Serenity Found

by Jane Espenson

  (2.4) We return to Zoe in shock in the infirmary; Simon administers an adrenalin injection. Transition: the adrenalin injection.

  (3.5) In the infirmary Mal cries out in pain and gives himself an adrenalin shot. Transition: the infirmary, and a flashback of Kaylee’s voice.

  (2.5) Kaylee is asking if Zoe will be okay (just as we worry if Mal will be okay in Time 3). Kaylee lets Mal know that the ship is dead in the water and that they only have a few hours of oxygen left.

  ACT TWO

  (2.6) Inara checks in on the injured Zoe, who is still unconscious. In the course of their conversation Simon begins to describe the horrors of dying of suffocation.

  (2.7) Shepherd Book reads his Bible and has a conversation with River who tells him he is afraid. She adds that they will not die of suffocation but of the cold.

  (2.8) Mal checks to see if Wash has sent out a distress beacon. Wash tells him it is pointless, that no one will pick it up. Mal has a long-shot plan to boost the signal and disrupt the navigation of any ships that pass by. Jayne comes by and cautions them on using too much air. Transition: the warning about air.

  (3.6) As the computer announces that oxygen is almost depleted, Mal struggles to carry the equipment down the engine room hallway. Transition: the hallway to the engine room.

  (1.4) Mal walks the hallway to the engine room to meet with Bester, who was supposed to fix the engine. Bester is having sex with someone in the engine room. Bester tells Mal that the ship won’t fly but the woman he was having sex with corrects him. It is Kaylee. She fixes it in an instant, bringing the engine to life. Transition: the hallway of the engine room.

  (2.9) Mal looks for Kaylee, who is despondent in the engine room. She shows him that a piece of the engine has failed and tells him they need a new one. He gives her a pep talk. Transition: the engine room.

  (3.7) Mal attempts to get the part into the engine. It falls through a hole in the floor and he shakes.

  ACT THREE

  (2.10) Mal recaps the situation for the crew: life support is failing. He tells them he wants them to leave in the short range shuttles, in opposite directions, in the hope someone will find them. He will stay behind. Wash goes to devise a way to call the shuttles back if someone answers the beacon. Inara tries to talk him out of staying behind as he heads for her ship. Transition: Inara’s shuttle.

  (1.5) In a flashback we see Mal showing Inara her short range shuttle inside Firefly. He tells her it will get her where she needs to go and bring her back home again. She tells him that he wants her, wants her on his ship, because she will grant his ship respectability. He asks her what it is she is running from. He agrees not to call her “whore” again. Transition: Mal and Inara.

  (2.11) On the bridge of the ship, Inara tells Mal that he should come on her shuttle, that no one has to die alone. Mal tells her everyone dies alone.

  (2.12) Wash explains that if a ship makes contact, all Mal has to do is hit a button to recall the ships.

  (2.13) Jayne tells Mal to lock the doors behind him to conserve air. Everyone boards the shuttles and launches, leaving him alone. Mal locks the doors of each room-cargo bay, both kitchen doors-and waits on the bridge for someone to signal.

  (2.14) Eventually someone does signal, but Mal must negotiate with the other captain to get him to board the ship and help. Mal says he will not open the door unless he sees the part he needs. When they do board, Mal has air to breathe, but the newcomers have come with guns to rob him.

  ACT FOUR

  (2.15) The salvagers investigate the ship. Transition: Mal at gunpoint, hands in the air.

  (1.6) We flashback to Jayne robbing Mal and Zoe at gunpoint (their hands are in the air). Mal offers Jayne money to turn on his partners and join the Firefly’s crew and he accepts. Transition: Mal at gunpoint, hands in the air.

  (2.16) The head salvager shoots Mal (hands in the air) in the stomach and tells him they are taking his ship. Mal pulls a gun and demands the part he needs. At gunpoint he forces them to leave, but then collapses on the floor from his wound, into the shot from the teaser. We again get shots of the rooms on the ship, with blood stains to show where Mal has been: cargo bay, infirmary, and finally the engine room. Transition: the engine room.

