So from Bits & Bobs I see there are still people who haven’t seen Firefly.

Please excuse me while I draw my fingers across my face and let out one long, exasperated sigh.

Okay. Here we go again.

What is Firefly?

Firefly is about freedom.

Every other science fiction television series set in the great void has somehow managed to chain itself to something. Babylon 5 dealt with people at the mercy of epic events, in the end fighting to save said galaxy. Star Trek dealt with a crew bound by a code of behaviour, honour and law – and more severely, a code of convention and expectation. They had to behave the way the fans expected them to behave. The TV series Stargate had its exploration-portal thing going on, with yet more galaxy saving. Battlestar Galactica was one big chase series involved with trying to escape fate. There was nothing wrong with these confines, but they pretty much meant that each show dealt all its cards early and that characters would always, always be subservient to the main plot.

Firefly was the first TV show set in space that had the wit to shoot off its chains. Every other show the characters were burdened with quests and mysteries and had to fulfil a grand destiny or lead people into the light. No one asked anything of Firefly’s crew. Malcolm Reynolds, the hero of Firefly, had no grand destiny. No special power. He was just a little quicker on the draw and could take a punch. He wasn’t even terribly bright. And the freedom lay in the only mission statement the show ever gave the viewer, ‘to keep on flying.’ Mal’s only concern was to keep his beloved ship – which is a character in itself - in motion and below the radar through air and vacuum. Whatever scrapes Mal got into were through his own choices, and that’s what freedom meant in Firefly. No one called the shots, and the main fear Mal had in Firefly wasn’t death, but to be in chains.

It is cowboys in space, and it goes beyond the frontier trappings and the horses, the clothes and the shotguns. Mal’s a drifter, but he isn’t looking for anything. For him to travel, to be on the move, is the only life he can tolerate. This is because Mal once had a cause, was once one of the big damn heroes you’d find in those other series. But he was beat down, and beat down hard. And in the dust he was kicked ‘till he couldn’t run, ‘till he couldn’t walk and nearly ‘till he couldn’t crawl. But crawl he did, he licked his wounds and bought a ship. And in this ship he’s running to stay free, free from great causes, rules and orders and even emotional attachments. Everything he cares about is on that ship, a ship with no particular mission.

But a man’s gotta eat and a ship needs fuel, so Mal finds that no man is an island. Sometimes violence and danger finds him, and sometimes he finds it. But he fights for no man but himself and his crew.


Leaving aside the wonderful special effects, the fantastic performances, the witty and charming script and just the entire feeling of the ship actually being really there, a real place you’d love to hang out in… leaving that aside, the most beautiful thing about Firefly was that it could have gone anywhere. It could have picked up any plot and dropped it. It could have stayed episodic or begun to follow the grand threads hinted at. But ultimately wherever Firefly the series headed, Serenity would always be able to fight its way upstream, to slip away from the great events that would threaten to overwhelm it. It is one of the reasons why the film was such a gut punch, not only because of the events that made grown men cry, but because for a time there Mal and Serenity had been corralled, had been chained to a cause. The best and happiest ending the film finds is not the overthrow of oppression, that’s never even an option in Firefly, but the regaining of the personal freedom that a ship with a tank full of gas, a belly full of food and a pocket of loose change provides. Firefly’s ‘verse genuinely offered infinite story-telling potential with no way of painting oneself into the corner. The crew of Serenity could always just slip under the radar again, because unlike almost all other sci-fi the show was about the little people.

Firefly was Roseanne, in space. Blue-collar sci-fi featuring an often bickering but ultimately loving family trying to stay afloat, and because of that it had all the wit and charm of that drama, whilst bringing it to a genre that had never known it before. As such, Firefly really was an exceptional show.

Plus, y’know, it had scary space cannibals and a baddy like the dude from Marathon Man and horses and space-whores and Badger and old war stories and awesome coats and the possibility of infinite adventure.

And THAT is why it still hurts.

Just go watch the gorram show, okay.

(Guns sounded a bit rubbish though. Why was that?)