TV Talk

Would you believe that I still haven't managed to catch the season premiere of Enterprise? I was hanging out with a friend on Sunday, shooting the shit, and completely lost track of time. Sigh. Fortunately, in this town it's easy enough to find someone who got it on tape...

I did see the first episode of Firefly, though, and am feeling quite well disposed towards it. It is very much an outer-space Western, which rather appeals to me. I've always been fond of stories which cross or blend different genres, and, while I'm not a huge fan of Westerns per se, there is something about them that meshes very well with science fiction. It doubtless has something to do with that whole "frontier" thing. Anyway, it seems to work pretty well in this case.

Visually, the show is fairly impressive: very pretty special effects for the space shots and an authentically grungy look for everything else. The plot was OK: an action-adventure/heist story with an interesting ethical dilemma thrown in. Nothing super-special, but interesting enough to keep my attention.

But the characters, of course, are the most important thing. I'm afraid we don't get much of a chance to get a good handle on the rather large crew over the course of this one fast-paced hour, but I do get the feeling that they at least have the potential to be very interesting. I already like the captain; he seems to be the type of likeable-rogue character that I generally appreciate. And the dialog is fairly sharp, which is no more than you would expect from the creator of Buffy.

All in all, a show with definite potential, and I'm looking forward to seeing more of it and to getting to know these people better.

You know something that I find really interesting, though? It seems to me that the concept of a ragtag band of misfits and/or criminals flying around the galaxy in a spaceship has become the new main paradigm of science fiction TV. It is, after all, part of the premise behind Farscape, Andromeda, Lexx, and now Firefly. I imagine that this is largely beacuse everyone is making a deliberate attempt to do something other than the Star Trek formula, where everybody is shiny and happy and heroic and always gets along with everybody else. (Although even Star Trek chose to partially abandon this formula for something slightly more akin to the "gang of misfits" thing with Deep Space 9, with surprisingly good results.) But in consistently attempting to avoid the Trekkish cliche, today's SF shows seem to be busy building up a brand new cliche of their own.

Not that I'm complaining. I like misfits. Plus, this just goes to confirm my belief that Blake's 7 -- which featured, yes, a gang of criminal misfits flying around the galaxy on a spaceship -- truly was 20 years ahead of its time. (Speaking of Blake's 7, I did notice that Firefly featured a couple of lines of dialog that were word-for-word identical to an exchange in the B7 epsiode "Orac": "Nice shot."/"I was aiming for his head." I'd like to think that Whedon is a B7 fan and shamelessly stole the dialog from Blake and Avon, but in reality it's much more likely that they were both stealing from the same source material. I believe it was actually a variant on a line from The Magnificent Seven, in fact.)