What's so great about Firefly?

[Admiral Buzzkill]

I try not to be one who thinks if you don't like something I like then you just don't get it. Some people don't like things, and that's fine.

There are some well reasoned arguments in this thread about why people don't like Firefly. Only problem is...the reasons they're saying for not liking the show are actually complete misinterpretations of the show, as if they've never actually seen it and are basing their arguments on what their friend told them their brother said.

*shrug* Whatever. Some people just don't get it.

I know what you mean. It's like when people dismiss Farscape as "that show with the muppets" . . . .

Exactly so.

 

[Vulpes]

Firefly failed to impress me on multiple levels. The ideology it espoused—the government is bad because it's the government—is pretty stupid. But I would be willing to look past that if it wasn't for the fact that it was so BORING.

I dislike action. I don't like to have people pulling guns on each other every 20 seconds. I would rather had to think about the ethical, philosophical, scientific, and technological implications of social problems—that's why I like Trek.

 

[Lapis Exilis]

Firefly failed to impress me on multiple levels. The ideology it espoused—the government is bad because it's the government—is pretty stupid.

See, I don't follow where the show espoused such an ideology. Mal didn't like government, and neither did Zoe - but no one else particularly had a problem with it. Book obviously had no issues with being part of an institution, being a preacher and all, and we know he spent time in a monastery, and apparently was once a law enforcement officer of some kind. Inara states clearly that she supported Unification and the Alliance during the war, and she is part of a plainly sophisticated and far reaching institution. Kaylee, Wash and Jayne don't seem to have political opinions of any sort, and the Tams are fugitives - so their issue with "government" is simply that they are wanted by authorities. Prior to that, they were obviously very comfortable participants in the upper class of the Alliance and would have been happy to stay that way. Even in Serenity, we see that the government as such (it really appears to be one small division of government - some sort of scientific experimentation unit) was well-intentioned but screwed up and the Reavers were the unintended consequence.

Just because the main character holds an opinion, it doesn't necessarily mean that's an idea the entire story is trying to sell - especially when the main character's opinion is so clearly shaped by personal bias. Mal is pretty clearly set up as a sort of unreliable narrator.

 

[Bishop76]

I dislike action. I don't like to have people pulling guns on each other every 20 seconds. I would rather had to think about the ethical, philosophical, scientific, and technological implications of social problems—that's why I like Trek.

Okay, Plato. I'm guessing you haven't ever watched the show based on this response, but more power to ya.

 

[barnaclelapse]

I don't like "selling" people on things. All I can say is that I found it to be a smartly written, well acted character-driven series. It's pretty much as simple as that.

I wasn't thrilled with the movie though.

 

[Vulpes]

I dislike action. I don't like to have people pulling guns on each other every 20 seconds. I would rather had to think about the ethical, philosophical, scientific, and technological implications of social problems—that's why I like Trek.

Okay, Plato. I'm guessing you haven't ever watched the show based on this response, but more power to ya.

Matter of fact, I have.

For the record, I don't like Plato either.

 

[I Grok Spock]

Firefly failed to impress me on multiple levels. The ideology it espoused—the government is bad because it's the government—is pretty stupid.

It seems to me that the government is shown as bad because they were doing fucked up experiments on River's brain.

But I would be willing to look past that if it wasn't for the fact that it was so BORING.

I dislike action. I don't like to have people pulling guns on each other every 20 seconds.

This sounds like fun.

I would rather had to think about the ethical, philosophical, scientific, and technological implications of social problems...

This sounds like grad school.

 

[Bishop76]

I dislike action. I don't like to have people pulling guns on each other every 20 seconds. I would rather had to think about the ethical, philosophical, scientific, and technological implications of social problems—that's why I like Trek.

Okay, Plato. I'm guessing you haven't ever watched the show based on this response, but more power to ya.

Matter of fact, I have.

For the record, I don't like Plato either.

