In this week’s Fandom Flashback, we hop aboard this Firefly and sail away on Serenity.

Fandom Flashbacks are a weekly Hypable feature that looks back at old shows (classic, vintage, and freshly dead) and takes our readers onto memory lane as we express our favorite moments, characters, and plots.

“I don’t care, I’m still free. You can’t take the sky from me.”

Created by Joss Whedon following his Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame, Firefly is a space western set in the 26th century aboard a transporter spaceship named Serenity.

In Firefly’s timeline, when humans used up Earth, they had to move on to a new solar system to terra-form new moons and planets for human habitability. The central planets where the elite and wealthy classes lived were adequately terra-formed, but the outer rim planets filled with the poor were left with a desolate landscape.

When the Alliance wanted to unify all of the planets under one rule, the outer-rim planets that wanted to remain independent fought back in a war. But after losing the war for indepence, the “Browncoats”, like Serenity’s Captain Malcolm Reynolds, were left trying to make a living as pioneers on the outskirts of the galaxy.

After acquiring his crew of fighters, a pilot, and a mechanic, Mal set off for the skies to find his freedom. The crew makes a living by smuggling stolen goods across planets. Along the way, they acquired a Companion for legitimacy, and ended up with a preacher and two fugitive siblings in tow.

Malcom Reynold’s Crew on Serenity is an odd assortment of thieves, runaways and adventurers who, for whatever reason, feel most comfortable aflight in the sky. And though they may often fight, by the end of the series, they’ve become a family, united by their distrust for the Alliance and their love for each other.

	Malcolm Reynolds The grumpy but loveable Captain of Serenity, Mal is a former “Browncoat” sergeant who fought during the Unification War. A petty thief and smuggler, Mal is still an honest and moral man defined by his loyalty towards his two true loves: his ship, and his crew.		Zoe Washburne The Captain’s most trusted and loyal friend, Zoe served under Mal during the Unification War, and is now Serenity’s second-in-command. A disciplined “warrior woman,” her calm and confident demeanor makes her a fierce fighter, but her soft side comes out around her goofy husband, Wash.
	Hoban Washburne Zoe’s head-over-heels-in-love husband and Serenity’s genius pilot, Wash is both the voice of reason and the voice of the audience amongst a crew that often has to live a life of extremes. Generally a quippy and light-hearted man, Wash is always sensible, and often advocates for nonviolent solutions.		Jayne Cobb A hired gun working for the Captain, Jayne puts on a selfish, brutish front, but occasionally allows his sensitive side to peek through. He isn’t afraid to be upfront and honest about the hard questions, and though the crew often questions his judgment and trust, he remains remarkably loyal to the Captain.
	Kaylee Frye Serenity’s genius mechanic, Kaylee is a sweet, cheery girl who genuinely loves and is genuinely loved by every member of the crew. Though often portraying a positive, childlike outlook on the world, she isn’t afraid to go after what she wants and conquer her crush on Dr. Simon Tam.		Inara Serra A registered Companion, Inara carries all of the dignity, elegance and compassion of a 26th century courtesan who has spent a lifetime perfecting the craft of comforting human loneliness. Her high education gives her high social standing, and affords the Serenity crew a degree of legitimacy.
	Simon Tam Once an elite medical researcher and top trauma surgeon, Simon gave up his career to protect River from the torture projects the Alliance were inflicting on her. Refined even in the outskirts of space, his selfless devotion to caring for his little sister has left him hiding on Serenity as the ship’s doctor.		River Tam A genius in every sense of the word, River is a remarkable child prodigy who the Alliance was attempting to turn into an unstoppable war weapon. The experiments have left her delusional and paranoid, and she frequently scares the crew with her erratic violence and apparent psychic abilities.
	Shepherd Book A Christian preacher, Shepherd Book is the moral compass of the Serenity crew, advocating for nonviolence and mercy. His back story is occasionally questioned, as he has superb fighting skills and an in depth knowledge of criminal and Alliance activities.		The Alliance The Serenity crew’s omnipresent antagonist, the Alliance is the authoritarian government that controls the known universe since the victory of the Unification War. Though their overall morality remains ambiguous, the Alliance is responsible for performing horrific mental experiments on River.

“You are a nice man, Captain. You’re always looking after us. You just gotta have faith in people.”

