Firefly Friday, “Our Mrs. Reynolds” 1.07
06 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
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I swear by my pretty floral bonnet…
What is it about Mal and flowers? What is it about trouble following this crew around? This time, Mal and company dispatch some evil men who’ve been bothering a town and in the midst of celebrating, Mal finds himself hitched to the lovely, innocent Saffron. Once aboard Serenity, all manner of wacky ensues, namely the discovery that Saffron is not exactly who or what she seems to be.
The Shiny
A curious bond develops between Jayne and Mal in this episode, even from the very start when they’re posing as husband and wife. They’re close while drinking, they’re close when Saffron declares she’s Mal’s wife, and then there’s the whole “I’ll trade you Vera” scene. They’re almost friends.
The reactions from the crew to the news that Mal is married are beautifully in character. Zoe ribs him mercilessly, Book warns him about the special hell, and Inara looks like she’s taken a skillet to the face she’s so upset/shocked. Mal brushes Saffon off with a “she’s no one,” and I always thought it was too bad we didn’t have a scene where some of the women on board try to welcome Saffron more.
“He makes everyone cry.” “Someone tries to kill you, you kill them right back.” “But she was naked and all…articulate.”
The curious
The end scene, in the cabin, in the snow. The costuming of Saffron almost strikes me as too deliberate–trying to get 180 degrees away from the cottony things she wore on the ship. Makes me wonder where she’s headed since this venture of hers went ass over tea kettle. Mal won’t kill her (she hardly deserves death), but he’ll still smack her a good one. Is the planet here Beaumont? And in the film we get Beaumonde? Or are these actually the same place? Either way, we get more Saffron in “Trash.” Yehaw!
The Drowning Girl
05 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
in Book Reviews
I’ve read a good number of book reviews where in the reviewer exclaims “this book changed my life!” Never expected to have that happen to me, personally, but it did. I keep trying to find the proper words to explain what happened and why it happened, but I haven’t. And I probably won’t. Perhaps it’s not an explainable thing and I’m okay with that.
The Drowning Girl, by Caitlín R. Kiernan, details the life of Imp, a schizophrenic. That word feels too simplistic, because nothing about Imp’s life or experiences are that concrete or defined to me. There is a wholly otherworldly quality to her, though she is very human indeed. Imp tries to sort through her disjointed memories of an encounter with a woman named Eva–or possibly with two different Evas. She isn’t sure and her memory isn’t helping. Mermaid? Wolf? What was Eva? Who was she? Why does she haunt Imp’s life?
That entire paragraph…it’s crap. It doesn’t do any kind of justice to the story that awaits you in this book. It doesn’t do any kind of justice to the story that changed my life.
This book is about ghosts–that which haunts us. This book is about sirens–that which calls us. This book is about coming to terms with both things–can we ever? This book is about the things we cannot see and yet cannot look away from. This book is about that which cannot be put down on paper and yet must be. This book will crawl into your heart and I pray it will never come out.
I was drowning when I read this book. I’m better now.
Firefly Friday, “Safe” 1.06
30 Mar 2012 Leave a Comment
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This is not my favorite episode. The crew sets down to deliver the cattle picked up in “Shindig,” and of course they wind up in a heap of trouble! Book is shot during a confrontation with the cattle buyers (who are wanted by local law), and Simon and River find themselves kidnapped.
Safe? Not so much.
While “Safe” does contain some shiny, it contains a lot of baffling stereotypes, too. Hill people who think River is a witch? Really? Well sure, we’d hate to give them any more credit than that… Still, we get more wold building here: the Tams house, the way police stations work, and the same souvenirs at every dusty shop in the ‘verse.
It’s a delight to see Simon and River as kids, but their life there feels so polished, almost forced. Still, flashbacks deepen the story and it makes me wonder if the Tams knew exactly what the Academy was about. The parents brush it off too easily and continually enforce Simon’s future, what he stands to give up if he believes this nonsense about River. Did they know?