Well, then, you're clearly missing quite a bit of what's actually happening in the show. Maybe philosophy isn't for you after all.

 

[Vulpes]

I think I understand the show all too well. But whatever, it doesn't really matter.

 

[Vendikarr]

In other news, despite my third try, I can't get further than episode 4, season 1 of Babylon 5. Maybe I can skip to season 2?

Yes, watch Season 2. After season 4, go back and watch season 1 and you'll see all the worldbuilding that took place, as well as the set up for future seasons.

 

[6079SmithW]

I love Firefly/Serenity! I had always heard people talking about it and was skeptical, but I decided to watch it on Hulu and fell in love with it by the second episode. For me, its really the characters and their interactions with each other that sell the show. Plus, all the witty jokes.

 

[Gaith]

one of the things I really liked about Firefly - there was no cliche large scale Evil Empire (or benevolent Federation - Whedon was playing more against the Star Trek trope than anything else), there was a complicated and murky political background out of which many different kinds of villains and heroes could emerge in the small scale of the raggedy edges of the fictional universe that the protagonists inhabited.

There's a thin line between "complicated and murky" and "nonsensical and lazy". I love Trek, of course, but am still willing to try intelligent alternatives to its multispecies utopia. Sitcom jokes+relationships in an undesigned universe, OTOH - sorry, thank you, no.

 

[Anduril]

The other main thing about this show that really frosts my shorts is that, God help me, I hate, despise, with the fire of a thousand suns, all Joss Whedon dialogue. I hate it worse than TATV, worse than the second season of "War of the Worlds", worse even than the Boston Red Sox. Every character Whedon ever writes is a snarky smartass, and I fucking HATE that. In the Whedonverse, nobody ever takes anything seriously; I, on the other hand, take EVERYTHING seriously, and so you can see the problem.

Its nice to hear someone else say it. Why would I want to watch something that reminds me of middle school?

 

[Lapis Exilis]

Firefly failed to impress me on multiple levels. The ideology it espoused—the government is bad because it's the government—is pretty stupid.

It seems to me that the government is shown as bad because they were doing fucked up experiments on River's brain.

It's unclear at best who was doing experiments on River's brain. In Ariel the blue hand guys show up -and kill the regular law enforcement guys just because they'd spoken to the Tams. In Serenity the movie, we're suddenly introduced to Parliament and the Operative, so, yes, somebody in the government is doing something pretty icky, but I still got the sense that your run of the mill law enforcement and Alliance ship crew and officers were not implicated in such high level ickiness. Which, to me, is more realistic than most scenarios we're given in SF tv. For instance, I'm fairly sure that various divisions of my government have done things I would find completely morally reprehensible, including experimentation on human beings (Tuskegee airmen, etc). But that doesn't mean every Senator, Congressman, President, state official, and so on is corrupt and evil. So, is government bad? I can't say that it is or it isn't. Governmental structures have room for all sorts of horribleness. But so does business, so do charitable institutions, so do religious organizations, so do families. And depending on your personal experiences with any of these you may decide that they are "bad" or "good". What I liked about Firefly is that each character had an opinion based on their particular history -a s opposed, say, to Trek, where every Starfleet officer thought Starfleet was the awesomest thing ever to exist and it wasn't until pretty late into Trek's development that any serious corruption was even hinted at being possible within Starfleet - and then it was usually pretty isolated to individuals.

There's a thin line between "complicated and murky" and "nonsensical and lazy". I love Trek, of course, but am still willing to try intelligent alternatives to its multispecies utopia. Sitcom jokes+relationships in an undesigned universe, OTOH - sorry, thank you, no.

Obviously FF was not for you, but I have a hard time with the idea that it's universe was "undesigned". I thought it had at least as much definition to its fictional universe as Trek did - certainly as much as Trek did in its first 15 hours, when they couldn't even decide what the space agency the Enterprise worked for was called. I thought in its brief time on the air FF managed to put forth as coherent and complex a universe as Trek managed to come up with until deep into TNG - some 6 or 7 years worth of episodes. But to each his own.