  (3.8) In the engine room, Mal retrieves the part he dropped and gets it into the engine, starting it. He struggles through the ship toward Wash’s button-we get shots of the hallway out of the engine room, the kitchen, the hallway to the bridge, and the bridge-where he collapses. Transition: Mal unconscious.

  (3.9) The screen goes black as we hear lines of dialogue from earlier in the episode. Mal awakes in the medical room, where everyone is gathered and Zoe is awake. Mal never reached the button; they came back anyway, and saved his life. Transition: a mixed voiceover from the past (from all three time periods shown in the episode).

  (1.1) A salesman is trying to interest Mal in a ship that he says will be with him the rest of his life. But Mal has spotted another ship-Serenity.

 

  ANALYSIS

  Any good screenwriting book-Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, David Howard’s How to Build a Great Screenplay, Syd Field’s Screenwriting (and related books), Paul Joseph Gulino’s Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach-will tell you that story structure is everything. Firefly’s “Out of Gas” follows the standard structure of a one-hour television drama closely: it begins with a teaser, then the story is told in four acts, essentially four mini-stories each with their own beginning, middle, and end; the end of one act propels the drama in the subsequent act. But Joss Whedon and Tim Minear are such accomplished storytellers that-like good jazz musicians playing off a standard chord progression-they are able to introduce and play with the massive complication of moving freely between three distinct time periods: Mal’s journey alone through the ship, the story of how Mal got in that position, and the story of how Mal found the ship and gathered his crew.

  Figure A

  Though it is not emphasized in the episode at all, the three time periods resonate with River’s psychic abilities. Just as River is able to read minds, just as she is able to know what is happening before anyone else in the crew knows (she says, “Fire,” just before there is one), we are able to watch two of the time periods knowing more than the characters we are watching. When Zoe points to a spot on the floor and notes that something seems to be dying there, we know that, in the future, Mal will be dying on that exact spot. When Zoe tells Mal that something about Wash bothers her we know they will eventually be happily married and that Wash will get rid of that horrible moustache. Minear uses the structure to create a complex emotional tone: Zoe making fun of Mal is complicated by a dark knowledge that he will be badly wounded in the spot she points to; Zoe’s worries about Wash, we know, will dissolve. For this reason, River is hardly in the episode at all-her psychic abilities would needlessly complicate an episode already quite difficult. On a more pedestrian level the flashback structure allows the audience to quickly grasp what is going on in many of the scenes where exposition would be difficult if not impossible-Zoe getting the adrenalin shot in Time 2 instantly explains what Mal needs the needle for in Time 3; Kaylee explaining to Mal about the part that has failed in Time 2 explains what he is doing in the engine room in Time 3.

  Lost is structured around flashbacks not unlike the flashbacks in “Out of Gas”-we experience the main characters in two different time periods and are often asked to compare. But Lost’s flashbacks are unified by theme-in both the present narrative and in the flashback we get to see John Locke overcoming physical limitations, for instance. Firefly’s, on the other hand, are unified by space, specifically the space of the ship. Each Time 1 flashback shows a member of the Firefly’s crew that did not join the ship in the pilot seeing the ship for the first time-Zoe, Wash, Kaylee, Inara, Jayne, and finally Mal himself. If structure is everything the screenwriting guides insist it is, it is doubly important in “Out of Gas” bec
ause the structure of the episode is held together by the structure of the ship.

  The space of the ship provides the anchor for the time-the ship itself holds all three times together. We know the structure of the ship is massively important to how the episode works since we are given “tours” of the ship no less than three times: the episode opens with a shot of each room, empty and dark (3.1); we see each room as Mal closes the doors behind him to conserve air (2.13); and we see all the rooms again as Mal attempts to get from the engine to the bridge to hit the button that will recall the crew (3.8). The initial “objective” tour-a tour the director is giving us without a character to follow-traces the ship from the bridge to the cargo bay. The second two tours follow Mal on the same path in the opposite direction with opposite results. The first time Mal heads off to the bridge with every expectation that that is where he will die (though he is saved by the transmission); the second time he goes to the bridge to recall his crew and save their lives (but he collapses).

