posted
I was rewatching the fouth disc of Firefly this weekend, and noticed something in the beginning of The Message (this is the one where the old war buddy arranges for his corpse to be mailed to Zoe and Mal).
I noticed that at the beginning of the episode, when the carnival barker is shouting his spiel about how we aren't alone in the universe, and that aliens walk among us, it cuts directly from that scene to a closeup of the rogue cop who is wanting to retrieve the war buddy's organs. Joss Weadon is too good of a director to do this accidentally, I think. Is he suggesting that the cop is an alien? Or that aliens are behind Blue Sun, and that this guy is in their employ? Or is Joss just throwing out a red herring to watch us scramble after it?
Also, in Objects in Space, I noticed that the planet Serenity flies over at the beginning of the episode looks almost *exactly* like the jacks ball that River looks at in closeup at the end of the episode. I assume that that's just an aesthetic thing on Joss's part, but if anyone sees any meaning in it I'd love to hear about it.
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Oh, if either of these things is discussed in the commentaries, just let me know. The version that I've been watching doesn't have episode commentaries, but I'm going to be getting a boxed set of Firefly DVDs for my birthday that has them.
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I've been rewatching Firefly this weekend ("Out of Gas"? Still best hour of TV EVER). Just got to the fourth disc last night, but haven't watched any yet. I will comment anyway.
quote:I noticed that at the beginning of the episode, when the carnival barker is shouting his spiel about how we aren't alone in the universe, and that aliens walk among us, it cuts directly from that scene to a closeup of the rogue cop who is wanting to retrieve the war buddy's organs. Joss Weadon is too good of a director to do this accidentally, I think. Is he suggesting that the cop is an alien? Or that aliens are behind Blue Sun, and that this guy is in their employ? Or is Joss just throwing out a red herring to watch us scramble after it?
Checked the script, and there's nothing in there about that, so it was added in directing or editing. I suppose it's possible, but I'm pretty sure Joss meant for the show to be alien-free. So I think it was just a coincedence. If it *did* mean a thing, then I'd say it's suggesting the inhumaneness of the government and Blue Sun (a metaphorical alien), and not that the guy is a literal alien. By the way, this episode was directed by Tim Minear, not Joss. While I agree that Joss is very deliberate in his framing and directing, I'm not so sure Tim is. Not familiar enough with the episodes he's directed.
quote:Also, in Objects in Space, I noticed that the planet Serenity flies over at the beginning of the episode looks almost *exactly* like the jacks ball that River looks at in closeup at the end of the episode. I assume that that's just an aesthetic thing on Joss's part, but if anyone sees any meaning in it I'd love to hear about it.
quote:CLOSE ON the ball, as she contemplates it. The solidity of the thing. We might notice it has a similar coloring to the moon we saw at the beginning of the show.
Haven't listened to the commentaries yet for these, but will do so in the next few days.
Thanks xnera, both for the comments and clarifications, and for the link. It's a site that I'll be checking out in-depth; looks like a good one.
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I'd be hard pressed to tell you which episode of Firefly is my favorite. Often it's the last one I've watched. Right now I'm finding Objects in Space to be the most enthralling, but you're right that Out of Gas is incredible.
War Stories is another contender, and might even take the prize. I love that episode.
The only episode I can really say I don't care for is The Message, actually. It was okay to watch once, but even just a second watching of it was a little tiresome for me. Still better than 99% of the TV out there, but it's weak compared to the other episodes of Firefly, at least in my eyes.
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Porter, there are four (I think it's 4) episodes on the DVD that FOX had in the can but chose not to air. You need to watch them right now!
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I love love love that show. Unfortunately our DVD player's broken right now and I can't watch my DVDs I don't know that I could choose a favorite episode, I love Out of Gas and The Message and Heart of Gold and Objects in Space and...just all of them I suppose if I had to pick a least favorite it'd be Bushwhacked, but I still like that one too.
Anyone else think OSC should review it in his column? I'd be interested to hear his take on it.
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Yeah, Bushwacked is close to The Message as being my least favorite episode. The thing that saves it, though, is that hilarious montage of scenes showing the various crew members being questioned by the alliance officer. I love how they manage to capture each character's personality in just a few lines, and love the Alliance guy's reaction to each of them.
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I do think that OSC would love the shows, were he to watch them. I actually emailed him (well, kacard) a few weeks back and suggested it, but their total lack of response makes me think that maybe recommending TV shows to people who don't know me from Adam seemed a bit stalkerish or something. Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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Ha! Yeah, I sent an email right after he mentioned how much he'd like Alan Tudyk's performance in I, Robot, but again, no response whatsoever. Alas.
