Like Adam, I am posting late. Oh, break. It was nice knowing you!
So. Firefly.
As much as I wish I could say that I dislike it, and although there are moments when I feel a jarring sense of disengenuousness, like something doesn't quite fit--such as the random Chinese and country-western phrases, or the unpredictability and at time unbelievability of the characters' interactions with one another--I am sucked in almost against my will.
One of the things I love about Whedon's shows is his obsession with morality in a broken world. He brings this to the fore with Firefly in particular. Since he takes out the supernatural element the characters must deal with very real threats (the Alliance; Reavers) and ambuiguities (selling goods on the black market, prostitution, murder) and must find a way to survive.
My favorite moment comes curtesy of Shepherd Book. It arrives at the end of the episode when he says to Inara,
"Is that what life is, out here?...I've been out of the abbey two days, I've beaten a lawman senseless, I've fallen in with criminals. I've watched the captain shoot the man I swore to protect. And I'm not even sure if I think he was wrong...I believe I just...I think I'm on the wrong ship."
As a person of religious background, I can relate to Shepherd's confusion and struggle with the complexity of moralism, of what makes something right or wrong and how the two often messily co-exist and melt into each other. Things are easy to fit into catagorical boxes when you're tucked away from the world instead of interacting directly with it. It's when you jump in with both feet that the boxes are split open and your world and prejudices and assumptions and convictions are turned upside down and come spilling out in a mess that is difficult at best, impossible at worst, to sort out.
But it's a good thing to struggle, it's a very human issue. And there is hope. As Inara says, "Maybe you're exactly where you ought to be."
2 comments:
the whole morality in a broken world is a good concept, sometimes I feel like it is a little heavily done, but that's not Whedon and Crew's fault, that's more of a television in general thing.
I kind of see Cait's point here. In some ways, it gets wearying to keep talking about how to be a moral person in an amoral world. The challenge for writers/actors etc. is to make their contributions seem new and fresh or at least different. I think Firefly does a good job with this, but again, in some ways, it does feel like a story we've heard/seen before. At the same time, there is nothing new under the sun, right?
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