Firefly, Serenity and 'The Wish'

** Serenity and Dollhouse spoilers**

In the ‘bonus extras’ section of the DVD of Serenity, Joss Whedon’s 2005 movie, there is an interview with Whedon – the writer/director of the movie and creator of its precursor, the TV series Firefly – in which he says that he does not want to make TV shows and movies that people like. He wants to make TV shows and movies that people love.

Like many people, I came to Firefly once it was already on DVD. The first I knew of Nathan Fillion was his creepy turn as Caleb on season seven of Buffy; at that time I was a Buffy and Angel devotee but Firefly was not being broadcast on an identifiable TV slot in Australia and thus I’d only read about it online. It was Joss’s orphan child, and I was prepared to wait, plus I wasn’t so fanatical about the Whedonverse (at that stage) that I was going to buy the DVD as soon as it was released. At that stage I was alone in my Buffy love and thus there was no one prodding me to watch Firefly. (I should also note that at that stage I was obviously still immune to the Charms of Fillion – Caleb being a not-exactly-endearing character.)

Eventually I bought the DVDs and watched them speedily. Then I watched them again. Then the grief set in: only one season. However, relief was at hand: Serenity was newly released on DVD and I could watch that too.

Imagine my dismay when I discovered that Book and Wash get killed. When I’d left these characters in Firefly, they were alive and well and floating around in the ersatz Millennium Falcon that was Serenity. When Wash was done away with in the movie, my intake of breath was audible.

It is, of course, Joss’s prerogative to change the stakes for the movie and to kill whomever he chooses. But despite that fact that he killed two such dear characters, it didn’t make me love the movie less. He had managed to create one TV show and one movie from the same story germ and they were both creations to love. They also demonstrated how one brilliant mind can find ways to explore the same story and that there can be the same characters and the same universe yet different intentions, different moralities, different outcomes. Maybe it’s Joss’s own little quantum physics experiment: if I change X here, how does Y change, and does Z even exist at all at that point?

As a stalwart admirer of the output of Joss’s vast brain, I can’t help but wish there were similar ways to explore different outcomes in his other shows, other than through the comic books. One of my favourite, most-watched episodes of Buffy is ‘The Wish’, in which Anya grants Cordelia’s wish that Buffy Summers had never come to Sunnydale. It’s a glimpse into what might have been; it is the darkness that is always a fingernail’s breadth away in all of Joss’s stories. Then the spell is broken.

Serenity, in a way, is the equivalent of ‘The Wish’ for the Firefly audience: our opportunity to explore what happens if a handful of key elements in the original story are changed. For anyone interested in the role stories play in human existence, how they change to fit the times, the purposes they serve, it is thrilling to see.

This post was written in part to assuage the blues that arose when I finished watching season two of Dollhouse. I need to spend a bit more time thinking about it before I write about it, but there will perhaps be quite a lot of writing about it. For now, I’m still underground with Echo.