Firefly: An Observation

Firefly is Joss Whedon's prematurely cancelled TV series. It's probably the best thing Joss has done so far, excepting certain individual episodes of Buffy (eg. The Body, Hush, Once More With Feeling). For those who don't know it, it's a post-Civil-War Western set in space. It follows the Firefly class spaceship Serentity and it's crew of nine. It has been released on DVD and I really can't recommend it highly enough.

Anyway, on one of the DVD commentary tracks, Joss points out that the crew of Firefly all represent parts of the soul of the Captain, Mal Reynolds, that he'd lost after being on the losing side of the war. When you break it down like that it becomes clear that the characters are archetypes and map quite clearly, and cleanly, to certain, defined, roles.

Mal is easiest as he's the Captain, the leader and father figure. Zoe is the warrior. Wash is the comic relief and pilot. Jayne, the muscle. Book, the conscience and faith. Kaylee is the heart. Inara is the mother. Simon is the intellect and River is the enigma.

What's good about this is that you can take any two or three characters from this list and put them together and there is going to be conflict. What I recently realised, though, is how a few of these are paired together not as opposites but different reflections of the same idea.

What I mean is this: take Mal and Inara, they are the Father and the Mother of the ship. They are leaders and strong people and they are both nurturing of the crew in their own ways. It is mentioned at least once in the series, in the episode "Heart of Gold" for instance, how alike they are, and yet they are very different. Zoe and Jayne are the Warrior and the Muscle. Both fighters, but in different ways, relying on stealth and brawn respectively. Kaylee and Book are the heart and faith, again the same idea, belief: one believes in the goodness of all because their heart tells them people are good, whereas as the other looks to God for the same realisation. What I found clever about this is that you have different aspects of the human character represented from the male and the female sides -- at least heart, body and soul are represented this way.

You can combine a lot of pairs of characters in similar ways, though not quite so cleanly. For instance Kaylee and Simon are the mechanic and the man of science. It is mentioned that Kaylee's ability is quite intuitive whereas Simon went the normal route through University to his knowledge.

Perhaps I'm over analysing here, but I do think that it was mostly intentional on the part of Joss and the other writers.

There is one other theory I have on Firefly, and it's this:

Part of what makes it seem so good is that it was cancelled. It reminds me, in some ways, of The Magnificant Ambersons, it's a flawed, yet still great, glimpse of something that could have been so much better. Then again, perhaps our imaginations are just filling in the missed greatness -- hinting at something that could have been but without the disappointment of actually existing. The lost possibility of so much richness adding a mystique to what does exist.