TNMC
This site’s design is only visible in a graphical browser that supports web standards, but its content is accessible to any browser or Internet device.
Firefly
Episode 1.02, "Bushwhacked"
Written and directed by Tim Minear
Air Date: 09.27.02
Check out our double shot review with Ultra Magnus' Review and Hollyfeld's Review.
Firefly has crazy potential. That much is obvious. And while "The Train Job" only hinted at it, "Bushwhacked" realizes much more of it. I still wouldn't say the show has really hit its stride just yet, but I do think I'm hooked now. And just when I thought my Friday nights had finally opened up...
Anyway, things start off leisurely enough with the crew enjoying some variant of basketball. Things are interrupted though when they stumble across a derelict ship near the frontier. We know right off something's amiss here because River whispers the word "ghosts" in her typically creepy way. Oh yeah, and a dead guy slammed into Serenity's hull.
Long story short, they find the crew slaughtered, and Mal suspects it was a group of savages known as Reavers. The Reavers are technically men, but are so far removed from humanity that you wouldn't know it. Having apparently gone mad from the nothingness of deep space, they are now self-mutilating, mindless cannibals. And the worst part is they've set a trap for visiting ships, so Serenity is stuck. There's also a survivor who's freaked out to point of incoherence. Mal suspects he was forced to witness the mutilation and murder of his fellow crew members, and goes so far as to say it would be charitable to put the guy out of his misery right away. Instead though, he simply has the doc sedate him, and by this time Kaylee has freed the ship from the booby trap. But just as they're about to get the hell out of Dodge, the Alliance shows up. And while that's still better than a run-in with the Reavers, it's still bad news for the crew since they just stole Alliance goods from the ghost ship. Not to mention the amount of trouble they'll be in if the feds find Simon and River aboard...
I enjoyed this episode, but I felt it was almost like two episodes in one. The first two acts dealt with the discovery and re-con of the ship and had a pretty creepy vibe to it. It even reminded me just a bit of the classic Farscape ep "Eat Me", but not nearly that creepy. I thought at that point they were going to be stuck there for the remainder of the episode, with crazy boy on the loose and the threat of returning Reavers thrown in. But then again, the crew isn't really expendable, so I guess nobody would have died in that scenario... Things just got a whole lot less exciting I thought once they were in the (relative) safety of the Alliance ship. I guess I'm just a sucker for sci fi/ horror... I freely admit I'm a fan of Event Horizon.
Despite the shift in gears midway through though, I did think was a cool episode. I thought it did a much better job of rounding out the characters than "The Train Job". Not to mention it was a hell of a lot more interesting. My only real qualms were that I didn't buy the fact that simply witnessing atrocities would turn a man into a murdering psychopath overnight, and the ending seemed just a little rushed. I also think that while Minear's dialogue is great, his directing could be honed just a bit. The pacing seemed just on the wrong side of methodical once or twice. But the good definitely outweighed the bad this week. At this point, I'm anxious for more Firefly.
Episode Rating: 7.5 out of 10.
Episode 1.04 of Firefly (though only the second episode to actually air) is so much of an improvement upon last week's premiere that I fail to see why it didn't air first. All of the heavy-handed character introductions we were subject to last week were covered quickly and effectively, the plot was less formulaic but equally recognizable and interesting, the universe in which the characters live is more vividly drawn out, and it's full of memorable dialogue, fitting humour and suspense. In short, this is the episode that confirms that I like Firefly.
In "Bushwhacked," the crew of Serenity opens with a playful game of cargo bay basketball, which unlike last week's "The Train Job" introduces us to a crew that actually (for the most part) likes each other. The cynicism that surrounded the ship's captain (seriously, did it seem like he really liked any of his crew last week) and the outright boorishness of Jayne in particular are replaced with more realized characters who have both positive and negative qualities. Though Jayne remains a wise ass that still thinks very little about the ship's new doctor, he also now has a sense of humour, and a sense of fear that makes him particularly human - more on that shortly, and more on why Mal is the my favorite ship captain on TV.
