The Cult I Just Joined

Best sci-fi television drama ever, or damn near to it: Firefly. I have a confession to make: I have recently become one of the many obsessive fans of this prematurely-killed Fox series, probably the only unsuccessful television show ever to be reincarnated as a big time movie (the recently released Serenity). I completely agree with all the other junkies out there that what makes this story so great is the characters and their interactions. It's kind of like Friends set onboard the Millennium Falcon, but with a lot more action thrown in (and much smarter humor). But what's probably best about Firefly, in my view, is the intelligence of its vision of the future. There are plenty of inhabited planets in this particular sci-fi saga, but no implausibly human-looking aliens and no silly misunderstandings of the theory of evolution to justify their existence. In fact, the show pokes fun at those who hawk alien stories. On one of the planets the characters visit, a street crier claims, Roswell-like, to have a dead alien carcass on display that you can see if you pony up $$. Simon Tam, the doctor of the ship, checks it out and finds that it's just an upside-down cow fetus. Instead of Klingons, in Firefly the only bad guys in in the universe are our fellow humans who have gone bad in some way, becoming totalitarians on the one hand (the Alliance), or savages on the other (the Reavers). Indeed, Firefly achieves a perceptive depiction of cultural difference: On each planet visited, people have different customs, some ridiculous, some superstitious, some sublime. The characters, meanwhile, speak both English and Chinese, because those were the languages of two superpowers that had merged to control of Earth at the time when many people left it. Firefly is also open-minded about religion: The hero, Captain Malcolm Reynolds, is an apparent atheist, and in one episode there's a hilarious scene in which River Tam (the brilliant and crazy prodigy) tries to "fix" the Bible because it doesn't make any sense. And the show is gutsy: The plot-line of one episode, for example, featured a sultry combination of lesbian lovemaking and brutal torture. Anyway, enough reveling in my new obsession. Since we're all geeks here at ScienceBlogs, I hope you will forgive me. Moreover, considering that I've done quite a lot of bitching about crappy sci-fi and fantasy lately, it's about time I tried to be positive. To that end, I encourage you to check out both Firefly and (afterwards) Serenity, if you haven't already.