A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Due to the DVD mix-up, sartorias and I watched Shindig, Safe, Our Mrs. Reynolds, and Jaynestown today. I don't think they were as strong overall as the last set, but that's to be expected because they were earlier episodes, and they were still a great deal of fun. Random thoughts:

1. The writers seem to really enjoy beating on Mal. He's been shot, stabbed, beaten up, tortured, or knocked out in almost every episode I've seen so far. Curiously, unlike most characters who bleed frequently, he's not the angsty "suffering beautifully" type.

2. I am not usually one to see incest where there isn't any canonically, but I can't see Kaylee getting anywhere with Simon unless River left the picture. I don't think this is because I've been reading too much manga, either. Am I going to go to a very special hell for asking if River and Simon are most commonly paired together in fanfic?

3. Let me just mention again how much I love Jayne. He makes me happy every time he appears on the screen. In addition to finding his character extremely entertaining, I also find him curiously hot. I mean, it's curious that I find Jayne hot, since he's basically a thug without even the usual redeeming values of smarts or wit or a heart of gold; it's not especially odd that I would find Adam Baldwin hot, since I have also had crushes on several other Baldwin brothers. I hope the writers will give him more scenes doing pull-ups, and I was disappointed that that Shindig did not take the opportunity to clean him up and put him in a suit, because I was very eager to see what result that would produce.

I am going to go to a very special hell for this, too.

ETA: Oops, he's not a Baldwin brother. My bad.

4. The last moment of Our Mrs. Reynolds was classic. So were many other moments in that episode, whose overall thrust, as it were, took me by surprise.

While poking through commentary on episodes I watched today, I realize that sartorias seem to have accidentally picked up disc 3 when we meant to pick up disc 2, because we went from "Bushwhacked" (let's just say that I found both Reavers and the psychology of trauma to be profoundly unconvincing) to "Out of Gas," apparently missing four episodes in between. Unless this is some function of the way episodes were aired? Sherwood, perhaps you should check.

This is disappointing, because I really liked how some characters were developing, especially regarding Jayne and River (let's just say my favorite episode of that batch was "Ariel,") so I'm more eager to go forward than backward. "Out of Gas" and "War Stories" were also really good, and that's where we left off.

I now realize that I should not read any more episode commentaries, because they will spoil me for earlier episodes which I apparently haven't seen yet.

Yesterday I visited sartorias and watched the two-hour pilot and regular first episode of Joss Whedon's Firefly. Woo-hoo! Going over to work watch more of it today. I know absolutely nothing about the show except that it was canceled after thirteen episodes and that there's a movie which isn't out yet but has been previewing all over, so spoil me and die.

I did read a couple non-spoilery comments, and remember yhlee being annoyed that there were no significant Asian characters even though the future was so Chinese that all the characters are fluent in Mandarin. Yes, yet another example of TV-land's fear and loathing of casting actors who are neither white nor black. I worked there and believe me, it is an uphill battle. You can't even think of casting non-white or black leads, so I used to write the entire supporting cast as Asian or Hispanic, except that the supporting characters were all cast out of Vancouver where apparently everyone is white, because I'd always get reports that no minorities had auditioned so they had to cast white anyway. I am getting revenge on this in my manga, but that's not going to help any out-of-work actors, alas.

However, I hope yhlee enjoyed Mal's cheerful willingness to kill people who needed killing, because it provided two of my very favorite moments and I thought of her every time he very sensibly killed someone who was clearly going to otherwise cause horrible trouble later on and probably kill some of his crew or him, rather than doing the usual "Oh no I must not kill a human being even though there's no justice system I can turn him over to and he's standing there informing me that the second I turn my back he's going to rip out my throat and present it to his wife in a chocolate box, because that would be wrong." My feeling is that when people are regularly presented with that sort of situation, they develop flexible ethics.

Special love for Mal for that and getting the best lines, Zoe for being female and kick-ass and having the sense to marry Wash, Wash for being adorably geeky, Jayne for being hilarious, and River for embodying one of my very favorite plot points, the half-crazy traumatized psychic who was experimented on by the government that wants her back. I love that plot so much that I have written an entire manga about it. Actually, I don't know if River is psychic or not, but I assume she must be because she was already a supergenius, so what else could the experiments have possibly done?