{"id":574,"date":"2006-08-22T17:10:43","date_gmt":"2006-08-22T22:10:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=574"},"modified":"2006-11-21T07:46:37","modified_gmt":"2006-11-21T12:46:37","slug":"firefly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=574","title":{"rendered":"Firefly"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following up on my gushing about Firefly<\/a> the other day, here is my favorite moment from the show. This is where it really hooked me: <\/p>\n

In the pilot episode there is a character who poses as a passenger, but who turns out to be a bounty hunter. He causes some trouble, then they catch him and lock him up. Then another, much larger and more immediate problem comes along. During the confusion he gets loose and takes River (a teenage girl) hostage. Now, the audience saw this coming<\/em>. Everyone did. I got irritated, as I always do. I heaved a big sigh. Would one of you guys just shoot this bastard?<\/em><\/p>\n

Then the captain strides in and does exactly that. No fuss. No gunplay. No moment of hesitation. No quips or trash talk or moralizing or negotiating. No trickery. No suspense about the bad guy shooting the girl or not. Mal just strides into the room and guns down the bad guy before he’s done issuing his demands. The captain doesn’t break stride, and – more importantly – neither does the plot. <\/p>\n

After things settle down there is no angsty Hollywood hand-wringing over killing this guy. None of that “killing him will make us just as bad as he is” nonsense. The series did this sort of thing time and again, setting up what looked like cliché situations and then shocking the audience simply by avoiding the contrived and preachy outcome and having the characters do something reasonable<\/em>. Firefly is a grim, stark cure for Star Trekian idealism.<\/p>\n

Dear Hollywood: More like this one, please.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Following up on my gushing about Firefly the other day, here is my favorite moment from the show. This is where it really hooked me: In the pilot episode there is a character who poses as a passenger, but who turns out to be a bounty hunter. He causes some trouble, then they catch him […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dream-cast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}