Firefly 4k
Kerby Reynolds
Firefly is an American space Western drama television series, created by writer and director Joss Whedon, under his Mutant Enemy Productions label. Whedon served as an executive producer, along with Tim Minear. The series is set in the year 2517, after the arrival of humans in a new star system, and follows the adventures of the renegade crew of Serenity, a "Firefly-class" spaceship. The ensemble cast portrays the nine characters living aboard Serenity. Whedon pitched the show as "nine people looking into the blackness of space and seeing nine different things."[1]
The show explores the lives of a group of people, some of whom fought on the losing side of a civil war, who make a living on the fringes of society as part of the pioneer culture of their star system. The two surviving superpowers, the United States and China, fused to form the central federal government called the Alliance. According to Whedon's vision, "nothing will change in the future: technology will advance, but we will still have the same political, moral, and ethical problems as today."[2]
Firefly premiered in the United States on the Fox network on September 20, 2002. By mid-December, Firefly had averaged 4.7 million viewers per episode and was 98th in Nielsen ratings.[3] It was canceled after 11 of the 14 produced episodes were aired. Despite the short life span of the series, it received strong sales when it was released on DVD and has large fan support campaigns.[4][5] It won a Primetime Emmy Award in 2003 for Outstanding Special Visual Effects for a Series. TV Guide ranked the series at No. 5 on their 2013 list of 60 shows that were "Cancelled Too Soon".[6][7]
The post-airing success of the show led Whedon and Universal Pictures to produce Serenity, a 2005 film that continues the story from the series.[4] The Firefly franchise expanded into other media, including comics and two tabletop role-playing games.[8][9]
The series takes place in the year 2517, on a variety of planets with numerous habitable moons. The TV series does not reveal whether these celestial bodies are within one star system, only saying that Serenity's mode of propulsion through space is a "gravity-drive". Each episode begins with either Book or Captain Reynolds providing the backstory. Book's narration runs as follows:
After the Earth was used up, we found a new solar system, and hundreds of new Earths were terraformed and colonized. The central planets formed the Alliance and decided all the planets had to join under their rule. There was some disagreement on that point. After the war, many of the Independents who had fought and lost drifted to the edges of the system, far from Alliance control. Out here, people struggle to get by with the most basic technologies. A ship would bring you work. A gun would help you keep it. A captain's goal was simple: Find a crew. Find a job. Keep flying.[10]
The film Serenity reveals that the planets and moons are in an extensive system, and production documents related to the film indicate that there is no faster-than-light travel in this universe. The characters occasionally refer to "Earth-that-was", and the film establishes that long before the events in the series, a large population had emigrated from Earth to a new star system in generation ships:[11] "Earth-that-was could no longer sustain our numbers, we were so many." The emigrants established themselves in this new star system, with "dozens of planets and hundreds of moons", and many of these were terraformed, a process that was only the first step in making a planet habitable. The outlying settlements often did not receive support in the construction of their civilizations. This resulted in many border planets and moons having forbidding, dry environments, well-suited to the Western genre.
The show takes its name from the "Firefly-class" spaceship Serenity that the central characters call home. The Firefly-class ships, some 40,000 still in use,[12] is so named for the resemblance to the shape of a firefly, complete with a tail section that lights up during acceleration, analogous to the bioluminescent insect's abdomen. The Serenity was named for the Battle of Serenity Valley, where Sergeant Malcolm Reynolds and Corporal Zoe Alleyne were among the survivors on the losing side. It is revealed in "Bushwhacked" that the Independents' loss at the Battle of Serenity Valley was widely considered as sealing their fate.[13]
The Alliance governs the star system through an organization of core planets, following its success in forcibly unifying all the colonies under one government. DVD commentary suggests that the Alliance is composed of two primary systems, one predominantly Western, the other pan-Asian, explaining the blended linguistic and visual themes of the series. The central planets are firmly under Alliance control, but the outlying planets and moons resemble the American Old West, under little governmental authority. Settlers and refugees on the outlying worlds have relative freedom from the central government but lack the amenities of high-tech civilization found on inner worlds. The outlying areas of space ("the black") are inhabited by the Reavers, a cannibalistic group of nomadic humans.[14]
The captain of Serenity is Malcolm "Mal" Reynolds (Nathan Fillion). The episode "Serenity" establishes that the captain and his first mate Zoe Washburne, ne Alleyne (Gina Torres) are veteran "Browncoats" of the Unification War, a failed attempt by the outlying worlds to resist the Alliance. A later episode, "Out of Gas", reveals that Mal bought the spaceship Serenity to travel increasingly distant reaches of space, beyond Alliance control. Much of the crew's work consists of cargo runs or smuggling. In the original pilot, "Serenity", Simon (Sean Maher) joins the crew as a paying passenger, smuggling his sister River Tam (Summer Glau) aboard as cargo. River is a child prodigy whose brain was subjected to Alliance scientists at a secret government institution; she displays symptoms of schizophrenia and often hears voices. It is later revealed that she is a "reader", one who possesses telepathic abilities. Simon gave up a career as an eminent trauma surgeon in an Alliance hospital to rescue her, and they are fugitives. As Whedon states in an episode of a DVD commentary, every show he does is about creating a family.[15] By the last episode, "Objects in Space", the fractured character of River has finally become whole, partly because the others decided to accept her into their "family" on the ship.[15]
The show blends elements from the space opera and Western genres in a grounded depiction of humanity's future. Firefly takes place in a multi-social future, primarily a fusion of Western and East Asian societies (and in particular those of mainland China), where there is gross class inequality. As a result of the Sino-American Alliance, Mandarin Chinese is a common second language; English-speaking characters in the show frequently curse in Mandarin.
