You can't take the sky from me...

When I was a student this summer at CBKS, my professor and I pulled a trade. He highly recommended the show Firefly to me, which he had on disk. In return, I lent him my disks of Roughnecks: Starship Troopers, which he apparently used to watch with his son when it was still on...at the suicidally early time slot of 5:30am or 6:00am or something like that.

Anyway, to make a long account short, I burned my way through his Firefly box set and in doing so, ensured that I'd make every effort to watch Serenity before deploying.

This follows a trend; on my last overseas deployment, I made it a point to watch another large science fiction movie, which in 1997 ended up being Star Wars in its Episode IV re-release form.

I won't throw out spoilers, but in short, it's hard not to be incredibly partisan about characters who have been told in as much detail as the ones in Firefly. It ties up a number of loose ends, but certain things I saw in the series are now elucidated in the film.

In particular, the episode "War Stories" had a scene where River takes three blind shots and delivers three headshots on guards attempting to board the Serenity. The words she says are pretty chilling in the wake of it: "no power in the 'verse can stop me." That background becomes very clear in Serenity.

The movie is an interesting compromise from those Browncoats who were partisan Firefly fans and those who weren't as invested in the show as the former, but I think it does a good job.

In any event, I'm damned glad I saw it. The one thing that really hit from Firefly was Malcolm Reynolds as a character. It was obviously that he was once an idealist who had lost his idealism in a very visceral manner...an ethos I can empathize with in an awful lot of ways. Malcolm isn't a very nice character, but he is principled, and maybe that's why I think so damn much of and in turn, Firefly, and in turn, Serenity.

And, by the way, I wasn't leaving the theater until I heard the Firefly theme song. I had to wait until the end of the end credits to hear it, but I wasn't leaving without hearing it.

And to think I have my professor from BSAP to thank for all this...