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.
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. It's possible that one incompetent blue-hander told River the secret. But probably not. The movie is desperately trying to close omissions that the show left out with the specific goal of making a reboot even harder.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment