogy of the US civil war. But stressing that it wasn't pro-slavery.

The revisionist position incorporated into the premises of Firefly is very, very widely held, so widespread that no one even noticed the claim that the Confederates had some right on their side.

Mainly because it wasn't there.

 

[Starkers]

It's overated, but but probably not as overated as I used to think it was...

It has a great cast and that, I think, covers up a multitude of problems with the show, and particularly early on there are some quite ropey, poorly paced episodes where danger is averted (and sometimes doesn't even arrive) in the final few minutes, and you wonder if maybe they'd lost a bit of the banter earlier on we could have got to the plots quicker...but having said that the banter is the show's main selling point so without it, who knows.

I'd have liked to seen more, but given how far they moved certain plots along (Inara/Mal romance, River's story) it's hard to see where the show could have gone, apart from down the route of heist of the week or more A-Team eps like the one with the whorehouse. I think it might have got very repetitive very quickly (although who knows you could make the same argument about Buffy or a whole host of other shows).

The blue hand guys are still one of the silliest things I've seen in ages, and why, given the prevelance of Chinese language and culture, do we see so few Asian faces, even in the background scenes?

 

[RandyS]

Nice picture of Athena Randy S although I like her more in her Viper pilot gear!

Me too actually, but I couldn't seem to find one.

 

[Set Harth]

The blue hand guys are still one of the silliest things I've seen in ages, and why, given the prevelance of Chinese language and culture, do we see so few Asian faces, even in the background scenes?

There's always Li Shen...

 

[AJ86]

Well, if you can justify it with a reasonable environment and set of circumstances leading to that situation, go for it.

That seems like an unfair prerequisite. Joss certainly didn't.

 

[Kegg]

But for heaven's sake, FF is a fantasy. Whedon just wanted to focus on the people that history and destiny pass by - not a flagship like the ENT or the BSG. He wanted to focus on the people struggling to survive. He could have easily suggested the losing side in the Irish civil war or the War of the Roses as his comparison.

Irish Civil War, eh? Now that would have been a very different show. I'd like to see that (but on second thought, considering The Wind That Shakes The Barley, probably not).

Where I base my claim of "exaggerated transfer loyalty" is that certainly back in 2003 you took your life into your own hands if you criticized Firefly.

There was quite a bit of argument on the TrekBBS about Firefly early on, a few episodes into its run (I dropped it at episode two, if memory serves - so I saw "The Train Job" and "Our Mrs. Reynolds" and after that was out). It's true that before the series aired it had very fervent supporters - in this case, Buffy and Angel fans who held Whedon up to a high pedestal - and generally disliking those shows and by extension Whedon I was pretty sceptical.

I'll certainly concede in retrospect it's a very, very good show and despite its single season a top tier space opera program.

Incidentally, "transfer loyalty" isn't new (I don't know if that's term anyone else uses or not).

I wouldn't say it's 'transfer loyalty' so much as a desire for space opera, a genre loyalty. I love space opera. Obviously, probably the biggest reason for this is growing up with Star Trek and watching it religiously, inscribing its genre format into my skull. And thus, sure, a huge part of the pleasure I got from Farscape was the way the show would kick around some familiar space opera plots, and then combine them, or twist them around a bit.

Clearly there's a lot of people who love space opera, many of them chiefly because of Star Trek, but, frustrated with various Star Trek series - or finding an alternative series doing simply being a better show - championing the alternative.

Honestly though?

I miss the days we had alternatives.

 

[doubleohfive]

I like Firefly a lot. Some Firefly fans though take it way too far.

Not sure if I think its overrated or not, but there's obvious quality to the series and the film that is undeniable.

 

[Lindley]

Firefly came out at a time when the Star Trek TV franchise was dying. And I very much saw Firefly as receiving "transfer loyalty" from those who wanted something to latch on to as they abandoned Star Trek.

You have the correlation right but I think the causation is a bit different. Firefly---as well as Stargate and other concurrent series---demonstrated by comparison just how bland Enterprise was becoming, and thus may have contributed to its decline. Certainly having the two side-by-side enhanced my frustration with the state of Star Trek at that time.

With Firefly it has always seemed exaggerated even further because it only had the dozen episodes or so, which as result gave it an air of martyrdom.

True, and even moreso because that "air of martyrdom" resonated so completely with the theme of the show in the first place. There certainly was a bit of poetry in the show's fate given its premise!

