There's this book of essays called "Finding Serenity"

[xiphias]

About the series Firefly.

And most of the essays are crap.

Okay, kradical's essay on why "The Train Job" sucked, and how he could have cut "Serenity, Pt 1 and 2" down to a single episode, that was interesting. I don't know if I agree, but it was pretty good.

So, let me summarize some of the essays for you, so you don't have to read the book, or, if you do, you can just read the interesting bits.

(Note: I consider a C to be a decent grade. "C" means, "good enough". "B" means "insightful, clever, keen". "A" means "blows the top of my skull off in order to put interesting things in it." "D" means "I'm being polite". "F" means "I'm not being polite.")

"The Reward, The Details, The Devil, The Due," by Larry Dixon.
"I'm Larry Dixon, and I do lots of exciting things sometimes, and I come from tough stock and I'm an artist, too, and the characters in the series do exciting things and are tough folk."
Grade: D-, if you're interested in reading about Firefly, C+ if you're interested in Larry Dixon.

"The Heirs of Sawney Beane" by Lawrence Watt-Evans
"The Reavers are a really interesting concept, and there are lots of legends in mythogy of human-eating monsters that, if you DO manage to survive their attacks, you become one yourself. But really, there are actual, real historical precidents too, like the seventeenth-century Scottish story of Sawney Beane and family, and they're real, and . . . um. . . wait . . . what do you mean they're probably just fictional, too? I've got half this damn essay already written! Umm. . . okay. . . so. . . maybe the Reavers mean something totally different, because ALL the precedents are fictional. . . wonder what they could mean. . . "
Grade: B-, could have easily been an A if, after learning that Sawney Beane was fictional, he'd gone back and rewritten the earlier parts of the essay. . .

"Asian Objects in Space" by Leigh Adams Wright
"How come, if China is one of the real huge influences in this 'verse, there have never been any Asians with speaking parts? Is this sloppiness, just the plain viccisitudes of making a series, or something clever?"
Grade: C. Good concept, solidly done, didn't hugely grab me.

"The Rise And Fall (And Rise) of Firefly (The Behind-The-Scenes Story)" by Glenn Yeffeth
A cutesy, ostensibly humorous series of "memos" from Fox to Joss on Firefly.
Grade: D. It's the sort of thing you'd like if you like that sort of thing.

"Who Killed Firefly?" by Ginjer Buchanan
"There is just no audience for television westerns any more. There's a very small audience for television science fiction shows, and a surprisingly high percentage of that audience demands the existence of aliens in their TV SF. So, what the heck did you THINK was going to happen to a television science fiction western without any aliens?"
Grade: B. Yeah, okay, good point.

"'The Train Job' Didn't Do the Job: Poor Opening Contributed to Firefly's Doom" by kradical
"'The Train Job' is a fairly weak episode of Firefly by any standard, and is especially weak if you don't already know and care about the characters. 'Serenity' was a strong episode, if a bit draggy in parts, and does an excellent job of introducing the characters and world. When Fox said that they wanted a one-hour opener, instead of a two-hour one, a smarter thing to do would have been to cut the running length of the pilot by 50%. And it actually would have worked, and made a tighter episode."
Grade: B+. But I now really, really want to see the Keith R. A. DeCandito cut of the pilot episode, and see if it works as well as he suspects.

"Serenity and Bobby McGee" by Mercedes Lackey
"Most of the characters on Firefly seem to be attempting to find freedom in some sense or another, but what does that really mean? What IS 'freedom', and how do you get it? Does running away from the Alliance make you free, or does it put you in another sort of bondage? Of the characters, really only Zoe and River seem to be pretty illusion-free with respect to 'freedom' -- River because she's had all illusions stripped away from her, and Zoe because she's, Zen-like, chosen her own bondage: she is loyal to Mal, and to Wash, and she knows who she is and what she does."
Grade: A-. I really, really like this essay. I don't usually think of her as an essay writer, but if this is typical, then I like her essays a lot more than her fiction.

"Firefly vs. The Tick." by Don Debrant
"Firefly and The Tick (animated) are both very similar shows. Because they both involve facial hair, and dinosaurs. And, well, because ticks are fireflies are both bugs."
Grade: C. It's pretty funny, but disjointed. It's supposed to be gonzo, and it works well enough.