Though there’s an argument to be made for every one of Serenity’s crewmembers as the “best” character, there’s something special about Serenity’s champion and cheerleader, the brilliant, shiny mechanic, Kaylee.

A fan favorite both on the ship and in the show, Kaylee is in many ways the heart of the crew, consistently unifying them through love — as her unguarded nature allows her to be the only one who is able to love each and all of them, wholly and genuinely.

According to Joss Whedon, if Kaylee believes something, it is true.

A bright, positive young woman, Kaylee is able to be sincerely happy aboard Serenity because she genuinely loves the work she does on the ship, as well as everyone on it. She sees the beauty and good in each of them — even when they can’t see it in themselves.

Her childlike outlook on the world makes her bright and passionate. She delights in beautiful yet objectively tacky things, and wears her heart on her sleeve openly. Though Simon’s fancy clothes and elite education leave her feeling shy, she’s generally a confident, self-assured woman. Self-educated, her knowledge of mechanics is purely intuitive.

A peacemaker on the ship, Kaylee detests violence, but is always willing to go to the mat for her friends. She’s brave, but not fearless. Scrappy and resourceful, she holds the ship and the crew together with sheer love and strips of wire.

“I’m not on the ship. I’m in the ship. I am the ship.”

Every episode of Firefly’s all too short 14 episode run is a standout in it’s own way, peeling back another layer and revealing another mystery in the lives of Serenity’s crew. The finale of the series however, the remarkable Objects in Space is a true feat of television mastery: a bottle episode that both encapsulates the series, and expands the world to leave us wondering at what might have been.

Two things are essential in the perfection of this episode: the hero and the villain.

I aim to misbehave.”

Jubal Early is a monster in every contradiction of the word. Unlike most of Firefly’s villains, who usually come off as greedy aristocrats and goofy thieves, it’s implied that Early ultimately inflicts harm for the pleasure he gains from it. In the most shockingly terrifying scene in the series, we watch Early threaten to rape Kaylee while he waxes on about philosophy. And as he watches her plead through tears, her terror crippling her into submission, we recognize that this man is heartless.

And yet, in what makes him perhaps even more terrifying, we recognize that he is incredibly intelligent. A philosophic villain, he spouts out truths and anomalies, all the while absurdly asking, “Does that seem right to you?” And every once in a while, it stops us, as it does the crew, to wonder if in some bizarre way, this mad, cruel man makes sense in that he wants to push the world to ask the hard questions, even if he isn’t much interested in the answers.

He manages to be both horrific, and in his own way, classy — a gentleman villain in a world of petty thieves and corrupt government entities. His ability to rationalize and verbalize not only his own actions, but the inevitable actions of others makes him a master manipulator — even enlisting Simon’s “help” in his search to capture River.

SIMON: I don’t think my last act in this verse is going to be betraying my sister.
JUBAL EARLEY: You’re going to help me, because every second you’re with me is a chance to turn the tables. Get the better of me. Maybe you’ll find your moment. Maybe I’ll slip. Or, you refuse to help me, I shoot your brain out, and I go upstairs and spend some time violating the little mechanic I got trussed up in the engine room. I take no pleasure in the thought, but she will die weeping.

So, in a twist both eagerly welcomed and delightfully unexpected, the hero of the episode for once isn’t the cool-under-pressure Captain, but rather River, the flighty girl that everyone’s spent the series trying to protect. To see River as this unexpected hero at the end of the series is a contradiction to what we thought we knew about her all along, even as late as earlier in the same episode.

As the crew has spent the better part of the season finding River at turns irritating, pitiful, and eventually terrifying, she finally gets the chance to come into her own, and use her powers to protect those she loves. We, like the crew, come to not only understand more of River’s mentality, but to respect her as a survivor, as well as a brilliant woman. And once we’ve seen what she can do, even we can’t help but believe, like Simon, that perhaps it is true: as crazy as it seems, why couldn’t a mind like River’s finally mold itself into Serenity?

On Page 2: The best moment, the most emotional moment, and vote for your favorite episode!

“We gotta go to the crappy town where I’m a hero!”

Firefly is awash with quotable one-liners and quippy comebacks, but if there’s one episode that really amps up the absurd, it has to be the surprisingly hilarious, Jaynestown.