The Shiny
River with the cows–little soul, big world, they weren’t cows inside. This is an idea we’ll come back to when River gets a hold of Book’s Bible. Jayne with the cows–”I like smackin’ ‘em.” River in her red dress, dancing… Kaylee getting smacked in the face by Simon’s feelings about Serenity…Serenity leaving Simon and River behind…the connection between the Alliance and Book…Jayne looting Simon’s things–this feels in line with his hazing of Simon (and his dislike, which makes me wonder if Jayne was crushing on Kaylee; knowing she likes the doctor, is Jayne extra cruel to him?)…Zoe when the ship is boarded…sanguine…false papers. I love Kaylee coming to sit with Book, because she feels like she can’t do anything else, and that he’d done it for her. I love Zoe patching Book up–she’s handled gunshots before and she’ll no doubt do it again.
The Confusing
Does Inara vanish in this episode? We see her with Kaylee and then…she’s gone. Is that supposed to be her at the foot of the table at the meal in the end? And those hill folk… Just wish there’d been another twist with them, and people not so set on burning a “witch.” But, I reckon it just points to the fact that stupidity will always be with us–even in the future. Alas!
Arms of Jayne.
O Captain, My Captain
26 Mar 2012 Leave a Comment
in movies
I don’t often talk about movies here, but wanted to mention a documentary I watched over the weekend: William Shatner’s The Captains. As the title implies, it’s a look at the actors who have played captains on Star Trek.
Shatner journeys to each of the captains to spend time talking with them about anything and everything: how they got their start (all have a history on the stage), how they almost didn’t take the role, how the work impacted their personal lives, if they believe in life after death, and more. Each interview is amazingly insightful, breaking these actors open in ways you probably haven’t seen before. Shatner even talks about why he was so reluctant to do the convention circuit early on, and talks about how there are many things about Captain Kirk that he hasn’t come to terms with
You can see it in all of their faces: the love they still have for these special roles. Patrick Stewart invites Shatner into his England home; Avery Brooks spends his interview at the piano; Kate Mulgew finds Shatner in a box on the streets on NYC; Scott Bakula and Shatner spend time on a horse track; and Chris Pine talks to Shatner outside the Paramount Pictures gates.
Some other Trek actors are also interviewed, but the focus is ever the captains. If you ever enjoyed Star Trek, watch this film! (It’s entirely too short at 96 minutes!)
Firefly Friday, “Shindig” 1.05
23 Mar 2012 1 Comment
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Learning each other's steps.
One thing I continue to appreciate about Firefly is how the world building was introduced. In “Shindig,” we get holographic pool, floating chandeliers, a card game where chores are exchanged, and living mannequins. Each says much about the world which surrounds our shiny characters.
In this episode, they return to Persephone and encounter Badger who has another job for them. Despite how the last one from him went, they take it. (Of course, the way Fox aired things, we hadn’t seen “Serenity,” and didn’t know that had gone badly.) Inara makes plans as Persephone is filled with her kind of folk, and gets to go to a ball!
The Shiny
So much, I will try to sum up! We get to see new sides of characters here–Mal picks a pocket, Kaylee longs for a dress that looks like a layer cake, Zoe likes slinky dresses, Jayne eats tea and sammiches. We get to see the intimacy Zoe and Wash still share, Mal’s jealousy over Inara and Atherton, and Kaylee swapping engine talk with a crowd of men. We discover that Inara is also schooled in some fighting techniques–she seems to know more about sword fighting than Mal does. It’s too bad we don’t see more of that, considering how much Morena says in the commentary that she practiced! River with the can labels…”he’s got that killing in the morning”…Inara with power when it comes to making sure Atherton is banned from companion lists…Kaylee eating snacks saved from the party and admiring her dress…the crew not getting to implement their cunning plan to break Mal out…cattle!