And yeah, that's my favorite moment in Bushwhacked--we get to learn so much about the characters just from a minute or so of juxtaposition of their interviews with the Alliance officers rummaging through their stuff. I think probably my favorite moment from the whole show, if I had to pick one, is the story of how Kaylee joined the crew Posts: 957 | Registered: Aug 2002
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Yeah, I love that scene. The first time I watched it, I was so startled when Mal referred to his brilliant mechanic, and some surfer looking guy responded. And I love that while the guy was having sex with her, she was checking out (and diagnosing the problem with) Serenity's engines.
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I also love the scenes where Inara is muzzily insisting that she fell "like Mal" in Our Mrs. Reynolds.
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Another favorite moment: in The Train Job, when Niska's thug is vowing to hunt Mal down and kill him instead of accepting the offered compromise, so Mal says "darn" and boots him into the jet intake For once a movie/television character actually did the logical thing.
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I like the one where Mal is in a fight to the death and the others break in and Zoe says, “Mal would want to handle this himself,” (or something like that) and he says, “No. No I don’t,” and she says, “Oh, okay,” and they blow the other guy away.
Like the kicking the guy into the engine bit, it takes a cliché and points out how incredibly stupid it really is.
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Doesn't it though? In great part, Firefly seems to me to a direct reply to the idiocy that is Trek dominated TV SF. One of the first things you see in the pilot is the capatin of the ship taking a leak. Sexuality isn't danced around, and relationships aren't simple. Good and Evil are pretty murky. When members of the crew leave the ship, the do so because it makes sense for their characters to do so; in Firefly it makes sense for the captain to go down planetside, because he's the head of a crew you could count on your fingers). There aren't aliens representing some particular aspect of human nature walking around.
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At the con I went to last weekend, I missed a panel I had wanted to attend because they were showing the two lost episodes of Firefly on a big screen. My son and I wandered in to kill a few minutes and -- depsite having seen the shows in question a few zillion times apiece -- stayed to watch them all over again. Great to see them on a big screen, even better to watch in the company of a lot of other people, many of whom clearly hadn't seen them yet.
My absolute favorite scene? There a lot of contenders, but it has to be the deleted scene from "Our Mrs. Reynolds" where River is trying to get her brother to marry her. If you haven't watched this yet, go get the DVDs and do so. Now.
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Which two constitute the "lost episodes"? The back of the DVD boxes I've been renting said that there were 4 unaired episodes. Are there two more that I haven't seen in addition to those (he asked hopefully)?
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My mistake, there were three (we only showed up in time for two of them).
Trash - when his former bride shows up again. The Message - when Mal and Zoe get a dead body in the mail. Heart of Gold - when the crew comes to the aid of a beleagured bordello.
Note that the last episode in order, Objects in Space, was shown but the three before it weren't. I guess FOX isn't big on continuity...
I also noticed that Firefly won an Emmy in 2003 for 'Outstanding Special Visual Effects For A Series.' So how many canceled FOX shows does that make that go on to win Emmys afterwards?
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There were three unaired episodes: "Trash", "Heart of Gold", and "The Message". All the others made it to air, although they were shown hopelessly out of order. There's also Dead or Alive, which was an episode that was never filmed. IIRC, parts of it were retooled and used in other episodes, which means it doesn't take place after "Objects in Space". Still makes interesting reading, though.
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That jet intake scene is also where I fell in love with Firefly.
In many ways, Farscape also tried its best to be an anti-ST show. Sometimes, though, it seemed that Farscape went too far in trying to be anti-ST. I wonder of Firefly would have had the same problem if it had stuck around.
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You know, I've wondered that too Porter. It occurs to me that the brilliance in Firefly might not have been sustainable over an entire series, and that we were saved from some very mediocre crap by virtue of FOX's foolishness. As it is each episode is like a gemstone, you know? I'd love to have seen seven years of that kind of quality, but I'm not utterly sure it would have been possible.
Somehow I was thinking that Objects in Space hadn't been aired either. So. Three lost episodes.
I found the script to Dead or Alive a couple of weeks ago, and really enjoyed reading through it. I wasn't absolutely certain that it wasn't just really good fanfiction though. It's authentic, I take it?
