Episodes getting darker? by christhecynic

FIREFLY EPISODE DISCUSSIONS

Episodes getting darker?

POSTED BY: CHRISTHECYNIC
UPDATED: Thursday, June 12, 2003 12:37
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VIEWED: 3757
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Tuesday, June 10, 2003 4:39 PM

Serenity started off with them out of money, and out of fuel. Then Kaylee was shot and near dead. By the end the bad guy was dead, the money was in, River was up, Kaylee was good, and everything was nice.
Ends on an up note.

The Train Job had them do the right thing and get away with it.
Ends on an up note, Crow deserved to be kicked into that engine, and the people got their medicine.

Bushwhacked they don’t get off so easy, but considering how close they came to living the rest their lives in jail with river sent back to that place it was fairly happy ending.

Shindig- nothing so dark about this one, defending Inara’s honor, getting the cargo.
Ends on an up note.

Safe- Beautiful saving River heroics at the end. Brother sister love, cows getting to be cows again under the sky, all was good.
Ends on a guess what? Up note.

Our Mrs. Reynolds- ending = everything fine.
Ends on a funny note (funny notes are up notes.)[this is the end of me saying what kind of note it ends on]

Jaynestown The coming of age of the kid Inara had sex with (ok so he was older than a kid, but didn’t he seem very innocent and kid-like?) Though they lose Jayne for a hero now that Inara’s client will stand up to his dad we know life will get better for the mudders.

Out of Gas It all turns out quite nice, lots of heartfelt flashbacks.

Ariel Jayne’s betrayal is pretty dark, but at the end when he is “held over the volcano’s edge” so to speak we see that he does care at least a little. (After he’s dead it doesn’t matter whether people know the truth or not, so his desire for them to think he didn’t betray them means that he does want on some level to be good.) Further River is on her way to being better, what could be better than that?
It had a dark scene of Mal threatening to kill Jayne, but ended on River getting a hopeful new med.

War Stories- The entire crew, even Jayne, come together to help the captain. But still, most of the episode is torture, not too fun. It ended funny though.

Objects in Space- Fun stuff, starts off dark like, but in the end, especially when River asks for permission to come aboard its happy kind of thing.

There be spoilers here, so look out. There is also the end of the message here.

Select to view spoiler:

Trash Inara and the Captain are at odds, they pull together long enough To pull the job, and the ending is just funny.

The Message- Tracy dies needlessly, all of the episode was for nothing, they accomplished nothing good except to get his body where it belonged. Jayne’s hat got insulted, Simon and Kaylee got off badly, Mal had to shoot his friend, ended with a funeral, very sad, very dark.

Heart of Gold- I’ll skip to the end, Inara was crying her eyes out (this is a bit before the end) then her friend Nandi dies. Nandi didn’t have to die, Inara could have slit the guy’s throat, Mal could have been quicker, Simon or River, could have done something. Of all of the deaths that occurred, hers was the only that really had no purpose, the others died in battle, she died accomplishing nothing, failing. Further she died after finding out that she had unknowingly betrayed her friend in a way she could probably never make up for.
The only good that could have come out of that would be Mal and Inara finally being honest with each other. Instead Inara gives a very nice speech about family,

INARA
I learned something from Nandi. Not just from what happened, but from her. The family she made, the strength of her love for them. That's what kept them together. When you live with that kind of strength, you get tied to it, you can't break away. And you never want to.
(that’s from the script, so the actual one might be different. I didn’t check, it’s the same idea)

That’s the kind of family that she has on Serenity, and right after that speech she ditches them. That’s probably a bigger down then the funeral.

All of the earlier ones had happiness, or funniness, to offset the dark. Even though they did seem, to me at least, to be getting darker and darker it didn’t really hit me how depressing it was till I watched the last two.

On a different subject, who decided that dark was bad? Bright always seemed worse to me, eyes stinging and such. I’d take dark over bright any day, after all, if it is so dark you can't see well an equal amount of brightness could cause permanent damage.

