The Best Thing About the Show

I actually wrote this at 11:30 pm on Holy Saturday, but even I wouldn't post something like this on Easter. That'd be like spawn-camping the Resurrection.

So I was looking for something else, and came across yet more praise, and, worse, shouting-down of criticism, of Firefly. And it pissed me off. Did you know the idiot fans actually don't like their show's theme song? But it's actually pretty good; it's absolutely perfect for the theme. It's what I was referring to, above, as "the best thing about the show", but really, the best thing about Firefly is the closing credits. Zing!

Anyway, just to pour some venom out on the unjustly praised, I'm a go line by line.

Take my love, take my land
This could actually be some decent SF, since habitable planets would be the only resource a spacefaring civilization would feel the need to fight over. 'Cept the Alliance can make their own...and yet have trouble winning wars with people who demonstrably can't?

Take me where I cannot stand
...Which probably ought to include half the planetary colonies in "the 'verse", if their surface gravity (and surface atmospheric pressure...) had a realistic variation. Maybe Whedon shoulda had some of the Independents be from station-colonies. Sieg Zeon!

I don't care, I'm still free
Which is odd, because allowing the private ownership of a space-capable reaction engine is stupid—do we allow colorful "tramp" nuclear submarines? Mal should be one closely monitored son-bitch.

You can't take the sky from me
Well, son, actually, if Joss could world-build worth a damn, yes I could: because y'all would be living in a gorramn habitat dome, and it ain't economical to privatize those. And it'd be a simple matter to polarize the dome material so it's opaque: Nathan Fillion's character in a better story does it routinely with his ODST helmet's visor. Plus, you'd want dome material able to filter out unwanted radiation.

Take me out to the black
Tell them I ain't comin' back
This couplet actually makes me very happy, purely from a musical perspective. It's a very Western-style phrasing, especialy the second line, firmly in the British Isles workman's lament tradition that gives us a lot of the Western standards, like "Streets of Laredo" and "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie". Whedon and Firefly may suck, and the song's execution may leave a lot to be desired, but the songwriter knew what he was about.

Burn the land and boil the sea
The work of a few moments, if the Alliance were really capable of the terraforming scale they demonstrated. Hell, even making the Independents' worlds "burn until their surface is but glass" wouldn't have been out of the question—and it probably wouldn't take them 30 years, like it does for the Covenant (which, by the bye, is crazy fast). Am I the only one who thinks Whedon doesn't quite get the scale involved, with terraforming?

You can't take the sky from me
Or does "sky" here mean "space", as it does in Taiwanese Mandarin? (like in "taikonaut"—the "kong" hanzi might mean "void", but most of its common uses involve aviation) In which case, actually, yeah, again, I could: because you'd be spacefaring at the state's pleasure, son. There's a reason the 2nd Amendment don't apply to hydrogen bombs, and that's just the low end of the scale we're talking, with decent spaceship engines.

There's no place I can be
Another classic line in the great Western lament tradition...

Since I found Serenity
...completely flubbed to name drop that stupid-looking, and unbalanced, ship. No seriously, the damn thing should fall off its tail every time it takes off.

But you can't take the sky from me...
Not only can I, but do you realize, if the Alliance could really do that level of terraforming, the only reason you're still alive to be a thorn in their side, is that they were generous with you? I made this comparison in my book, about the humans who don't accept losing their war with the felinoids, but this smacks of the cartoon character who gets dropped with one punch, and then slurs out, "Had enough, tough guy?"

Which reminds me, remember how I mention that "faht joehng" ("an image of the Buddha", formerly known as a Joss) was Chinese stationer slang for "self-important dink"? Yeah, well, the context is some spaceport gossip, about some captain getting arrested for having an untrained engineer, who just "intuitively" understands what her ship is doing. As one of the characters remarks, "Boy, it's a good thing our ships are powered by unicorns and propelled by rainbows, because that'd be dangerous if there were any superheated plasma involved."

I'm just filthy with Take Thats.