He is careful to assemble a crew he both trusts and can dominate. His second in command, Zoe, is so devoted to him that she seldom seriously questions him; if any of the others have the temerity to suggest that he might be wrong, Mal quickly reminds them that it’s his ship, and they are never to dispute his orders. The fact that his history as a commander is checkered at best does not matter to him. What matters is never letting anyone be “the boss of me” again.
This is the Malcolm Reynolds we met at the beginning of the series.10 His wit and humor made him entertaining, but his hard edge kept us, and the other characters, at a distance. The series and subsequent film gradually close that gap, until Mal can at last drop his guard completely, as he does with River in the film’s final moments.
Can I make a suggestion that doesn’t involve violence, or is this the wrong crowd for that?
-WASH, Serenity
Mal is comfortable to an unhealthy degree with violence. Although he does not appear to be physically intimidating (he’s neither overly muscular nor towering), he can take a punch like no one this side of Bruce Campbell in his prime, and his military training allows him to compensate for any lack of size or brute force with tenacity and smarts. In his line of work these qualities are assets, and he’s not above killing people for no more than the sake of expediency, as when he kicked Crow into the engine at the end of “The Train Job,” or shoots the Alliance survivor trying to surrender at Haven in Serenity. Although these moments are played in entirely different ways (the first comedic and the second to illustrate Mal’s wrath), they both spring from childish impulses not controlled by maturity. Death is never casual, and should never be used by an ostensible hero simply to illustrate a point. Allowing Mal to initiate death in this way shows him to be severely, if not fatally, flawed.
But on occasion, Mal successfully fights his violent impulses. In “Trash” he didn’t kill Saffron even though he knew she would likely cause him more trouble in the future. He fails to kill Niska in “War Stories,” even after the gangster literally tortured him to death. In “Heart of Gold,” he did not kill Burgess even though he had a personal, and justifiable, reason to do so.
This contradiction implies that Mal only sees people with whom he’s interacted as people. Those to whom he has no emotional connection, whether love or hate, are fair game, but if Mal gets to know them, even as enemies, he cannot arbitrarily kill them. Although this still results in a high body count, it is a step toward maturity, and leads to the final commitment to strangers Mal makes in Serenity.
Mal may not kill an acquaintance casually, but he’s not above physically brutalizing them to keep them in their place. He often punches and threatens his ostensible friends, especially if they have the temerity to disagree with him. Caught between adulthood and adolescence, he is grown-up enough to admit he’s not always right, yet still childish enough to insist everyone play by his rules in his backyard. The struggle leads to repeated instances of physical confrontations with his friends, with only Zoe immune from his wrath. He punched Simon in the first episode,11 surely one of the most childish things he’s been shown doing, asserting his schoolyard authority over the new rich kid. The bookend of this is found in Serenity, when Simon decks Mal for putting River in danger. By this point everyone is standing up to Mal, disputing his much-vaunted authority and showing him the limits of his adolescent people skills, but Simon has made the greatest journey, from quivering fear of Mal to utter disregard: when Mal warns him about giving ultimatums on “my ship,” Simon continues as if Mal had not even spoken.
Mal lives a violent existence in a violent world, but must learn to separate his professional self from his role as head of Serenity’s family. Since violence is always expedient and sometimes speed is essential, the challenge for a ship’s captain is even harder. But Mal discovers that respect is a far greater motivator than fear.
[Sings] My love for me ain’t hard to explain. The hero of Canton, the man they call . . . me.
-JAYNE, “Jaynestown”
To see where Mal could end up if he remained locked in this adolescent mode, you only have to look at Jayne Cobb. Jayne is Mal writ large and crude, with all his sociopath tendencies given free reign. Mal will kill strangers with no regrets; Jayne will kill anybody with no regrets. Mal puts the arbitrary conceits of “ship” and “crew” ahead of personal consideration, often not seeming to realize these terms represent actual human beings; Jayne puts himself first, not caring that anyone else might be a human being. He was bribed to join Mal’s crew, and was not above selling out crew-mates in “Ariel.” His loyalty is entirely based on money and fear.
What separates Mal from Jayne is the very self-awareness that forces Mal toward emotional adulthood. Jayne, so self-absorbed he often only knows he’s the butt of a joke when everyone else starts laughing, will never have this quality. Perhaps that’s the real reason Mal keeps Jayne aboard; surely armed muscle isn’t that hard to acquire among the outer settlements they frequent. Jayne may serve as his personal moral barometer, alerting Mal to his own excesses before they can get out of hand. If Jayne believes something is a good idea, Mal knows to stop and think about it some more.
In the film Serenity, Jayne is the one who, at last, brings up the one undeniable fact about Mal’s past. When Mal insists on a dangerous, profit-less mission and demands the crew’s loyalty because, as always, it’s his backyard, Jayne challenges him with the question, “How many men in your platoon came out of [Serenity Valley] alive?” Significantly it’s not Mal but the loyal Zoe who stands up to Jayne, while Mal does and says nothing. Jayne’s point, that blindly following Mal could very easily get them all killed, is undeniably true; and to accept it, and move past it, is Mal’s greatest challenge.
