I don't like stuff that sucks: Firefly

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I hate Firefly. Google that phrase and you get some hits, but they're mostly variations on the theme of "I hate Firefly because it's so sublimely brilliant that it ruined science fiction for me forever, as nothing else can approach its transcendent genius. Watching Firefly was like experiencing the birth of my first child and eating a hot fudge sundae and having an orgasm all at the same time!"

This is something of a minority opinion, because among the geek community, saying you like Firefly is like saying you hate Jar Jar Binks or enjoy breathing air. I first heard about it when I was working at a mall book store. I met my friend Jen and her vervoid-loving husband Tom there, and I also met another friend named Kate. Kate was a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. HUGE. The way she talked about made me want to see it, despite how stupid the premise sounded. So I had a couple bucks to burn after my birthday one year and the Buffy Season 1 DVD was on sale, so I picked it up and we LOVED it.

 

Then Kate started telling me how Firefly was even better than Buffy. We had Netflix, so I moved the whole series to the front of my queue and eagerly waited for it to arrive. It came, (not soon enough) and I threw it into the DVD player and watched the first episode, and thought, "That was meh, but they were simply introducing the cast. ( If you've somehow avoided being exposed to Firefly, there are nine main characters: a priest with mysterious past, a dinosaur loving pilot who wears garish Hawaiian shirts, his tough ex-soldier wife, a space pirate who is Han Solo without everything that made Han appealing, a space hooker, a young doctor, his idiot-savant sister, a cutie pie mechanic and a moronic mercenary), Mal Reyolds is a Browncoat from the Space Confederacy. They lost the Space Civil War after they tried to secede, presumably because the Space Union told them they couldn't keep Space slaves on their Space plantations. Or some such shit.  It's a ridiculously literal space western. They have a fucking cattle drive. More on that when we get to the appropriate episode, but it was absurd.

So we wrapped up the pilot and started up the next episode. 

"It'll take off from here!" I thought.

It didn't.

I'm not saying it's all terrible. Some episodes were downright tolerable (Though Shindig was just about the worst piece of shit I've ever seen) It was...okay.I watched it at first, didn't see the point and was largely indifferent to it and only slowly grew to dislike it every time somebody mentioned it as a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. It was a space western. (or Western in Space, if you're my friend Eric).  It was a middle of the road sci-fi show, but its pedigree and the circumstances of its cancellation have elevated it to the status of sacred martyr and the wailing and gnashing of teeth that began when it was yanked eight years ago have not even begun to subside. 

People at the Eden Studio's (publisher of the Buffy RPG) boards have mentioned that Joss Whedon's dislike of large organizations tends to show itself in his work.  I think this is true, but seeing it stated so starkly like this made me think of  the scene from Alien: Resurrection (which he wrote) where the people on board the research facility are scanning the visiting space pirates for weapons with a handheld metal detector. They get to the pirate in a wheelchair, and he has some kind of sassy comment, like "Are you gonna scan me?" and they let him through, and later on, he assembles a wide variety of weapons for his fellow pirates, based on stuff that had been hidden in the chair. I imagined Joss Whedon pumping his fist in the air after writing that, "Yeah! Stickin' it to the Man!" 

To digress for a moment, my friend Karen loves giraffes.

Actually, she doesn't. But I tell everyone she does. I forget why I thought it would be funny, but I started telling everyone that she loves giraffes, so now people send her links to giraffe-themed gifts and I send her giraffe cards on her birthday and hide stuffed giraffes in her apartment whenever we come over to visit. Karen has accepted this mostly with good grace saying, "I am neither a giraffe lover or hater but I think I will end up hating them if this keeps up!"

That's how I feel about Firefly. It's mediocre. I could forget about it entirely if people would stop telling me how brilliant it is. I get random fans cruising by this blog to tell me how great it is and how much I suck because I don't appreciate it.

It wasn't terrible. It plays like the account of a Traveler campaign run by an indulgent high school freshman. The plans the crew of the Serenity come up with are something you might expect from a smart sixth-grader, not totally idiotic, but not really brilliant either, though presented in-universe as incredibly clever.
 
Rodney Dangerfield tells us "If you want to look thin, hang around with fat people". And likewise, the only way Mal can appear clever is if Joss dumbs down the rest of the 'verse.It's not that they're smart; it's that their opponents are idiots. It's the Constantine problem. John Constantine is the lead character in the Vertigo series "Hellblazer". He's a more or less normal guy from Liverpool with some magical powers, but he manages to triumph against more powerful foes because he's smart and ruthless. In the "Dangerous Habits" storyline, he learns he has lung cancer, so he sells his soul to three demon lords, and if they go to war over his soul, they'll tear the universe apart. He does it because he knows that none of them will back down, so they're forced to cure his cancer to save face. And it's kind of a clever plan, but it's not so clever that supernatural beings that having been buying and selling souls for literally millions of years should be surprised by it. Nobody's ever tried this before? Really?

So I don't hate Firefly. It's an entirely unremarkable sci-fi show. It's just overrated, and I just don't care. 

In fact, I care so little that I'm going to be writing about how much I hate each and every episode.