Malcolm
It’s a revealing glimpse of Malcolm Reynolds here–we know we can’t just open him up and start reading from the middle. But we see Mal as the Mal we know–picking pockets, doing the job for Badger, getting himself neck-deep into trouble–but we also see a different side to him. A side that knows the same dances Inara knows. A side that is painfully upset over the idea of her staying on Persephone with Atherton Wing. I suspect there are a bunch of people who don’t like the Mal/Inara relationship, but I have only love for it. I wish we’d gotten more seasons, to see where these two would have gone. This one ends with them drinking homemade wine, watching the cattle mill in the cargo bay, she in apricot silk and he in his suspenders. Love, love, love.
Shiny layer cake.
Firefly Friday, “Bushwhacked” 1.04
16 Mar 2012 Leave a Comment
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Anybody home?
Almost everyone likes a ghost story and to me, that’s what “Bushwhacked” is. Our intrepid crew comes across a ship floating in space (not to mention a body floating in space!), and tiptoe on board to see what happened. They find but one survivor, a man who Mal thinks would be better off dead, being that Reavers likely killed the rest of the crew.
The Shiny
The score and the lighting both help set an amazing mood for this episode, as does the sense of fear everyone conveys. Wash may be lighthearted in the beginning, but once the idea of Reavers comes up, everyone reacts–and when even the big strong guys are scared, you know something is up. The hazing of Simon by Jayne in this episode feels more authentic to me than did Mal’s in “Serenity.” Getting Simon to suit up and make his way onto the ship when suits weren’t necessary and he wasn’t even asked to come seems like something Jayne would very much do. Have to give Simon props here: he steps up. When everyone else gets twitchy over bodies, he doesn’t, and Book comes help lay them to rest as best they can. Barefoot River…bleeding booby trap…hints of Mal’s not-so-dead faith (we’ll come back to that in “The Message”)…Doug Savant…Wash raising his hands when the Alliance boards them… “Jayne, you’ll scare the women…”
The Shiniest
This episode has a lot of shiny, but for me the best is the alliance “interrogations” of the crew. There really is no better short character study than this sequence, especially as the dialogue bleeds from one character to another. Zoe refusing to talk about her marriage, while Wash enthusiastically goes on about her legs and backside. Jayne saying nothing. Inara’s grace. Mal’s insistence. If you are a writer, you may well want to watch this scene. And then watch it again.
The Moment that Sums Up the Whole
This may sound strange, but it’s all about the place mats. When the Alliance comes on board and starts tossing Serenity, they enter the kitchen/dining area. The table is neatly lain out, with the center lamp and place mats at everyone’s seating place. The Alliance toss the place mats everywhere. It’s foolish to think that a clue to Simon and River’s whereabouts might be under one–they just want to make a mess, prove that they’re better than this place. But they’re not, because that dining table says a lot about the crew of the ship. It says they care about their ship, their fellow people, and about the meals they share. Sharing meals is important, breaking bread, having that moment. As we see in later episodes. It’s all about the place mats.
Firefly Friday, “The Train Job” 1.03
09 Mar 2012 1 Comment
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Big damn heroes!
“The Train Job” came about when Fox didn’t like what Joss and company had done with “Serenity,” hence “Serenity” getting pushed to the very last position when the episodes first aired. Insanity. But, while “The Train Job” pulls together many of the similar themes of “Serenity,” it also does a few brilliant things all on its own.
Of course it’s another caper gone wrong, when Mal and the crew get information about a job that a man named Niska has for them. When Mal learns they’ve stolen medicine, he sets about making sure the meds get to the people who need them after all, even if those meds go for big money on the black market.