When Mal and the crew land on a poor planet on the outer rims of space, their perfect smuggling plan goes awry when they discover that Jayne Cobb is a local folk hero — complete with his own statue in the town square.

Adam Baldwin took the Jayne’s statue head after the episode finished filming, but when reshoots were needed they had to reattach it, leaving a visible crack.

The shock value of seeing a mounted, muddy Jayne Cobb statue is humor enough, but of course our witty crew supplement the absurd sight with a running commentary that gets straight to the heart of the matter.

SIMON: This must be what going mad feels like.
WASH: I think they captured him, though, you know? Captured his essence.
KAYLEE: He looks sorta angry, don’t he?
WASH: That’s kinda what I meant.
JAYNE: Oh hey, I got an idea. Instead of us hangin’ around playing art critic ’til I get pinched by the man, hows about we move away from this eerie-ass piece of work and get on with our increasingly eerie-ass day. How’s that?
MAL: I don’t know. This here’s a spectacle might warrant a moment’s consideration.
KAYLEE: Everywhere I go, his eyes keep following me…

As it turns out, Jayne was an accidental hero; when a smuggling job went bad a few years back, he was forced to throw all his money out of the ship… right in the middle of the mudder’s town square. So Jayne’s act of extreme selfishness became an anthem of hope for these forgotten and forsaken mud people, and when they realize their hero is back in town, they welcome him with a hero’s return — complete with his own legendary ballad.

Of course, because this is Firefly, a show that revels in emotional truths, the laughter doesn’t last forever. When Jayne’s old betrayed partner hunts him down, bent on revenge, a young mudder sacrifices himself for his hero. And while Jayne is left devastated that an honest man would die to save a lying thief, the message left behind is one of hope — the hope that even within our own selfish hearts, we have the capacity for heroism. “It ain’t about you, Jayne. It’s about what they need.”

When your miracle gets here, you just pound this button once, it’ll call back both shuttles.

A space saga with such high stakes is bound to leave its characters emotionally exhausted on a weekly basis, but the single most emotionally driven episode has to be the fan-favorite Out of Gas.

In Out of Gas, we traverse three different timelines, each as emotional as the next, though often for different reasons.

In the present, we struggle alongside a clearly dying Captain, as he fights for survival on a ship that’s falling apart in a flurry of sirens. We assume we are with him as he recounts the day’s events leading up to his sure demise, as well as his memories of how he met each of his beloved crewmembers.

We watch as he hires a highly-recommended Wash — despite Zoe’s apprehensions. We watch as he meets Kaylee in a less than ladylike fashion, and smile as he hires her on the spot. We watch as he works Jayne’s opportunistic nature, and switches him over to his side. And finally, we watch as the Captain meets his true love, Serenity, and dreams of flying her into the sky.

And finally, we watch in astonishment as the Serenity crew’s birthday celebration is horrifically interrupted with the realization that unless a miracle happens their way, they are all surely going to die. Kaylee stares helpless at the broken compression coil that can never be fixed. Wash breaks his usually lighthearted demeanor to break down over his dying wife. And through it all, the Captain keeps his calm, assuring his crew, and sacrificing himself in the hope that he can save them all.

I’m not on the ship. I’m in the ship. I am the ship.”

After Firefly’s all too short series run, the Serenity crew got a second life in the 2005 film Serenity, written and directed by ‘Firefly’ showrunner Joss Whedon.

The film takes place about a year after the series left off, and expanded the heroes’ backstory to answer many of Firefly’s questions – from Simon’s rescue of River, to the development of River’s powers, to the unintentional creation of the savage Reavers.

In the film, Summer Glau used a hybrid of Kung Fu, kickboxing and ballet to create a “balletic” martial art.

The story for Serenity is based on Joss Whedon’s original story ideas for what would have been Firefly’s second season. After the Serenity crew discover that the Alliance is using subliminal messages to trigger River into exposing herself, they are forced to go into hiding as The Operative begins killing off all of Mal’s allies to deny them a safe haven as they try and protect River.

They travel to Miranda, a planet that they believe will hold some answers, but discover only a wasteland — an experiment gone wrong by the Alliance. Thus, the renegade crew must simultaneously fight off both the Alliance and the Reavers to send out their message of truth into the verse.

The entire Firefly series is available to watch on Netflix and Hulu Plus! The DVD set also offers fun commentaries and special features for the devoted Firefly fan.

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