So I’m well into the Firefly DVDs by now. I generally consider myself someone who doesn’t like TV, but that’s not entirely accurate. There’s no real principle that I hold against television; I just don’t particularly like aspects of the distribution. Set time periods every week for shows, for instance; I have trouble with that sometimes. The fact that you only get new episodes once a week if that. And the commercials, which range from inane to, well, inane. But there is such a thing as quality programming, and I’ve come to feel that the best way to watch it is on DVD, a season at a time.
Anyhow, in case you blinked and missed it when it was originally broadcast in late 2002, Firefly is a space opera. The principal characters are the crew of a small independent freighter-spaceship, which takes a variety of shady jobs to stay afloat. The series is co-created by Joss Whedon, the man principally responsible for Buffy and Angel, which might give you some idea of the tone of the show.
Now, any series that starts with a premise like that just naturally invites comparisons with Star Trek and its descendants, the great-grandmother-hive-queen of all televised space opera. And there are numerous subtle ways that Firefly encourages such a comparison; for instance, there’s one scene in an early episode where the ship’s mechanic takes great offense at the ship being dismissed as junk
, which echoes how a bar brawl got started in a Star Trek episode when someone calls the Enterprise a garbage scow
to the chief engineer’s face.
At the same time… Star Trek starts with the little spiel about Space, the final frontier
, and yet rarely treats it as such. The Federation is civilised; humanity has by and large been tamed by their new technology. Starting a new colony world means throwing vast amounts of hi-tech at any problems until they go away. And despite all of this, despite the apparent unification of Earth, humans still cling to their ancestral cultural identities.
One of the many nice things about Firefly is that it treats the frontier like a frontier. The malcontents, the restless, the oppressed: these are the people who go out to try their luck on a different, new world. The series often invokes tropes from Western movies (much like the anime series Cowboy Bebop does), drawing comparisons between this and the old American frontier. These are juxtaposed with the use of Chinese motifs… which makes perfect sense if you start by assuming a unified human race, since English and Chinese are the two most populous languages. (Oftentimes characters will throw in bits of Chinese into their speech, particularly in places where one might otherwise supply English swear words; I’m not sure whether this is meant to suggest that they’re speaking in Chinese all the time, or just that both languages are equally common to the point of being blended. Also, most of the main cast have features that suggest ethnic fusion in various combinations, which is a nice touch.)
It’s not a perfect show by any means; I find the tendency to have a theme
for each episode to sometimes work and sometimes not, for instance. But I’m finding it a much more honest attempt than Star Trek to project humanity a few centuries into the future.