Serenity Found

by Jane Espenson

  But Firefly’s crew members were more like the people we meet in real life: who they were was more than just the functions they performed. The characters had a personality, a recognizable-and distinct-way of inhabiting and responding to their world. It’s hard to imagine the things that came out of Jayne’s mouth being said by, for instance, Inara. A Wash joke is very different from a Zoe joke. The characters’ internal continuity made them come alive as individuals-but they all had a link to Mal that made them come together as an ensemble.

  Mal’s crew was an extension and reflection of Mal. Echoing attributes of the central character in the supporting characters is of course a time-honored technique. Star Trek again offers an instructive example in the way Spock reflected Kirk’s intellect and McCoy embodied Kirk’s emotions. Watching McCoy and Spock argue was like seeing Kirk’s internal dialogue externalized. This dynamic made both Spock and McCoy vital to Kirk’s success as a captain and integral to his wholeness as a person. It also helps account for why the trio was so compelling as a unit.

  Firefly achieved a similar effect but with three times as many characters. This was perhaps most easily observable with Mal and Simon. Simon’s absolute dedication to his sister, his unbreakable loyalty, his foolhardy willingness to risk everything for the one he loves, echoes Mal’s commitment to his ship and his crew. Thus, Simon earned Mal’s respect. (In the Firefly DVD commentary Nathan Fillion mentions that the Simon-River relationship was his favorite in the series and that he loved Simon’s devotion to his sister. For all the conflicts between Mal and Simon-Simon’s background and adherence to formal conventions of propriety mark him as a creation of the Alliance, after all-something of that love, however unspoken, is expressed through Fillion’s performance.) Mal kept River and Simon on board not just because Simon was useful as a medic but also because the captain saw something of himself in the doctor.

  Standing in direct contrast to Simon’s impractical dedication, Jayne reflects Mal’s elemental pragmatism. Jayne could easily be mistaken for, and could have thoughtlessly been played as, stupid. But he is not. Rather, like a space-faring Stanley Kowalski, Jayne’s is an inate, physical-as opposed to intellectual-intelligence (nicely manifested by Adam Baldwin’s acting choice to have Jayne relate to the world largely through senses like touch and taste). Whedon points out on the Serenity DVD commentary that it is Jayne who is always apt to ask the practical questions. He is also the one most apt to grasp the practical, physical implications of a situation. In “Out of Gas,” for example, Jayne stopped Mal and Wash from fighting, not out of a principled objection, but simply because they were using up precious air. Yet his particular intelligence has no way of accommodating displays of altruism which exceed the confines of practical self interest. Acts such as Mal sheltering River and Simon or the mudder sacrificing himself to save Jayne in “Jaynestown” are likely to puzzle him. Jayne’s strictly rational common sense and Simon’s Quixotic and chivalric devotion established the two men as opposites and repeatedly led them to butt heads.

  And so on with the rest of the crew. Zoe shares Mal’s experience as a soldier, the primal bonds developed by comrades in arms, and understands his special relationship to Serenity Valley. Kaylee shares Mal’s love of the ship, Inara his emotional guardedness and fear of intimacy; River, like Mal, has been interfered with and wounded by the Alliance. And Wash? Well, I was a bit stumped about Wash, figuring he was something of a fish out of water, like the wisecracking Jewish guy who married into the mid-western family, until my friend Jeremy pointed out that Wash represents Mal’s spirit of resistance to authority and is the one most likely to challenge Mal’s orders. That sounds right to me.

  Just as children often pick up different traits from their parents, the members of Serenity’s crew had different parts of their captain. Dispersing parts of Mal amongst the other characters helped forge a cohesive ensemble, and gave the audience a sense that these individuals were part of an organic whole, distinct but related. It also partially explains why so many fans reacted to the travelers on the Firefly as if they were a family. Not all the residents of Serenity had much of a relationship to each other, but they all had a relationship to Mal.

