Firefly Friday: Ep2 The Train Job

The trope of a rag-tag crew of a spaceship on the wrong side of the law feels like such a familiar one but there’s not an obvious type-specimen. The UK example would be Blake’s 7 who are a mix of criminals and out-right revolutionaries. There’s obviously elements of the idea in the crew of the Millenium Falcon in Star Wars but the films don’t really frame the story as the key characters as a crew based on a ship (the animated Star Wars: Rebels has more of this feel). A precedent/contemporary for Firefly would be Farscape but that’s another show that I never got to see. Cowboy Bebop also sits around that millennial cusp which also covers a period of time when I didn’t get to see much TV.

Star Trek sits as the biggest cultural precedent for a show centred on a starship and its crew but the original series and TNG intentionally avoided being a show with recurring interpersonal conflict among the crew. That was an odd choice for a TV drama (although it clearly worked) but the alternative idea of a less than brilliant ship crew who are together through circumstance feels like a natural choice with more dramatic scope. In short, I’m saying Firefly feels like it has an obvious premise but also one that was relatively original.

With the Train Job we get an episode that is the functional pilot, with the longer more detailed actual pilot not televised until the end of the show’s first run. A narration by Book gives the backstory for the setting (humans fled Earth, set up on new planets/moons, had a war and live a life of horses and spaceships) and we then meet Mal, Zoe and Jayne in a bar. And we are straight back to the Civil War as a jingoistic Alliance supporter celebrates the 6th anniversary of the final victory. It’s an economical way of establishing the main tension for the crew. They aren’t rebels in the sense of either Star Wars or Blake’s 7 i.e. not engaged in active resistance against an authoritarian regime as such. Mal sardonically says he bought his brown coat because it was cheap but he is overtly wandering around wearing the symbol of the defeated side in the conflict. It’s not a case of drinking in Mos Eisely cantina surrounded by stormtroopers with a Jedi symbol on your back. From the context, clearly, the Alliance are going to turn out nastier than they currently appear but at this point you Mal is not very circumspect about announcing his loyalties.

The bar-fight is not relevant to the plot but it does establish the post-Civil War Western-style frontier setting quickly as well as the relative dynamics of Mal, Zoe and Jayne as well as Wash’s role as primarily ship-based. With the bar-fight sequence done, the crew take on a commission from a particularly scary criminal who likes torture and murder. The over-the-top evilness of the crime-lord is there to add tension to the later moral dilemma but the idea of voluntarily doing business with this man is absurd unless the crew literally have no other choice. I can see this scene working if we were deeper into the series and Mal is more clearly desperate but at this point “let’s work for the torture/murder guy” runs counter to the later moral of the plot.

That moral is, of course, that while the Firefly crew are criminals, that they are people with morals and integrity (aside from maybe Jayne). The train robbery is largely successful but the crew discover that what they have stolen is life-saving medical supplies for a frontier mining town. Learning this they have to choose between being complicit in the deaths of people with a chronic disease or angering the murder/torture guy. They rightly choose to do the right thing in the end.

The script and direction are tighter than the pilot but the plot is weak partly because of the odd way the episode has to re-introduce everybody in a more economical way. I wonder now if I should have watched the episodes in broadcast order (or at least watched this one first) to see how viewers would have experienced this.

The two notable “problem” aspects of Firefly are also re-introduced here. Firstly the Civil War analogue for the Western vibe gets a full airing in the bar scene. Secondly, also in the bar scene, we get the very nicely done (and understated) Mandarin dialogue as just part of everyday interactions. It’s a really clever way of adding a sense of a future human society without relying too much on made-up words. Nice…except for the complete lack of anybody who looks East Asian anywhere. I won’t keep harping on about this but it is just so weird given the obvious effort put into incorporating these cultural aspects into the show. Scripts, props, set-design, presumably multiple rehearsals so that Nathan Fillon just delivers the lines in another language with an easy familiarity but what? They forgot to CC the memo to the casting team? Weird and weirder than the usual unexamined-racism-makes-people-do-weird-things weird.

I’ve watched episode 3 already but I’m saving that review for Christmas Eve. I’m picking holes but these first two episodes show a lot of promise despite a shaky start. This episode still isn’t sure how all of these pieces are supposed to work together but that’s part of the story tension — how are all of these characters, thrown together by circumstance, going to work together? I guess we’ll find out.