Let us now praise Joss

Trailers for the Firefly movie! Fellow Joss Whedon fans, rejoice! (Via Making Light and TangognaT.)

You know, I didn’t really get into "Firefly" when it was on TV. Fox’s addlebrained decision to show the episodes out of sequence made the storylines hard to follow, and the cinematography was too dark to look good on my small-screen TV (also, I was cable-less and my local Fox station came in all snowy). But this year I watched the entire series on DVD and couldn’t believe I’d been so indifferent. Lots of people have already commented on the marvelously unromantic future-world of "Firefly," its rattletrap spaceships and its dusty, harsh, barely settled planets. And its great ensemble cast and its slowly unfolding story arcs. What I loved, in addition to all of that, was the way it avoided the usual ham-handed exposition and let us fill in the blanks: we’re never given all the backstory, but we guess it from small details, like the way everyone speaks Chinese, or the way Book buys a passage on a spaceship with a bag of fresh vegetables, or the way the characters always refer to Earth as "Earth-that-was."

That, and the future-slang is irresistible. Or, rather: shiny.

(And, look! patterns for Jayne’s hat! Now I know what my next knitting project will be.)

One Response to “Let us now praise Joss”

  1. Harrison says:

    Firefly! Thanks for the link!