Firefly Friday: Ep6 Our Mrs Reynolds

On the one hand, this episode features a cast clearly enjoying the script and on the other hand, there’s a whole pile of yikes here made all the more uncomfortable by later revelations of Joss Whedon’s history of infidelity. But let’s get to the plot.

The Serenity crew defeat a gang of bandits by disguising Jayne and Mal as husband and wife in other to stage a reverse ambush. That night the whole town celebrates and in the morning the head of the town is apologetic that they couldn’t give Mal et al. a bigger reward. This is just a preamble to the main story which begins in earnest once the ship has left the moon/planet. Mal discovers an apparent stowaway who reveals herself to be his new wife — part of the impoverished town’s reward.

The initial premise here is that a naive (and very, very attractive) young woman, who has been brought up to be very subservient to her husband, is now Mal’s wife due to a ritual in the celebrations that he thought was just part of the party. The woman (“Saffron” played by Christina Hendricks in an early role) want nothing more than to please Mal and be a good wife much to Mal’s consternation and the initial amusement of much of the crew.

I’ll spoil the plot as it makes some of this much less creepy. Saffron is actually a skilled seductress whose actual mission is to help space pirates capture the ship. Even so, the set-up feels like a minefield. Sure, Sheppard Book overtly tells Mal that if he in any way takes advantage of the young woman then this would be morally equivalent to child abuse (the actual age difference between Fillon and Hendricks is only 4 years) and yet even this intervention is there to make it all the more of a dilemma for Mal.

While the subgenre of Steven Moffat Sci-Fi sex comedy had yet to be invented, this is a prototype and along with the uncomfortable situation, the script presents Mal as just a poor misunderstood man with natural urges and also places Zoë and Inara as inherently jealous.

Jayne, on the other hand, tries to trade his prize gun to Mal in exchange for Saffron, making it that much harder to distinguish the character from my existing perspective on Adam Baldwin.

I guess it all works out in the end. Not knowing where it was going made the whole thing more uncomfortable than fun. On balance, the story avoids the worst aspects of the premise but then heads into dodgy dialogue towards the end. The comedic aspects and the group dynamics work out well…sort of…but are hard to untangle from a storyline whose main narrative tensions arises out of potential sexual abuse.