- Title: Firefly – Serenity
- wiki: link
This week’s Flashback Friday post takes us into the black and the two-hour pilot episode of Joss Whedon‘s Firefly. While it turned out that Fox could indeed take the sky from us, the show’s introduction (which the network, in all their genius, chose to run at the end rather than the beginning of the show’s short run) does a great job of setting up the universe of Firefly and introducing us the Captain Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) and the crew of Serenity: the loyal first officer (Gina Torres), her wacky pilot husband (Alan Tudyk), the bubbly engineer (Jewel Staite), the gruff mercenary (Adam Baldwin), the space hooker (Morena Baccarin), and their guests in the man of god (Ron Glass), big city doctor (Sean Maher), and a girl in a box (Summer Glau). And, not to be overlooked, the show’s eighth character in Serenity herself which would be home for so many of us that fell immediately in love with the space-western.
Setting the stage for the tone of the series, we see that our crew of smugglers try to do what’s right while still breaking the law to make a profit. Along with the overreaching military presence of the Alliance which Mal and Zoe (Torres) fought against in the war, there are plenty of regular folk such as the crew’s fence (Mark Sheppard) and a woman (Bonnie Bartlett) less-interested in paying for stolen goods than she implied, who are all too willing to take advantage when they get the upper-hand. And there’s plenty of trouble on the ship when one of their paying passengers (Carlos Jacott) turns out to be an agent hunting down Simon (Maher) and the sister he smuggled out of a government facility. It will take a few episodes for the show to reveal to us just what the Alliance did to River (Glau), but it’s obvious from what we see her they will go to great lengths to get her back.
By the end of the two-hour pilot our cast of characters is assembled, the kinds of missions they’ll do under the nose of the Alliance have been set-up, and the foreshadowing of trouble coming for Simon and River has been established. We also see the beginnings of feelings between Simon and Kaylee (Staite), Mal and Inara (Baccarin) ignoring their own, and Wash‘s (Tudyk) irritation of how his wife always defers to her captain rather than her husband. The show may not have lasted as long as we would have liked, but “Serenity” does offer the promise of a great big universe worth exploring and a group of people you wouldn’t mind taking the trip with.