 

[Bishop76]

I agree. It was a really well thought out universe and was far more coherent a setting than most shows bother with in their first 15 episodes. And sitcom writing? I'm inclined to believe you didn't watch the show at all. The characters are snarky and sarcastic and glib to be sure, but I'd hardly put in in the same writing category as sitcoms.

 

[M'rk son of Mogh]

The characters are snarky and sarcastic and glib to be sure, but I'd hardly put in in the same writing category as sitcoms.

I dunno, for some reason I'm thinking specifically of the sitcom "Roseanne"...

 

[Temis the Vorta]

I have very little tolerance for renegades/rebels/rogues, UNLESS the thing that they are rebelling against is obviously evil and definitely deserves to be rebelled against.

Huh? One of the things I liked about the show was the counter-intuitive notion that hey maybe the Alliance wasn't all bad. Maybe they had a legit point of view. Maybe Mal and Zoe could have been right to fight them without the Alliance being all wrong.

That made it more interesting that they had a (possible) Alliance supporter onboard - Inara. That aspect of her was more interesting to me than the silly space whore stuff or her cliched arms-length romance with Mal.

Whether a story does the black/white thing or shades of grey thing is a creative choice. Star Wars is black/white (or rather, it should be - when George tries getting fancy, the whole thing falls on its face). Star Trek does shades of grey well. Was the Dominion all bad, or was it justified in fighting back against intruders? Is the Federation all good? Not if you knew what kind of shit they got up to in that war. So Firefly was more in the Trek mold than Wars, that's fine by me.

The ideology it espoused—the government is bad because it's the government—is pretty stupid.

I don't think we got far enough into the story to know that was the philosophy. The movie Serenity sure came down on the anti-government side, though, with its chilling revelations. Even then, that wasn't technically anti-government as a concept, it was anti- any government that would do something like that!

As for the Chinese cursing, it would have come off better if there had been any people of Chinese ancestry around. Without that, it came off as inorganic.

 

[Nerys Myk]

As for the Chinese cursing, it would have come off better if there had been any people of Chinese ancestry around. Without that, it came off as inorganic.

Why? Once certain phrases enter the language do your really need to see a person from the culture where they originated to justify their everyday use?

 

[Lapis Exilis]

The characters are snarky and sarcastic and glib to be sure, but I'd hardly put in in the same writing category as sitcoms.

I dunno, for some reason I'm thinking specifically of the sitcom "Roseanne"...

Hell yeah! Probably why I liked FF - Roseanne was pure genius. (Though I may think that because it was essentially the house I grew up in...)

As for the Chinese cursing, it would have come off better if there had been any people of Chinese ancestry around. Without that, it came off as inorganic.

Why? Once certain phrases enter the language do your really need to see a person from the culture where they originated to justify their everyday use?

Well, a major weakness of FF was the idea that human culture had become an amalgam of US and Chinese cultures - but there were no Chinese/ Asian people anywhere, except occasionally as background. The Tams were ostensibly of mixed Western/ Eastern heritage, but that would have worked a lot better if they had actually been of some sort of Asian ancestry. Considering the actual distribution of Asians to Caucasians on earth (approximately 1/2 of the total human population versus approximately 1/4 of the total human population) there should have been a lot MORE Asian people than white people in the future FF showed.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I have very little tolerance for renegades/rebels/rogues, UNLESS the thing that they are rebelling against is obviously evil and definitely deserves to be rebelled against.

Huh? One of the things I liked about the show was the counter-intuitive notion that hey maybe the Alliance wasn't all bad. Maybe they had a legit point of view.

Exactly. Since the Alliance was not inherently evil, I have a hard time sympathizing with those who sought to bring it down.

And I would love to see what would happen if certain FF episodes were retold from the perspective OF the Alliance...