Firefly: Serenity
Mar. 25th, 2013 07:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI have finagled one of my friends into a Firefly rewatch! It did not require much finagling: I said "We should watch a Firefly episode every Monday! I will provide refreshments!" and she said "Okay."
Today we watched "Serenity," the pilot episode, not the movie, because that would be a silly place to start. I liked many things about it! But I will focus mostly on Mal and Inara's relationship, because Mal and Inara exasperate me.
It occurs to me that Mal and Inara's relationship resembles Castle's relationship with Beckett in early Castle, except that a) Firefly got canceled before Inara and Mal arrived at a Castle/Beckettian rapport, and b) Castle thinks that Beckett is basically amazing from day one, and certainly never denigrates her and her profession the way Mal denigrates Inara when he introduces her to the ship's new passengers as a whore.
And that's basically the first interaction we see between the two of them: Mal calling Inara a whore, and Inara being like "Kaylee and I are going back to my shuttle, JERKFACE."
(Incidentally, Kaylee/Inara? Or just Kaylee & Inara? Definitely my new favorite thing. The looks of delight they give each other when Inara arrives back on the ship are just beautiful: Kaylee looks as happy as if she hasn't seen Inara in months.)
I feel like, with Mal and Inara we're more told that they should be a couple than shown it. For instance, Shepherd Book drops by Inara's shuttle, apparently for the sole purpose of chatting about Mal. Why are you so obsessed with him? Inara asks, and he responds, Perhaps because he's a mystery. Why are you?
(Mal does not strike me as particularly mysterious. He's a tough guy with a poor sense of boundaries who tries to take care of his family/crew. That doesn't seem very hard to comprehend.)
But I digress. The main problem is that this scene is the first time we see Inara give any sign that she is obsessed with Mal, so it's odd that Shepherd Book would ask her about it. Actually, even if she did give signs of being obsessed with Mal, it's still weird for Book to ask her about it, given that they just met
I think the story would be stronger if it let Mal stand on his own rather than providing these (rather forced) scenes explaining how we ought to react to him. There's an unwillingness to let silence speak.
It occurs to me that it sounds like I hate Mal. I don't; I think he's often a lot of fun. But I think the show doesn't quite realize how dysfunctional he is, so there's this gap between how the show presents him and who his actions say he really is, and it frustrates me.
***
Have I shared my theory that Mal is so irritating to Inara - constantly invading her shuttle, etc. - because it turns him on when she smacks him down? I feel like I have written about this somewhere, but I can't remember where, ugh.
And finally (in my headcanon, because this never happens in the show) Inara is like, "MAL, if you want me to order you around then you should ask me WITH YOUR WORDS like a grown-up person." And then Mal has a crisis about how he wants to submit to someone who is basically a living breathing embodiment of the Alliance that he hates, what is wrong with him?
Mal being Mal, he probably solves this crisis by ignoring it until it goes away. Mal does not strike me as being very good at self-reflection.
Today we watched "Serenity," the pilot episode, not the movie, because that would be a silly place to start. I liked many things about it! But I will focus mostly on Mal and Inara's relationship, because Mal and Inara exasperate me.
It occurs to me that Mal and Inara's relationship resembles Castle's relationship with Beckett in early Castle, except that a) Firefly got canceled before Inara and Mal arrived at a Castle/Beckettian rapport, and b) Castle thinks that Beckett is basically amazing from day one, and certainly never denigrates her and her profession the way Mal denigrates Inara when he introduces her to the ship's new passengers as a whore.
And that's basically the first interaction we see between the two of them: Mal calling Inara a whore, and Inara being like "Kaylee and I are going back to my shuttle, JERKFACE."
(Incidentally, Kaylee/Inara? Or just Kaylee & Inara? Definitely my new favorite thing. The looks of delight they give each other when Inara arrives back on the ship are just beautiful: Kaylee looks as happy as if she hasn't seen Inara in months.)