  But while the rest of the crew tended to reflect Mal that is, Book reflected Mal that was, but is no more: Mal as believer. Mal’s religious estrangement was foregrounded early in Firefly’s pilot episode. Joss Whedon has Mal invoke God and angels and kissing his cross in the opening sequence, then sharply juxtaposed that behavior with Mal’s forbidding Book to say grace at the table a few scenes later. This is a textbook example of showing, rather than telling, the audience what they need to know. In a few concise gestures an entire arc was implied and understood. Mal believed once, but no longer. While Book, a former sinner we may assume, now believed. It would seem that just as the defeat at Serenity Valley stripped Mal of his belief, something pushed the shadowy Book into the light. While belief in something larger disappointed Mal, that very belief may have saved Book. Thus, like the rest of the crew, Book reflected an aspect of Mal, but it was more of a reflection in the literal sense: a reverse image.

  More than any other episode, “Jaynestown,” with its “broken” Bibles and fallen idols, addressed the role of faith and the divergent views of the captain and the shepherd. Book maintained that “faith fixes you,” whereas when Mal acknowledged that the mudders’ belief in Jayne was not about Jayne but “about what they need,” his use of the word “they” marked faith as something strictly for those that need it, not for himself.

  In the pilot episode Book worried about his suitability for life on Serenity, but by “Bushwacked” he had come to understand that the way of things on the frontier was “not so plain as on the central planets, rules can get a might foggier.” Though Book inhabited a religious world he balanced that commitment with the need to adjust to the nature of life in “the black.” While Mal had left Book’s spiritual world and showed no interest in it, at times (“War Stories,” “Our Mrs Reynolds,” “The Message,” and, especially, the Serenity feature) Book understood Mal’s world better than Mal. A clergyman schooling a former soldier on military tactics certainly posed an interesting challenge to the captain.

  The affinity and the tension, the pull and the push, between Mal the non-believer and Book the believer held much promise, not only as an exploration of the Western genre conventions of disillusioned rebel and preacher with a past, but as a reflection of and engagement with our own complicated contemporary relationships between faith and hope, disappointment and doubt, belief and proof. Sadly Firefly’s premature death and Book’s death in Serenity left that promise largely unfulfilled

  But while Mal no longer believed in Book’s book, it is not right to say that Mal believed in nothing at all. It is more accurate to say he believed in nothing that was abstract, only in what was immediate. Like many a pragmatic hero in the American Western, Mal is compelled almost exclusively by practical considerations, immediate survival needs, and personal loyalties. Mal is primarily instinctual rather than ideological. Having lost the great cause, Mal was left uninterested in causes or ideals or abstract principles. On the Firefly DVD’s making of Firefly documentary, Fillion recalls being drawn to Mal precisely because he “didn’t have any grand dreams, he didn’t have any great causes or goals, all he wanted to do . . . was continue living his life.” No longer driven to rebellion by Alliance injustice, Mal’s interest was more in avoidance than defiance. He travelled the frontier planets where Alliance influence was weakest and tried to stay away from the core as best he could. As Mal says in Serenity, “The war’s long done, we’re all just folks now.”

  Being an outlaw, a “petty criminal” as Inara calls him in “The Train Job,” allowed him to remain a rebel, but only in petty ways.6 Having lost the war, Mal became neither a guerilla warrior fighting entrenched power (like the heroes of so many Westerns who, after losing the American Civil War, migrate to Mexico and join theirs), nor an errant knight carrying on the noble cause of a
shattered Round Table, nor a Robin Hood avenging the downtrodden-“stealing from the rich, selling to the poor” (note: selling ), as Wash puts it in “Ariel,” is the closest he comes.

