20 Thoughts, Observations, and Questions About "Firefly" [Episodes 1-5]

20 Thoughts, Observations, and Questions About “Firefly” [Episodes 1-5]

I just started watching Firefly. There are 14 episodes. I have watched five of them so far. Here are some thoughts, observations, and questions that I have…

01. That line about the reavers: “They‘ll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into their clothing.” This must have been one of those place-holder first draft lines that just somehow squeaked its way through to the final cut. It’s so bad it’s great.

02. There are some fantastic laugh breaks.

03. There’s so much dust! And nobody does laundry.

04. Ron Glass stars as Dr. Shepherd Book as Jack Donaghy in “Jack-Tor”. Will somebody get this man two coffee mugs!?!?

05. Dr. Simon Tam cannot travel through a doorway/passageway without touching it.

06. I swear I know Jewel Staite from something other than Dead Like Me and I cannot figure out what it is.

07. Does the intermittent use of Chinese ever get explained? (Don’t answer that! I trust Joss!)

08. That basketball-ish game does not look like fun.

09. Whether “plums are tall” or not, that fake card game does not look like fun.

10. “Atherton Wing” is such a bad name, it took me out of Episode 4 anytime it was spoken.

11. All that talk about people owning slaves came outta nowhere!

12. Surprise! Conrad Hilton! [EDIT: Nevermind, it’s not Connie.]

13. I’m having a hard time reconciling how virtual pool exists in this world, but the guns just shoot regular bullets.

14. Do the guns just shoot regular bullets? I thought they did for awhile, but nobody is ever reloading and around Episode 5 I started to hear the ever-so-familiar “pew-pew” of laser guns.

15. I wish all the guns made this noise:

16. Surprise! Zac Effron!

17. Remember how if you didn’t have cool parents when you were a kid you were stuck on AOL Teen or… heaven forbid… Kidz Only? Well, I think it’s still like that in the future, but instead of the Internet, it’s all about the Cortex. Also, Google Wave is back, the new iPads are much bigger, and you can still lose an essay from ~~a hard drive crash~~ not having a dedicated source box.

EFRON: Did you get my wave?
DAD: I got it. Your text shorted. I got the whole thing during a board meeting, thank you.
EFRON: If I had a dedicated source box it wouldn’t short out. I lost half my essay!

18. This show has really good pacing - not only across single episodes but also across the season arcs. The story generally has an episodic structure, but the serialized components of it are really great and they come frequently enough to keep me hooked.

19. I know the show got cancelled after one season, so it must have struggled with poor ratings. I imagine some of this was because of the complicated premise. This is evidenced through three different opening sequences. The first episode has no intro - essentially saying, “figure it out yourself.” By the second episode there’s a semi-scientific sounding explanation of the show’s premise. And by the fourth episode, the opening sequence has devolved into Captain Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), literally telling it “how it is.” Desperation is a stinky, stinky cologne.

20. Nathan Fillion is really good. I should watch Dr. Horrible again.