Firefly: Still Flying

In what was both a blessing and a curse, I was made aware of the Firefly/Serenity scene after all was said and done. Firefly was already canceled and Serenity was already on DVD after a terrible run in theaters. The thing of it was, I remember both the movie and the show when they came out, and I remember specifically not wanting to watch either of them for one reason: I really did not like Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. And if you watched the trailers for either, that's always how it was billed.

"From the creator of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and Angel comes..."

Why the hell would I watch something like that? How the hell was I supposed to know that what I was missing out on was a revolution in sci-fi storytelling (prepare for more hyperbole as the article continues)? How was I...I mean, come on...I...

I DIDN'T KNOOOOOW!

/cries

I say "blessing" because, on a whim, I watched Serenity on DVD and fell in love with it. After doing a bit of research, I found that the Firefly DVDs were available for purchase, and I got them on sale at Wal-Mart for $14.99! That's the deal of the century! I watched the episodes, one after the other, and followed them up with the movie only to find...nothing. There was nothing else. It was like a cruel joke. How could a series so clever, so smart, so downright emotional at times be tossed out into a pile with all those other shows that Peter Griffin listed when Family Guy returned to Fox?

Not only that, but knowing that Serenity was to be the first movie in a proposed trilogy was heartbreaking. Because the movie was just barely able to make enough money to recoup its losses, that trilogy was canceled as well.

=(

Years went on...seasons changed (?)...and more Firefly works were eventually released. Two comic series were churned out by Joss Whedon, both of them on the meh side of things. We got a special edition of Serenity and a newly released book of interviews, production sketches, and short stories by the Firefly writers called Firefly: Still Flyin'. It was always my hope that, someday, a studio would pick up the rights for the show and we'd get AT LEAST one more movie or TV special or...I dunno...something. But as time went by, and I hear of everything that might have happened if the story had continued...I'm wondering if we Browncoats got lucky.

Very few shows are perfect. The fourteen episodes of Firefly are perfect. Chances are, if it had gone on, it would not have been the case. As evidenced by Angel and Buffy, Joss Whedon's shows have a tendency to go off on wild-ass tangents. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I'm not so sure how it would have worked in Firefly. You might remember Bad Horse from Doctor Horrible's Sing Along Blog, yeah that was actually a reference to a storyline that Joss had thought up for Firefly concerning mutant animals. Yeah.

Also (and it remains to be seen if this is canon) but in the book I mentioned, Still Flyin', Jayne is actually killed off. Yeah. And not in a particularly heroic sense, either. More in the he-got-drunk-and-accidentally-shot-himself sense. Eh.

Firefly worked so well because the characters had marvelous balance. You knew them. It was easy to know them, and peeling back the layers was the best thing about the show. It's what Lost would eventually become. To have three main characters just wiped out like that was just...I don't know. I'm all for main characters getting killed. I know stuff like that's gonna happen, especially if Joss is behind it. But...I keep thinking about how Wash died...getting randomly impaled by Reavers that somehow snuck into that hangar...somehow. It was like that fucking t-rex from Jurassic Park at the end of the movie: how the hell did that thing get into the building?! It's not the noble end to a character that I loved. Wash deserved better. Book, for that matter, deserved better...or they could have at least expanded his story before they did him in. Instead of pulling this during Serenity:

"You're gonna have to tell me all about that crazy backstory of yours, Shepherd."
"No, I don't..."
And Mal just looks at him like he's gone crazy. That's obvious foreshadowing if I ever saw it. Gawd.

It's like every death on that show was trying to compete with Admiral James T. Kirk's wrestling match with the collapsing bridge.

I've basically come to peace with knowing that Firefly might never continue, and I might be okay with that. The whole point of the series was to show how these misfit characters got by, and how their guiding philosophy was to make enough coin to keep flying. I'd like to think that they'd continue doing just that.

...I'd still wouldn't object to another movie, though...