  The ship anchors the structure of the episode and reinforces its theme, which is how the ship is the emotional hub of the show. Mal describes to Zoe how it means freedom for him and his crew; Zoe meets her husband on the ship; Kaylee feels a deep emotional wound when the ship breaks down; Inara is running from something and this ship is her refuge; even Jayne is not unmoved, as he turns on his original crew for the promise of his own room on the ship. The final scene of the episode is Mal first laying his eyes on the ship. The flashbacks point directly to the total importance of the ship, and again a contrast with Lost is very helpful here. Because the concept of Lost demands that all the events of the show take place on an island in a very narrow time frame,16 Lost’s flashbacks are the only opportunity to play on a wider stage: flashbacks allow the creators to tell stories in L.A., Australia, Korea, and Scotland. The flashback’s in “Out of Gas” could allow Minear to tell stories all over the universe, but every single one is centred on the same ship that the primary story, as part of its concept, cannot leave.

  Film narratives string together individual scenes, and normally we have no trouble understanding how one scene connects to the next, especially if the scenes are chronological. Even when jumping from a plot to a sub-plot, we often instinctively understand that the plot is taking place at about the same time as the sub-plot. Occasionally, however, the audience may need a clear and concrete point of transition to carry us from one scene to the next. One way to transition smoothly from one scene to the next is to focus on a single object that will be in both scenes: the most famous transition in film history is in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey-the ape throws a bone in the air and we transition to a bone-shaped orbiting nuclear missile platform in space. The gap in time is closed by the object-a human tool appears in both scenes. “Out of Gas” has such a complex structure that each transition from one time period to another must be handled with care, so that the episode is as clear as possible.

  Though occasionally we transition from one time period to the next by focusing on the same character in both periods, most of the transitions in “Out of Gas” use the ship itself as the anchor between the past and present. Mal dying in the cargo bay becomes Mal showing Zoe the cargo bay for the first time; Zoe’s adrenalin shot in the infirmary takes us to Mal in the infirmary, giving himself an adrenalin shot.

  Act two has a particularly complex use of a single space to transition among three time periods. In act two the engine room and the hallway to the engine room serve as the points of transition no less than three times in a row-the four key scenes are a wounded Mal attempting to get the piece to the engine room (3.6), Mal meeting Kaylee for the first time in the engine room (1.4), Mal attempting to comfort Kaylee in the engine room (2.9), and Mal dropping the piece in the engine room (3.7). The transitions are tricky because of the direction Mal is travelling when they occur. The first transition (between 3.6 and 1.4) uses Mal heading to install the new part to go back to when Mal entered the engine room and met Kaylee for the first time. The second transition, however, goes from Mal leaving the engine room (having just hired Kaylee) to him going in the opposite direction (in Time 2) to comfort Kaylee. Then we transition to Mal in the engine room, dropping the piece. The importance of the failure of the engine is doubled in the structure of the episode as Mal can not get away from this room; in these scenes he is a bit like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, forced to revisit the same place over and over until he gets it right (and like “Out of Gas” Groundhog Day involves time being distorted). It is thus important that Mal has hired, at first, the wrong mechanic-he is going to have to try again until he gets it right.

  While the ship is the focus of the episode, every part of the ship is not given equal weight. With the exception of the scene where Zoe first meets Wash on the bridge, the bridge, the hallway from the bridge to the dining room, the dining room, the common area in front of the infirmary, and Book’s room are not part of the deep flashbacks of Time 1 and a few only show up briefly in Time 3 as Mal attempts to get to the button on the bridge. Inara’s shuttle only transitions once from Time 2 to Time 1. The medical bay is the point of several transitions but only between Time 2 and Time 3. There are only two points on the ship which transition among all three time periods: the cargo bay and the engine room. The engine room is obviously the most important room in the episode because the engine failure guides the entire episode. The cargo bay is the second major point of transition because it is the entrance and exit of the ship, the thematic center of the flashbacks about how the crew first joined.

