Firefly Review: "Our Mrs Reynolds" Was Good

Here's my rather critical review of the third episode of Firefly. Note that I actually enjoyed the episode in spite of what I see as weaknesses in the story line.

Okay, this time I can excuse the implausibility of 19th century cowboy low tech planets which trade with interplanetary space travellers of the same species. What makes me suddenly more willing to accept the show's glaring shortcomings? How about a good story with a premise based on cunning, deception, and hidden motives. It isn't just "Mrs Reynolds" who turns out to have hidden motives - so does Inara with her designs on the Captain. But Mrs Reynolds' hidden motives were the real drivers of this story. Her motives were effectively hidden from us long enough that when she finally moved to implement her dastardly plan it was a surprise that made for a good shift in the direction of the story line.

The show starts out with the Firefly crew on some planet on a crude river raft boat (like something from the 19th century West) apparently getting held up by a band of robbers. In the shoot-out the robbers all eat lead and the good guys (and gals) come out unharmed. Turns out Mal and company were hired by the local settlers to deal with this robbing gang. Mal and a few of his crew are war veterans and skilled with guns. Still, it seems an odd job for interplanetary traders.

With the robbers all dispatched from this mortal life there is a celebration that night with people dancing around at a country hoe down. An attractive young woman in a country dress comes up and gives Mal something to drink and then drags him out on the dance floor. It all seems innocent, fun, and wholesome.

Cut to the next day and the crew is accepting supplies from the locals in return for services rendered. They have to get underway quick because the Alliance might come looking for them (or at least for some Firefly).

They take off from the planet. Mal is looking at the cargo and out pops the woman he had danced with the night before. She proclaims her wifely devotion to Mal. Zoe comes over and hears the explanation for why this woman Saffron is a stowaway and Zoe summons everyone from the crew to introduce Mal's bride (hence the title "Our Mrs Reynolds").

Mal's reaction to finding out he has a bride is excessively rude and his callous insensitivity is displayed to the whole crew. Okay, I get that Mal really doesn't want a bride. I get that he's a rough cut kind of guy. But at some point in the dialog after he'd already been sufficiently insensitive he received a rather stern admonishment from Inara and that should have been sufficient to get him to shift gears a bit. It wouldn't have hurt him to handle the poor young farm girl more gently. I would even say more pointedly that it would have been in character for him to do so.

Was Whedon trying to emphasise that Mal is not a paragon of moral virtue? Did he see that he could do this by showing Mal being callous? Well, a character can be morally flawed without being unnecessarily insensitive. Mal's reaction seemed out of character to me. Was the point that he's not fully mature? But he's mature so much of the time. Is the point supposed to be that he's romantically immature but mature in other ways? It didn't see that way if that is what was the point they were trying to get across.

One can't portray characters as morally flawed by just having them be rude, insensitive and selfish every now and then. If one wants to demonstrate that characters are unsure of their own moral beliefs then the characters should be shown shifting back and forth on some issue as they change their minds back and forth about whether they think they should use ethical beliefs to make some decision.

Book (the reverend played by Ron Glass) cites the law of the planet they came from and how what Mal did the night before in accepting a drink and dancing with Saffron really did wed them.

Saffron claims she was given to Mal to help pay for what the Firefly crew did for her people. I find this implausible. It would have worked better if something that happened on the planet would have set them up to believe the country folk of that planet really would have done such a thing. Though when she describes the paucity of decent male alternatives mates on the planet her argument does come to seem more plausible.

Inara's hidden motive: When Inara learned of this betrothal the look on Inara's face was priceless. There were hints in the first two episodes that she might have feelings for Mal. It became clear at that moment that she did. So did she choose to come on the ship because of these feelings? Or did the feelings for him develop after she came on board?

Mal tries to be more gentle and understanding toward Saffron. Events lead Mal and Saffron to the ship's galley. Saffron is a great cook. Zoe and Wash show up and Zoe is not about to cook for Wash. Zoe is not domestic. This is made clear. She's a warrior. The relationship between Wash and Zoe is based on something else and as the episode progresses we get hints about that but nothing clear beyond some mutually recognized compatibility and attraction.

Meanwhile, Jayne the tough and truly insensitive mercenary wants to buy Saffron from Mal and offers his gun Vera in exchange. This reinforces the view of Jayne as a fairly amoral, selfish, ruthless mercenary.

Mal enters his cabin in order to go to bed. But there is Saffron ready to strip naked to get Mal to bring his lips to hers. Of course this scene is the sort of thing that will bring the viewers back for the next week. But her lips contained a knock-out drug and so his weakening of will and eventual succumbing to her charms nearly gets the whole crew killed (as well as disappointing Inara about Mal's character).

Zoe's husband the pilot demonstrates his love and devotion to Zoe when he turns down Mrs Reynolds' advances. She then proceeds to knock him out, wire up the control panel to set the Firefly on some course, and then to take off toward one of the scout craft. But she runs into Inara. She tries to come on to Inara and Inara, a trained courtesan who can read people, figures she is being played. Mrs Reynolds has to knock her out and then takes off in the scout.

