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Like John Ford westerns, "Firefly's" stories are morality plays, but with a millennial twist. In Ford's moral universe, law and anarchy confronted each other in a showdown, the law won, and civilization rode into town. (In "My Darling Clementine," for example, civilization was symbolized by the arrival of a schoolmarm in Tombstone.) In Whedon's fictional universe, characters exist in a moral void (the prostitute is respected and the preacher is not) that makes the whole good/bad thing tricky, and nobody has a mission. On the face of it, it's a promising idea -- if "Buffy" is a metaphor for growing up in the modern world, as has been said, "Firefly" is about being a grown-up in the modern world. The driving principle of the Serenity's crew is to "find a job, any job," and the harshness of this reality could make Buffy's adolescent idealism look like just that.

Unfortunately, it doesn't. After having created a messianic character driven by fate to battle evil (Buffy has no choice but to slay vampires, even when she'd prefer not to), Whedon's new relativist characters seem a little lost. Admittedly, this is the point, but the show lacks the kind of psychological tension that makes "Buffy" snap. As much as the space and western genres have in common, "Firefly" could have probably done without the western soundtrack and the vague "Bonanza" look too. It's not just that the "space as Wild West" metaphor is somewhat redundant, but that neither genre binds the series to the present.

This is a shame, because some of the ideas that Whedon has talked about exploring in his new show -- existentialism, morality in the absence of God -- are distinctly modern themes that tend to get lost in all the atmosphere. On "Buffy," two distinct worlds come together as naturally as they do in any Gothic horror story, because they are all about the tensions between good and evil that can coexist in a single person or place. "Buffy's" constant pop references add to the conflict by contrasting Buffy's absurd but normal everyday problems with her messianic duties. It's this tension that makes "Buffy" consistently exciting and psychologically complex.

On "Firefly," however, whatever tension there is, is slack. The Alliance is generally -- if not all -- bad; and the Serenity's crew is generally -- if not all -- good. ("We're not thieves. Well, we are thieves. But we're not thieves.") We are meant to sympathize with Mal, even though tiny seeds of equivocation are scattered throughout: His name, as River points out during one of her lunatic rants, means "bad, from the Latin," the independence fighters wear brown shirts, and they say things like "We will rise again."

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Originally posted by Ringwraith:
Funny how Salon still doesn't give me any reason to take them seriously.

A few years ago when "Saving Private Ryan" was released, someone from Salon did a review of the movie, but the person who wrote it didn't "get it." "Who is that old man? Why is he crying?" That kind of thing. Didn't understand why war was (is) hell.

This article is much better written but they still don't "get it." I don't see why this show even has to be relevant. Who cares if it isn't? It's a TV show. Like they sing in the MST3K theme song, "Just repeat to yourself, 'It's just a show, I should really just relax.'" TV doesn't have to be a reflection of what is going on in current times. It's escapism.

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Besides, pop references tend to date TV shows, for good and bad.

You can please some of the people some of the time...

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"How will this end?"
"In fire."
--Babylon 5, 'The Coming of Shadows'
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