thinking about Firefly
Jan. 3rd, 2003 07:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyMy subconscious gets another cookie. Last night I dreamed about Mal.
I've been thinking about Firefly lately (because I'm spoiler-free on Buffy, and staying that way AND thinking about Buffy is going to cause my head to explode a la the Gentlemen). One of the other reasons the poor damn show should be continued is the level of realism it manages. Yes, I know, SF, no realism in sight, except that there are ways and ways of writing SF for television, and some of them are even less realistic than their premise.
Firefly remembers that space is a vacuum. I love it for this forever. It answers questions like, where are the toilets and how do they work? (We're still waiting on the showers, but I know the answer's out there.) And it examines, over and over again, the truths about the chain of command.
I'm not a big Star Trek fan, but I've watched ... well, actually, I think I've watched more than my fair share of various franchises. TNG, DS9 (which I actually came to love), and, may the powers have mercy, Voyager. I have never watched an episode of Enterprise, nor will I unless forced. What always happens when I see commercials for it is I think, Sam! What happened? And then I have to go away and cry.
The point I'm getting at can best be explored via Voyager. There was a while there where MH and I were watching Voyager, although we couldn't even explain to ourselves why, and what happened after every episode is that we would systematically take it to pieces, often times rewriting to follow a more vigorous standard of logic. And one of the single worst things on Voyager was the cavalier and consistent dismissal of the chain of command. B'Lana (did I spell that even remotely right?) and Parris are Starfleet officers in the same chain of command. They should not sleep together. I don't mind that they do, since Voyager is all by herself out there in the deep, but I want it to be a PROBLEM. I want the show to TALK about it. And it never does, in the same way that Janeway's nauseating rhetoric of family is allowed to resolve conflicts that are not ABOUT family. They're about the chain of command.
(We had a game we played with that, which began, "No one can sleep with anyone. Except Seven of Nine. Seven of Nine doesn't want to sleep with anyone." And it got more demented from there. Usually it ended with Tuvak stuffing Neelix out an airlock and the whole crew celebrating.)
Now Serenity isn't a commissioned vessel. But Mutant Enemy knows the chain of command is there nevertheless and knows that because of it, the characters are going to hit some serious interpersonal snags. We see this most clearly and most consistently with Wash ("War Stories" is all about this problem, as Wash fails to separate chain-of-command from friendship/romance), but Jayne runs afoul of it in "Ariel," and we see Mal forced to be unsympathetic to Kaylee in "Out of Gas," because, no matter how much he loves her, she's his engineer and he doesn't have time for her to have a crisis. Mal has to behave in some ugly ways sometimes, because he's the captain. Firefly faces up to that and goes ahead and LETS him be an asshole if it's what he has to do to keep Serenity flying. And he doesn't forfeit our sympathy for it. I like Mal better BECAUSE he won't back down and because if he has to, he'll let his crew hate him, just so long as he can keep them, himself, and his ship alive.
In general, Star Trek franchises do not have this kind of courage (DS9 is the honorable exception, but it's also a freakish fluke in the family of ST shows), and there are stories they can't tell because they aren't willing to follow their own premises to their logical conclusions. And I'm sure if Firefly had backed down from some of its own premises and conclusions, it wouldn't have been cancelled, because it would look like Star Trek and the rest of mainstream television-SF. But then it wouldn't be Firefly, and I wouldn't be able to write this insanely long post about how intelligent it is.
Keep flying, Serenity.
I've been thinking about Firefly lately (because I'm spoiler-free on Buffy, and staying that way AND thinking about Buffy is going to cause my head to explode a la the Gentlemen). One of the other reasons the poor damn show should be continued is the level of realism it manages. Yes, I know, SF, no realism in sight, except that there are ways and ways of writing SF for television, and some of them are even less realistic than their premise.
Firefly remembers that space is a vacuum. I love it for this forever. It answers questions like, where are the toilets and how do they work? (We're still waiting on the showers, but I know the answer's out there.) And it examines, over and over again, the truths about the chain of command.
I'm not a big Star Trek fan, but I've watched ... well, actually, I think I've watched more than my fair share of various franchises. TNG, DS9 (which I actually came to love), and, may the powers have mercy, Voyager. I have never watched an episode of Enterprise, nor will I unless forced. What always happens when I see commercials for it is I think, Sam! What happened? And then I have to go away and cry.
