Firefly: The Complete Series

I'd never seen a Joss Whedon show before (Buffy, Angel, Dollhouse), but this short-lived one seemed like it had both a cult following and critical acclaim, so I bought it a couple of months ago for a low price and figured, for better or worse, that I'd be done with it soon enough. The series lasted for fourteen episodes and even if I didn't like it, my logic was that it'd be "over" soon enough. The good news is that I did come to like the series. The bad news is that it took about half of the series for me to do so. Let's start with the premise. Firefly has often been described as a Western set in space. And I can attest to the accuracy of this genre-merging description. In a nutshell, it takes place in the very distant future where humanity has spread to a wide range of planets and star systems. But out on the "rim" or "fringe" of the civilized galaxy lies a frontier of sorts in which there just isn't enough official jurisdiction to prevent lawlessness. It's a frontier just like the Old West. To drive the point home, the writers even have many of the frontier planets' residents speaking in some hokey Southern backwoods accents and - for whatever reason - everyone's in 19th century regalia for the most part. The whole thing kind of works. It's science fiction, for sure, but there are no aliens or laser beams or anything; good old fashioned gunplay abounds and there's horseback riding aplenty. To call it steampunk wouldn't be fair, but also wouldn't be entirely unwarranted. Anyway, the premise of a Western in outer space intrigued me, but I probably should have known, going in, that fourteen forty-four-minute episodes is a very long series to enjoy based solely on a concept. I'd need to understand and appreciate the characters themselves, too, in order to enjoy the series. And as I already kind of said, it took me several episodes to get to do so. I'm not sure whether the blame for that rests with the show, with me, or with Fox itself for drastically fucking up the order and presentation of the episodes. See, the pilot episode of the series is two hours long. But my understanding is that, at the last minute, Fox said, "we don't want to kick off this series with a two-hour episode," and the Firefly folks were forced to overhaul the second episode into one that could serve as a worthy introduction. And then the third, fourth, and fifth episodes were each also affected, to varying extents, as content from the pilot also needed to be shown in each of those. So for those of us viewing the series on DVD, we get a two-hour pilot episode, and then we get another four straight episodes that each rehash a little bit of that pilot episode. So, yeah. Clunky-feeling, I guess. In spite of all the introduction and exposition, I still found myself confused about the relationships between various characters right up through those first five or six episodes - likely not because the show had failed to establish them, but because my own interest had waned beyond the point of caring to commit them to memory. Ultimately, the series and I did find our "groove," so to speak, but by then I was already halfway finished with it. It goes against the nature of backlog-clearing to revisit any movie or TV show that I've previously seen, but I'd definitely be interested in re-watching this series, especially those earlier episodes, if given any excuse to do so. (Maybe a friend or girlfriend would like to try it out? And wouldn't mind watching those first few episodes with me? Anyone?) Once I got over whatever hump there was, I enjoyed the character-driven stories that dominated the latter half of the series. The series finale - which was really just the last episode produced before cancellation was official and production shut down - was actually pretty fitting and, while it's always a shame when a series gets cancelled midseason, I think the "loose ends" here are fewer and farther between than with many other series that suffered the same short-lived fate. Also, there is of course still the motion picture Serenity which I'm hoping serves as an adequate epilogue to provide closure for the series and its characters. I'll probably get to that movie tonight or tomorrow. In the mean time, have a happy Presidents Day.