The Message

This is episode 13 I think there has been a mistake.

Mal and his crew are having entertainment in a space station and Mal goes to the post office to check and he receives a big trunk addressed to Zoe and him. When he opens the box, he finds the corpse of their army pal Private Tracey. They also find a message from Tracey asking Mal and Zoe to deliver his boy to his parents in a planet. The Serenity heads to the planet and out of the blue, she is attacked by another spaceship. Ml asks Simon to make an autopsy in Tracey and they discover that the man is alive. What has happened to Tracey?

"The Message" is a strange episode with a weird story. The idea of smuggling human organs using the body is creepy and is not reasonable. But the episode works. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "The Message"

This episode has the perfect ending.

During a certain scene there are 4 Chekov's guns, aka 4 lines that pay off at the end literally and thematically via foreshadowing.

It takes at least two viewings and some skill at analyzing art to spot all four of these "guns." Once you recognize how every single line and even movement was selected as foreshadowing for the end, then you will appreciate this as one of if not the very best Firefly episode. There is a real reason this episode almost won a Hugo.

Unfortunately, most people today will not catch the well-hidden subtleties that Whedon and Minear injected into the script, and so this episode shall forever endure the tragedy of under-appreciation.

As a fan of TV dramas in general (and science fiction in specific), I had always wondered what "all the fuss" was about "Firefly" and the furious reaction to its cancellation. As I began watching the show, it slowly began to grow on me. By the end, I understood.

For a basic plot summary, "Firefly" describes a dark future in which the planets have all fallen under a centralized, government-controlled rule. There are some on the fringes of the galaxy, however, who resist, and smuggling-ship captain Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) is one of them. Along with first mate Zoe (Gina Torres), tough guy Jayne (Adam Baldwin) pilot Wash (Alan Tudyk), and engineer Kaylee (Jewel Staite), Mal survives by "doing jobs" for various un-sundry parties. As the opening voice-over states, Mal "doesn't much care what they are", as long as they pay him enough to keep his ship in the sky. Along the way, Mal and Co. pick up a religious Sheperd Book (Ron Glass), a high-class prostitute companion Inara (Morena Baccarin), doctor Simon Tam (Sean Maher), and the doc's crazy sister River (Summer Glau), who the authorities are always after.

It took me a few episodes to really "get" this show, as the premise is quite strange. It is basically a "space western" created by Joss Whedon, and what are all westerns truly about at heart...the characters! The first few episodes feature quite a bit of gun-play and swashbuckling from the cast and thus it takes some time for the characters themselves to become flesh-out. Once that happens, though, each character becomes quite "real" and easy to get emotionally attached to. A great ensemble cast, to be sure. At first, I wasn't too comfortable with Fillion as the lead (I'm always so used to seeing him as the "stuffed shirt" type), but even he grew on me.

It truly was a shame that the FOX network did such a disservice to such a great concept and group of characters. Not only was the series advertised all wrong and pre-empted seemingly every night by sporting events in the fall, but it also was aired out-of-order and forced to include "mythology" elements to make it more X-Files-ish. Basically, the FOX execs out-thought themselves on this one. Had they just given Whedon a little bit more play on the leash, "Firefly" could have been a great franchise, I think. As it is, now the title "cult classic" better applies to the 14-episode run. Very similar parallels to a later FOX show in "Fringe", although that show survived longer because of the JJ Abrams brand.

Overall, I very much enjoyed the "Firefly" series, short as it was. The characters really grew on me as I kept watching and I truly feel as if I could have watched many more episodes of this type of drama. There are better TV dramas to be had, admittedly, but this one is still better than most. The show's abrupt and unsettling cancellation is just proof that justice isn't always served. At least we got what we got.