‘Firefly’ Talk is Back

Perhaps moved by the celestial forces of the recent eclipse or because a groundhog somewhere saw its shadow, the discourse around Joss Whedon’s 2002 sci-fi western Firefly is upon us again. The last few weeks saw an uptick in talk about the show, from your good-and-tried pleadings for someone to bring Firefly back to a dedicated gamer recreating the titular Firefly-class ship Serenity in the videogame Starfield. Firefly discourse has been ebbing and flowing through the great vacuum of the internet for more than two decades now, though it has changed, with more and more people not just asking for the show’s return but debating whether it was ever really that good in the first place. Great question! Let’s try to answer it.

Like It or Not, the Show is a Part of the Great Sci-Fi Continuum

I personally don’t care for Star Wars, but there is no denying it’s an important link in a long chain of seminal sci-fi. The franchise carries within it traces of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, and has gone on to inspire a ton of sci-fi, Firefly very much included. Without Star Wars, Whedon might never have gotten the idea for a story about scruffy space rebels/smugglers (Browncoats) fighting against an evil empire (The Alliance) while flying around in rusting buckets of clanging spare parts held together with duct tape, prayer, and occasional blood sacrifices from all the western-style shootouts going on inside them. And warriors with vaguely-defined psychic abilities (River Tam)? Forget about it.

Not every movie or show with lasers and futuristic technology can lay claim to a spot in the Great Sci-Fi Continuum. If you ever meet a person who can name more than two characters from James Cameron’s Avatar, you just met James Cameron in a latex mask doing guerilla marketing for his next FernGully in Space sequel. Firefly, on the other hand, will live on in our pop-culture through shows like Defiance, Killjoys, and The Expanse, all of which will carry parts of Whedon’s vision into the future. And that will be a problem for some.

Yes, Joss Whedon Is Awful; That Doesn’t Mean So Is Firefly

The laundry list of accusations against Joss Whedon and his unprofessional behavior include such gems as calling pregnant women fat or bragging about making one writer cry twice during the same meeting. If that’s enough to make you denounce all-things-Whedon on principle, then I will personally harvest Jesus’ tears, brew coffee with them, and wish you godspeed. But let’s not fall into the trap of pretending that bad people only make bad art.

How beautiful the world would be if spotting evil was that simple, but it isn’t. Bad people are capable of creating good art. Salvador Dali defined surrealism for a large portion of the world while hitting women and supporting fascists. And Whedon, well, he’s a bully who made an enjoyable sci-fi show with likable characters, gripping mysteries, and a unique esthetic where he replaced the lack of sound in hard vacuum with western-style guitar twangs. But, to be fair, there’s a chance two of those things would have been ruined given enough time.

Maybe What People Really Love About Firefly Is Its Unrealized Potential

Firefly is only 14-episodes long and not all of them aired due to some spectacular rat-fornicating by Fox. That’s why Firefly doesn’t end as much as it stops. And that might also be a big reason for its continued popularity: it left so many questions answered. Who were the assassins in the blue gloves hunting River? Who was Derrial Book before becoming a Shepherd/priest aboard the spaceship Serenity? Did he steal his hair from Einstein during an epic time heist?

Fans didn’t have those answers, which made them potentially the most awesome things in the world. Then the tie-in comics came in and kind of ruined everything. Who were the assassins in blue gloves? According to Those Left Behind, they were… government assassins who wore blue gloves. As for Book, The Shepherd’s Tale explains that he was a resistance mole who achieved a high rank in the Alliance to sabotage their war effort. Not awful but a little underwhelming. The 2005 movie Serenity gave us some cool worldbuilding, including the origin of the insane space cannibals called The Reavers (results of a planetary-scale Tuskegee experiment gone wrong), but it also killed Wash the pilot (a fan favorite) and Book, the latter getting fatally wounded off-screen.

Given this, it’s possible that if Firefly ran for two to three full seasons, it might have succumbed to bad ideas like the time Willow from Buffy got catfished online by a medieval demon named Moloch.

Forget All That: Does Firefly Glorify the Confederacy?

So… are the Firefly Browncoats stand-ins for Confederate soldiers? They did fight against the unification of planets and their rhetoric sounds suspiciously like The Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Also, Joss Whedon straight up admitts that the 1974 novel Killer Angels, set during the American Civil War, inspired Firefly. But, Whedon clarified that what fascinated him about the book was the “minutiae of life” out on the frontier, and there is plenty of that on Firefly: just the daily lives of people from a futuristic… future, surviving on the edge of society. Also, even if the Confederacy was the first spark of inspiration for The Browncoats, that doesn’t mean the two are one and the same.

Philip K. Dick got the inspiration for the robots in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (later adapted as Blade Runner) from a diary of a Nazi officer stationed in Poland, who wrote: “We are kept awake at night by the cries of starving children.” The inhumanity of that sentence stayed with Dick and eventually morphed into an idea of a being that looks human but is not human. But does that make the replicants in Blade Runner Nazis? Does it make Roy Batty a straight up bad guy? I don’t think anyone who saw the movie could seriously make that argument.

I, however, will never condemn anyone for disavowing Firefly for having even a hint of a shadow of a fraction of a percent of the Confederacy in it. Because I’m not likely to be a victim of the people who still cling to its ideas in the 21^st century. I absolutely do not think that the main cast of Firefly is evil (that would be the fascist government who kidnaps and lobotomizes children) nor do I think that the series is racist in any way. But I would not be surprised if some racists liked it. If some people decide that that makes the show unwatchable to them, maybe we should all just stop trying to change their mind and instead recommend Farscape to them.