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Wednesday, June 11, 2003 1:47 PM

TALONPEST

Dark is great. The darker the better, if you ask me. I actually like Angel more than Buffy generally because it's darker, and Firefly was darker than Angel (and it's sci fi, and I like sci fi better than fantasy). I love dark comedy, and dark plots make for much better action scenes, because you know more is at stake (because people are almost certainly going to die).

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Wednesday, June 11, 2003 5:29 PM

CHRISTHECYNIC

I don't know, I love realistic happy. Now there is a hard thing to do. Realistic happy is usually quite dark, but it doesn’t leave you with that empty life really sucks and nothing good ever happens feeling. It leaves you happy, or fulfilled or something.

If you want dark and depressing you can get the news. I think that a lot of people are turned off by happy endings because they rarely see a good one and then they start to get the feeling that a happy ending is a badly done ending. It’s harder, it’s easy to get characters into a bad place, harder to get them out. Not too difficult to have a story where someone realistically falls into a deep depression, or goes insane, much harder to do a well made engaging one about the return from that. It doesn’t have to be much, like Mal says “Its enough” and all he has going is that the ship is working and the crew isn’t dead. But other times it isn’t enough, if Inara had stayed then the dark ending of Pentaline shooting the unarmed father of her child could have passed as somewhat happy. But the way she goes, and when she goes, it just makes it not so good. Not that the show isn’t good, don’t want anyone to get that impression, if that part had been done badly it wouldn’t bother me nearly so much.

It’s just that the episodes other than HoG and TM seemed to say that life sucked, and bad stuff happened left and right, but they would make it through. They wouldn’t make it through because of some greater power in the universe, or because good always triumphed, or any corny thing like that, they would make it through because they were family. They would stick together, and if anyone tried to hurt anyone of them the rest would be there with guns. They stood up for one another, and had a healthy dose of luck. That was a good thing to watch week to week.

If it continues on the downward track (IT WILL CONTINUE <- see optimism, coming from cynic that’s very impressive, that’s what the show does) then I will keep watching to see them get it back together. But if it just kept on getting worse and darker then I would enjoy it less. I have to watch, the characters are so well done they might as well be real people, and you need to know how it will end once you’re hooked (that’s how it is with me at least.)

It’s kind of a rule of fiction (but not remotely) you don’t pick the guy who dies. What if it only had one main character and that was Book. Then in the third episode Book died, it doesn’t work, now you need a new show. So the show you watch has to have the luckier characters, the ones that do make it through time after time, and that’s a reason to watch, to see a show where it has these nine people, and there are other ships just like them that get hit by Revers and everyone dies, or there are bounties that Jubal brings back, and the Hand of Blue guys have got to go out and track down other people who were gotten out, but I’ll bet the caught them.

So these guys make it through and every time they make stuff turn out good it is more likely they can do it again. Every time the escape the alliance they get practice which will help them the next time. When River gets more well, the possibilities of good increase (she stopped Jubal, she had Simon save a guy on Ariel, she staged a preemptive strike on Jayne.)

I’m not saying that I want happy cheery endings, not remotely. I don’t want every one to turn out good. But I’m really pissed off that I got left with the last two being really depressing. The movie is comeing, Joss, Nathan, and Adam all said so, and might wait would be less of an “I want to smash something because those damned [inset something really nasty to be bleeped out here, the biggest compound swear you can think of] at Fox should be killed” kind of wait, and more of an “I cant wait because it’s going to be so good” kind of wait.

Yeah this post made no sense, and wasn’t related to the topic at hand by much, but after typing that mush I see no reason not to post it. It is my topic after all.

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Wednesday, June 11, 2003 5:38 PM

SUCCATASH

Everything made sense to me except why you are pissed off at the last two eps being depressing.

