Firefly's Most Important Speech

 The story of the movie Serenity so far:   River Tam is now recognized as a Psychic, and she apparently took in what the Alliance had done 12 years ago when "in a room" with "leading members of Parliament".  She doesn't recognize what she knows, but the Alliance is terrified that people will find out.  She is accidentally triggered to remember, and what she remembers is the single word "Miranda".  The crew figures out how to go to Miranda, which is a planet in "Reaver Space", and when they get there, what they find is weird devastation.  The people have just laid down and let themselves die.  They find a recording of a scientist, who explains what happened--they'd been experimenting with an Aerosol drug that was supposed to calm down the population, but it went too far, and they quit living.  Except for a tiny number, who lost all self control and became exceptionally violent.  The scientist is killed by Reavers on the video, and the crew, with several interactions with Reavers, realize who the Reavers are and how they came to be, and why the Alliance so desperately wants this secret kept.

 Malcolm Reynolds, who despite his rural background has read quite a bit, knows the history of previous efforts to improve the species, such as the Nazi Eugenics programs, and realizes that though well intended, they are nearly always a really bad idea.   And he gives this speech:

 

 

He doesn't hold to that.  And he is right to.  Trying to overpower natural selection is risky at best.   It's hard to know what motivation led the scientists to try planet-level distribution before they did a pretty thorough small scale experiment at a level that would surely have shown both bad responses, but there may have been some unknown factor.

 

I think the Alliance chose the wrong response: they tried to keep the thing a secret, and they did a fairly good job.  But secrets eventually do find their way out, especially one this big.  They probably should have told the truth and sent the navy to exterminate the Reavers as soon as they realized what happened.  Most of the guilty died on Miranda, so they can put the blame there--even if the important member of Parliament actually was responsible.

 

I am sympathetic to the urge to Eugenics.   We've done it with our farm animals, with our vegetables, etc., etc.  And by and large it has worked.  But the successful efforts have taken hundreds or thousands of years to perfect, and there are lots of "errors" that have needed to be culled.   We cannot cull humans, although the Nazis did think we could.  

Serenity Lies to Us.

My favorite TV show is 2002's martyred Firefly.  It was presented out-of-order, in the Friday Night Death Slot, by a network that clearly didn't understand what it had, but did let the show's writers and producers do a competent job.  Nearly all of the actors have gone on to have long and successful careers.  It was killed just as it was beginning to develop a following in spite of the horrible support the network had given, and that following quickly grew--sufficiently that the showrunners were given a chance to make a feature film 3 years later.   My thesis is that feature film, as likeable as it is, does not make sense in the context of the rest of the show.

 Almost everything in here is a spoiler.  If you haven't watched the show or the movie, and I urge that you do, don't read this essay until you have.

 There are a number of big screwups--killing off two of the main characters being the least of it.  Another is that the writers seemed to feel that a lot of the movie's viewers would not have seen the TV show.   That resulted in a lot of valuable movie time being spent in exposition.  But the most important is that the central plot element--the origin story of the Reavers and River Tam's connection to it, makes no sense.   As two separate stories, it makes perfect sense, but tying them together as they tried to was simply a mistake.

 I regard the entire movie as Retcon: Retroactive Continuity, meaning, in this case, significantly rewriting the story so that two unrelated back stories share a single plotline.  This was a mistake. 

The alliance, and most likely their corporate benefactors, especially the Blue Sun Corporation, have done and will continue to do a lot of shady things, and they have a staff of secret agents to defend them.   Some version of this is likely true of most powerful governments in our world too, and lots of good stories can be written about them.  They need talented operatives to do this work, and the unnamed "operative" is one of them.  I am virtually certain that River was being recruited and trained to be one too.  I'm pretty sure that Reverend Book was also an operative during the war, although perhaps not as high-level as the Chiwetel or River characters are.

 Similarly, I am comfortable with the story that the Alliance accidentally created the Reavers.    It makes sense, especially since we're aware that they've been learning how to fiddle with people's attitudes and self control with chemistry.  I find it profoundly unlikely that River had anything to do with this, or that The Operative did either.  It does make sense that those who are guilty of creating the Reavers would like to cover up their involvement, and might even use an operative or two to interfere with word getting out.   But I am profoundly skeptical that they would have gone so far as to bury a secret codeword into a trainee operative.

Why do they want River so much?  This secret is sold to us as the central premise of the movie.  They don't want the secret leaking.  Why would they give the secret to a not-yet-fully-trained operative?   I can't think of a single reason, and I can think of lots not to.  If you need for her to know for some reason, there's no reason not to wait until she's been sufficiently brainwashed to be as loyal as the Chiwetel character.   It's mission-specific info.  When the Chiwetel character learns the truth and realizes that he's been brainwashed, he flips.  "No longer their man" as he puts it.   

The answer is that they accidentally put a senior member of the Alliance in a room with River, and she apparently read his mind and found out about Miranda.

