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Originally posted by Wishimay:
https://moviepilot.com/p/best-cancelled-tv-shows-were-supposed-to-end/
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I didn't know some of these details for sure, wondered if you all did. I guessed some of them...

Season 2 would have Adam Baldwin's character Jayne fulfill his dream of piloting his own ship, one that would even rival the Serenity. Other main developments we would have seen include the birth of Zoe's child, another baby born from the loins of Simon and Kaylee... oh, and the unnecessary rape of Inara as she died from a terminal illness.

Yep, during an interview with io9, executive producer Tim Minear revealed that Joss Whedon pitched a rather dark episode for #Firefly Season 2 that would have turned Inara into a drug-using rape victim, finally forcing Mal to stop slut-shaming her:


"She had this magic syringe. She would take this drug. And if she were, for instance, raped, the rapist would die a horrible death. The story was that she gets kidnapped by Reavers and when Mal finally got to the ship to save her from the Reavers, he gets on the Reaver ship and all the Reavers are dead. Which would suggest a kind of really bad assault. At the end of the episode, he comes in after she's been horribly brutalized, and he comes in and he gets down on his knee, and he takes her hand. And he treats her like a lady."


Yeah, I'm glad we DIDN'T get season 2 that way... I see Mal and Inara going down in style somehow, but Mal pining over a relationship he never had would've been heartbreaking. If I had to choose between Wash going the way he did, or Inara going out that way...I'd choose Wash every time.



EDITED TO ADD. I just had a thought, that maybe if Inara DID survive her terminal illness that she would have been as emotionally damaged as Mal was, and maybe that was the thought behind it. They would be kinda on the same level of PTSD.

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EDITED TO ADD. I just had a thought, that maybe if Inara DID survive her terminal illness that she would have been as emotionally damaged as Mal was, and maybe that was the thought behind it. They would be kinda on the same level of PTSD.

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Originally posted by Wishimay:

EDITED TO ADD. I just had a thought, that maybe if Inara DID survive her terminal illness that she would have been as emotionally damaged as Mal was, and maybe that was the thought behind it. They would be kinda on the same level of PTSD.

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Originally posted by GWEK:
I think MoviePilot's article is a mischaracterization of potential elements from the series, and misses at least one major element that has been revealed by Joss himself. In other words, don't believe what you've read.

Here are some facts:

1) Minear has said repeatedly that he and Joss did indeed pitch the idea of Inara being gang-raped by Reavers... and the idea was summarily shot down by FOX. At the same time, FOX was also working with Joss and Tim on the tone of the show, which become less dark than Joss had originally intended.

Joss's originally intention was that Mal would be in a very dark place when the show started (as darker, or darker, than he is in the movie) and that he would slowly become more heroic as the show progressed. Essentially, the tone of the series starts where Joss wanted to be a few years into the show.

Thus, it's quite likely the Reaver rape sequence was never planned for the version of Firefly that WE saw, but was, instead, simply an anecdotal story left over from a different iteration that never happened.


2) Zoe was going to have Wash's baby... but not necessarily in Season Two.

Whedon has said that he intended for Zoe to have Wash's baby after Wash died, but that he wasn't sure when he was going to kill Wash off. Could be Season Two. Could be Season Three. Who knows? The baby would likely have been the season after that.

Joss is smart enough to understand the dynamics of working on a television show and knows that having a baby - or, worse, a small child - as a regular on a show is extremely disruptive, so he would likely have sought to minimize the "damage" from this decision.

Which leads to...


3) Simon and Kaylee have a baby (and, for that matter, Jayne piloting his own ship): What's the pedigree for this information?

I've read every article and interview I could find about the future of Firefly and have never seen either of these items mentioned. Does anyone know the pedigree of either assertion?

4) Joss had a 7-year plan for Firefly and it would have ended with the discovery that Blue Sun is the Big Bad (and, presumably, the crew taking them on in some way). That's from Joss himself, when talking about the movie and how the movie and series interacted with each other.

The fact that this final bit of information is not included tells me that the folks who wrote the article didn't do their research properly, and makes the whole article nothing more than a bit of interesting fluff. (Secondary to this, both Tim Minear and Alan Tudyk had ideas that pitched that might well have become Season Two episodes... and that info isn't exactly hard to find, so...)

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