The point I'm getting at can best be explored via Voyager. There was a while there where MH and I were watching Voyager, although we couldn't even explain to ourselves why, and what happened after every episode is that we would systematically take it to pieces, often times rewriting to follow a more vigorous standard of logic. And one of the single worst things on Voyager was the cavalier and consistent dismissal of the chain of command. B'Lana (did I spell that even remotely right?) and Parris are Starfleet officers in the same chain of command. They should not sleep together. I don't mind that they do, since Voyager is all by herself out there in the deep, but I want it to be a PROBLEM. I want the show to TALK about it. And it never does, in the same way that Janeway's nauseating rhetoric of family is allowed to resolve conflicts that are not ABOUT family. They're about the chain of command.
(We had a game we played with that, which began, "No one can sleep with anyone. Except Seven of Nine. Seven of Nine doesn't want to sleep with anyone." And it got more demented from there. Usually it ended with Tuvak stuffing Neelix out an airlock and the whole crew celebrating.)
Now Serenity isn't a commissioned vessel. But Mutant Enemy knows the chain of command is there nevertheless and knows that because of it, the characters are going to hit some serious interpersonal snags. We see this most clearly and most consistently with Wash ("War Stories" is all about this problem, as Wash fails to separate chain-of-command from friendship/romance), but Jayne runs afoul of it in "Ariel," and we see Mal forced to be unsympathetic to Kaylee in "Out of Gas," because, no matter how much he loves her, she's his engineer and he doesn't have time for her to have a crisis. Mal has to behave in some ugly ways sometimes, because he's the captain. Firefly faces up to that and goes ahead and LETS him be an asshole if it's what he has to do to keep Serenity flying. And he doesn't forfeit our sympathy for it. I like Mal better BECAUSE he won't back down and because if he has to, he'll let his crew hate him, just so long as he can keep them, himself, and his ship alive.
In general, Star Trek franchises do not have this kind of courage (DS9 is the honorable exception, but it's also a freakish fluke in the family of ST shows), and there are stories they can't tell because they aren't willing to follow their own premises to their logical conclusions. And I'm sure if Firefly had backed down from some of its own premises and conclusions, it wouldn't have been cancelled, because it would look like Star Trek and the rest of mainstream television-SF. But then it wouldn't be Firefly, and I wouldn't be able to write this insanely long post about how intelligent it is.
Keep flying, Serenity.
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no subject
Date: 2003-01-03 10:59 am (UTC)*snickers*
Very interesting post. The chain of command thing is no doubt very ingrained in the minds of Mal and Zoe, seeing as how they were military-types back in the day. The conflicts with this sort of attitude are readily apparent in the way Jayne, Wash, and Kaylee interact with their Captain. There's friction there, because those three are not military people and probably have no experience with the sort of chain of command necessary to run a ship. You can see this with Kaylee having her breakdown, Jayne betraying them all, and in Wash's jealously in not understanding his place on the ship nor the Captain's relationship with his wife. Even in the course of the far too few episodes we've seen, I can see that understanding starting to dawn on the three of them. It would probably make Mal's job a lot easier if he didn't have to say some variation of, "I'm not asking, I'm telling," all the time.
DS9 was a rarity and a beauty. Not as good as Babylon 5, of course, but few things are. In DS9, the Sisko (Sisco?) had the station well in hand (except for the times he took the entire senior staff out in the Defiant - who the heck was running the station?). Voyager was just silly most of the time, which is a shame because it had so much promise. The Star Trek franchise is far from being realistic, as you said.
*giggles* And I like Enterprise. You just can't set your expectations too high. They have a similar chain-of-command problem. Malcom Reed, who came from strict military training and is the ship's security/weapons expert, is always bashing heads with Sam... err.. Captain Archer, that is, because he's so lax on the that very issue. It's cute. They're cute. It's just like how I like Smallville, even though the writing is atrocious, because of the wonderful looks Lex keeps shooting at Clark. *giggles again*
At this point, I could go into a massive discussion about the wonderful realism of Babylon 5 and its keeping with attitudes proper on a military vessel, but I won't. That's a whole other post of monumental proportions. ^_^
no subject
Date: 2003-01-03 01:08 pm (UTC)I never watched B5, so sadly cannot comment.