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Wednesday, June 11, 2003 5:55 PM

TALONPEST

I think that Firefly has done an excellent job of "realistic happy" as you call it. Often in life things go badly for a while, and then get worse before they get better. Hell, in reality it doesn't always get better at all. In Firefly there are enough things that go well (IE Trash, recently) and they make fun of enough things that go wrong that I never found it depressing.

Naturally things have to turn out alright in the end- otherwise there's no motivation to watch the show if everyone's just gonna keep having rotten stuff happen to them and no bright spots. But given that Firefly (just as Buffy was) is more serialized than most shows, it's possible to draw out the down period before the happy ending towards the end of the season... then they quickly blow that up for the season finale cliffhanger

I mean think about it- Inara wasn't really going to leave for more than a few episodes. Maybe she would have gone out and Atherton would come after her when she's on her own, or maybe she would miss the "Mal element" of her life and start pulling cons of her own and get in trouble, and Mal would have to come and help her, and shazam! Happy reunion ending. I sincerely doubt Joss would write her out after only 15 episodes (yeah, that's 5 more than Doyle lasted on Angel, but I think that probably had more to do with Glen Quinn's drug problem that ended up killing him). The Mal/Inara dynamicis too valuable to the show to dump that quickly. So yeah, I'm really pissed that we don't get to see what Joss had in mind for Inara's threatening to leave (for a while) but I was never really worried that she was going to be gone for good.

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Wednesday, June 11, 2003 6:08 PM

CHRISTHECYNIC

To Succatash

Oh, ok. I just don't want to be left with that. Depressing things have to have resolutions, happy stuff not so much so.

It doesn’t have to have a happy resolution, but there needs to be one. Inara leaving isn’t a resolution, it’s an obstacle, and either it will be overcome or it wont be, but you cant just be left hanging, Firefly is too good to watch then sit back and say “oh that was nice/interesting” you need to know more.

Now if they were still flying and stuff was going reasonably ok then we wait, and we make noise, and demand it back, and make some more noise, and discuss, and finally watch a movie (the firefly movie we’ve been hearing of). Then we do whatever we can to get the movie to be turned back into a series, or a series of movies, we ask, yell, and beg, for books, or comics, or whatever else we can get.

But now we are left with nagging questions, and not just what did they do to River, will she ever be normal, who are the blue hands, what’s Jayne’s family like, who is book really, why did Inara leave the core worlds, why can’t Kaylee just deal with the fact that Simon is a moron when he tries to talk with her and let go the stupid things he says, why doesn’t Mal return home, how does he know so much about the Revers, and stuff like that.

Now what has happened is we are left with immediate nagging questions. We can’t look at the show and try to figure them out, in the end of The Message Simon and Kaylee’s relationship had reached a crux, or climax (using literary term, not something else) and what happened in the next days or weeks would have a profound effect on it. In the end of Heart of Gold Inara says she’s leaving. If she goes it will have a huge affect on everything on Serenity, and a bigger one on Mal. Does she go? Does he chase? What happens now isn’t something that we can look back on and say, “Well the way this happened in OMR makes me thing such and such will happen.”

The reason is that these are instantaneous things, a person doesn’t make these decisions on an arc, the back-story won’t help us figure it out. These are things we would learn in the next episode, they would be immediate, wait till the start of the next season and they would be the first things addressed. You cant try to guess what was in store because these are snap decisions. It would be like trying to figure out the ending half way through the episode OiS, and knowing you might never know. It just really pisses me off. The movie might not even touch on these things because there is only so much you can do in a movie.

After all of this TALONPEST really hit it with less than a sentence:

So yeah, I'm really pissed that we don't get to see what Joss had in mind for Inara's threatening to leave

If we were to leave on an ending like Serenity
-Still flying
-That’s not much
-Its enough

we wouldn’t have the immediate “I want to know how this was going to be resolved” problem. We would still be dying for more, but it wouldn’t be the same level of annoyance, it would be more anticipation.

