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.