Inara runs to Mal's cabin and kisses his unconscious body when she discovers he's alive. This demonstrates for all of us huddled around campfires watching at home that, yes indeed, she has a special place in her heart for Mal. So in future episodes lets watch for those camera shots of her face at key moments and perhaps little slip-ups she has to cover for. The mystery then becomes whether the writers decide to keep Mal in the dark about this devotion indefinitely. I figure they may let Book figure it out and say something to her about how her secret is safe with him. That'd be a touching moment and would set us up for all sorts of meaningful exchanges of secret glances in later situations and Book could even cover for her as well.

From the standpoint of character development this episode is a success. Inara's feelings for Mal are brought out for the viewers to see and her astute ability to read others is emphasised. Jayne's mercenary incompassionate nature is reinforced. Wash demonstrates a romantic loyalty to his wife Zoe. The ability of Mal, Zoe, and Jayne to rally and use their warrior skills are demonstrated in the opening sequence and in the approach to the pirate spaceship-catcher machine. I'm less certain about what less we are supposed to learn about Mal in this episode.

First Problem: The false reason for Saffron being a stowaway (ie that she was married to Mal as part of a payment for services rendered) should have been built up to be more convincing. There were ways to do this. One way would have been to have given the country folk of the planet where the episode started some sort of custom that the Firefly crew would have learned about while on the planet that pertained to how they pay their debts (or honored agreements or treated honored guests or dealt with traders). Maybe there'd be some mention of how it was customary for them to always deliver more on their side of a deal than they promised (which might have been what attracted Firefly to the planet in the first place - the planet's people had an excellent reputation in trade deals of delivering beyond customer expectations). Or the planet's customs could have involved some sort of ritual gift exchange with symbolic gifts that get exchanged that have more than one meaning. The idea here is that Saffron could have learned about the customs of this planet and could have seen that the customs would have served her well by providing her with a more convincing story every time she was found stowed away on a spaceship that came to trade on the planet. In fact, the reuse of the planet by Saffron for this purpose could even have been used at the end as a motive for the Firefly crew to know to go right back to that planet to find her again (yes the Alliance ship was out looking for a Firefly but it might have passed thru already by the time they went back for her).

Second Problem: Why did Mrs Reynolds need to drug Mal? If her intent was to take over the ship and change its course all she really needed to do was to knock out Wash. If Mal was coming to his cabin to go to sleep anyway then once he was asleep she could have gone up to the main control room to deal with Wash (the pilot). It was really only the pilot she needed to knock out. She left other people on the ship in a conscious state. So obviously there was no need to knock out everyone in order to accomplish her goal.

Of course her trying to seduce the captain makes for sexy television and a test of Mal's character. It also set up the part where Inara, after seeing thru Saffron, then goes and finds Mal knocked out and so Inara could demonstrate her feelings for Mal, her jealousy, and her need to suppress her expression of both those feelings. There was inner turmoil that only the viewing audience was privy to. Therefore I can certainly understand Whedon's motives for structuring it the way he did. The emotional dynamics were well developed. But I think the mechanics of how the motives and the feelings were made to come out needed more work. The story line should have developed in a way that would have made Saffron's attempt at seduction more necessary.

Third Problem: Why did Saffron leave alive the two people she knocked out? If "Mrs Reynolds" knew the whole crew was going to die as a result of the hijacking then why leave alive the ones that she knocked out? They could wake up and try to regain control of the ship. This of course is exactly what they did. It made more sense for Saffron to just take over the main control room and knock out/kill Wash. Alternatively, it made sense to effectively go for a bigger grand slam of trying to incapacitate more of the crew in order to reduce the odds that the crew would be able to regain control of the ship.

Fourth Problem: Why was getting control of the Firefly (or at least sending it off course) so hard? The idea that a single control panel could be jury-rigged in some hard-to-reverse way seems implausible. Plus, they could have gotten manual control of side thrusters or disabled the engines. Okay, maybe it already had enough momentum - but it was aiming very small destination and in order to get it to hit dead on it would have needed to do minor course adjustments in the final phase of approach. It also would likely have needed to decelerate.

Fifth Problem: Then there is a lesser but (at least in my mind) real problem. How is it that Saffron is doing all these spaceship hijackings? If she's doing this multiple times then is she always doing it from the same planet? If so, then were those locals aware that she was doing it? If not, then did the locals see her as a stranger? This is something that can be left to the viewers' imaginations. So I see it as a lesser problem.

Note that 4 out of the 5 problems I see here involve the plausibility of Saffron's cover story and actions. Had these been handled better this episode would have come across much more forcefully.

At the very end I'm wondering what happened to Mrs Reynolds. The Firefly crew tracked her down to a cabin on a planet since the scout ship she'd left on didn't have the range to go to too many planets (to make this plausible we can imagine that the scout ship had a transponder that allowed them to find her by visiting each of the nearby planets).

Mal came into the cabin and after a verbal exchange and a bit of fighting Mal knocked her out. So then what? Surely she's responsible for a lot of deaths. Did he leave her alive? Take her somewhere to be locked up? He made it sound like he wasn't going to kill her. So what happened to her?

Posted by Randall Parker at October 16, 2002 07:40 PM