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Wednesday, June 11, 2003 6:18 PM

TALONPEST

I think it goes without saying that Heart Of Gold was not intended to be the final episode. It's not really a shortcoming of the show's that you are having this problem, it's yet another shortcoming of Fox's (may they burn in hell

) shitty treatment of the show.

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Wednesday, June 11, 2003 6:44 PM

GINOBIFFARONI

Haven't seen HOG yet, downloading it now.

I wouldn't call The Message depressing, hell it was dark, and it was sad. I loved it. It had more emotion than any of the crap on TV tonight.

A huge reason why I love Firefly, but the part that left me wanting more was the closing shot of Mal, with a cold look of enlightned sadness as Stacy talked about " When you can no longer run, then you crawl. When you can no longer crawl "

I think there's a deeper element here. I think Mal is beginning to feel closed in and the more he wants to feel joy and live in the moment, the more he feels what happened at Serenity valley will repeat itself. This is why in eposodes to follow I think he will push those he loves away, Inara because he does love her, Kaylee because she is the innocence he has lost. Simon and River have no where else to go, and Mal feels compelled to protect them, as he failed to save his troops at Serenity. Zoe will stay because she anchors him, and Wash will stay because of Zoe. Book, still an unknown but likely stay because he is needed. Redemption is a hard path.
Jayne, I feel is a lot deeper than most would credit him. In a strange way, he is as innocent as Kaylee, but Mal sees potential in him to grow as I am sure he will...

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Wednesday, June 11, 2003 7:43 PM

CHRISTHECYNIC

I'm not pissed at the show, I'm pissed at Fox. Not only did they have the nerve and stupididty to cancel it, they left us with that hanging out there. Not that they wanted to leave us with that hanging out there, they wanted to leave us with OiS, but we wouldn't stop there, now the fact they canceled it means we cant go any further.

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Wednesday, June 11, 2003 8:34 PM

TALONPEST

I personally dislike the idea of Jayne turning out to be a deep person. I mean, I have no problem with episodes like Jaynestown where he gets the chance to emote. That epsiode and Ariel show that he does have depth as he is- he demonstrated that he does have an attachment to the crew when he asked Mal not to tell them that he'd tried to turn in Simon and River when he thought he was going to die, and in Jaynestown he showed that he doesn't think a whole lot of himself as a person, and that he was undeserving of the Mudder's sacrifice.

But for the most part I love the fact that he's a ruthless mercenary who will turn on you for the right price. I love the fact that he can't be trusted. I don't want to see him develop a consience, or learn how to have a healthy relationship.

I think that there is a fundamental difference between Jayne and Kaylee- Kaylee is young, innocent, and idealistic. Jayne is ignorant, and more than a little dumb about anything that doesn't relate to being a mercenary. Showing him changing into a well-rounded person with good honest friendships and decent values will just make him less appealing in my eyes.

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Wednesday, June 11, 2003 8:45 PM

JAYNESGIRLFRIEND

Except that if Jayne stays that way there really is no point to his character. The character has to have some sort of an arc, either learning to be a better person or falling into being a worse one. Otherwise the momentum of the character staggers and there's nowhere to take him story wise.

"I was gonna get me an ear, too." - Jayne

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Wednesday, June 11, 2003 10:02 PM

TALONPEST

He can change in other ways than becoming a better, more civilized person. I'd like to see something less cliche done with him.

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Wednesday, June 11, 2003 10:14 PM

MANIACNUMBERONE

I'd like to see a Jayne/River relationship. I could see Jayne learning about some wierd aspect of River that really brings him out in an interesting way.

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Wednesday, June 11, 2003 11:08 PM

TALONPEST

You know Maniac, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I actually kind of like that idea! Of course, it would have to wait a while until River gets it a little more together so it's not as if Jayne's taking advantage of the crazy girl (though I can see her taking advantage of him). It may even be useful to see her actually kill someone with her brain to ensure that he can't hurt her.

