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Originally posted by KATI:
There’s another problem with Ariel, I think. Jayne made no secret of his feelings against the siblings – never, from the beginning on. And after this “He looks better in red”-scene he makes that clear again and speaks about the reward they could have again. Mal knows that.
Why does Mal send Jayne with them into the hospital, why doesn’t he leads them himself and let Zoe and Jayne take such medicaments? Or he could have send Zoe with River and Simon – and go himself together with Jayne. Why the hell he was so prepared to risk this thing?

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Originally posted by KATI:

Oh, LIZ, even Mal had written his arm full of names to remember the meds... *g*

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Originally posted by Talonpest:
Mal kicks Krowl (or Crow, or whatever Niska's thug's name was) into the engine while he's unarmed and has his hands bound.

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from "Swatting the Firefly" by Hank Parnell originally published in The Texas Mercury
But most of all, living "beyond the law" as Reynolds and his crew had to, the moral universe of Firefly depended not on the "rule of law," but on its much-maligned and deliberately-misunderstood alternative, the rule of honor. And Firefly made the case, through Reynolds, as persuasively as it has ever been made in American fiction, print, TV, film or otherwise, in my opinion, for the ultimate superiority of the rule of honor over the rule of law—at least for uncommon people, if not the run-of-the-mill herds of swine, sheep, slaves and robots held to be so dear today.

For you see, the rule of honor demands what law must defer: individual responsibility, personal culpability, what is fair and what is just, of every man (and woman) who lives by it. Nowhere is this made more clear than at the climax of the episode "Ariel," in which Reynolds is about to space Jayne for betraying River and her doctor brother to the Feds. Jayne, after some hemming and hawing, admits his guilt, and his reasons for the betrayal: "The money was too good. I got stupid." This makes little impression on Reynolds, who turns and walks away: he knows Jayne is guilty, and why. What turns him back around and stops him is when Jayne asks what Reynolds plans to tell the others, and says, rather pathetically:

"Make something up. Don't tell 'em what I did."

I, for one, could see the wheels turning in Mal Reynolds' head: He's ashamed. There may be something of a man in him after all.

It is then, of course, that Reynolds closes the outer hatch before Serenity leaves the atmosphere, and spares Jayne's life.

Some of you may think this is only in my imagination; and to be sure, I do not imagine that Joss Whedon has sat down and thought about the rule of honor as I have, or would even support or espouse it, as I do, other than as a fictional device for the development of one of his characters. And yet there it is; consciously or not, it is in there, and it underlies every single thing that Reynolds does. Honor is his roadmap in life, his way of finding his way through the wilderness. It says to him at every turn: This thing I can do and live with myself; this thing I can't. It is in the end what makes him a "good" man, in the conventional sense, and an American, and, ultimately, a Southerner.

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Originally posted by Talonpest:
The one thing that's always bothered me about the line "If I ever kill you, you'll be awake, you'll be facing me, and you'll be armed" is that in the very next episode Mal kicks Krowl (or Crow, or whatever Niska's thug's name was) into the engine while he's unarmed and has his hands bound. So yeah, I think it only applies to Simon.

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Originally posted by TheRealMe:
... flashing red light telling him the air lock was not shut completely

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Originally posted by TheRealMe:
But I did think it odd that Wash's control panel didn't show a flashing red light telling him the air lock was not shut completely...

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