I got flamed big time on this board when I tried to point out issues with the show

Most of us are aware of what problems there are. Most of us tend to think they are outweighed by the good. It's regrettable if you had a bad experience of course.

I also made the big mistake of pointing out, politely, that using the term "browncoat" to describe fans wasn't exactly the most politically correct choice of word (and if you have to ask why there's no point me explaining).

Most of us are also aware of the terminological similarity and dismiss it as unimportant. After all, it's not the same word, and the component subwords are common enough for the parallel to be coincidental.

 

[Astraea]

I've been largely avoiding commenting in this thread because I didn't want to get mixed up in the "If you like Firefly, you support Confederate revisionist history!" arguments - so watch me go ahead and do it now, even though I intended just to comment on the other aspects of this thread.

I love Firefly and hate any attempt at Confederate revisionistic/"Lost Cause" glorification. I think Firefly certainly heavily used the Civil War as a basis for world-building, but I don't think that this automatically means that Firefly glorifies "Lost Cause" ideology, or that loving Firefly means you're an apologist for the historical Confederacy (or even that you agree with states' rights ideals in modern politics.)

Pretty much, I agree with these folk:

The show was, clearly, making an effort to get viewers to empathize with the worldview embodied by Mal & Zoe ("can't take the sky from me") as opposed to the Alliance. While Firefly was very good at portraying shades of grey, it's simply wrong to assert that it objectively and equally portrayed the values of the Browncoats and Alliance.

What Whedon does here is he takes that idea and then refashions it in a way that's much more sympathetic to the losing side - for modern audiences - than the history it's based on. The war in Firefly's history really was about "state's rights" and a rejection of overly-centralized government.

I do think it is a failing of the story that despite his protestations that "The Alliance is not an evil empire akin to Star Wars..." we don't see a lot of the good side of the Alliance outside of Simon and Inara; it's a failure in that Whedon wanted the Alliance - or at least individuals or factions of the Alliance - to be more sympathetic, but didn't portray these things. Whether he would have had the series gotten more than a half-season run is, of course, not an answerable question, unless we get Firefly comics continuing the story.

While I agree with stj that actual post-Civil War Lost Cause mythology ignores the fact that slavery was the main cause of the Civil War, I don't think Whedon was trying to promote modern-day Confederate apologists by making the Browncoats sympathetic non-slaverowners; nor do I think that Reavers are literally meant as Native Americans. I think that Whedon simply took what pieces of history he wanted and incorporated them into his worldbuilding; he pulled background that was convenient (and, if he wanted literal Western cowboy trappings, the time period and geographic location was the most obvious to draw from.)

The gist I get from the discussion is that stj feels that Firefly is strongly overrated because it's an explicit endorsement of Confederate ideology, as in specifically Confederate/Lost Cause ideology, which I don't agree with at all. Certainly, we're meant to sympathize with Mal's belief that people have the right to make really bad decisions and that making bad decisions is what makes people human, but that's come up in Whedon's works before (see the Jasmine plot in Angel for a more explicit example.) While Firefly's heroes might promote libertarian ideals, I like Firefly and its heroes without taking Mal's ideals as gospel (or in general even attempting to translate them into modern-day political ideology.)

My actual reason for posting in this thread: to comment on the lack of Asians in Firefly. I remember reading that Kaylee was supposed to originally be cast as Asian before Jewel Staite read for the part. It doesn't excuse the lack of Asian casting in other areas of the series (xkcd referenced this as an "uncomfortable truth" quite a while back, and while Firefly should've had more Asian cast members for being set in a Chinese universe, the main cast's chemistry together was such a big part of making Firefly work that I honestly can't resent the fact that there wasn't an Asian member of the crew.

I mean, for a half-Chinese-dominated 'Verse, there really should have been more Asians, and if there had been a season 2, it would've been perfect for setting up recurring Asian characters. (A big problem with casting Asian actors in S1 is that most of the non-main-cast members were their adversaries, and then having a lot of Asian enemies for the crew with no Browncoat-supporting Asians would have Unfortunate Implications - but even so, some of Inara's clients, the Ariel hospital staff, more of the Mudders, some of the Alliance crew, and Nandi or some of the other women at the Heart of Gold could've been Asian without running into that problem. I mean, cast the best actor for the part, but if you're going to have a universe that's predicated on being half-Chinese, you need to have Asian actors to maintain plausibility.)