That said, central to the show is the message that the Alliance is incompetent.  They are massive, powerful, and most of all boring, and over and over they prove that one part of the administrative state has no idea what other parts are doing.   The operative has figured this out.  But he is

It is tragic that the show was cancelled when it was.  A decade later, the internet was advanced enough that rebooting a show like this would have been easy.  I put forth the example of "The Expanse", which was cancelled by SciFi, but brought back to life a few years later because Jeff Bezos personally liked it.  The actors were mostly all still available and pretty much looked as they had earlier.  Similarly, Serenity was released only 4 years after the show was cancelled.  They had to build a new set, and improved CG and budget made a real difference--and Summer and Jewell were both under 25.  But ten years after the movie, one of the actors had died, and the two that were purportedly teen-agers could no longer pull that off.    The story would have to explain the passage of so much time.

 Animation makes it much more possible to play these games.  Voices change almost as much as physical appearance, but AI voices are getting so good I think this could be faked now.   I hope the new show can pull it off.  I say: put it into the timeline between the show and the movie.  I think there are as many as three plausible years in there. 

Ranking Episodes of Firefly

 My favorite TV show is 2002's martyred "Firefly".  They did 14 episodes, one of them a double-length Pilot, and a feature movie.  The movie was good, albeit disappointing.

 If you haven't watched the show, do it.  Watch the episodes in order, most importantly the Pilot first.  Fox aired them out of order, and that was one of the things that damaged the show's popularity.  There are several spoilers in here.

 

Best Episode: Out of Gas.  This episode was full of flashbacks, many of which explained who members of the crew are and how they came to be part of Serenity's crew.  It's only best by a tiny bit.   The one real error is that Wash set up a call back button, but Mal never uses it.  The plot would make more sense if he had pressed it, and only a few lines would have to change.

Pilot: The initial, double-length episode is only in second place by a nose: it's also one of the best.   It's actual name is the same as the ship: Serentity.  It has several scenes from the battle that gave the ship its name.  We meet everybody, including several of the baddies.  Reverend Book, now aware that he's on a pirate ship rather than the Tramp Steamer that he thought he was boarding, expresses misgivings, which are completely gone by the next episode.

Ariel: Inara needs to go to a central planet for her annual medical certification, and Doctor Tam comes up with a job for the crew to do at that site.   We learn a lot about Jayne, a really lot about River and "The hands of blue".

Objects in Space: a Bounty Hunter attempts to capture River, but River turns the tables on him.  The bounty hunter was a terrific character, and River and Simon are at their best.  River goes from being a character that made the rest of the crew nervous, to being a full fledged part of the crew, that everybody loves--almost as much as they all love Kaylee.

 

The Train Job.   The "second pilot".  It was written quickly, over a weekend, and the network foolishly ran it instead of the real pilot.  It's a pretty good episode, but it fails to do a lot of the exposition that the pilot did so brilliant.  It has a bunch of very likable scenes, such as when the goon is pushed into the running engine and when the captain realizes that he's doing his theft right under the noses of a whole troop of Alliance soldiers.

Safe.   The doctor and River are kidnapped by hill people, who need a doctor.  I really like the world building that this episode does.   It almost ranks with the best episodes.

 Shindig.  while trying to make a deal for some goods to transport, Captain Reynolds gets crosswise with a local oligarch and is forced to fight him.  There's a lot to like about this episode, but it's in the bottom half only because there are others that are significantly better.

Jaynestown.  We learn a little about Jayne and his history.  While he is mostly a crude, money grubbing thug, he does care about things.   We see a lot of the character of various characters.

War Stories.  A great episode in a lot of ways.  Niska, from the earlier Train Job episode, is back and he's angry.  River is starting to recover, presumably with the aid of the treatment the Doctor was able to devise following the episode in Ariel, and we start seeing a little of what the alliance wanted to turn her into. 

Our Mrs Reynolds.  Christina Hendricks plays an interesting character--who seems like an incredibly naive young woman but turns out to be a highly cynical and skilled thief.

Trash.  Christina Hendrick's character is back.   It's a more straightforward episode and it does a little world-building, and it is a great episode overall, but it's definitely in the bottom half.

The Message: Mal and Zoey's army buddy shows up with a secret.    It's got a fulfilling but very sad ending, compounded with the fact that the actors had just been informed that the show had been cancelled

Heart of Gold:  Inara's old friend hires the crew to deal with a thug.   The plot shares a lot with the Clint Eastwood movie "Unforgiven".   It's the archetypical horses and spaceships in the same scene episode, although there are others.  Mal goes full Indiana Jones and chases down a hovercar with a horse.  

Bushwacked.  This is probably the most disappointing episode.   The crew comes upon a colony ship that had been attacked by Reavers, leaving behind a virus that infects the Serenity and the only survivor.  

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 I rank the movie in the bottom half of this list.  It's a good movie, and it explains some important stuff, but I regard a lot of the plot as inappropriate Retcon.  I'd rank it above "The Message" and below the YoSaffBridge episodes.   I wish they had told more or less the same story with three or four regular episodes, and not tried to do the exposition: most of the audience were already fans, and at least 1/3rd of the movie was wasted on that.  River is now almost a human being, as well as being something considerably more, Simon and Kaylee end up together, and it looks like the Captain and Inara are right on the edge of the same thing.   Wash and the Preacher were killed, only because the authors felt the movie needed the weight of that, not because it added to the story.  Mr Universe is a character that should have either been left out, or had a stronger story arc.  The Operative is a great character and I think his arc was just about right--but should have been spread over three or four episodes.