The crew's game is shortly interrupted by a proximity alert, which reveals a ghost ship floating aimlessly in their way (a corpse, too). After hailing the ship and receiving no response, most of the crew automatically writes off the possibility of survivors and is ready to go on their merry way, until Mal notes that there could easily be valuables on board. Jayne quickly chimes in with, "Yeah, um, no, uh... someone could be hurt!" And one of the oldest plots in sci-fi television history is underway. Finding a ghost ship, finding out what went wrong, finding yourselves in trouble. Luckily for us, Firefly finds a slightly new way to handle this "Old Glory" of a premise.
Finding no survivors on board, and telling the more sensitive crewmen and women that they must have all escaped, even though he knows that this isn't even possible, Mal and the others search for items worth salvaging and soon discover a salvo of corpses, and one really freaked-out survivor who attacks a now also freaked-out Jayne. Mal assures the survivor that everything is going to be okay, then punches him in the face and carries him on board, where the strange man starts droning on about cattle and "opening up" and seeing what's "inside." Against doctor's suggestion, Mal insists that the man be doped up and silenced immediately.
This side of Mal is a pleasant change from the cynical rogue in "The Train Job." Now we see a man who makes difficult decisions to keep his crew safe and calm, we see a man whom we might actually allow to lead us, the audience (and as much as I liked "The Train Job," that man sure as hell wasn't there). Continuing this trend, he agrees to allow the ship's priest to perform the last rights on the dead in order to buy time for Kaylee to disarm a bomb that could destroy them all. She does, but even afterwards Mal keeps the fact that they all could have died from the more sensitive members - particularly Jayne, who is more than anyone else scared crapless about their situation.
It's then that all Hell breaks loose, because an Alliance ship has pulled Serenity over, seemingly for the interstellar equivalent of a broken taillight (lack of identification markings on the side of the hull, to be more precise). When they discover that Serenity may be harboring Simon and River, and has on board an insane survivor of the ghost ship, they take a more active interest in scouring for stowaways. The crew is taken in for questioning, and in a series of short interviews with the Alliance captain reveal more about themselves than the exposition-laden "Train Job" ever did. Particularly memorable were the differing views on discussing one's marriage, as Zoë finds it "none of (the captain's) business," while Wash goes on with, "have you seen what she wears? Forget about it. Have you ever been with a warrior woman?"
The Alliance doesn't find River and Simon, since Mal has rather cleverly chosen to hide them in space suits clinging to the hull of Serenity - quite harrowing, thanks to Simon's effectively foreshadowed fear of spacesuits, an especially grand zoom out shot showing the duo as specs in the depths of space, and River's obvious opinion that the whole thing is pretty darn cool. But by now the survivor has gotten loose and started mutilating himself to emulate the never-seen, but nicely described Reavers - a group of savages who have been too long from civilization, who instill fear into the hearts of all those who hear their name, and oh yeah, killed the entire crew of the ghost ship and made the survivor watch. Mal manages to kill the crazed man before he likewise murdered the Alliance captain, and in exchange for his pains gets to go free, along with the rest of his crew, but sans everything they salvaged from the empty ship.
Unlike last week's episode, in which the crew of Serenity got of a little light, the give-and-take attitude of their release rings pretty true. The Alliance, unlike the town of dying people, had no particular cross to bear with Mal and his people. In fact, the Alliance comes across not as an evil empire trying to bend the galaxy to its will, but rather as bureaucrats who simply want things neat and tidy, and I can buy that, just as I can buy people rebelling against it.
All in all, a well crafted, involving and damn near perfect episode all around. It makes me proud to call myself an Ass-Blaster. And next week, it appears that sex is on the agenda! Mm... space sex...
For all of the excellently handled above, along with an apparent nod to John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars, I give "Bushwhacked":
Episode Rating: 9 out of 10
What do you think? Talk about it on the Forums