Jayne and River are even more polar opposites than Simon and Kaylee. I can imagine River messing with Jayne's mind 'till his head is ready to explode, then winning him back in the sack. They could do all kinds of things with Jayne in that situation- he'd have to have more self-image issues being around a genius all the time, and being unable to surprise her. Could drive him to do some pretty crazy stuff. And can you picture River being jealous of Veera?

It would also make Simon hate Jayne even more than he already does- he threw away his life so River could be with someone like Jayne? Plus he'd be jealous of their relationship, since he got her out so they could be together again (in a sibling capacity, of course). They'd also bump heads trying to protect her in their own ways. Jayne would think Simon is sheltering her too much because he'd like seeing her experience new things, and Simon would think Jayne is putting her in danger by overexposing her. One of the things I like most about a Wheadon show is how much some of the characters hate each other.

I think Mal might actually approve of it, too- it would give Jayne a reason not to sell them out for the right price.

And of course, this would satisfy my requirement of Jayne not changing into the kind of guy who can hold down a normal relationship- this would be anything but normal.

The only problem I see here is (provided nobody else's reltationships explode) that would leave us with three couples and a preacher, and I don't know if I'd like the show to turn into The Love Boat in space. Must we pair everyone up?

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Thursday, June 12, 2003 2:00 AM

GINOBIFFARONI

The thing of it is he will always be the same core person,

But over time he will want to change, for various reasons. A Simon / Kaylee / Jayne triangle, to try to win Mals respect, many things.

I think his struggle with himself to change and maybe try to supress his natural insticts would be quite a bit of fun, and the hurt he would feel when being rejected for just being the old Jayne would fit nicely into the shows themes. I myself think Adam Baldwin could portray this with a bit of brillance, and after all the show is about the journey right. Having one character standing still would be no fun.

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Thursday, June 12, 2003 9:17 AM

MANIACNUMBERONE

We don't need to pair eveybody up, but it seemed like the thing to do. It just seems almost too good to be true, if that were the way Joss worked it out to be.

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Thursday, June 12, 2003 10:06 AM

CHRISTHECYNIC

Jayne is more rounded, he sends money home to his family and loves his mom and siblings, that isn't the simple ruthless mercenary we saw him as in the beginning. He seems to be quite protective of Kaylee, as if she were a sibling, and loyal to Mal (he isn't willing to betray him in spite of the incredibly large reward he could get on River, he goes in after Mal, and gives his money to buy him back in War Stories even though he gets nothing back and thinks it's suicide.)

Even in The Train Job, where he was going to be leave Mal while he completed the deal he planed to come back for him after.

That makes me think that Jayne is a bit deeper then the mercenary you cant trust already, seeing him in a relationship, or showing some more depth wouldn’t be surprising. Hell he’s got depth visible when he talks about death in The Message.

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Thursday, June 12, 2003 12:37 PM

TALONPEST

I think that the backstory of Jaynestown pretty well establishes what Jayne is capable of- he worked with a guy for six months and then dumped him out of a moving vehical 30 feet off the ground rather than dump the loot. And he DID try to collect the reward on River and Simon in Ariel, remember? He would have too if the Alliance hadn't double crossed him.

Mal doesn't trust him at all- he flat out says so on multiple occasions.

Frankly I don't see much of Jayne looking out for Kaylee in particular, other than in Serenity when he wanted to kill Dobson after he shot her... though I suspect that had as much to do with the fact that he was a Fed that had tried to rat them out as anything else.

True, Jayne has demonstrated some loyalty to Mal. In Serenity he didn't turn on him when Dobson offered him money, saying "the money wasn't good enough." And yes, he went in to Niska's station with everyone else to get Mal back... 'course that could just have been him not wanting to pass up a fight.

Jayne is still very much a mercenary, and he's still very willing to kill people without much provocation. He's not a good person and I don't want to see him become a good person any time soon, because it would cheapen him. I don't want him to get all warm and fuzzy- let him keep his moral flexibility, and you can make him as complex as your heart desires.

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