In this week’s video, I react to the 2005 film Serenity and the Firefly series that preceded it. What did it get right? What did it get wrong? Is Serenity the coolest ship in the Galaxy or what? Let’s dive in.
Time marks:
0:00 – Intro
1:01 – Overview
3:01 – Earth That Was
6:46 – Our Star Pupil
8:24 – Paralysis
9:19 – Oh God Oh God We’re Going To Die
11:40 – Going All Bibbledy
13:09 – A Smaller Star System
14:32 – It’s the Pax
18:29 – Making People Better
22:20 – Silent Guns
23:09 – Somebody Fire!
25:12 – Review
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One of my most favorite movies! Good breakdown dude!
This series and movie was my second favorite after B5
Everything is good… but why they have artificial gravity on their ship? ;-P
If you do a powered reentry (that takes a lot of delta-v we can't produce nowadays), won't the entire maneuver be a lot less dramatic? Without the burning envelope around the ship?
Which reminds me of the short lived SF show Salvage 1 (1979), starring Andy Griffith. The premise was of an enterprising junkyard owner that builds a spaceship to salvage the gear left on the moon by the Apollo program. Ridiculous on the face of it, but IIRC, they did an ok job of selling the entire idea. Worth checking forthe scientific insights, I think.
Love the show. Dumbest decision in TV history to cancel it. However, a single solar system with "dozens of planets and 100's of moons…"? OK, but how can they ALL be in the habital "Goldylocks" zone?
I'm very much in the minority here: I loved Babylon 5 and Star Trek, but after watching the first episode of Firefly, never wanted to watch another. I found Reynolds just too unpredictable; I couldn't follow a leader who would lie to a doctor that their patient had died, among the other foolish things he did.
However, I enjoyed your review, as always 🙂
I'm intrigued that they say "dozens" in plural… especially if they're all/several terraformed.
Loved Firefly! Now do The Expanse! 🙂
Mike, I liked this one a lot.
Have you covered any of Ronald D. Moore’s Battlestar Galactica series? I’d love to see your take on it.
0:55 there's an anime called Tenchi Muyo which has very strange starships. Would you do a video on that?
It's looking alot like a reboot is coming, except it's Disney. They have a bad habit of mucking everything up.
Firefly does actually have completely silent space. The movie deviates from this.
Thanks for this review Michael. I am a big fan of Firefly, and I love it for the same reasons. NO FTL and Joss Weadon invented the ‘Verse so it was grounded in reality. The space sequences don’t have sound, and travelling to another planet or moon takes weeks. Of course, all of this is background to the characters and the “space western”, and it IS a shame it was cancelled after 12 aired episodes (don’t worry future fans, all 14 are on the BlueRay.) The movie, conversely, I have issues with, and most of this is timeline. Originally, Joss Weadon planed this to be a seven-season arc, and thus when he was given the chance to make the movie, six seasons of stories had to be jam-packed into 120 minutes. So the movie suffers. Never-the-less, it’s still a good end to the story, but I feel the series is better.
Oh and for those who have watched the show, consider something Joss Weadon said. Good guys don’t wear hats. Bad guys wear hats. Sometimes, Jayne wears a hat….
I always imagined the star system of the Firefly universe as a multi-star system. It would allow for more planets and moons to be terraformed, and the stars could be relatively close to one another, allowing for slower-than-light travel to those many planets.
The amalgamation of English and Mandarin plus the mixture of cultures from around the earth is another one of Joss Whedon's main points in his building of this universe….
I think it was a generational ship, it one of the novels they find one of the old arks that came from earth.
Like you I loved Serenity. Unlike you, I haven't yet seen Firefly. So much sci-fi, so little time….
There are 2 RPGs, one based on the movie, one based on the TV series, there are novels… yeah. Lots of fan stuff.
In the Firefly RPG Core Book, it describes the system the Humans have settled in… it's a Star System with 12 Stars. The map and descriptions are on page 14 and 15.
The central star is referred to as White Sun, it's named Bai Hu. This star is the, more or less, center of the system. The star Qin Shi Huang between the 7th and 9th planetary orbits of Bai Hu. The star Lux is between the 11th planetary orbit and an asteroid belt of Bai Hu. Lux is has a slight tilt to its orbit around Bai Hu.
The next two stars to orbit Bai Hu are Huang Long (Georgia) and Zhu Que (Red Sun) which share their orbit; in the picture presented they are orbiting on opposite sides of Bai Hu. Huang Long has one companion star, Murphy, which is past the 13th planet in a tilted orbit. Zhu Que has two companion stars, both outside of the 8th planetary orbit, and both have tilted orbits… tilted in in opposite directions (their highest point of their orbit is opposite of each other)
The next closest major star to Bai Hu is Xuan Wu (Kalidasa). It has a smaller star Penglai orbit between the 10th and 11th planetary orbits.
The furthest major star from Bai Hu is Qing Long (Blue Sun). It has a companion star Burnham which is beyond the 7th planetary orbit.
I'm no Astrophysicist, but, if you want to figure out how long it will take for this 12 star system to break apart, you may do so. Sorry for ruining the system for you, but multi-stellar star systems do happen… although the highest I heard of was 9 stars. To be somewhat fair, a lot of the secondary stars appear to be red dwarfs.
