Books, Movies and Random Thoughts

I really enjoyed the short-lived series Firefly. It wasn’t as good as Babylon 5, but I liked it more than, say, Farscape. Obviously, since it wasn’t a full season, some things were still settling down a bit, but I thought it was a promising beginning to what could have been a really good series. (Then again, I would have said the same thing halfway through the first season of Angel, but after that – IMHO – it went downhill in a really big way. So you can never tell for sure.)

So I’d been looking forward to Serenity for quite some time, and fortunately, I wasn’t disappointed. As usual, the dialogue was great, with lots of funny lines, and the plot unfolded in an interesting way. I think we learned more about the way the Firefly universe works in one two-hour movie than in the entire 14 episodes, although some of the quieter character moments were lost (e.g. there was nothing like the bit in the series where Jayne is sent a home-made hat by his mother, and spends the entire episode wearing it: “A man walks down the street in that hat, people know he’s not afraid of anything”). It is interesting to speculate how far into the series he would have got before revealing so much about the Reavers. My feeling is that it wouldn’t have come out in the first series, but it might have been the arc story in the second.

I knew in advance that characters were going to die in this movie. One of them I had predicted in advance; the other I had thought there was a high probability of, but I was still really disappointed when it happened.