Investigating "Firefly" and "Serenity": Science Fiction on the Frontier (review)

Discussing Malcolm Reynolds's foil, Saffron, in the first essay of Investigating "Firefly" and "Serenity": Science Fiction on the Frontier, Cynthea Masson states, "Mal finds her naked on his bed, but her body is not enough of a temptation. Saffron thus reverts to textual authority (via oraculum) to seduce him through sexual metaphor" (25). Could there be a better analogy for Firefly itself? Firefly debuted, ran out of the intended order, and was abruptly canceled in the span of a few months in 2002. Initially, it seemed a failure: whatever magic Joss Whedon had captured in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel had not survived the space Western format or the jump to network television. But then came cult success, massive DVD sales, a full-length movie, and now academic conferences, articles, and books. As Investigating "Firefly" and "Serenity" lovingly details, Firefly should in no way still be considered a failure today.

The nineteen essays collected by Rhonda Wilcox and Tanya Cochran do much more than detail the post-television success of the show. Moving from Shakespeare to Agamben and techniques of rhetoric to the prevalence of Firefly fan creations on deviantART (a website devoted to amateur art), Investigating "Firefly" and "Serenity" tours through the creative, philosophical, and technical aspects of the show with an astounding completeness. The essays in the book touch on the obvious topics (can Firefly be discussed without mentioning the genre-cross-pollination of the space Western?) and make less obvious connections that reveal new facets of the show (the comparison of Inara's companion status with Athenian Hetaera in Andrew Aberdein's essay comes to mind).

Of course, Investigating "Firefly" and "Serenity" leaves out some aspects as well. Outside of Mal, the male characters receive scant critical attention, sometimes detailed only in their responses to, and relationship with, the female crewmembers. Jayne, Wash, and Book are labeled "complex" but are reduced to the tough one, the funny one, and the religious one with little inquiry into their importance to the show's narratives and themes or—in the case of the latter two—their eventual deaths.

If Investigating "Firefly" and "Serenity" has a more thematic weakness, however, it is the sense of "fandom" imbued in the collection. This is not to say that the essays are "amateurish" but rather that the battlelines have already been drawn, and most of the contributors come down on the side of Whedon and the "browncoats," or those fans who spurred Firefly's post-television success. While some of the essays do touch on problematic moments in the show, Whedon's choices and characters are given a relatively free pass: the contributors could have gone much further than they did regarding legitimate concerns with tokenism and racial stereotypes. Firefly's cancellation, and the "undeserved" nature of it, hangs over multiple essays like "the Black" does over Serenity. Nevertheless, Investigating "Firefly" and "Serenity"'s problems are palliated by the care it takes with its subject matter; it serves adeptly as the textual authority that recalls the show's original temptation.