There's finally an official web site for the movie sequel to the best damn TV series that has been on television since the end of season 4 of Babylon 5, Joss Whedon's "Firefly" at Serenity: The Official Movie Website. If you log in, there's a banner competition going on. I especially liked this one:



... although yes, the grammatical error annoys me.

I know that not all of my friends "get" what's the fuss over a show that lasted only 15 episodes, only 13 of which made it onto the air. Some of you saw only a couple of episodes, out of order, and said, "What's the big deal? This isn't so great." Well, first of all, the network (and most people) never gave it enough time. Do I have to remind you how stupid the first 13 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation were? Or how stupid the first couple of episodes of Babylon 5 were? But the other thing is that this is a show where there's something that's never been done before on television going on, and that's inherently cool in and of itself.

There's a piece of delicious irony here that I'm not even sure that Joss Whedon knows about (although he's deeper than he gets credit for, so I wouldn't take any bets). When Gene Roddenberry pitched Star Trek to NBC, he lied to them. Because the most popular television show at the time was a western adventure series called Wagon Train, Gene Roddenberry promised them "Wagon Train to the Stars." He had no intention of making Wagon Train to the Stars. He intended to give them Horatio Hornblower in Space, and that's exactly what he made. The network never entirely forgave him for this, and that's part of why they tried to pull the plug on it after season two and succeeded in killing it after season three. The irony is that what Joss Whedon was making with Firefly was the best possible thing that could have been done with the idea of Wagon Train to the Stars.

I'm pretty sure that there's nobody left in television or film today who really understands the classic westerns. No serious attempt to make a classic western has been attempted since Clint Eastwood made Unforgiven. And that was 12 years ago. And that wasn't a real western, it was intentionally a deconstruction of the clichés of the western genre. Still, it was very cool, and deserved the 4 Oscars that it won. Well, what Joss Whedon has done is use the science fiction vocabulary to further explore the symbolism of the western genre. Sure, there are lots of anime artists doing this. But unlike any of them that I know of, Joss did it in a way that makes sense. And by so doing, he was able to put some distance between the archetypes, symbols, and themes of the western and the actual politics of that time period.

The actual politics and history of the western? In 1865, the United States had just finished the bloodiest war in American history, before or since. What's more, it was a Civil War, one where Americans fought other Americans. Families were torn apart and in places whole neighborhoods went to war against their immediate neighbors over politics. They used weapons of new and poorly-understood destructive capabilities. They wrecked the economy of both sides early on, so both sides were desperately short of food and medicine. The results were horrific, and left behind an entire generation of men who'd seen and done things that emotionally or mentally shattered a lot of them. Everybody who could tried to put it behind them, but not everybody could. And that's why for a couple of years after the Civil War, there was a semi-official escape for people who knew they were going to lose it any minute now. No matter how much trouble you were in, you could chalk the three letters "GTT" on your door, pack a small bundle of your possessions, and as long as nobody back in civilization ever saw you again, nobody was going to bother to go looking for you. You had Gone To Texas. Or Oklahoma, or Arizona, or parts of Nevada or Colorado or Kansas. These were desolate places where human beings could barely survive. People back in civilization were busy rebuilding; they couldn't be bothered to care what went on out in the desert southwest. And that setting is the backdrop for some of the coolest movies ever made. Rooster Cogburn. True Grit. Once Upon a Time in the West. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. So many more. And they became classics of human literature because badly broken Good Men trying to save fragile and uncomprehending remote outposts of society from identically broken Bad Men makes for great art.

So what'd Joss Whedon do? Imagine a human race spread to the stars because Earth's ecology has collapsed. When the first wave of colonies become prosperous, they send out terraforming ships to adjust the ecology of more worlds so that humans can live there. Then when the second wave of colonies start to get prosperous, you have a bloody civil war, the first interstellar war, fought with new weapons and new combat spacecraft. It pits brother against brother, friend against friend, and wrecks fragile economies and ecosystems, so that once again people get to find out what it's like to pile up a dozen rotting corpses of your closest friends and hide behind them, with the maggots and the flies, in hopes that their putrid bloated remains might stop the next couple of incoming shots. When the war is over and the secessionists have lost, both sides have wrecked economies and the new colonies have wrecked ecosystems. It's going to take all of civilization's resources to rebuild, so just about nobody can afford to care what goes on out in the distant second-wave colonies and the even more distant third-wave colonies. Which means if you can't deal with civilization, or don't want to, you can go "to the black" and nobody is likely to ever come looking for you.

What's "the black" like? The terraforming teams left behind air that could be breathed, and at least some water that can be drunk. On the second-wave colonies there are maybe a few small fields of straggly crops, and a few scattered flocks of domesticated animals. Third-wave colonies don't even have that much. Nobody has concrete or steel buildings, nobody has hospitals, nobody has high-tech medicine, nobody has high-tech communications gear. Heck, most places don't even have much in the way of electricity. What little they've got, they concentrate in starports so that they can hope at least to export at least something in order to be able to buy even rudimentary medicine. In the mean time, they try to maintain a hardscrabble existence with crops that don't always survive, and horses, and maybe a few cattle or pigs or sheep. But blacksmithing doesn't take much in the way of high tech, you can do that with cast pig iron. If you can get from there to making even rudimentary steel, you can make old-fashioned pistols and rifles and a some decent knives. And it's not like gunpowder is hard to make. If your colony is even halfway stable, you wear homespun cotton and cured leather. If not, you wear whatever rags you can get. So sure, back in civilization, on the Core Worlds, they have ultra tech medicine, and computer networks, and zap guns, and flying cars, and force fields, and fancy synthetic clothes, but they can't afford any of that out in The Black, and couldn't really afford the electricity or exotic power cells to run it if they had it. (In at least one place that we see, one guy has managed to import a single hover car and a laser pistol, and enough solar cells to power both of them. It makes him an absolute monarch.) And most of the newer immigrants to The Black are disturbed at best, and not a few of them are stone cold crazy killers.

That's inherently cool as a setting for a science fiction series. It's also an entirely legitimate reason to have a mixture of classic western looks and ultra-tech science fiction. And it made for some absolutely fascinating characters. But because the network never really "got" it, they stuck it in a bad time slot and moved it all around the dial, guaranteeing that nobody saw more than one or two out-of-sequence episodes. The only real way to appreciate this is to borrow, or rent, or buy the four-DVD set of all 15 episodes and watch them in order. If you haven't done so, do. You'll thank me later.

Take my love. / Take my land. / Take me where I cannot stand. / I don't care, / I'm still free. / You can't take the sky from me.

Take me out to the black. / Tell 'em I ain't comin' back. / Burn the land / And boil the sea. / You can't take the sky from me.

Have no place I can be / Since I found Serenity. / But you can't take the sky from me.