Saturday 29 November 2008

CAN SIMON FIX RIVER OR SHOULD HE JUST HAVE FAITH IN HER?

If I haven't referred to Inara much then I've said even less about Simon and River. Time to address that, but first a pithy statement from Book which could have come straight out of a conversation in the Emerging Church.

In the episode Jaynestown, Shepherd Book finds River editing his Bible in order to remove the contradictions.

Book: ‘River you don’t fix the Bible!’


River: ‘It’s broken, it doesn’t make sense!’


Book: ‘It’s not about making sense. It’s about believing in something. And letting that belief be real enough to change your life. It’s about faith. You don’t fix faith, River. It fixes you.’


Commenting on this dialogue, and on the relationship between Simon and River, Alyson Buckman writes:

‘Ironically, River is like the Bible – she “doesn’t make sense,” and her brother attempts to fix her as she attempts to fix the Bible. As Book says about the Bible, the crew of Serenity must come to have faith in River, which they do by the end of [the episode] “Objects in Space.”’
Buckman, AR, ‘Much Madness is Divinest Sense’ in Wilcox, R & Cochran, TR (editors), Investigating Firefly and Serenity: Science Fiction on the Frontier, (London: I.B. Tauris,2008) p.46.

2 comments:

Whedongeek said...

Thanks for the quote! ;-) (Hope you enjoyed the essay... Have you seen Dale Koontz's _Faith and Choice in the Works of Joss WHedon_?)Alyson

Julie said...

Thanks, I used another quote from your essay in my dissertation.

Yes, I found Dale Koontz's book realy useful.

Julie