The show features slang not used in contemporary culture, such as adaptations of modern words or new words. "Shiny" is frequently used as the real world slang "cool", and "gorram" is used as a mild swear word. Written and spoken Chinese, as well as Old West dialect, are also employed. As one reviewer noted: "The dialogue tended to be a bizarre pure of wisecracks, old-timey Western-paperback patois, and snatches of Chinese."[4]
Tim Minear and Joss Whedon pointed out two scenes that articulated the show's mood clearly:[15] In the original pilot "Serenity" when Mal is eating with chopsticks with a Western tin cup by his plate; and in "The Train Job" pilot when Mal is thrown out of a holographic bar window.[16] The DVD set's "making-of" documentary explains the distinctive frontispiece of the series (wherein Serenity soars over a herd of horses) as Whedon's attempt to capture "everything you need to understand about the series in five seconds."
Whedon struggled with Fox over the tone of the show, and especially over the character of Malcolm Reynolds. Fox pressured Whedon to make Mal more "jolly", as they feared he was too dark in the original pilot, epitomized by the moment he suggests he might "space" Simon and River, throwing them out of the airlock. Fox was unhappy that the show portrayed "nobodies" who "get squished by policy" instead of actual policymakers.[15][17]
Whedon developed the concept for the show after reading The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara chronicling the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War. He wanted to follow people who had fought on the losing side of a war, their experiences afterward as pioneers and immigrants on the outskirts of civilization, much like the post-American Civil War era of Reconstruction and the American Old West.[41] He intended the show to be "a Stagecoach kind of drama with a lot of people trying to figure out their lives in a bleak pioneer environment".[42] Whedon wanted to develop a show about the tactile nature of life, a show where existence was more physical and more difficult.[15] Whedon also read a book about Jewish partisan fighters in World War II.[41] Whedon wanted to create something for television that was more character-driven and gritty than most modern science fiction. Television science fiction, he felt, had become too pristine and rarefied.[43] Whedon wanted to give the show a name that indicated movement and power and felt that "Firefly" had both. This powerful word's relatively insignificant meaning, Whedon felt, added to its allure. He eventually created a ship in the image of a firefly.[15]
Production designer Carey Meyer built the ship Serenity in two parts (one for each level) as a complete set with ceilings and practical lighting installed, as part of the set that the cameras could use along with moveable parts.[45][48] The two-part set also allowed the second unit to shoot in one section while the actors and first unit worked undisturbed in the other. As Whedon recalled: "you could pull it away or move something huge so that you could get in and around everything. That meant the environment worked for us and there weren't a lot of adjustments that needed to be made".[48] This design allowed the viewers to feel they were really in a ship.[45] For Whedon, the design of the ship was crucial in defining the known space for the viewer and that there were not "fourteen hundred decks and a holodeck and an all-you-can-eat buffet in the back."[49] He wanted to convey that it was utilitarian and "beat-up but lived-in. Ultimately, it was home."[50] Each room represented a feeling or character, usually conveyed by the paint color.[49] He explains that the colors and mood progress from extremely warm to cooler, as you move from the back of the ship in the engine room, toward the front of the ship to the bridge. Besides evoking a mood associated with the character who spends the most time in each area, the color scheme also alludes to the heat generated in the ship's tail. Whedon was keen on using vertical space; having the crew quarters accessible by ladder was important.[48] The set design allowed the actors to stay in the moment and interact, without having to stop after each shot and set up for the next,[45] helping contribute to the documentary style Whedon aimed for.
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