I feel like, with Mal and Inara we're more told that they should be a couple than shown it. For instance, Shepherd Book drops by Inara's shuttle, apparently for the sole purpose of chatting about Mal. Why are you so obsessed with him? Inara asks, and he responds, Perhaps because he's a mystery. Why are you?
(Mal does not strike me as particularly mysterious. He's a tough guy with a poor sense of boundaries who tries to take care of his family/crew. That doesn't seem very hard to comprehend.)
But I digress. The main problem is that this scene is the first time we see Inara give any sign that she is obsessed with Mal, so it's odd that Shepherd Book would ask her about it. Actually, even if she did give signs of being obsessed with Mal, it's still weird for Book to ask her about it, given that they just met
I think the story would be stronger if it let Mal stand on his own rather than providing these (rather forced) scenes explaining how we ought to react to him. There's an unwillingness to let silence speak.
It occurs to me that it sounds like I hate Mal. I don't; I think he's often a lot of fun. But I think the show doesn't quite realize how dysfunctional he is, so there's this gap between how the show presents him and who his actions say he really is, and it frustrates me.
***
Have I shared my theory that Mal is so irritating to Inara - constantly invading her shuttle, etc. - because it turns him on when she smacks him down? I feel like I have written about this somewhere, but I can't remember where, ugh.
And finally (in my headcanon, because this never happens in the show) Inara is like, "MAL, if you want me to order you around then you should ask me WITH YOUR WORDS like a grown-up person." And then Mal has a crisis about how he wants to submit to someone who is basically a living breathing embodiment of the Alliance that he hates, what is wrong with him?
Mal being Mal, he probably solves this crisis by ignoring it until it goes away. Mal does not strike me as being very good at self-reflection.
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no subject
Date: 2013-03-26 02:29 am (UTC)I dislike it in general when other characters have nothing better to do than think about other characters' love lives. It annoys me on shows when characters just sit around talking about the main pair's potential to hook up (completely different than RL gossip, because in RL when people talk about people they're rarely shipping them). This isn't exactly that (I'm thinking about Bones and The Vampire Diaries as I type this), but you're right, it is weird since Book doesn't even know Inara at this point.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-26 03:02 am (UTC)Yes! I mean, if they do it once or twice over the whole show, that's one thing, because people do gossip...but if they talk about it all the time, or if the writers use it to explain something about the romance to the viewers - like, we're wondering why A & B don't just get together already, and X explains to Y "Well, it's because A is SHY (or whatever)..." It's just so lazy!
And it's especially weird here. IDK, the Firefly characters just seem to be weirdly insightful about each other's feelings about things, even when they don't know each other very well. It's like they're afraid that if they don't spell things out, the viewers might miss the fact that Inara and Mal are totally destined for each other.
Which, to be fair, we might. Because Mal does not treat Inara all that well. But this does not seem like a good way to solve that problem...
no subject
Date: 2013-03-26 10:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-26 12:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-27 06:30 am (UTC)I think this explains a lot of his interactions with Inara; he doesn't entirely recognise what his own motives are in treating Inara the way he does. And then he hides his true feelings by pretending they don't exist and just manages to confuse himself - and Inara, if nobody else - in the process.
I have to admit, I was initially confused by Mal because I watched Firefly and season two of Castle at the same time, and it took a while to stop thinking of him as "Castle in disguise"...
no subject
Date: 2013-03-27 12:45 pm (UTC)And Inara is torn between "He's so cute!" and "But it's so confusing whether he really likes me" and "Do I care if he really likes me? He may be cute, but he's also a jerk!"
I think the makers of Castle borrowed some of Mal's more portable characteristics when they were designing Castle's character: probably they realized they were going to get an influx of Firefly fans.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-01 08:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-01 12:35 pm (UTC)Maybe for the rest of the rewatch I will pretend Kaylee and Inara are dating. I feel like that will make the show that much more adorable.