  This is not to say that Mal was a villain: he was not a sociopathic gun for hire like Jubal Early in “Objects in Space,” a cynical opportunist intent on getting others before they get him like the pirate captain in “Out of Gas,” nor a heartless predator like Niska in “The Train Job” and “War Stories.” It is not that Mal was without morals or honor but that he did not abstract those personal morals into an overarching ideology. As Simon said in Serenity, “what’s of use” was Mal’s “guiding star.” For Mal practicality trumped principle, what he did was determined by what he needed and what he saw rather than by conceptual constructs (perhaps a reflection of Mal’s creator, who acknowledged on the “Objects in Space” commentary that he is “very literal about everything I do”).

  Repeatedly Mal rejected overarching principles and constructs in favor of the specific demands of the moment. In the pilot episode, for instance, Mal, unmoved by the injustice of what he dismissed as Simon’s “tale of woe,” was concerned strictly with the peril Simon and River had brought to “me and mine.” In “The Message” Mal was willing to shoot Tracey because protection of his current crew was more important than devotion to a former comrade.

  “Out of Gas” was particularly rich with examples. When Mal saw that Kaylee could do the job and Bester could not, he fired Bester on the spot and gave the job to the better woman. It was a straightforward, simple calculation: competence outweighs contract. The same pragmatism which counsels Mal to take a better option when it comes along allowed him to intuit that Jayne would betray his employers if Mal offered a better deal (and also alerted Mal that Jayne had betrayed him in “Ariel”). And while principles of loyalty and familial devotion might dictate that a man should stay with his wounded wife, for Mal the need for survival demanded that Wash get to the bridge to help save the ship rather than tend to Zoe.

  In “Ariel” Mal insisted that River and Simon were “on my crew. No one is getting left.” But in “Safe,” faced with choosing the principle of leaving no one behind and the immediate need to get help for Book, Mal left Simon and River so he could seek a medical facility. For Mal even the imperatives of self-preservation and survival are contingent, not absolute, principles-they too are subject to practical considerations. Mal was willing to go to the Alliance to get medical help for Book and there was no reason for Mal to think he would get out of that a free man. Furthermore, a strict pragmatist might have opted to save Simon before Book, calculating that the doctor’s skills were more essential than the shepherd’s. Thus, Mal’s pragmatism notwithstanding, he is capable of self-sacrifice

  Putting himself at risk of Niska’s wrath by returning the medicine in “The Train Job” might seem like an act motivated by an abstract principle, but there again Mal was responding to the immediacy of what was before him. Perhaps Mal would have chosen to return the medicine to Paradiso if he had simply heard about, rather than seen, the suffering of those in need of the medication. But having seen the reality of that suffering with his own eyes, Mal felt that he had no choice other than to return the medicine.7

  But, while not insensitive to the needs of others, Mal’s main loyalty is to the well-being of the small community he has built around him, an egalitarian community that allows equal membership to preachers and prostitutes, doctors and mercenaries, the young and the old, the healthy and the sick, browncoats and unification supporters, Black people and White (though, disturbingly, not Chinese people, whose presence, culture, and language are reduced to mere adornments8), all bound together not by allegiance to any code, cause, or principle, but by the bonds formed by common peril, mutual reliance, and the fact that, as Mal said in “Our Mrs. Reynolds,” they “trust each other, do for each other, and aren’t always looking for the advantage.” Again recalling classic Western themes, the Serenity is a space where meritocracy, as a microcosm of an idealized America free of race, class, and ideological divisions, can flourish; where social status gives way to merit; where the talent you bring means more than the title you bear; where, in the most stunning image in the series, a priest can receive the benediction of a prostitute.

  Like Firefly’s other characters, Mal is remarkably consistent in his core characteristics, and that opened up an intriguing space between him and Book who, as a clergyman, by definition was guided by overarching principles and ideological constructs. Again, had the series had a longer run it would have been nice to have seen that space and those tensions explored more deeply. But with Book dispatched after two short scenes in Serenity, Book’s role as the believing counterweight to the non-believing Mal is taken up by the Alliance operative.

