Five hundred years in the future there's a whole new frontier, and the crew of the Firefly-class starship Serenity is eager to stake a claim on the action. They'll take any job, legal or illegal, to keep fuel in the tanks and food on the table. But things get a bit more complicated after they take on a passenger wanted by the new totalitarian Alliance regime. Now they find themselves on the run, desperate to steer clear of Alliance ships and the flesh-eating Reavers who live on the fringes of space.

- From The Box Set.

The Bottom Line

It's a shame that it was canceled, because in our opinion, everyone should watch this.

01 - Serenity - Part 1 & 2: The crew of Serenity is eager to rid themselves of an easily traceable cargo they salvaged from a vessel adrift in space, totally unaware that a passenger has brought an even more dangerous cargo aboard. (These episodes originally aired as two in the middle of the season, not as a single episode pilot.)

02 - The Train Job: Mal has second thoughts after discovering that two boxes of Alliance goods his crew has been hired to steal are full of badly needed medical supplies headed for the mining town of Paradiso.

03 - Bushwhacked: After encountering a booby-trapped spacecraft carrying the lone crewmember of a horrific Reaver attack, Serenity is boarded by an Alliance Commander looking for Simon and River.

04 - Shindig: In order to secure a job transporting cargo off-planet for a client, Mal attends a social event where a dance with Inara leads to him being challenged to a swordfight in defense of her honor.

05 - Safe: When Simon is kidnapped by a group of villagers in need of a doctor, Serenity is forced to make contact with an Alliance ship in order to seek medical help for the critically wounded Book.

06 - Our Mrs. Reynolds: After a celebration in which the crew is honored for ridding a planet of a group of bandits, they return to Serenity to find a woman named Saffron who claims that Mal married her during the festivities.

07 - Jaynestown: When the crew returns to a planet where Jayne participated in a heist gone bad, they're shocked to discover that Jayne's past actions have turned him into a local hero of Robin Hood-like mythic proportions.

08 - Out Of Gas: After an explosion leaves Serenity crippled, Mal orders everyone to abandon ship while he stays behind in an attempt to make repairs - and reminisces how the found the ship and picked its crew.

09 - Ariel: Simon offers the crew a proposition: if they help him sneak River into a hospital so he can run tests on her, he'll tell them where to find medical supplies that will fetch an enormous price on the black market.

10 - War Stories: Wash regrets insisting that he be allowed to accompany Mal on a mission after the two men are captured by Adelai Niska - the client who previously hired Mal to steal the medicine bound for Paradiso.

[UNAIRED] 11 - Trash: Mal is shocked to discover that his old friend's new bride is Saffron who, although furious after Mal blows her cover, offers to cut Mal in on what she calls the perfect, big-time scam.

[UNAIRED] 12 - The Message: While Jayne opens a mail package from his mother that contains a wool cap with ear flaps and a pom-pom, Mal and Zoe open their package to discover the body of their old war buddy, Tracey.

[UNAIRED] 13 - Heart Of Gold: The crew comes to the aide of a bordello when its madam, an old acquaintance of Inara's, asks for help after a gunslinger claims a prostitute's baby as his and he's taking it because his wife in barren.

14 - Objects In Space: The crew is caught off guard when a bounty hunter, eager to claim the enormous reward on River's head, sneaks aboard Serenity and methodically begins taking the crew prisoner one by one.

Season Recap information taken from the Episode Guide on the DVD release.

Well, after years of being hassled by Ender to watch this series. I have. Over the last three days. Some via tv rips, and then, the rest on the DVD set I purchased the other day along with Serenity on HD-DVD. Yeah, I'll give it to Ender, it's pretty damn good. (Serenity too.)

While it's not going to dethrone Farscape as my favorite SCI-FI show, it does rank up there with it. Definitely better than anything else I've watched to date. After all, I love Westerns, so how can I go wrong with a SCI-FI Western?

For a TV series, the CGI is decently done (and it improved greatly with the movie), and honestly, the CGI quality it probably the worst thing about the show. The acting, story, and everything else is well done.

This being my first review since the site came back, I'm a bit rusty, but this definitely a show you should watch. After Farscape, of course. ;)

****

I was forced to watch a lot of Westerns when I was a kid. It was the only genre my dad would ever watch. I've likely seen every western made before 1970. I wasn't a big fan. In most of the movies, it wasn't so much a genre as a setting, and bad movies are bad movies.

That said, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is a great film, as are a few other notable westerns. But a western in space? My hopes were low.

Firefly is much more than a western in space. It's a character-driven drama about freedom. Burning bright in the night sky and all. Lighting up the darkness while doing your own thing. I could write an essay on the symbolism and metaphor use in Firefly, but I won't. The show deserves to be seen on its own merits. The acting and writing are some of the best I've seen, and the camerawork and pacing are refreshing to say the least.

It got cancelled because it was new. Not new to TV, but new for TV. Hell, it was new for visual media in general. The good die young though, and it'll rest with other Fox shows like Arrested Development, Undeclared, Futurama, and the canceled but resurrected Simpsons and Family Guy. It amazes me at how easy it is to get an awesome show on the air at Fox, and how hard it is to keep it there.

****½