Firefly is an American space Western drama television series, created by writer and director Joss Whedon, under his Mutant Enemy Productions label. Whedon served as an executive producer, along with Tim Minear.
The series is set in the year 2517, after the arrival of humans in a
new star system, and follows the adventures of the renegade crew of Serenity, a "Firefly-class" spaceship. The ensemble cast portrays the nine characters who live on Serenity. Whedon pitched the show as "nine people looking into the blackness of space and seeing nine different things."
The show explores the lives of a group of people, some of whom fought on the losing side of a civil war, who make a living on the fringes of society as part of the pioneer
culture of their star system. In this future, the only two surviving
superpowers, the United States and China, fused to form the central
federal government, called the Alliance,
resulting in the fusion of the two cultures. According to Whedon's
vision, "nothing will change in the future: technology will advance, but
we will still have the same political, moral, and ethical problems as
today."
Firefly premiered in the U.S. on the Fox network on September 20, 2002. By mid-December, Firefly had averaged 4.7 million viewers per episode and was 98th in Nielsen ratings.[3] It was canceled
after 11 of the 14 produced episodes were aired. Despite the relatively
short life span of the series, it received strong sales when it was
released on DVD and has large fan support campaigns.[4][5] It won a Primetime Emmy Award in 2003 for Outstanding Special Visual Effects for a Series. TV Guide ranked the series at No. 5 on their 2013 list of 60 shows that were "Cancelled Too Soon."
The post-airing success of the show led Whedon and Universal Pictures to produce Serenity, a 2005 film which continues from the story of the series,[4] and the Firefly franchise expanded to other media, including comics and a role-playing game.
Backstory
The
series takes place in the year 2517, on a variety of planets and moons.
The TV series does not reveal whether these celestial bodies are within
one star system, only saying that Serenity's mode of propulsion is a "gravity-drive". Re-runs start with Book or Captain Reynolds providing the following backstory:
After the Earth was used up, we found a new solar system and hundreds of new Earths were terraformed and colonized. The central planets formed the Alliance, and decided all the planets had to join under their rule. There was some disagreement on that point. After the war, many of the Independents who had fought and lost drifted to the edges of the system, far from Alliance control. Out here, people struggle to get by with the most basic technologies. A ship would bring you work. A gun would help you keep it. A captain’s goal was simple: Find a crew. Find a job. Keep flying.
The film Serenity
makes clear that the planets and moons are in a large system and
production documents related to the film indicate that there is no faster-than-light travel in this universe.
The characters occasionally refer to "Earth-that-was" and the film
establishes that long before the events in the series, a large
population had emigrated from Earth to a new star system in generation ships:[10]
"Earth-that-was could no longer sustain our numbers, we were so many".
The emigrants established themselves in this new star system, with
"dozens of planets and hundreds of moons" and many of these were terraformed,
a process that was only the first step in making a planet habitable.
The outlying settlements often did not receive any further support in
the construction of their civilizations. This resulted in many of the
border planets and moons having forbidding, dry environments,
well-suited to the Western genre.
Synopsis
The show takes its name from the "Firefly-class" spaceship Serenity that the central characters call home. It resembles a firefly in general arrangement and the tail section, analogous to a bioluminescent insectoid abdomen,
lights up during acceleration. The ship was named after the Battle of
Serenity Valley, where Sergeant Malcolm Reynolds and Corporal Zoe
Alleyne were among the survivors on the losing side. It is revealed in
"Bushwhacked" that the Battle of Serenity Valley is widely considered to
have sealed the fate of the Independents.
The Alliance is shown to govern the star system through an
organization of "core" planets, following its success in forcibly
unifying all the colonies under one government. DVD commentary suggests that the Alliance is composed of two primary "core" systems, one predominantly Western,
the other pan-Asian, justifying the mixed linguistic and visual themes
of the series. The central planets are firmly under Alliance control but
the outlying planets and moons resemble the American Old West,
under little governmental authority. Settlers and refugees on the
outlying worlds have relative freedom from the central government but
lack the amenities of the high-tech civilization that exists on the
inner worlds. The outlying areas of space ("the black") are inhabited by
the Reavers, a cannibalistic group of nomadic humans.
The captain of Serenity is Malcolm "Mal" Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) and the episode "Serenity" establishes that the captain and his first mate Zoe Washburne, née Alleyne (Gina Torres)
are veteran "Browncoats" of the Unification War, a failed attempt by
the outlying worlds to resist the Alliance. A later episode, "Out of Gas", reveals that Mal bought the spaceship Serenity to live beyond Alliance control. Much of the crew's work consists of cargo runs or smuggling. A main story is that of River Tam (Summer Glau) and her brother Simon (Sean Maher).
River is a child prodigy, whose brain was subjected to experiments by
Alliance scientists at a secret government institution; she displays
symptoms of schizophrenia and often hears voices. It is later revealed
that she is a "reader", one who possesses telepathic
abilities. Simon gave up a career as an eminent trauma surgeon in an
Alliance hospital to rescue her and they are fugitives. In the original
pilot, "Serenity", Simon joins the crew as a paying passenger with River
smuggled on board as cargo. As Whedon states in an episode DVD
commentary, every show he does is about creating family.[12] By the last episode, "Objects in Space",
the fractured character of River has finally become whole, partly
because the others decided to accept her into their "family" on the
ship.
Signature show elements
The show blends elements from the space opera
and Western genres, depicting humanity's future in a manner different
from most contemporary science fiction programs in that there are no
large space battles. Firefly takes place in a multi-social future, primarily a fusion of Western and East Asian societies, where there is gross class inequality. As a result of the Sino-American Alliance, Mandarin Chinese
is a common second language; it is used in advertisements and
characters in the show frequently curse in Chinese. According to the DVD
commentary on the episode "Serenity", this was explained as the result
of China and the United States being the two superpowers that expanded
into space.
The show features slang not used in contemporary culture, such as
adaptations of modern words, or new words. "Shiny" is frequently used
in a manner similar to the real world slang "cool" and "gorram" is used
as a mild swear word. Written and spoken Chinese as well as Old West
dialect are also employed. As one reviewer noted: "The dialogue tended
to be a bizarre purée of wisecracks, old-timey Western-paperback patois, and snatches of Chinese".
Tim Minear and Joss Whedon pointed out two scenes that, they believed, articulated the mood of the show exceptionally clearly.[12]
One scene is in the original pilot "Serenity", when Mal is eating with
chopsticks and a Western tin cup is by his plate; the other is in "The
Train Job" pilot, when Mal is thrown out of a holographic bar window.[14] The DVD set's "making-of" documentary explains the distinctive frontispiece of the series (wherein Serenity
soars over a herd of horses) as Whedon's attempt to capture "everything
you need to understand about the series in five seconds".
One of the struggles that Whedon had with Fox was the tone of the
show, especially with the main character Malcolm Reynolds. Fox
pressured Whedon to make Mal more "jolly", as they feared he was too
dark in the original pilot, epitomized by the moment he suggests he
might "space" Simon and River, throwing them out of the airlock. Fox was
not happy that the show involved the "nobodies" who "get squished by
policy" instead of the actual policy makers.
Due to Copy Right Issue We Don't Provide any torrent or any Direct link in this site
No comments:
Post a Comment
If You Have Any doubts Please Let Me Know