  Having so clearly defined Mal in Firefly, in Serenity Whedon gives him an adversary who is his diametric opposite. Mal, the pragmatist who reacts only to what he sees, is opposed by an agent known only as the Operative,9 a fanatic who blinds himself to the reality before his eyes and who, as Whedon says on the commentary “believes so strongly that he would do anything.” The Alliance and its Operative, unlike Mal, act almost exclusively in the name of abstractions like order, law, and morality. Yet these ideals have been severed from the true values that arise from lived human experience: the need for self-determination, the importance of dissent, the simple moral imperative that children should not be kidnapped, killed, or turned into killers.

  When killing his targets the Operative is fond of telling them what their sin is, but his sin is the big one in the eyes of the film: unlike Mal, the Operative ignores what is in front of him, the true morality of slaughtering civilians or murdering a child, in favor of serving an idea, an abstraction. “We’re making a better world,” he says, destroying Haven in order to “save” it, clinging to the idea of the world to come while ignoring the reality of the world that is. Perversely, obedience to an abstracted morality means that normal moral impulses to empathy and compassion must be subsumed to concepts of righteousness. Therefore even his own recognition that he is “a monster,” doing “evil,” leaves him unmoved.

  With no name, no history, no rank, the Operative is less a person than a function, so committed to abstraction he becomes one himself. Continually watching holograms, surveillance recordings, and video monitors-but never looking in a mirror-the Operative sees all, but understands little. The Operative stands not only in opposition to Mal but in opposition to Book as well. Book and the Operative embody two very different kinds of faith. Book’s faith leads him to engage the world. The Operative’s faith leads him to dominate it. Where Book might try to convince, the Operative, like the Alliance, seeks to control. That characteristic of the Alliance, the urge to control, is at the heart of its crime on Miranda. It is also a crime that Book likely would have objected to on theological grounds.

  A standard trope in cautionary science fiction is that human beings should not “play God.” But the Alliance goes way beyond that. In the Hebrew Bible the God of Genesis, Chapters 6-9, deems that the inclination of the human heart is toward evil continually, decides to wipe out the human race with a flood, but then relents and allows a remnant led by Noah to survive and rebuild humanity. But in so doing God does not “reprogram” the essential nature of human beings, which, presumably, God had the power to do. God does not extinguish human free will. God does not eliminate the capacity to do evil, even as God hopes that humans will do right. God will send commandments and prophets, promise punishment and reward, in order to cajole, exhort, and inspire humans toward virtue. God may weep and mourn when we sin, but unlike the Alliance, God does not try to instill docility in order to control people. God knows better than to “play God.” So the Alliance does more than try to “play God,” it tries to play a part that even God, wisely, turned down.

  Conventional wisdom is that Book’s dying wish that Mal “believe in something” helps initiate a change in his character. But I am not convinced. Mal never emb
races anything like faith, or even belief in any abstraction. He does not come to believe in the way that Book believes and certainly not in the way the Operative does. On the commentary track Whedon says that Mal’s arc in Serenity is from not admitting that he cares in the beginning to being self-sacrificing at the end. Perhaps that is the case when looking strictly at the film, but looking at the whole of Mal’s arc throughout the series, I don’t think that’s quite it. Yes, by the end of the film Mal is willing to risk his life and the life of his crew for something beyond self-preservation, but he had been already willing to do that in Firefly episodes like “The Train Job,” “Safe,” and “Heart of Gold.” Mal always cared, but who he cared about tended to be narrowly circumscribed to those in his immediate circle (a circle which included Simon and River in the series but which, probably to serve the needs of the arc Whedon intended for the movie, did not include them when the film began).

  But there is a transformation. When over the course of the movie Mal sees with his own eyes the damage that the Alliance has done-to River, to Haven, to Miranda-he widens the circle of his concern from those in his immediate community to the rest of the Alliance’s current and potential victims. He responds to both the fact of what the Alliance has done and to his fears of what the Alliance will do in the future, and is willing to risk his life and the life of his crew for something beyond the immediate needs of survival.