I belong to the Blockbuster mail-order rental club thingy. You know, the one where you pay them £15 per month and they send you three DVDs at a time. When you’ve watched them, you send them back and they send you three more, and so on, so the quicker you watch them, the more value for money you get.
I love a bit of Sci-Fi, so when I perused the Blockbuster catalogue and came across a film called ‘Serenity’, I thought “what the heck”. When it turned up, I pretty much watched it staight away, since I had nothing else on at that particular moment.
“Hmm…very enjoyable” I thought to myself. The movie itself is a follow on from a now-cancelled TV series called Firefly, which I had never seen, but had heard good things about. The movie piqued my interest enough to add the TV series to my list at Blockbuster.
Fortunately, the first disc turned up almost straight after I sent Serenity back, so I sat back to see what the series was like…
“Wow!”
I normally avoid watching new TV shows, as they tend to be sterile affairs, full of vacous models with little character, and derivative attempts at plot. I think the only recent exceptions to this rule are South Park (which just keeps on getting more outrageous), and House (I caught a few episodes and found it worth catching if I was in). I am also mourning the loss of Malcolm in the Middle (mourning might be a bit strong), as this has been the most consistently funny series on TV for years. I will catch Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, and American Chopper if I have nothing better to do, but as for the rest of it….well, most of it is a waste of time. You already know my feelings towards Big Brother (well, actually you know a small fraction of my feelings towards Big Brother), and I hold Soap Operas with almost as much distaste. But I don’t want to talk about them.
Where was I? Oh yeah - “Wow!”.
What a great show! I pretty much binged on them the past few days, since discs 2 and 3 (and then 4) turned up in sequence and just at the right time to have a marathon of sorts (in between me prepping for Summer Camp).
The basic premise is “Cowboys in Space”. It’s set 500 years in the future, when Earth is “all used up”, and humanity has moved on to a star system containing dozens of planets and hundreds of moons. The system is run by the Alliance, a rather totalitarian authority, who provide the core worlds with technology and luxury, while leaving the outer worlds with the bare minimum, or sometimes less, giving these outer worlds a somewhat ‘frontier’ quality, where the rule of the gun prevails.
In this setup we meet Mal Reynolds, Captain of the Firefly class starship ‘Serenity’, a rather dilapidated ship which, with its ragtag crew, fly from system to system, looking for charters (legal or otherwise) and trying (usually unsuccesfully) to stay out of trouble.
It’s a great premise for a Sci-Fi series (even if my praisee didn’t do it justice), and it was living up to it’s potential, thanks largely to it’s creator, Joss Whedon (of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ fame). There were large helpings of humour and pathos, mixed with a deep, gritty, ‘used space’ sensibility. The protagonists are (or rather, had the potential to be) more three-dimensional than your usual TV heroes.
It could have been the best Sci-Fi series of all time…but it got cancelled.
After just 14 episodes, Fox Network pulled the plug. They say it was due to tepid ratings, but when you consider that Fox themselves caused that reaction by scheduling it wrong, showing the episodes out of order and frequently ditching it in favour of sporting events, it was no wonder that audiences did not easily come to know it. It was almost as if Fox sabotaged the show in order to justify it’s cancellation. But why.
Well, one (paranoid) view is that the show’s anti-authoritarian stance might not have sat well with the Bush administration, and pressure was brought to bear. This is perhaps lent weight by the fact that Fox rejected the original Pilot, and insisted that they make a new one, citing certain character traits and the overall tone.
Whatever the reasons, whoever made the decision to axe the show was either a retard or a fascist, and should have been fired.
The show is stonkingly good. I have, since watching the show, ordered the season box set and the follow up movie ‘Serenity’ from Amazon. The urgency was partly instigated by disc 4 being faulty (an unfortunatley common trait with Blockbusters DVDs - they offer you no recompense, even thought I must have received over 50 faulty DVDs since joining), resulting in an inability to watch the last three episodes of the series.
I since went back and watched ‘Serenity’ again, and it came through with so much more power, reaching its zenith as a couple of principle characters are killed off (obviously the impact of this is heightened by the familiarity that the series generates). Great movie. I hope that Universal will continue their good sense in making it, by agreeing to do more. Joss Whedon has stated in interview that his preferred medium for continuing this story is cinema, although he would consider re-awakening the TV series format if an offer was made.
Anyway, if you like a bit of sci-fi, get yourself in possession of this gem of a tv-series and movie, and learn how to swear in Chinese!