The Shiny Things
There are a lot of shiny things in this episode and it’s hard to pick a favorite. One thing this episode does so well is Niska himself. Michael Fairman is brilliant as the bad guy. Even though his henchmen do the dirty work, you get the distinct feeling that it’s all rooted here, that Niska pulls every thread that ties those men to him. Niska returns to us in “War Stories.” Mal and Zoe pretending to be married…Inara coming in and busting that lie up to save them with another one…Kaylee and the compression coil which will bite them all in the ass in “Out of Gas”…Mal lighter than in “Serenity,” but still carrying war wounds with him…the long handled teapot…Serenity‘s entrance!…the holographic bar window…”time for some thrilling heroics”…drugged Jayne trying to catch angels…two by two, hands of blue…
The Perplexing
Even now when I watch the episode, I wonder: did Mal actually mean to kick Crow into the engine? I think about birds getting sucked into plane engines and the damage they can cause, and it seems to me that a human body in a ship engine would cause the same kind of problems. I imagine Kaylee cleaning out the mess of Crow and cursing Mal every step of the way. (Though I reckon it’s possible the body just burned up in there, too?) First time I saw it, I really thought Mal only meant to kick him down, and that expression comes from thinking “ah, shit, what did I just do to my ship.”
The moment that sums up the whole
For me, it’s probably Jayne joining in the bar brawl, even though he makes it plain to Mal that he didn’t fight in the war and doesn’t seem to have a stake in the outcome of such things. In the end, Jayne’s on the crew, and he knows it. I’m quite certain Jayne doesn’t mind busting up a few heads, either, no matter who they belong to.
Firefly Friday: Serenity
02 Mar 2012 2 Comments
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I’m having a good deal of difficulty wrapping my head around the fact that Firefly will turn ten this fall. Ten years of Firefly, though we didn’t even get a full season on air. Ten years. Can you imagine where the crew would be now if we’d gotten ten seasons?
Our shiny Firefly cast
I digress–and likely will a hundred times more!
Ten years since Firefly premiered and Browncoats were born, and I’m still not sure why Firefly received such a cool reception while it was on air. The more I read, the more it seems Fox really did torpedo the series, showing episodes out of order and eventually not showing all the episodes that had been filmed.
But I’m not here to gripe about Fox and how they handed this show. I’m here to talk about the show for the next string of Fridays, until we reach the end. I won’t be giving exhausting plot summaries as those can be found elsewhere. And no spoiler warnings. I just want to ramble a bit. About Firefly, looking back across ten years.
Episode 1.01-1.02: “Serenity”
“Serenity” serves as our launch point (the title which would also serve as the show’s terminus in the feature film). Mal and Zoe, companions since the war, are stuck with stolen goods when a deal goes wrong, and are left to handle the cargo amid a ship full of passengers they’ve taken on.
The best things
The entire series can be found in these opening episodes. If you were trapped on a desert island with but one episode of Firefly (horrors!), the “Serenity” two-parter might be a good choice. Though you will have a darker Mal than in future episodes, within every other character you will find the missing pieces/qualities of Mal–as aptly pointed out by Nathan Fillion in the DVD commentary. Kaylee’s umbrella, the strawberry, the loss of faith and private absolutions, Reavers, “everybody’s making a fuss,” fresh tomatoes, the idea of an abbey garden.
The worst things
I dislike Mal’s lie to Simon where he tells him that Kaylee is dead. Mal drops the bomb that she’s “dead” and Simon panics. In a gorgeous blurred out sequence, he flees to the medical bay. We see Book approaching as if to give last rites. And then–Kaylee is alive. Cut to the crew cackling in the cockpit. While Mal is a darker Mal in these episodes, this still sits strangely with me. Why would he purposefully be that cruel to Simon, when he knows that Kaylee likely would have died without Simon being there? Sure, you could argue that it’s Simon’s fault she was shot at all, but heck, is it also then Kaylee’s fault for accepting Simon on board to begin with? The other thing I dislike is Mal shooting the horse. Sure, it pins Patience, but ugh. Poor horse! I do like a dark and tormented Mal, but these actions seem to stand outside even that mindset.
