Firefly (2002-2003)

Time to revisit Joss Whedon’s ill-fated science fiction 2002-2003 TV series Firefly. I disliked it at the time but perhaps I’ve mellowed since then. It is possible that at the time was suffering from Joss Whedon Fatigue.

At that stage Whedon’s fans thought he could walk on water and perhaps he was starting to believe that himself. He was apparently thinking in terms of a show running for seven seasons, which was certainly wildly optimistic. It was cancelled midway through the first season. It was his first taste of failure.

To be fair it was not entirely his fault. The network was unhappy with the series right from the start. They helped to ensure its failure, starting by screening the episodes out of order. Disastrously, they screened the first episode midway through the show’s run. That episode gives us crucial backstory on the main character and crucial background information. As a result viewers had no clue what was going on.

The basic premise is breathtakingly unoriginal - an ill-assorted band of misfits adventuring through outer space. This is the exact same premise as Blake’s 7, Farscape, Lexx, Cowboy Bebop and Outlaw Star. By 2002 it was the most over-used cliché in science fiction.

Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) is the captain of the Serenity, a battered Firefly-class cargo spaceship. He and his crew are smugglers, thieves and all-round criminals and they’re notably unsuccessful. The crew also includes Inara Serra (Morena Baccarin), a high-priced whore. More on her later. They have taken on a few passengers. One of them is a preacher man. There’s also a young doctor and his insane sister River (Summer Glau). The Alliance government has done something nasty to her brain. 

The Alliance are the bad guys. Mal supported the Independents in their war against the Alliance. The Independents lost and this left Mal bitter and twisted.

We have nine ill-assorted people who don’t necessarily understand or trust each other and some of them are not what they appear to be. And romantic and sexual attractions start to happen. There’s potential for interesting character developments and relationships.

So what went wrong? The answer is, almost everything. The hints that there is going to be interesting character and relationship stuff and that there is something really bizarre about River don’t really kick in until we’re well into the series and by that time most viewers had switched off. Realistically you have to grab the audience in the first three episodes or so and Firefly fails to do this, for reasons I’m about to explain.

We expect the crew of the Serenity to encounter new and different strange worlds in each episode but every planet has normal Earth gravity and normal Earth atmosphere and normal Earth vegetation. In fact every planet looks just like California, in the days of the Old West. Every planet has a Wild West town. It’s too much of the same thing each week. Even when they visit a more urbanised world it looks like the 19th century. Firefly’s aesthetic is just awful. It’s boring.

Whedon was hoping that it would be original and exciting to make it a western set in space. The blending of space opera and Wild West elements is always very uneasy. How do we know this is a western? There are guys on horses, with six-guns. There are saloon brawls. There are cattle rustlers! The dining table in the mess hall is straight out of Little House on the Prairie. The captain of the ship looks like a poor but honest rancher in the Old West. His second-in-command looks like a lady gunslinger. The spaceship, the Serenity, is basically a stagecoach in space.

I can understand Whedon’s thinking. He wanted to avoid science fiction clichés. He wanted to avoid a futuristic aesthetic because such things always date very badly. He wanted it to look as unlike Star Trek as possible. He succeeded in this. This is the anti-Star Trek. This is Star Trek if the Federation were the bad guys. This is the anti-Star Trek. I’m OK with that as a concept but it just doesn’t come off. He needed to create an aesthetic that was different and exciting, but it’s dull.

And in an effort to avoid science fiction clichés he ended up with a series that lacks any real science fiction feel. Too many of the plotlines seem like they belong in 50s B-westerns, with B-western villains. Apart from the spaceships there is no cool technology at all.

These mistakes undoubtedly alienated the target audience - science fiction fans. 

Perhaps Whedon, whose previous TV successes Buffy and Angel had been aimed primarily at a female audience, failed to understand that a science fiction series was going to have to aim much more at a male audience. Offering hints of complex character and relationship stuff is all very well but a male sci-fi audience is going to want more actual actual sci-fi and more cool tech stuff.

A major problem is that Whedon wanted Mal Reynolds to be dark and brooding and cynical, a character we would slowly come to understand and admire. The network vetoed that. He had to be a conventional hero from the start so he is turned into a bleeding heart tough guy with a heart of gold and it makes him boring. Nathan Fillion is OK but the series needed more acting charisma and more colourful characters.

Inara is potentially interesting. She insists that she’s a Companion, not a mere whore. And in this future being a Companion is a respectable high-status profession. They have a union and everything. There’s also a suggestion that there’s a quasi-religious element - that it’s a bit like the temple prostitution or sacred prostitution that (possibly) existed in the ancient world. It’s an intriguing idea which presumably Whedon intended to develop but I’m inclined to agree with Mal Reynolds - he regards Inara as just a high-class hooker. But at the same time he’s very attracted to her.

Whedon learned some hard lessons from Firefly and in his next foray in TV sci-fi, Dollhouse, he did not make the same mistakes. Dollhouse has a much cooler premise which grabs our interest right from the start. It has a cooler and more consistent aesthetic. It feels like a genuine science fiction series. It has colourful but ambiguous characters. And in Eliza Dushku it has a very charismatic lead actress.

I’m afraid that on a rewatch Firefly still doesn’t grab me.