MORE ON FIREFLY CHARACTERS

I really like Bruce Bethke's description of the characters in Firefly. These descriptions are attributed to his friend 'John the screenwriter':

Mal is 'Han Solo [Star Wars] with an actual backstory ... Rick Blaine [Casablanca] with a spaceship instead of a night club. He's a classic lost paladin; an embittered losing-side war vet with a junk freighter, struggling to eke out a living on the fringes of civilization and the law. But underneath his rough exterior he's still got his honour, his pride, and that sense of justice that forces him to get involved and become a big damn hero, from time to time.'

Wash is a 'classic comic-relief sidekick, who gets to have all the emotional reactions the paladin can never show.'

Zoe is a 'tough chick' who served with Mal in the war - 'she's got the whole calls-him-"sir"-even-when-she-doesn't-say-it-out-loud thing going.'

Kaylee - 'it's really nice to see a woman in the role of the engine room grease-monkey.'

Simon, the doctor - 'there's obviously some bad blood between him and Mal, so I'd have to guess he has a little black bag full of patent medicines that save the day on a regular basis and make him worth putting up with.'

River - 'Buffy' - 'the ninety-pound pixie who can toss around men three times her size when she gets mad ... [probably] the focus of the entire plot.'

Jayne - 'big and tough, none too bright, obsessed with weapons, and probably worth his weight in gold in a fight.' Is the name like 'A boy named Sue'? Or is JAYNE a reference to John WAYNE?

Book - 'the preacher with the troubled past'.

Inara - 'the hooker with a heart of gold'.

Bethke, B, ‘Cut 'Em Off at the Horsehead Nebula!', J (ed), Serenity Found: More Unauthorized essays on Joss Whedon's Firefly Universe, (Dallas, TX: Benbella Books, 2007) p176.

KAYLEE - 'THE HEART OF THE SHOW'

Kaylee (the mechanic on Serenity) also features in the notes on the Bible Study on http://blog.digitalorthodoxy.com/?p=661

' Kaylee seems to peer into Inara’s world and romanticises it, thinking that she gets some rich clients who give her things and make her feel pretty, the rest of the world seems to think this is the case too as her profession has a high status in the planets. Looking in from outside Kaylee wishes that she could have pretty things, be a normal" girl, wear pretty dresses, dance with men to nice music. Kaylee wants to live in the world beyond her own fence, the grass is always greener over there. ... And when she’s faced with the reality she meets people that want to keep her on the other side of the fence, people who look pretty on the outside but are not too pretty on the inside. These people make her feel unwelcome, unpretty. While she also meets others who seem to find her enchanting for who she really is at the same party.'

Similar comments, about the ordinariness of Kaylee's character and the way in which it is seen in the people we come into contact with every day, are made in Burns, M, ‘Mars needs Women’ in Espenson, J (ed), Serenity Found: More Unauthorized essays on Joss Whedon's Firefly Universe, (Dallas, TX: Benbella Books, 2007) pp18-19:

' they had Kaylee's heart, that fragile fear that people were looking down on them, that they weren't good enough or smart enough. ... Kaylee can fix nearly everything, sees the good in everyone, can't handle a gun. ... Kaylee was the beating heart of the show as she tended the beating heart of Serenity. Where have you ever seen anyone like her on a spaceship before?'

WHY AM I DOING THIS?

Sometimes I’ve felt as though the decision to study a sci-fi series for my dissertation on the emerging church was a bit too wacky! So I was greatly encouraged by Mike Alsford’s work on ‘Religious Themes in Science Fiction’, especially as he describes the way in which this particular genre encourages us to face both hope and dread.

'To contemplate a destiny amongst the stars whilst at the same time recognising our capacity for greed and self destruction; to aspire to new levels of existence, transformations to ever more blessed states of being, while acknowledging our equal potential to create and become monsters; to look forward to a future paradise or to dread the end results of urban decay and social collapse: hope and dread –these are indeed two of the poles that define us.'
Alsford, M, What If? Religious Themes in Science Fiction, (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2000) pp2-3.

Maggie Burns seems to take this a step further by declaring that Sci-fi makes us face our hopes, fears (=dread) and the truth.

‘… the highest goal of science fiction is to tell us the truth about ourselves. We find it in every sci-fi work that has ever tried to say: “This is how it is. Don’t pretend, don’t turn away, don’t lie. This is who you are. This is what we are.” … Firefly … sets out to show us our world through a created one.’ Burns, M, ‘Mars needs Women’ in Espenson, J (ed), Serenity Found: More Unauhorized essays on Joss Whedon's Firefly Universe, (Dallas, TX: Benbella Books, 2007) pp15-16.

This belief, in the power of story to touch us at a deep level, is my starting point.