Name: firstknt Date: September 18, 2008 Words: 784 words in MS Word Number: z-4-1-6-24 Subject: My Favorite TV Show - Firefly ============================================================================== My Favorite TV Show - Firefly Take my love, take my land, Take me where I cannot stand. I don't care, I'm still free, You can't take the sky from me... The first few verses of the theme song perfectly capture the essence of my favorte TV show, "Firefly." It's a story about a group of people living on a spaceship, finding work and trying to be free when the odds seem to be stacked against them. "We live in a space-ship, dear." Firefly is a fictionaly sci-fi series set in the near future, where people have left Earth and founded new worlds by terraforming them to be suitable for human life. There were many that formed the Alliance which deemed that all planets should join their rule, but there were others which refused and in the end, a great war called the Unification War was fought and the Independents lost. They moved to the outer fringes, away from Alliance control and sought to get by with the simplest tihngs, a ship for work, and a gun to keep it. "Serenity is not le-se!" The title "Firefly" comes from the class of ship that the protagonists travel in. It's a medium-sized transport with a bulbous engine in the back that "lights up" like a firefly when the ship accelerates. The ship is also capable of atomospheric flight, with VTOL engines that swivels down for landing and take off and reverts back to flight position for flying. But it's no the ship that makes the show, it's the people. "It sounds like the sort of thing this crew can handle." The crew is led by Captain Malcolm Reynolds, known as "Mal." He was a "browncoat", a euphemism for the Independents who fought in the Unification War. He survived the bloody "Battle of Serenity Valley" which marked the losing tide for the Independents and named his ship "Serenity" using the Chinese characters "Ning-Jing." One person who knows the captain longer than anyone else is Zoe, a "warrior women" who served who Mal in combat and is now married to Wash, the crazy pilot with astonishing skill. There's Jayne, the dim-witted, over-sexed muscle whose accidental charity caused a village to raise a statue in his name. And there's a shepherd named Book, well versed in dealings with the underworld and the Alliance, whose spiritual guidance is welcomed by the crew but shunned by Mal, who did believe in God but lost all faith after the war. Inara, a beautiful companion of expectional grace adds much lack legitimacy to the ship due to her high social status as a courtesan. She and Mal have much unspoken romantic tension throughout the series. And to keep the ship flying, there's the cute and always cheerful Kaylee who's the ship mechanic. She harbors a crash on Simon, a doctor, who is on the run from the Alliance along with his odd younger sister, River. "I aim to misbehave." The series start where Mal and his crew pick up some passengers, including Simon and his sister, who is hidden in a cryogenic crate. The brother and sister duo are on the run from the Alliance after Simon rescued River from a high-security facility that was experimenting on River's physic abilities. While River was there, in addition to being conditioned to become a physic and an assassin, she learned a terrible secret of the Alliance, which is trying to find and kill her to prevent it from coming to light. The crew, in addition to scraping for jobs and fighting off villains now have to be extra deft from evading the Alliance. The show lasted only fourteen episodes, but each one brought the audience closer to the crew and their struggles. Fox Network, which hosted the show, couldn't see the gem that it was and cancelled it after just half a season, but the fans who called themselves "browncoats" were more than your run-of-the-mill audience. They bought Firefly DVDs for themselves and their friends and pushed it quite a few times to the top sales ranks on Amazon.com. Later on, due to popular support, there was a feature-length movie, aptly named "Serenity," that picked up right where the TV show left off and took the fans on the wildest ride this side of the universe. "Shiny. Let's be bad guys." I love the show because of the witty dialogue, the colorful characters, and the intriguing story. I find the "wild-west in space" setting quite original and the essence of the series, the yearning for freedom, as something that resonates deep within me. Although the show is gone and the movie is no on DVD, I always think of the crew and the ship, a firefly in the black. ============================================================================== Notes: 1. The sentences listed in quotation marks before the paragraphs are quotes from the TV show. 2. There is quite a bit of Chinese used in the show, such as the name of the spaceship itself, using the Chinese characters 宁静 (note: simplified), and the swear words that are uttered by the cast. The reason for this is that the creator, Joss Whedon, thought of a universe where the two dominant cultures were American and Chinese. --

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