Went to my uncles cabin in the woods for a few days to relax, he’s got the box set of the show and decided to give it a rewatch, was a pretty big fan in college. Got through like 3 episodes and shut it off.
Yes, Whedon is a creepy and maybe knowing that affecting my judgment, but honestly does feel like I’m noticing things my younger brain didn’t. A lot of the dialog seems overwritten, some of the “quirky” shit the characters do comes off more obnoxious than endearing, also the story is giving me weird AnCap vibes. I mean yeah the Alliance clearly is pretty evil but we never get much explanation as to what the Brown Coats political program is, why did they want to succeed? Them being confederate coded sure as shit doesn’t help.
Also, it almost leans TOO much into the whole western asethic sometimes, to the point I find it unbelievable. Okay, sure, humanity hastily colonized some planets and now some have regressed into SciFi Deadwood, I can dig that. But like, people on horses with cowboy hats seems a bit too comic for me.
Idk, just some random observations.
Edit: oh yeah and the intro song fucking sucks. That was something I thought even back when I liked the show.
I don’t know about Firefly I never watched it but I’ll say my view of Trek also changed over the years, as I moved further left the glaring limitations and the world view portrayed by some of the writers(through some very questionable episodes) made me move from thinking TNG was FALGSC to understanding it is merely some good optimistic future based entirely on western liberal values.
The “dog whistles” people point out e.g Picard saying there is no money are just that, dog whistles at best, a full understanding of what communism actualy means would also lead to some very undesirable changes e.g
-The Earth government is just the UN and it is very much hand waved away, same with the “economy”. This wasn’t an issue until the whole shit with Picard series and the vineyard.
-The “military” is actualy in charge and people think its fine.
-The way the entire premise is human focused, obviously with rooted in the cold war mentality but it leads to some very silly stereotypes only DS9 realy managed to even begin to tackle properly(ferengi as more than capitalist troupe, Klingons are more than just “barbarians”).
There is more but yeah what you went through isn’t uncommon, for my take I still love Trek but I am very much aware of what went on behind the scenes and to be quite honest, the franchise is quite top heavy i.e a small percentage of extremely excellent episodes and a huge percentage of average to mediocre TV.
Firefly was never that good, there was just a lack of scifi TV shows at the time and people liked the
quip dialog.there was just a lack of scifi TV shows at the time
still is.
Reddit neckbeards loved it so of course it’s bad
I still like the show but there definitely is something off about it’s politics/ideology that I can’t quite fully explain or articulate and it’s fixation on civil war era aesthetics certainly ties into that.
That said I kinda respect/accept/understand the lack of any stated platform by the brown coats cause it’s basically whedons attempt to do a star wars empire v rebels setup.
Obv we have like half a century of lore and shit for all that stuff now but at the time of the first film the important part was just to setup that the empire are the big technologically sophisticated overlords and the rebels are the scrappy underdogs.
Instead of making his scrappy underdogs be Viet Minh he instead made his scrappy underdogs coded as literal slaver confederates. Pretty stark contrast between Lucas and Whedon in terms of based levels
Edit: oh yeah and the intro song fucking sucks. That was something I thought even back when I liked the show.
I never really minded it, but in any case it’s got to be impossible to hate on the Firefly theme much when Enterprise using Faith of the Heart is a thing.
“Faith of the Heart” is the kind of song you dunk on until you end up liking it.
Honestly, very few shows from the 2000s have aged well. For some reason “edgy” highschool level humour was turned up to 11 in most shows during that time period, from sitcoms to medical dramas to animation. Older classic shows somehow have managed to age better.
very few shows from the 2000s have aged well
Farscape still holding strong
I was going to say Supernatural, but I’m getting flashbacks to earlier seasons where Dean will make some offhanded transphobic/homophobic comments. I can’t remember how prevalent it was, but i remember it being in there.
Still fun to watch though, i think it aged alright in that respect.
Cowboy bebop is a much better space western.
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The problem with firefly is that even if it is lame now it never had a chance to be enduring because it chose a mishmash of western tropes rather than picking one western type and sticking to it.
Its aged bad you are right but I have to point out that that kind of dialogue was a lot less grating at the time, before absolutely every movie had to sound like that
Yeah others have made the same point, the MCU embracing that kind of witty dialog whole hog (largely thanks to Whedon ironically) has made it seem stale as fuck.
I keep coming back to The Expanse, but one thing I found refreshing was that most of the characters take things very seriously. There are jokes and witty bits of dialog, but there’s no straight up comic relief characters and everyone seems to fully grasp the gravity of the situations they’re in.
there really is no end to the amount that marvel disney has ruined culture in the last decade.