In the episode “The Message,” we met another “alternate” Mal: Tracey, a former soldier who served with Mal and Zoe in the rebellion. Like Mal, he hid his serious side behind a flip exterior and after the war drifted into crime and smuggling, only without the benefit of a ship (he smuggled experimental internal organs in his own body). Yet unlike Mal, he didn’t catch the same breaks that have clearly favored Reynolds from the first moments we saw him. Mal possesses two qualities Tracey lacked: intuition and luck.
Mal is a far better intuitive judge of people than Tracey, although (as “Our Mrs. Reynolds” ably demonstrated) he’s certainly not infallible. Still, it’s hard to imagine him making the blatant mistakes that led to Tracey’s death. Tracey failed to accurately anticipate the reactions of both his enemies and allies, something Mal excels in doing. By the end Tracey recognized this as his fatal flaw.
And “lucky” might not be the first adjective that springs to mind to describe Mal. But from the first scene of the first episode, he was clearly protected from an arbitrary and pointless fate. As he gazed up at the descending Alliance warships, the soldier beside him was shot down; Mal, oblivious to the danger or the death, continued to stare, just as exposed to enemy fire as the dead man, yet he emerged unscathed. In flashbacks to their time in battle, both Tracey and Mal behaved carelessly, even recklessly; Zoe saved Tracey, but only luck, or fate, saved Mal.
Tracey had no such luck (or savior) when they met again. Each decision he made turned out to be wrong, based on misunderstanding (and the fact that he didn’t blindly trust Mal). Mal was clearly affected by his death: there, but for the grace of the God not welcome on his ship, goes him. But one wonders if Mal really understood how similar he and Tracey were; when Tracey said, “Wasn’t never no good at life, anyhow. Couldn’t seem to make sense of it. Always running scared . . .” he could just as easily have been speaking about Mal as himself.
Mercy is the mark of a great man. [He stabs Atherton in the side.] Guess I’m just a good man. [Stabs him again.] Well, I’m all right.
-MAL, “Shindig”
Throughout the series there were glimmers of Mal’s growing discontent with his own approach to life, most notably in his relationship with Inara. Although he referred to her as a
“whore,” disparaged her lifestyle, and generally hid his obvious attraction to her from himself (if no one else), there were many instances when he took painful steps based on her guidance and example. She was, of course, completely familiar with the territory: after she helped a young man lose his virginity, he asked, “Aren’t I supposed to be a man now?” She replied, “A man is just a boy who’s old enough to ask that question.”
To keep that question at the fore of Mal’s thoughts, she continually punched holes in his juvenile “manly man” self-image. In “Shindig,” Mal insisted that he never backs down from a fight, to which she responded, “Yes, you do! You do it all the time!” In “Heart of Gold,” when Mal asked if Inara would “stoop to being on my arm,” she replied, “Will you wash it first?” When Mal found himself dueling for Inara’s honor and tried to blame it on her “society,” also in “Shindig,” she fired back, “You never follow the rules, no matter what society you’re in! You don’t even get along with ordinary criminals either, which is why you are constantly getting in trouble!”
Oddly, the man who should have been providing Mal with both guidance and an example, Shepherd Book, had few significant encounters with him. Book, a Brother Cadfael-like man of God with a dark secular past, is very under-developed in the series and film, no doubt a casualty of the series’s brief run. His few exchanges with Mal consisted of set-up moments for Mal to demonstrate his disillusionment. Most pithily, Mal told Book, “You’re welcome on my boat. God ain’t” (“The Train Job”). In fact, Book really discussed his beliefs only with River, in a scene from the episode “Jaynestown” notable for its sheer awkwardness.12
MAL: You know . . . they walk just as fast if you lead ’em.
JAYNE: I like smackin’ ’em.
-“Safe”
So what events mark Mal’s moments of change? When does the overgrown boy become the sadder, wiser man?
Obviously the Battle of Serenity Valley marked the end of his childhood, if not childish, idea of independence. The larger “adult” world simply will not allow him to make his own rules and behave however he wants. However, his reaction to this universal truth indicated his refusal to outgrow his failed ideals; instead, he created a microcosm-his ship-where these ideals could still function.13
Mal insisted the stolen drugs be returned to the miners in “The Train Job,” a standard-issue noble gesture used early in the series to indicate Mal’s basically decent nature. It showed an aspect of his personality not seen again until the film Serenity: the idea that he owes something to people he doesn’t really know. By refusing to profit from their misery, he clued the audience in to the maturity at his core struggling to express itself.
In “Our Mrs. Reynolds” he refused to bed the eager Saffron. The moment that really said something about Mal was that he steadfastly, if shakily, resisted her charms until she switched from offering herself to him, to asking for his attention to her. Only when he believed he was granting her a kindness she sought, rather than taking a gift she offered, did he give in to her entreaties.