The trouble with ALL Star Trek franchises is that the reality of the premise and the situation and the characters' lives is always secondary to whatever story the writers want to tell. That flaw was endemic from the very beginning in TOS: what the hell are they thinking, letting the captain go beaming down to random unknown planets? I read somebody somewhere (Who? Where? Does this ring bells for anyone else?) making the point that what they should have done was focus the show on an away team, people whose JOB is to go down and see if anything's going to think they look like lunch. But it's too late for that, and Star Trek seems to be an irredeemably captain-focused show. And everything's too damn clean.
I think you're entirely right about Wash and Kaylee; I'd argue that Jayne understands chain of command thinking, he just doesn't always want it to apply to him. Or, perhaps, a better way to think about it, Jayne is used to "chain of command" being the same as "wolf pack," where there's an alpha (Mal) and the rest of the hierarchy is certainly there, but it's fluid. You don't mess around with the alpha as a general rule, but everybody else is fair game. And it's perfectly okay to keep testing, jabbing at the alpha to see if he's still on top of things or if now's your moment to make a bid for power. I think Jayne is loyal to Mal in his own psychotic way, but he needs careful watching--as Mal says to Inara in "Out of Gas" and Wash & Zoe agree in "Shindig" (WASH: You are acting Captain. You know what happens if you fall asleep now? ZOE: Jayne slits my throat and takes over.). Jayne doesn't think of River and Simon as part of the pack/crew--until Mal shows him, pointedly, that they are. I'd like to see how and whether Jayne's attitude toward them changes post-"Ariel" (Damn FOX! Damn them!); "War Stories" is focused on Wash and Zoe's relationship with the rest of the crew, and Jayne spends the relevant part of "Objects in Space" asleep. (HL, since you're the one talking about character groupings, does Jayne interact at ALL with Simon and River in "Objects in Space"?)
Come on, UPN. You know you want it.
no subject
Date: 2003-01-04 12:19 pm (UTC)I'm not h.l, nor do I play her on the Internet, but Jayne's interactions with Simon and River are fleeting in "Objects in Space." In the opening River-perspective stroll through the ship, we get Jayne's "I got stupid. The money was too good," so that's interaction of a certain I'm-psychic-and-the-government-has-been-cutting-on-my-brain kind. Simon and Jayne are both in the room with everyone else (except River) for Kaylee's announcement of River's amazing gun-handling skills, and Jayne does respond directly to one comment of Simon's.
There's one other bit that seems very relevant to the issue of Jayne's post-"Ariel" attitude toward Simon and River: Jayne talks *about* River when arguing with Mal in the cockpit about not wanting to get the blame for River ending up with his gun, since he didn't make her crazy or even want her on the ship. And Mal leans in with an intense look and says, "Is that the direction you want this conversation to go in?"--the end-of-"Ariel" implications of which take a good bit of the fight out of Jayne. (Ah, shame! What a lovely weight it has hanging from the end of the chain of command.)
Re: Jayne sleeping through "Objects in Space," it's very interesting that the rest of the crew has the opportunity to have their fear/worry/etc. re: River transformed by what she does in the episode (especially Mal and Kaylee, who are perhaps the most important people for her to win over or win back--Kaylee because she is her friend and Mal because he determines her fate on Serenity). But Jayne sleeps through it. It might have been too deep for him, anyway.
no subject
Date: 2003-01-04 04:32 pm (UTC)I don't think I'd count the, "I got stupid. The money was too good," as a real interaction, because all of those flashes (like Simon's "I'd be there right now") are clearly things that people AREN'T saying to River. Simon would cut his own tongue out before he'd admit to River he felt anything of the sort. So that counts as River-learns-something-about-Jayne, but not Jayne-displays-new-attitude toward Simon & River.
River clearly makes Jayne VERY nervous--he is the only one she's physically attacked--and Jayne, I think, is particularly bad with things that make him nervous/things he doesn't understand. One of the things I loved about "Ariel" was the way you could see Jayne ALMOST feeling sympathy for River when Simon was explaining what had been done to her--and then refusing to feel anything of the sort, because it's too complicated and it gets in the way of his money.
Another reason to keep Jayne out of the mix in "Objects in Space," now that I think of it, is that he's too much like Early. Mind you, Jayne is clearly not anywhere NEAR as psychotic as Early, but I think he's too much like him to be able to deal with him. Which leads to an interesting question about why the other person who spent the episode "asleep" was Book. I don't know what to make of that, and now I'm making my head hurt. This needs more thinking.