That said, Bai Hu has 11 planets and 21 moons. Quin Shi Huang has 1 planet and 2 moons. Lux has 2 planets and 3 moons. Huang Long has 14 planets and 27 moons. Murphy has 3 planets and 9 moons. Zhu Que has 7 planets and 15 moons. Himinbjorg has 4 planets and 9 moons. Heinlein has 4 planets and 5 moons. Xuan Wu has 17 planets and 31 moons. Penglai has 3 planets and 9 moons. Qing Long 7 planets and 16 moons. Burnham has 1 plant and 1 moon.
The total number of planets* is 74. The total number of moons is 148. This does support the statement, of over 200 inhabitable planets and moons.
Note: Not all planets are terrestrial, a few are gas giants. All named moons, I presume, are somewhat inhabitable.
*Miranda is the planet orbiting Burnham
I hope I didn't ruin your enjoyment of such a good series!
"What was that?! Was that the primary buffer panel? Did the primary buffer panel just fall of my gorram ship for no apparent reason?!"
Where does Galaxy Quest fall into your rankings? Or fail into them?
That was a really fun review. Thank you 😊
An uncaring government viewing its citizens as assets and testing drugs on them….. why does this sound familiar? Lol
So, fun fact, I was one of the founding members of the local chapter of Browncoats in my area, campaigning to bring back Firefly after it was cancelled. When they finally started making the movie, we were invited to an early test screening of the film, in which they hadn't even finished the CGI effects yet. Also, Adam Baldwin was there, and I got to meet him, talk to him a bit, and take a couple photos. Very fun stuff.
The thing I remember most from that night, though, is the scene when Wash died. One of the women from our group absolutely LOST it. She was screaming, crying, sobbing. She was utterly inconsolable. She was reacting as if she had just seen her own child die. They actually had to stop the movie, and gently escort her out, so the rest of us could finish it. I think that is the best example I've ever seen of how endearing and affecting these characters were. In less than half a season, we utterly fell in love with all of them. It's just the greatest testament to the writing and performances of this series that I could possibly imagine.
20:00 Mandates. Minitru. Vaccine passports. Cancellation. Hate speech.
Wouldn’t Earth itself be the most logical choice to terraform? If you can terraform a different planet you can do it to the Earth.
Loving your videos – they're fun and informative – if you're taking requests – how about Space:1999, BSG and BSG original? Also, I know Farscape is more fantastical but that one would be great too. Thanks for all of the effort you put into these – I really appreciate it.
Sadly enough, we are in a new cycle of 'making humans better', a new try of defeating human nature. That's what woke ideology in the end is, and it's exactly as destructive as previous tries.
Creating the conditions where people better themselves is a great idea, and it works. I would suggest "The better Angels of our nature" by Steve Pinker for this subject.
Gravity plates are a bit of an absurdity.. but if you are going to have them why not explore what that means? At one point someone makes a joke about a small moon.. it seems sensible that these worlds were all different sizes, but in that case they would all have different gravities and some would never hold atmosphere.
If gravity plates are real though, maybe you can terraform a world of any size. Maybe some of those small moons really were tiny, eg the size of Enceladus or Ceres.
One thing we could have that is a bit like instantaneous communication is these AI web bots programmed to emulate individual people. We could get used to the idea that they are not really sentient but are reliable enough to negotiate the skeleton of contracts for us etc.
There's a ton of things to like about this movie, but I think my favorite – which you didn't spend much time on, unfortunately – is the character of the Operative. They managed to craft a villain that is simultaneously a complete monster and yet somehow still sympathetic (or at least comprehensible). The Operative sees himself as the hero of the story, and his actions as a grim necessity. The logic that drives him doesn't require any madness, blinding anger, brain worms, or dark side of the force to explain it; Just a soldier's sense of duty and a commitment to do whatever is necessary. And the resolution of the conflict comes not with our hero killing him in dramatic fashion, as satisfying as that might have been, but by simply showing him that the high ideals to which he's dedicated his life are fundamentally flawed.
Take my love. Take my land. Take me where I cannot stand. I dont care. I'm still free. You can't take the sky from me.
the heat is generated because the speeds they have to stay in orbit and shutels and capsules don't have the fuel to slow down and use the atmosphere to brake if you have a propulsion system that allows you to slow down there is no need to use the atmosphere to brake and there will no flames
the prohibition was to stop cars using ethanol as fuel Cambodia was heavily dependent on food supplies from the US that stopped all those supplies after the Vietnam war but we can not say that all those people died because of that
I bought the DVDs of Firefly on a whim also. It turned out being one of my favorite shows. The movie is also an underrated gem.
https://youtu.be/LbOn9r9TLPY?t=935
LOL wut?
They give SSRIs out like candy on Halloween and the "experts" can't explain how they work in the real world.
Patient, "I have suicidal tendencies."
A doctor that is trained to prescribe medicine and never treat the actual problem, "Take these SSRIs. But the side effects are you may have suicidal thoughts. By the way, you should not quit taking these SSRIs or you may have suicidal thoughts."
Patient, "Then what is the point of the SSRIs?
Doctor, "LOL, IDK! I am a doctor so you must listen to me. I can not be wrong, despite medical malpractice is the third leading cause of death!"