Firefly Friday:Ep 7 Jaynestown

No sooner than we cover an episode that felt disturbingly close to the Problem of Whedon than we have a devastating profile of the writer/director’s rapidly falling reputation. Entitled “The Undoing of Joss Whedon” by Lila Shapiro, it chronicles a history of bullying and abuse of power by the man. The second to last paragraph uses a Firefly episode as a metaphor.

“Whedon once wrote a line that could have served as a warning to all of us. In Firefly, one of the crew members, Jayne, accidentally tosses the spoils of a botched robbery into the hands of the town’s poor. Jayne is not a good man, but when he returns to the town years later, he sees its residents have erected a statue in his honor. When he confides to the crew’s captain that he’s unsettled by this development, the captain just stares into the distance. “It’s my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of ’em was one kinda sombitch or another,” he says. “Ain’t about you, Jayne. It’s about what they need.”

https://www.vulture.com/article/joss-whedon-allegations.html

And wouldn’t you know it but that’s the one we are up to!

Seeing Firefly purely through the lens of examining the influence (malign or otherwise) of Joss Whedon on modern popular culture, is itself a reflection of the problem. It elevates Whedon to an auteur like figure for a show that’s trying to make the term “space cowboy” a popular narrative. It also obscures the role of the other directors, writers and actors on the show.

Having said…Our Mrs Reynolds and Jaynestown one after the other, there are easy parallels to draw. With Jaynestown we have a story in which everybody’s hero turns out to be a fraud. When the crew visit a mud mining town to pick up some contraband, they find the workers have erected a statue of Jayne, much to the amusement of everybody but Jayne. In the past, Jayne had attempted to steal a pile of money from the local boss but had to ditch the money as he escaped. The riches had fallen on the town and the legend had turned Jayne into a Robin Hood-like hero.

During the course of the story, the truth of Jayne’s actions becomes clear and after a young miner dies to save Jayne from a gunshot, Jayne himself pushes the statue over. It’s a sad ending to an episode that overall works well. As a metaphor for Whedon’s own fall from acclaim, the parallels only stretch so far and unlike Our Mrs Reynolds, it wasn’t actually written by Whedon.

Putting these overstretched parallels aside, this is one of the strongest episodes of the show so far. Perhaps I’m becoming more habituated to the premise and basic similarity of every planet to what I assume is Californian countryside. The dirt poor town and the workers who literally dig up mud is almost a Pythonesque parody of poverty but even though the people are naive in treating Jayne as a folk hero, it’s not sneery and they aren’t depicted as being stupid.

The episode treats Jayne sympathetically as a character but at the same time doubles down on his basic shithead nature. I feel like the two pilot episodes depicted him as a bit smarter than how he is in the main episodes but the basic character is firmly established now.

The capacity of the show to give the whole cast something to do continues. River and Book are left behind on the ship and are given their own sequence, involving River trying to edit Book’s bible. Inara has her own side plot, and the potential romance between Simon and Kaylee is progressed also.

While we are here, Firefly also neatly aligns with the fandom discussion of the week in which our humble blog had a role, namely what I’m now going to call Squeak-or after the mouse themed He-Man remake discussed in the comments. Firefly really isn’t that quippy. The dialogue is lighthearted but our stereotype of a Whedon show I think edits onto our perceptions that Whedon=quips. Having said that, the previous episode (actually written by Whedon) was a bit more effervescent in the dialogue but overall Firefly isn’t a great example of this aspect of shows/movies Whedon is connected with. The main obstacle to the quippy style is the other aspects of the language. The cast affects a 19th-century American style of mannered but down-to-earth speech mixed in with future neologism and chunks of Chinese-derived vocabulary. Badger gets to be a bit more quippy but then Badger is one of the few characters to get an URBAN lower-class accent.

Aside from that, the show is steadily getting better. The biggest strength of the show remains a very effective use of an ensemble cast even in episodes with weak storylines. I don’t think the setting of the show really makes sense but as with a lot of science-fiction, in the end, you get used to basic absurdities.

Also, we are halfway through the episodes! Time for another ranking!

1. Episode 3: Bushwacked
2. Episode 7: Jaynestown
3. Episode 2: the Train Job
4. Episode 6: Our Mrs Reynolds – a tricky one. Maybe higher, maybe lower?
5. Episode 5: Safe
6. Episode 1: Serenity
7. Episode 4: Shindig

Next week another space episode!