Joining the Firefly fan club

My boss recently lent me the only 14 episodes made of Firefly. I wasn't hooked immediately and it took me a few episodes to get into it.

It's an interesting mix in anybody's book--how do cowboys end up on space ships--but it's actually nowhere near as weird as it sounds (although I have my hand up as a card carrying, hand waving sci-fi geek!). The use of a frontier, amost lawless environment inhabited by the heroes with a strong moral fibre throws up interesting stories, and the spaceship acts as a medium to transport them between places.

What was hard, though, was that it didn't last a full season. I was only just started to learn about each character and they were getting better all the time. I loved the captain's bluff exterior but serious moral fibre, and where was the relationship between the ship's doctor and Kaylee, the mechanic going to end up?

Another workmate lent me the movie Serenity, which picks up the story 8 months later. But in the main that's left me disgruntled. Sure, the movie had twice the airtime of an episode, but instead of learning more about the characters they were sacrificed to plot. Some characters barely had anything to say, and some didn't speak to each other at all. And two characters--Wash and Book--were killed. What's with that?



But it wasn't all bad ... the bad guy was a fabolous character who would have made a great addition to the show and I loved learning how the Reavers were created. They have to be among the nastiest human inventions ever created.

It's been a few years now since the series and movie were made and I'm betting it'll stay as a cult thing. But that doesn't mean I (and many more besides me) wouldn't like to see more ... maybe they could think about picking up the series as a cartoon or anime in the same way as Star Wars.