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Firefly
Episode 1.03, "Our Mrs. Reynolds"
Written by Joss Whedon
Directed by Bondie Curtis Hall
Air Date: 10.04.02
Check out our double shot review with Ultra Magnus' Review and Hollyfeld's Review.
"See, that's why I never kiss 'em on the lips." - Jayne
So this week we're back to a Whedon-penned episode, and accordingly it's a bit lighter in tone with great dialogue nuggets aplenty. And while I often think Whedon tries a little to hard to be witty or funny, this time he had me laughing my ass off.
The first half of the episode plenty much just deals with a pretty funny scenario - Mal unwittingly gets hitched during a campfire celebration on some random planet. He's so drunk, and the ritual was so ridiculous, that he's completely unaware of the situation until they're off-world and find Ms. Stowaway in the cargo bay. Who is also now the titular Mrs. Reynolds. Needless to say, Mal is not enthused. Not as much of the rest of the crew anyway, who thinks it's nothing short of hilarious. One great moment in particular came after the preacher had warned Mal that taking advantage of his new wife sexually could earn him a special place in Hell. Later on, when he's about to succumb to her advances, he quips that "Oh, I'm going to that special place... "
There was also some great interaction between Mal and Inara. There's a great sexual tension between the two, and we now know from the way that she reacted to his possibly dead body that she's got a thing for him. And just when we think they're about to make a connection, Mal misinterprets her actions for Lesbian tendencies. Like I said, funny stuff.
And of course the episode does get serious eventually. The new wife is actually working for a couple of space pirates who trap spaceships in their big ass space net. But if there was a shortcoming to the episode it was the rather easy resolution of a potentially life-threatening situation. Long story short, Jayne blows up the net. And the pirates. Which was entertaining, don't get me wrong. Simply a bit easy.
But whatever. I really, really liked this episode. By far my favorite one so far. At this point, I'd be officially bummed out if it gets cancelled. I think the show's moving along quite nicely.
Episode Rating: 8.5 out of 10.
A strong 8.5. I'm just hesitant to give away a 9 since I have a feeling that Firefly can get a lot better still.
It's somewhat remarkable - no matter how bad the teaser for next week's Firefly is, the episode in question always turns out better than could possibly be hoped for. At least, thus far. Last week's "mystery on board a ghost ship" cliché turned out to be my (still) favorite of the episodes thus far, and this week's "new girl seduces everyone on the ship" routine comes across as fresh as a juggled gosling. That said, though, the teaser for the next episode - Jayne the God - looks so fantastic that I cannot help but harbor ill-gotten feelings that it just may suck.
Anyway, there was no sucking done this week, which for a highly sex-oriented episode could both be a good thing and a bad thing. After saving a frontier town from some villainous... well, villains, Mal and his crew find themselves with a new passenger - a comely lass who claims to be Captain Reynold's new wife, Saffron, payment for a job well done. The crew of Serenity finds this funny as hell, even those who feel that if Mal takes sexual advantage of her, he will find himself in a "special level of hell - the one they reserve for child molesters, and people who talk at the theater." Also worked up over the situation is Jayne, who in the episode's funniest of many funny scenes offers Mal his favorite gun in trade for the lovely Saffron.
Despite his anti-religious sentiments, Mal does seem to opt out of Hell and does his best to avoid his wife's constant advances. His aversion to Saffron does seem to affect her, however, their first scene being little more than a series of ways in which Mal manages to make her cry. Kaylee does offer solace to the new Mrs. Reynolds, assuring her that Mal "makes everybody cry... like a monster." Saffron leaves the room, and asks Mal if he is going to kill her.
"What? What kind of crappy planet is that? No, I'm not going to kill you... Don't you ever stand for that sort of thing! If someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill them right back... You got the right, the same as anyone, to live and try to kill people. You know, people that are... that's a dumb planet!"
Eventually, though, a ruse is uncovered, after Saffron drugs Mal and kicks Wash upside the head. After a hasty rewiring of Serenity's cockpit, Saffron tries to make her escape before accidentally running into Inara. Trapped, Saffron does what she does best, and tries to seduce Serenity's registered companion. It doesn't quite work, and Saffron barely manages to escape before the rest of the crew responds to an alarm, seemingly sounded by... no one, actually. What was up with that?
Inara then runs down to Mal's quarters, where she finds him lying unconscious. In a fit of clearly foreshadowed romance, she kisses him, then passes out from the drug Saffron had used on his lips. They and Wash awake to find that the ship had been jury-rigged to fly into an interstellar net designed to kill a ship's crew, leaving the actual piece of machinery intact for the black market. Fortunately, Mal takes Jayne and his favorite gun (Vera) and manages to short out the machine before everyone got turned into... dead... things.
Cut to a newly skankified Saffron hiding out in a winter wonderland of some kind. Mal bursts in, they roll around for a while, after which he gets absolutely no pertinent information out of her and then proceeds to punch her out. He then talks to Inara, asks how she passed out from Saffron's poison, then comes to the conclusion that she had in fact been seduced by the lesser-seducer. He leaves with a spring in his step, leaving Inara with a rather hilarious look of disappointment and annoyance on her face. End episode.
"Our Mrs. Reynolds" contains what is easily the most memorable dialogue thus far on Firefly, and certainly the nuttiest. ("So... are you enjoying your own nubile slave girl?") But then this is to be expected from any episode penned by series creator Joss Whedon, credited with this week's teleplay. I myself have always been a fan of how Whedon writes his characters in particularly flustered circumstances ("But she was naked! And all... articulate!"), and in their more private moments, particularly this week with the rarely seen Wash, who has as yet been something of a non-character amongst the cast (speaking of which, River was conspicuously absent this week). His set-up of Inara's increasingly fuzzy feelings towards our captain also effectively clues us in to the show's future story intentions without ever hitting us on the head with a hammer about it.
But as entertaining as this week's installment of Firefly is, and it is very much so, I couldn't help but find it distractingly lacking in the plot department. Let's get this straight - Saffron is an educated woman, having at least trained to be a Companion. She works for ship-jackers ("That girl is a wonder," one of them says. "She gets it done," replies the other), but her method of hijacking spaceships is to infiltrate a rural community, get herself traded to the probably rare individuals who come by and perform important services, and only then hijack the ship? Then of course, she has to run away and start somewhere else from scratch? Mal himself notes how roundabout her manner of theft is, but apart from some dodgy answer about her actions not being goal-oriented, it's never satisfactorily explained. In short, it seems to be a case of extreme plot convenience, much like the ending of "The Train Job," the first episode of Firefly to air and another one with distracting plotting in the last act. Also problematic is how Saffron (or whatever her real name is) is ambiguously taken care of at the end. Aren't she and Mal still married? What's up with that?
These really aren't the kind of issues that ruin an episode, but they do keep an otherwise fantastic piece of entertainment from getting a perfect score. A mad shout out also does go to my man Vondie Curtis Hall, director of this episode and the tragically under-seen indie classic, Gridlock'd. The potential of Firefly seems to grow every day, and in every way - it's just a shame we have to wait two weeks for the next one (and a shame that I had to wait until 11:00pm to watch this last one - man, do I hate baseball).
I give "Our Mrs. Reynolds":
Episode Rating: 8.5 out of 10
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