Firefly & Serenity

While discussing the show and film with someone today, I realized what annoyed me so much about most shows on television. Firefly is the perfect example of most of them, from the stock sci-fi characters to the grand conspiracies dreamed up and run by people too stupid to run even the simplest tests to divert people who hate them from (or at least include a functional retraining program in) the "turn cute women into super duper bionic ninjas" program.

It's about as original as burnt toast, and about as palatable.

Something else that bugs me is what I've seen referred to as "oprahfication", the making of everyone into a victim. It annoys me that a show whose main characters are all desperately seeking to control their situation, in the "frontier" of space, can't just go 'fuck it' and take off to parts unknown. No, they have to stay around and whine about not being able to. If you have blasters, don't whine, blow something up and you'll feel better.

Shows are about characters. Stories have characters in them, so that we have something to relate to, but it's not that important that the story be about the characters. It used to be that the basic conflict of man vs nature, man vs man, and man vs self were the driving force behind stories. Take some people, put them into conflicts, see how they turn out. On a tv show, this could be repeated, with older shows suffering from Gilligan's Problem always leaving the characters the same at the end as at the beginning, with the conflict not really changing them. Newer shows borrowed everchanging characters from soap operas, where they've been a staple since before burnt toast.

But now the stories are character driven. Characters change and develop relationships in preset ways and the conflicts are only there to drag the show out past episode 4. Only sitcoms don't do this, and they still stick with the Gilligan's Problem format. Sitcoms exist mostly to be funny and retain unchanging characters to provide a pre-existing foundation for that episode's jokes, instead of establishing new characters/underlying motives every episode.

Gilligans Problem: The conflicts/problems of every/almost every episode stem from an overarching problem that is the premise for the series (the castaways were stuck on the island). Solving the overarching problem solves those issues and hence ends the series.

Firefly manages to do both, ongoing character development causing Gilligan's Problem. The overarching problem is that the characters are self-contradictory idiots. They want to be left alone, but can't stop themselves from helping everyone who crosses their path. The solution to their problems is to push the lot of them out of an airlock. Unfortunately, that's the general tone of sci-fi these days, the mindless pablum of Star Trek: 90210/Gilmore Girls in Space.

Goe, can barely stand to watch Battlestar: Galactica now.