In “Heart of Gold,” Mal had a sincere romantic liaison with a friend of Inara’s, who was then killed by the episode’s villain, Rance Burgess. Mal chased Burgess down, beat him up, but didn’t kill him, despite having both emotional and rational motives to do so. He did allow him to be killed in cold blood, but he did not pull the trigger himself. The implied rationale within the episode is that a) the other killer had a prior claim on Burgess, and b) Mal might have enjoyed it too much. But taken as part of his progression toward maturity, it shows that Mal understands at least a little that enjoying killing is wrong.
In the final moments of “Objects in Space,” River asked for permission to return to the ship. Mal granted it with a smile by saying, “You know, you ain’t quite right.” After fourteen episodes where River’s presence was often questioned, and the option of turning her in for the reward given serious thought, this represented Mal’s first acceptance of her as a real member of his crew, and broke the ice for his later acceptances in the film Serenity.
It wasn’t all forward progress, though. Like all of us, Mal won’t give up old behavior patterns without a fight and falls back on them in moments of stress. After the massacre at Haven, Mal commits a massacre of his own by shooting an Alliance pilot who tries to surrender. He does this to make a point, the same reason he kicked Crow into the engine. He wants his crew to know he’s serious, and to emphasize that he also threatens to shoot them. In his state of mind at the time he certainly seems capable of it, much as John Wayne seems genuinely determined to kill Montgomery Clift in Red River. This is the final last gasp of the old immaturity, before the revelations at Miranda force a different action.
During the trip to Miranda, there is a short, wordless scene where Mal, alone in the depths of Serenity, shows how affected he is by the recent tragedy. He can drop his façade to this degree only with his ship, the one thing he fully, totally trusts. The audience knows what he’s thinking about, but not what he’s actually thinking. I believe that, in these few silent moments, he’s realizing that all his old ways of acting and behaving, of all the arbitrary lines he’s drawn for himself and others, simply don’t function without a staggering cost he’s no longer prepared to pay. He must find something new within himself, and fast.14
When they reach Miranda and Mal comprehends the true horror of what’s happened, he knows something must be done. In part it’s his standard revenge impulse, since only by striking back can he supposedly give meaning to all the deaths surrounding the secret. But there’s a larger altruistic impulse, not really seen since the climax of “The Train Job,” that leads him to undertake a mission for which there is no profit, either monetary or personal. In an extraordinary speech he tells the crew (whom he’d threatened to kill to get them to even go to Miranda), “I’m asking more of you than I have before” (emphasis mine). For the first time in fourteen episodes and a two-hour feature, he does not order his crew to undertake a dangerous mission based solely on his own judgment, or threaten them with violence or abandonment if they disagree. He treats them with the respect of equals, and as a result, they stand with him of their own free will. For a man terrified of losing again as he did at Serenity Valley, this is a moment of real change, when he understands that the things he fears losing most (the people who mean something to him) are beyond his control. He can only be honest with them now, and hope they understand the importance of what he wants to do.
The fact that they do (symbolized quite wonderfully by the passing of a bottle from which they all take a drink) rewards his trust in a way that must touch him deeply. In fact, when he next speaks to them in a non-crisis situation, he is kind, concerned, and unafraid to show his softer side, as he does in the final scenes with Zoe, Inara, and River. He has grown, and grown up. Mal becomes a true hero not just for slaying the dragon before him, but the one within him as well.
You want to meet the real me now?
-MAL, “War Stories”
No discussion of Malcolm Reynolds is complete without mentioning the actor who embodied him, Nathan Fillion. Without the inherent intelligence and decency he brought to the part, Mal would have been an insufferable bastard and no one would have cared what happened to him. Fillion’s edgy, meaningful portrayal gave Captain Reynolds a surprising level of subtlety, and the depths of pain and fear beneath the bluster made it unfortunate we never got to know him better.
ALEX BLEDSOE entered the Firefly ’verse through the film Serenity and then blasted through the series in four days. The author of many short stories published in magazines you’ve never heard of, and a novel from Night Shade Books, The Sword-Edged Blonde, you hopefully will hear about soon, Alex now lives between two big lakes in Wisconsin with his patient wife and son, the Original Squirrel Boy.
Did anyone watch Firefly alone? It, like Buffy before it, seems to have been a show that people watched in groups, some small, some large. Viewers formed communities and they held debates and they forme
d personal attachments and they formed personal opinions. Opinions that make collections like this one possible, by the way. Rich provides us with a funny view of one small viewing community with very strong opinions.
Curse Your Sudden but Inevitable Betrayal
Things My Husband and I Have Argued About While Watching Firefly
LANI DIANE RICH
Before we get started, there’s something you need to know about my husband and me: We’re geeks.
And I’m not talking the kind of casual geek that’s popular nowadays, the person who enjoys the Lord of the Rings trilogy and plays the occasional hand of online spades. My husband and me?
We’re geeks.
My area of geekspertise is television. I did my undergrad in television, radio, and film back when ¾” tapes the size of your typical VW were the height of the new technology, and I started taping shows religiously about a week after the VCR was invented. Somewhere in my mother’s basement are piles of VHS tapes containing most of the episodes of Moonlighting, Northern Exposure, and The X-Files. When The X-Files launched a trend by releasing entire seasons on DVD, the skies of my world broke open with a thousand angels singing the hallelujah chorus.
Serenity Found Page 12