Regarding "transfer loyalty," I didn't discover BSG until January of 2009, and Firefly until probably about a year after that, while I'd given up on ENT in 2003, at the end of S2. (Granted, I'd been growing fed up with Trek since the later seasons of Voyager, but I did enjoy the 2009 reboot movie, and Trek literature had pretty much been filling any need for sci-fi stuff in my life.) I can't speak for anyone else, or for what the boards here were like 8 years ago, but I know that a lack of Trek in my life didn't have anything to do with somehow leading me to love BSG and Firefly more than I would have otherwise.

I enjoy Firefly quite a lot - I'm sure that the fact it got canceled so soon, produced an enjoyable movie, and went out on a high note all contribute to its reputation, and it's one of my favorite TV series of all time, mostly because of the affection I have for the characters and their banter. I also think that whether it's overrated or underrated is going to depend on who you ask, and what your personal tastes are. To me, even the lackluster episodes have redeeming moments or dialogue, and nothing is as truly bad as the painful episodes of some of my other favorite series - because of the short run, there's no equivalent to TNG's "Code of Honor" or DS9's "Profit and Lace," and Firefly's 1st season is certainly stronger than any 1st season of modern Trek, (or of any of Whedon's non-Firefly shows), imho.

 

[Lindley]

Well, if you can justify it with a reasonable environment and set of circumstances leading to that situation, go for it.

That seems like an unfair prerequisite. Joss certainly didn't.

The concepts were developed as part of the series bible, even if they were never explicitly explained during the series' run. The various interviews and essays have have been produced make that clear enough.

 

[Kegg]

My actual reason for posting in this thread: to comment on the lack of Asians in Firefly. I remember reading that Kaylee was supposed to originally be cast as Asian before Jewel Staite read for the part.

That is conspicuous, aye, although generally so for space opera. Most all space operas will skew to the national and racial majority or 'norm' of whatever country the series is made in or by. It never makes a lot of sense, and doubly so here given Firefly's Mandarin.

Regarding "transfer loyalty," I didn't discover BSG until January of 2009, and Firefly until probably about a year after that, while I'd given up on ENT in 2003, at the end of S2.

To be honest Enterprise had soured my patience for Firefly. I also bailed on that series in the second season, and after two less-than-stellar episodes of Firefly I was in no mood to wait for it to 'get better' anymore.

Didn't watch a lot of space opera for years after that, even though I'd read (and liked) the leaked script for the Battlestar Galactica miniseries. I eventually drifted back, as one does, though.

 

[TremblingBluStar]

You're right, why would a show, or any story, want to espouse a message that "harsh but free" is preferable to "comfortable but hardly free" lifestyle? I mean really, such a message would be singular in the history of storytelling!

How were the independent words free? It seems to me that most of them were owned by a rich barron or dictator. Did the mud farmers in Jaynestown strike you as free?

 

[6079SmithW]

My actual reason for posting in this thread: to comment on the lack of Asians in Firefly. I remember reading that Kaylee was supposed to originally be cast as Asian before Jewel Staite read for the part.

Kaylee is asian. So is Jewel Staite, for that matter. Perhaps not fully for either the character or actress, but they have asian heritage. I heard Simon and River were originally supposed to come from a mixed race family, FWIW.

You're right, why would a show, or any story, want to espouse a message that "harsh but free" is preferable to "comfortable but hardly free" lifestyle? I mean really, such a message would be singular in the history of storytelling!

How were the independent words free? It seems to me that most of them were owned by a rich barron or dictator. Did the mud farmers in Jaynestown strike you as free?

We saw those worlds post Unification. We have no idea how they operated before the war.

 

[paudemge]

It was underrated when it was on, and is overrated now.

It is one of my favorite tv shows of all time, but I might have a different opinion of there where more episodes.

 

[Sindatur]

My actual reason for posting in this thread: to comment on the lack of Asians in Firefly. I remember reading that Kaylee was supposed to originally be cast as Asian before Jewel Staite read for the part.

Kaylee is asian. So is Jewel Staite, for that matter. Perhaps not fully for either the character or actress, but they have asian heritage. I heard Simon and River were originally supposed to come from a mixed race family, FWIW.

I've always thought River/Summer looked a bit Asian, and Tam as a last name, could certainly be an Eastern Asian name