The moment that sums up the whole
There are two brilliant moments in this episode. As the action dies down, Shepherd Book comes to Inara, asking her if this is life outside abbey walls, saying he’s not sure he’s supposed to be there. Inara tells him that perhaps he’s exactly where he’s supposed to be. But the moment that sums up the whole of the episode–and indeed the whole of the series if you ask me–is a brief glimpse of Jayne, usually stalwart and tough, crouched outside a med bay window, watching intently as Kaylee is treated for her gunshot wound. Joss Whedon says his shows are always about created families and this one shot truly speaks to that.
If I were going to rate episodes on a scale, it would of course be a strawberry scale, and this would get all the strawberries in the ‘verse. Next Friday, we’ll talk about “The Train Job.”
Month of Letters
29 Feb 2012 1 Comment
in Me, Uncategorized
My friend Mary Robinette Kowal concocted this brilliant idea, that one should mail 24 things in the month and celebrate a return to handwritten letters and unexpected goodies in the mailbox. Having always been a fan of postal mail, I leapt right in–but did not mail the full 24 things.
I think my count is about 19, which is not so awful, all things considered. I wrote to old friends and new, to family and friends who’ve recently moved far away. (What do you mean my Netflix DVD returns don’t count?) What did I learn over the course of the month?
I learned that it’s really nice to sit down and write longhand. I often did this at my desk, but sometimes it happened away, and I welcomed the change of scenery. It was a good break in the middle of the day, time to practice my penmanship (which has grown dreadful), time to breathe, time to really think about the words before committing them to the page, because once there they could not be erased.
My mailbox did not overflow in February. I received postal mail from three people, one of them fictional (sealed with wax, which was a fabulous delight) and email from one other. I received two phone calls in reply to two letters, one from my granny who told me that no one sends her Valentine’s anymore. (You can likely guess what my new mission is there!) The second phone call came from my dear friend C. who moved to Canada at the end of last year. She loved the card and it made her resolved to begin sending her own. That’s a victory.
I will continue sending cards and letters to friends and family. Though today is the last day of the challenge, I still need to mail something. Is it coming to you? Watch your mailbox.
The Scottish Prisoner
12 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment
I distinctly remember the first time I read Outlander. I didn’t feel well, it was snowing, and a box of books had arrived from the book club. Outlander was one I picked at complete random, even the cover small and difficult to make out in the advert. The book revealed itself to have a clock upon it, though. A clock with a broken crystal. A string of pearls, a red plaid, and wilting roses. I wasn’t quite sure what awaited me. “Scottish time travel romance” surely oversimplifies the entire book and the series which follows. While it’s certainly that, it’s more, too, with some of the most enjoyable characters I’ve ever run across in fiction.
Gabaldon took one of those characters, Lord John Grey, and gave him his own series. I tried to read those books but they didn’t capture me the way the Outlander books did. Until The Scottish Prisoner. The title made it clear, at least to me, that this book would likely involve one Jamie Fraser, a main character of the Outlander books. Not only was I right, I was happy to discover it covers a stretch of time we’ve seen only a little of, when his wife Claire has gone back to her own time and Jamie is prisoner at Helwater. (Read through Voyager, before you read this book.)
I’ve seen plenty of people complaining that Jamie takes this book over, that it’s more his story than it is Lord John’s (and well, look at the title!), but for me, I felt it was a good balance. It was wonderful to see these two finding a way to work together that didn’t involve them killing each other. The other thread of story exposed here is Jamie’s developing relationship with William, the son he cannot wholly claim as his own. Watching Jamie with toddler William was a treat, especially when Jamie learns he does (and can) love William as his own, even if in secret.
William has come of age in future Outlander novels, and the next volume (Written in My Heart’s Own Blood) should contain more of his story. It will also cover more of the Claire/Jamie/John doings, as An Echo in the Bone took that whole triangle to an unexpected (for me) place. This book fills a great gap and includes teasers from the next Outlander novel. It was an unexpected treat that I could not put down.
