Firefly Friday: Ep5 Safe

The genre of cowboy stories doesn’t require the presence of cows but they help. The cows from the previous episode (The Shindig) have been taken to their destination by Serenity. It’s another Wild West small town of a planet/moon and the ship is a bit out of town to set up a temporary corral for the cows.

It would be easy to pick holes in the commercial principles of the Firefly worlds but shows with more standard space-faring premises don’t make a lot of economic sense either. What the Cockney gangster Badger gets out of this cow-trading isn’t clear either but it is all neither here nor there. The cow-deal suggests weird imbalances of wealth, poverty and goods that is intended to give a sense of what life is like but which would be hard to establish in detail.

The focus of the episode is not on cows or economics but on the backstory of the Tam siblings. The flashbacks don’t really work, exemplifying how show-don’t-tell fails if we’ve already been told. Curious viewers will find the actor playing the young Simon Tam oddly familiar because he’s a very young Zac Efron. In the show’s present, Simon and River get kindapped by hill folk from an even more poor settlement. The people there have a habit of stealing people to keep their community going and are delighted to get a doctor.

Help from the Serenity crew does not arrive for the Tams because Book was accidentally shot when the whole cow-trading situation goes badly wrong. With a lack of doctors on planet and with the Simon and River mysteriously disappeared, Mal if forced into space to find an Alliance ship with medical facilities.

Meanwhile, the kidnappy hill folk turn out to be poor-but-misunderstood and then turn out to be superstitous bigots who think River is a witch. River overtly displaying telepathic powers moves her story along and it is good that she gets more to do here than just act odd.

Naturally, Serenity returns to rescue the Tams. When Simon questions Mal as to why he came back, Mal states that he regards them as crew. Which is nice, although “doctors are so rare out here, that on some planets they get kidnapped and without one I’d have to rely on the help of my sworn enemies” would have been a more obvious, but less inspiring, reason.

The pieces here don’t really all hang together, although the found-family ending parallels Simon’s own quest (in flashback) to rescue his sister from the Alliance. Like every episode so far, some time is spent establishing personality aspects of characters who aren’t the main focus. This wasn’t a strong episode but it still brings the viewer into the lives of the crew.