  The only other point where all three time periods transition is in Mal’s head-in 3.1 and 3.9 we experience the rush of Mal’s memories as voiceovers. Both of these transitions give us an audio glimpse of the final scene (1.1): we hear the salesman say “She’s a real beauty, ain’t she?” in both. In the second voiceover-moments before we transition to 1.1-we hear lines from all three time periods as Mal’s memories reach from the episode’s final chronological point to its earliest chronological point, and pick up key lines from in between, finally interrupted by Mal’s overhearing Wash saying something unimportant to Zoe:SALESMAN: Real beauty, ain’t she? (1.1)

  KAYLEE: Serenity’s not moving. (2.2)

  WASH: When your miracle gets here pound this button once. . . . (2.12)

  INARA: Mal, come with us. (2.11)

  MAL: Everybody dies alone. (2.11)

  WASH: I’ll run up there and scrape off a piece. (3.9)

  In each of these mashed-up memory voiceovers we are being prepared, in an extraordinarily subtle effect, for the final scene of the episode, in which the salesman will say “Real beauty, ain’t she?” Because we have heard the line twice before-even though we did not know what it meant-it will feel especially important and familiar. As we recall the line, Whedon and Minear will achieve a small emotional burst to end the episode on, an effect they will playfully undercut as they reveal it is a description of a ship Mal will be completely uninterested in.

  Most of the time period transitions not centered around the physical structure of the ship (and they are few) are centered on people, but, interestingly, only in romantic pairs. Wash and Zoe (husband and wife) each act as a point of transition: Mal yelling at Wash in the infirmary transitions to Mal introducing Zoe to Wash on the bridge; Zoe being bothered by Wash in the hallway out of the bridge transitions to Zoe crashing in the infirmary. Mal and Inara’s chilly first meeting in her shuttle transitions to Inara trying to talk Mal out of staying behind with the ship, a hint of the intimacy we feel they will eventually have. It is important that the transitions not centered on the ship itself are centered on romantic relationships because they set up the final transition to the last scene, Mal first seeing the ship. Seeing this final transition in the context of the other three “personal” transitions emphasizes that this final scene is a love-at-first-sight scene. The only flashback that does not take place on the ship itself-the only scene in the episode that does not take place on the ship itself-is Mal see
ing the ship from afar and falling in love with it.

  “Out of Gas” tells a science fiction love story, but rather than a man and a woman against the world and time, “Out of Gas” shows us love among a rag-tag “family” of outsiders, and the love between a man and a ship, the symbol of his freedom. Whedon and Minear’s unique story structure, in scrambling its three time periods, shows how the love of the characters is the thing that holds the story, and the show, together.

  GEOFF KLOCK is the author of How to Read Superhero Comics and Why (Continuum 2002) and the upcoming Imaginary Biographies: Misreading the Lives of the Poets (Continuum 2007), based off his doctoral thesis at Balliol College, Oxford. The first book applies Harold Bloom’s poetics of influence to comic books; the second argues that the bizarre portrayal of historical writers in nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry constitutes a genre (and will be followed by a companion book on film). His blog-Remarkable: Short Appreciations of Poetry, Comics, Film, Television, and Music-can be found at geoffklock.blogspot.com. He lives in New York City.

  REFERENCES

  Fraction, Matt and Gabriel Bá. Casanova #3. Berkeley: Image Comics, 2006.

  A bias against space Westerns strikes me as being as strange, and as unfounded, as a prejudice against left-handed congressmen. Like people, works of fiction are individual, and to condemn them in arbitrary categories is to completely miss that. Since I had no idea this particular bias existed, I was interested to hear more. Bethke does an excellent job of laying out the history and reasoning behind this surprisingly pervasive prejudice.

  Cut ’Em Off at the Horsehead Nebula!