So, Sarah and I sat down and watched all of Firefly, and then we watched Serenity, courtesy of the Collector’s Edition of it I bought her at (not really) random, because I am a devious bastard like that. She’d like me to tell you all what I thought about it, so I will do so.

Short Version: Well, yeah, it was pretty good. Not All That, but pretty good.

Long Version:

Well, arright. I’ll skip the recap stuff, since if you don’t know what Firefly is by now, where the hell have you been living? Like I said, it’s pretty good. It is what it is, which is the first season of a TV show with a pretty good premise, which means that it’s going to be pleasantly uneven in places – mostly in the plot. For the most part, it’s episodic television at its finest. There’s an arc of sorts, mostly with River, but it never actually goes anywhere, and I was beginning to tire of it by the time we ran out of episodes. The plots in general were pretty obvious, I felt, and I’d seen most of them before in various permutations. Sort of like the first season of Highlander, you can tell it’s pretty good, but it’ll definitely get better in the next season, which was very true of Highlander, and if you count Serenity as season 2 of Firefly, true there, too.

OTOH, Firefly, like Highlander, gets saved from eternal enh by the characters, who are badass in the case of Highlander, and Shiny in the case of Firefly. I have not a bad word to say about any of them. They’re funny, they’re entertaining, and I’d watch them sit around a table any day, which in fact I have. In particular, River was intriguing (her arc just needed to go somewhere), the Mal/Inara subplot was great, Jayne stole every scene he was in, and Kaylee was, well, shiny.

Too, the worldbuilding was neat. Because it’s a space western, it is of course a huge ripoff of the post-American Civil War West, with the Alliance playing the Union, the Independents as more palatable Confederates turned random Western folk, and the Reavers as a rather more gruesome band of Indians. That said, it’s the details – the Chinese, the Guild, and what have you – that are really interesting.

As to Serenity, well… it’s a movie trying to be the second season of a TV show, and you can tell. On the one hand, the plot’s better, and it’s actually good and I didn’t see the reveal coming, which was great. We got see River hit some sort of brief conclusion, which was great. The bad guy was cool. OTOH, to get all of those, all the awesome character development stuff got cut ruthlessly in favor of moving the plot. Which sucked a whole lot.

So, yknow, it was pretty good. I’d wish there’d been more of it, because I think it could’ve really gone places, and surely anything that involves more good SF television is worth doing. That said, it’s a little hard for me to get worked up about there not being more of it. Maybe if I actually watched American TV (Firefly and Highlander are the only things I’ve seen this decade, and they’re on DVD), I’d care more. As it is, I can assuage my proto-anguish by watching some more Cowboy Bebop. Or Ghost in the Shell. Shows that have everything Firefly had, except they actually finished.

So, yeah. Worth the watch, but don’t (don’t don’t don’t) believe the hype.