Firefly

In the wake of recent revelations that Joss Whedon is even worse than we knew, I have been in some lively conversations on Facebook, including one inspired by a post proposing an interesting Firefly reboot. I have muttered about picking up where we left off in animation, so that special effects and aging actors are not a problem, but this is more interesting.

you get rid of Mal completely and Zoe is the captain [so the] story now centers around a Black woman who escaped the Confederacy-analog and is trying to make a living in a hostile world

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I will second my friend’s comment on how central it is that Whedon wanted to do a Western, and inherited the need for something like the US Civil War in the backstory, and just did not reflect deeply enough on the particulars:

It’s because the Confederate-soldier-as-traumatized-cowboy thing is endemic in the whole Western genre — I mean, look at Clint Eastwood’s filmography alone. So many considered-classic Westerns have Confederate veterans as sympathetic characters and use it as a shorthand for “he got used up and had something to run from and is trying to find a new kind of identity.” (I wonder how much of that is an attempt to translate the emotional dynamics of ronin characters in Westerns adapted from samurai stories.) As someone fond of Westerns, it sucks.

All that is to say, I can see why someone thought translating that thing for a space Western was a good idea. The fact that they then went through with it instead of stopping right there speaks to who didn’t have voices or power in the writer's room, and who did.

And also I have a belief, informed by many of Whedon’s comments about the show, stuff we know about the production, and evidence in the show itself, that the original intent was that the Browncoat Independents, and most of the Serenity crew, and Mal in particular would be bad guys, with the Alliance as good guys. Not kinda sorta. In a committed way.

You see it in things Whedon has said about grappling with what he needed to find respect for in The Other Side of the US culture & politics split. (Recall that this was the early 2000s.)

You see this in how repugnant a figure Mal is in the pilot episode. I find it very telling that he goes out of his way to be rude to a priest and a prostitute; given the way that W’s cultural politics rhyme with my own, that is specially galling. I mean, the show will later point out in the text that the name “Mal” means bad.

You see this in how feature film introduces the crew to unfamiliar viewers with Jayne saying “let’s be bad guys” right before they rob a bank.

You see it in hints of how Book was a black ops spy before turning to the priesthood.

You see this in how much muttering we got from W and others involved about how early plans for the show were “much darker”.

But there was Network Meddling, of course, and that’s not just W justifying himself (though of course it is also that). One of the big things was that they demanded that Mal & the Serenity crew needed to be “more likable”, and on reflection it is clear that the suits were kind of right. The charms of the show we got, the things most fans love, are unmistakably illuminated by that turn.

Had W really held full control, as he did with Dollhouse, I imagine that it would have been a lot like … Dollhouse: dark and strange and gutsy and perverse and morally upsetting and full of W’s poisons, with Mal clawing his way to some kind of strange Whedon-y redemption over several seasons. I imagine that the fan reception would have been similar. Even most Whedon fans dislike Dollhouse, for very good reasons.

But this change also gave us a Broken Aesop. Mal and his crew and the legacy of the Browncoats are played too much as Lovable Rogues With Hearts Of Gold for their position and backstory to make sense, narratively or morally. So there is a very weird tension in these characters being Big Damm Heroes.

Plus speaking from a long history of being a Relative Whedon Apologist ... remaining one even now, as I insist that Whedon must be understood both as a monster and yet also in an important way despite that, yes, a feminist ... and even being willing to make a spirited defense of Dollhouse as an unholy creation bathed in Whedon's poisons but nonetheless possessing some significant virtues for which we must credit Whedon ... let me say that:

• Inara’s characterization is probably the most unforgivable, indefensible unforced error in the whole of Whedon’s oeuvre, which is saying a lot
• River is the Whedon Waifish Badass who works best; he has said that the idea behind River was that she would be the Hero, the Damsel, and the Monster all at once and hey, there is something powerful in that, but he got those moves dialed in by letting his personal kinks bring him back to the Crazy Waifish Badass well so damm many times that … ew