"We're All Just Floating In Space" by Lyle Zinda
"I watched the commentary track for 'Objects in Space' and copied it down. I teach philosophy at Indiana University."
Grade: D-. There's plenty of nifty stuff in this essay. Specifically, the quotes from Joss Whedon's commentary track of the episode. And, by the way, Dr. Zinda, when River reads Jayne saying, "The money was too good; I just got stupid," he's referring to the events of "Ariel" -- it doesn't imply that he tipped off Early.

Okay, that's the first half of the collection. More later, maybe, if I feel like it.

Comments

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

"How come, if China is one of the real huge influences in this 'verse, there have never been any Asians with speaking parts?"

In general, one of the aspects of most futuristic shows that annoys me is that folks are usually very ethnically polarized still. Miles and Keiko's kid on DS9 was the first interracial kid on ST, no? They had mixed-species before mixed-race, there. Wouldn't people be beiger?

Zoe's a little beige, but really, Firefly's got a lot of white people. I'd expect more coffee latte skin except on the planets that have been isolated for a long time, and even those would only be extremes of skin tone if all the people who settled them were of a narrow range of skin tone.

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

Reality versus TV Reality.

I agree with your point, however in casting a show with actors both talented enough and familiar enough to get it on the air, sometimes these things get compromised.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

I find myself disagreeing with this. For me, the way that the cultures have blended and formed new combinations is far more compelling than the absolutely maddening bullshite of "Keiko" and the way her ethnicity was portrayed. I really wish they'd made that character out and out Korean instead of what they did.

Meanwhile, are you sure that Kaylee or any of them are "all white" ? I'm thinking of all those "white" American families with a bit of sub-Saharan African or American Indian in them, who pass to casual observers.

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

I'm one of those people who appears all-white. Pictures of my mother and grandmother next to pictures of me make me seem adopted.

But I still think a lot fewer people would appear as clearly one thing or another 500-3000 years from now than appear so now. I'm not saying everyone will have dark brown wavy hair and skin the color of coffee with milk, but there will be a lot more variation within the middle grounds.

I also recognize that there aren't enough actors that fit that middle ground to use them, so we have to use who's available.

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

(I think culture, and Keiko's culture, are orthogonal to that. It's a different point.)

[trinker.livejournal.com]

I think I'm failing to articulate my point.

I find that River's look, for instance, had me wondering what her ethnic background was. If the backstory came out that the Tams were mixed European/Chinese, I'd probably go along with that. Kaylee, has a bit of something going on...or so one might argue. Who knows what Rev. Book's background, or Zoe's, is?

Yeah, it's partly about the availability of actors in Hollywood, but it's also about the way that we in 21stC NorAm (and other English speaking parts?) have been trained to classify, too.

There's also a tendency in the U.S. (based on what I know of you, I'm not saying that *you* are doing this) to assume that "mixed race" means "white/black".

The thing that makes the presence of the polarized endpoints less irksome to me is that it *also* means that the cultures get to come through, too. I don't think you'd get Chinese language and writing coming through the ages unless there was also a tendency to preserve other bits of the ethnicity/culture as well. It's harder to see in the U.S. where it's much more possible to be "an American of geographically divergent ancestry", and culture and appearance can be more divorced.

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

It's harder to see in the U.S. where it's much more possible to be "an American of geographically divergent ancestry", and culture and appearance can be more divorced.

That gets really mixed up when one considers the meaning of "Hispanic" in terms of culture or race, when one tries to define "race" at all, or when one looks around the parts of South America that are somewhere between Hispanic (or Portuguese) and aboriginal while being neither. It's not just the U.S. Even culures that aren't immediately blending from recent immigration have very blurry lines around the edges, few are at all pure.

Of course, that might all change in space. ;)

"Hispanic"

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Mmm, nice counterpoint!

I think I'd also better stop with this discussion before I get into spoilers for the movie...

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

:sigh:

I never saw Firefly on TV. I've been watching it in the order they were /supposed/ to be shown (rather than the order Fox showed them), and I simply can't imagine the reasoning behind putting the real opening episode nearly at the end of the time it was on the air. So many things in other episodes refer back to that beginning! Yeesh.

[dancing-kiralee.livejournal.com]

I saw the series on TV when it first aired, and nearly my first comment was something like,

"They must have left something out. The first episode doesn't give enough information about who these people are and why they're here. I'll keep watching, for now, but unless they can fill in the blanks I'm going to stop watching."

Not telling the audience what was going on was a BIG mistake.

Kiralee