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OK, so netflix just sent me the first disc of Firefly. I am struck by how good the pilot (Serenity) was, and how the episode that they actually showed first (Train Job) is far inferior.
Why, oh why did Fox decide to not show the pilot?
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Joss and Tim wrote The Train Job in a day after Fox decided that Serenity was unsuitable (for the reasons Yogi mentioned).
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My favorite episode is Trash. I actually jumped near the beginning when the gentleman Mal was doing business with shouted for his bride and Saffron came hopping into view. I loved how Mal, sitting naked in the desert stated how things went well and you think he's being sarcastic till they return to that scene at the very end of the episode and you find out he's not. And I loved how Inara surprised Yosaffbridg and locked her in the dumpster.
The entire series is fantastic. It would be tough to rate them from Best to Least Best. (Don't grammarnazi me on that. It's something Joss would write.) But Trash has to be my fav.
I wonder if Saffron will be in the movie(s)?
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I *really* hope so. She's a great character. Think we'll see Nishka? I hope that the movies do incredibly well, and that somehow the TV show is reborn out of those movies' ticket sales. Don't know if that's actually something that could happen (the whole "going back to a TV format after a foray into movies"), but I'd like it to.
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In the version I've been renting, there are extras (not very many, but extras nonetheless), but no commentary. Christine is getting me the boxed set for my birthday, though, so I'll be able to watch the commentaries soon. On the version I've been watching, by the way, the extras are all on the 4th disk. If you haven't gotten there yet, Porter, it's possible that you've got them after all.
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My wife's as big of a fan of the series as I am. I'm not sure which of us she really got the boxed set for last Christmas... hehehe.
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It's a little too violent for her taste, actually. She squicks easily. She had problems with Farscape as well -- she couldn't get past Scorpie.
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Yeah, the first Farscape ep. I saw was the one with the brain surgery and Scorpius making that guy bite his own finger off. I was feeling ill after that....
I liked Firefly OK, I'm just not crazy about it. May have something to do with the fact that we always watched Firefly *and* John Doe. I liked Firefly alright, but I *loved* John Doe. Till it started getting lame. I was still crestfallen when it was cancelled. (John Doe, not Firefly.)
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I think the reason I didn't like Firefly was because I was still bitter about it killing Dark Angel. After hearing about how much everyone loves Firefly, I'll probably give it another shot once my Netflix queue clears up.
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Yeah, Christine squicks easily too. It's funny, really; she's such a mix of traits. She was honestly pretty angry with me for not muting the part where Zoe is talking about what the Reavers will do to them if they catch them in the pilot, but she was delighted when Mal kicked Nishka's brute into the engine intake in The Train Job. I didn't show her Bushwacked; she would have hated it, and probably would have stopped watching the show. Instead I just showed her the scene from it where the Alliance officer is interrogating the various crew members.
One thing that I've really been enjoying is watching her reaction as the show violates one stupid chiche after another. When Nishka's brute was threatening Mal in that close-to-final scene, she was muttering about how Mal should kill him, and how much she hated cliches like Mal's letting the guy live. Then ::kick::.
In Our Mrs. Reynolds, when Saffron was seducing Mal with that whole "I swell to think of you in me...and I see that you do too" bit, she was a bit incredulous, because SF shows typically have danced around sex rather than have a direct seduction like that, and also because she thought that Mal was going to be all virtuous and resist her. When he kissed her and then pushed her away, she had just enough time to say "fool" under her breath before Mal collapsed. I'm loving watching her watch the shows. I can't quite decide whether to show her War Stories or not. On the one hand, I know that she's going to be upset with being confronted by Mal and Wash's torture. On the other hand, it's almost a perfect episode, and provides *so* much character development, and blasts another cliche, and sets things up for Kaylee's being more afraid of River in Objects in Space. I think I'll have to warn her about it, tell her all the reasons its great, and then let her decide. I know she's going to choose not to see it though, and I really want her to.
But given Tony and I both love Buffy and Angel (and particularly the Joss written and directed episodes of each) I am very much looking forward to getting the DVDs.
posted
What's the deal? [I think?] I've never seen the DVDs before, but there was nothing on those DVDs that I din't seem familiar -- even the delete scenes.
I just saw Objects in Space again last night. I got chills.
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I friend got me into Firefly, and I have since bought it at bestbuy and watched it 3 times. I am on my fourth time with my brother who also loves it. I will be buying it for my sister and her husband.
Reading this thread makes me want to go home and start re-watching again. I wish my wife would like this show so I could show it to yet antoher person.
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