 

Who Was Reverend Book?

One of my favorite TV shows, 2002's martyred Firefly series, had several interesting characters.  It takes place in an imaginary solar system where there are dozens of habitable planets and moons, some of which are high-tech, urban and modern, while others are rural or even backwards.  The show takes place six years after an interplanetary civil war, after which the urban "central alliance" worlds imposed a police state over all the others, but with somewhat limited reach imposed by distance.  The circumstances present many opportunities for interesting contexts for the writers to tell their stories, putting horses and space ships in the same scenes, and allowing all sorts of social circumstances to be considered.  So much more could have been done with the show had it been continued.

One of the interesting characters is Reverend Derial Book.  He had been a monk in an abbey not too far from the Persephone Spaceport--as he puts it "out of the world" for a time, when he catches a ride of the show's namesake spaceship, the Firefly class "Serenity".  He proves very knowledgeable about spaceships and many other things, especially things related to weapons, small force fighting and apparently espionage, and has an identity card which gives him surprising rights in the alliance.  All of this is implausible for the preacher he purports to be.

My theory is that during the war, he was a secret agent for the Alliance, possibly even a highly trained Operative.  After the war, he didn't want to do this sort of work anymore, but was privy to many secrets that needed to be kept.  The deal he worked out with his bosses was that he spend some period--probably five years--completely out of the world, and was prohibited from selling his expert services and knowledge, so he couldn't work as a consultant of some sort.  Moreover, he'd done sufficient bad things that he really didn't want to be in the spy business anymore, but had earned a permanent "get out of jail free" card with the Alliance.  The abbey suited him well--it fit his new-found religiosity and allowed him to be out of the world for a while, but after the five years were up, he could go back out.  He enjoyed space travel and had many skills that would be useful, so he took a ride on what appeared to be a tramp freighter, and was in fact a pirate ship, and after the first adventure, joined the crew.

His background prevents him from telling the rest of the crew what his true history is, especially since the Captain and Zoey had fought against his side in the civil war, but he's realized that his ideas about freedom and civilization are more or less aligned with theirs, and besides, it's exciting and fun for him.  Eventually, he'll probably tell the captain about his activities during the war, but probably not for a long time yet.  As it happens, he was killed by "the operative" in the movie Serenity before this occurs.  I regard the events of the movie as non-canonical and perhaps even retcon, although much of the movie does extend the story of the series.  In particular, I think Book and Wash's deaths were intended to terminate the story and make reviving the series impossible rather than being a real part of the story.

Terraforming Jupiter

One of my favorite TV shows was the short lived Firefly series.  The premise of the show was that the Earth had been "used up" and that a bunch of humans had headed into space, finding another star system with dozens of planets that were near enough in size and temperature that they could be terraformed and turned into habitable enough planets they could be colonized.  The recent discovery that there are 7 roughly earth sized planets in the "habitable zone" around the red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 suggests one way this could happen.  TRAPPIST-1 is about 40 light years from earth, which would take thousands of years to reach with a plausible rocket, which predicates effective hibernation or perhaps even full stasis for such a colony to get there.

But there's another alternative.  What if we blow up Jupiter and move the fragments into orbits close to that of earth?   Jupiter is a gas giant, which means it's mostly hydrogen, but there's a metal and rock core--it's been catching asteroids, meteors and comets for 5 billion years.  Estimates are that the core is between 12 and 45 times the mass of Earth.  The show predicates cheap, safe energy of sufficient efficiency that it can power a Firefly-sized spaceship between planets with no visible fuel tanks.  This can only be nuclear or perhaps something even better.   Since we don't really have such a technology yet, it's not exactly clear how to make a bomb that would get deep enough into Jupiter to blow up the core into suitably sized chucks, but if we have such an abundance of nuclear or better energy, we can probably figure that out.  Once the Jupiter fragments are out there, we can use solar sails or our nuclear rockets to move them into orbits at a distance from the sun to keep them comfortable, and at a sufficient density to accommodate billions of people fleeting Earth.  This will take a lot of energy, but the spin and kinetic energy of Jupiter is substantial and if we can figure out a way of redirecting it, there's more than enough for the purpose.

Once we have a bunch of rocks that are big enough to have gravity appropriate for human habitation--between .3 and 2G--they will quickly turn themselves into spheres on their own, and the terraforming process can begin.  Left to their own devices this would take a billion years and if we're fleeing Earth we won't be able to wait that long, but presumably the terraforming technology will be able cool them down quickly enough.

Since we're engineering these new planets, it seems to me the way to do it is to have them in groups.  The Earth and Moon orbit each other around their common center of gravity--there's no reason they shouldn't be about the same size.  A third planet could orbit their common CG at a greater distance.   A bunch of such groups could be placed in such groups around the Sun, all in the same circular orbit...We'd probably use the same orbit that Earth-that-was is in.  If the mass of each is about the same, it'll be billions of years before they collide with each other.