WHY THE TELEVISION SERIES “FIREFLY” WAS DOOMED TO FAIL.
Right, yes, hello, first post and very much in the experimental phase, but hey ho.
Firefly. On the face of it, Firefly was a show with the perfect recipe for success; Joss Whedon, a talented cast, a large budget and a writer’s room that proved just how good they are on this very show. So, why was it cancelled after only 14 episodes? Well, in my opinion, this is why;
FLAWED CONCEPT
What!? I hear every brown coat in the verse cry out, but please, stay with me on this.
If we boil down all concepts to their most basic levels, we get good vs. evil every time. Without exception. This essentially means we have good guys and bad guys. Agreed? Good. In Firefly’s case, the good guys are our main cast of rogues and renegades and the bad guys are the Alliance. But here is where the concept becomes flawed because the alliance aren’t evil and our main cast aren’t doing anything.
Let’s compare Firefly’s Alliance to the evil empire from Star Wars. They are very similar in that they want to control the galaxy and impose their rule. Where they differ is in how they are portrayed on film. Stormtroopers, fighter pilots, technicians, Imperial Guard, and even Darth Vader himself, are all faceless drones. We forget they’re human. The only Imperial cast to have a face are the officers and they are all portrayed without any compassion for others.
Now let’s look at the Alliance. The few times we see them on board their star ships, we see them as normal people. There’s definitely an insidious presence at the top, but we never see it and we never see direct action from it. Even when the Alliance comes into conflict with our heroes, the Alliance are quite justified in doing so.
This presents the Alliance not as an evil empire but as the police of the galaxy. We have normal people doing a normal job, so how can we blame them for that? Obviously, the answer here is we’re not supposed to. It’s the faceless system that is the real bad guy. Or is it? Because all we see of the system (chiefly in episode ‘Ariel’) are good things; hospitals, cleanliness, order. Yes, we have a tough, no nonsense military force… but that doesn’t make them bad, rather it makes them good. Military forces and police are supposed to be tough, no nonsense, professionals, and they’re supposed to follow orders. In other words, the biggest mistake Firefly made is it didn’t show us enough of the real bad guys.
Let’s go deeper though and return to this good vs. evil concept, with another Star Wars comparison to boot. In Star Wars, the Emperor dies, the stormtroopers die, the death star explodes, no remorse is felt, everyone cheers. The only member of the Empire that we are supposed to feel sympathy for is Darth Vader and that’s only because he turned good at the end and ultimately saved the hero. This is important. This is Darth Vader (an evil guy) turning good. A bad guy becoming a good guy. Big tick there. Everyone likey very muchy.
For another example of bad guys becoming good, take Battlestar Galactica – the series that came about after Firefly’s failure. In Battlestar Galactica we have the faceless cylons who are basically as simple as you can get; robots wanting to kill humans. We also have cylons disguised as humans. The drama here is that the disguised humans start to feel compassion and question their orders. Bad guys becoming good. It’s a win-win because if the bad guy stays bad then that’s fine and acceptable and if they turn good then that’s a moral victory. We the audience pick up on this. It gets uncomfortable for the audience however when we see good guys doing bad things;
In Firefly, we see this aplenty, albeit not always directly, and it doesn’t sit well with a casual viewer. How can it? Think of the Nazi concentration camps in WW2. We all know how evil and despicable they were, but wait… we don’t like to think of the fact that the guards and the men following orders were normal people. And they were normal people following orders. In Firefly we have normal people following orders. We don’t identify them as bad guys because they’re not bad guys.
So, to sum up, the bad guys we see aren’t really bad guys. We don’t hate them. We don’t see them as a universal enemy. We don’t even see them as oppressive,
THE NEXT BLOG POST IN THIS SERIES – BORING HEROES
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