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169 “Wheel Never Stops Turning” Space and Time in Firefly and Serenity A L Y S O N R . B U C K M A N Joss Whedon’s Firefly (2002) begins with Sergeant Malcolm Reynolds (played by Nathan Fillion) running through a battlefield, dodging bombs and bullets, until he reaches the small cave in which his platoon is quartered (“Serenity” 1.1).1 The beginning of the film Serenity (2005), which continues the saga of Firefly, revolves around action as well: from a voice-over discussing the emigration of humans from a depleted Earth, to the escape of River and Simon Tam from a government facility, to the exterior shot of Malcolm Reynolds’s ship, Serenity, entering the atmosphere of a planet, to the captain himself walking through the interior of Serenity (in a beautiful, long tracking shot), motion is emphasized. These active beginnings—indicative of the series and the film—express a central aspect of both texts: movement. Jes Battis notes the “perpetual motion” at the heart of Firefly (2008, para. 5). Spatially, temporally, narratively, cinematographically, and generically, movement of one sort or another is a near constant, which reflects the creativity of Whedon’s approach and suggests new ways of thinking about both the interaction of space and time and these texts. We move from the advanced, twenty-sixth-century technology of the core planets to the nineteenth-century conditions of the rim,2 from war story to science fiction to road movie to western, advancing 1. In this chapter, I follow the DVD order of episodes, which corresponds to Whedon’s planned episode structure. Tim Minear was involved in this series as executive producer. My thanks to Charlotte Stevens, Tamy Burnett, Susan Fanetti, and Samira Nadkarni for their commentary on drafts of this chapter. 2. As Charlotte Stevens (2010) notes, this movement is encapsulated within the first few moments of the voice-over and accompanying images at the beginning of the film Serenity: the camera cuts from an image of terraforming to the futuristic and bright chrome buildings 170 ✴ Firefly and Serenity the characterization of both crew and ship as we go; with the cancellation of Firefly and the fandom-inspired genesis of the film Serenity, we also move from the televisual to the cinematic form. This multilayered motion is presented through a camera that itself is rarely stationary. Such activity is reflective not only of the space in which the object moves but also of the time that such movement takes. It additionally illustrates shifts in characterization—or lack thereof—and whether characters are metaphorically stuck or in motion: that is, whether they are able to move onward from their pasts and to grow.3 The relationship of the texts to history, including their ideological worldview, is important within this discussion of movement as well. In a nutshell, movement is at the heart of this multilayered and dynamic Firefly and Serenity ’verse, and it contributes to the richness of the text and characters. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, genre is an intrinsic part of how both literal movement and figurative movement function. Bakhtin theorizes that genre influences the relationship between time and space within a text and produces certain types of characters. Additionally, it results in a particular ideological worldview. These coalescent elements create a “chronotope,” which, literally translated, means “time space” (1982, 84). For instance, in “the adventure novel of ordeal,” or classical Greek romance, the hero does not change as he engages with his quests.4 He is tested and overcomes obstacles, but “nothing changes: the world remains as it was . . . feelings do not change, people do not even age” (91). Conversely, in the “adventure novel of everyday life,” transformation is essential. These characters are free to act in surprising and nontraditional ways, and their biographies extend beyond the confines of the story, resulting in untapped potential, as Caryl Emerson argues (1986, 34–35). At the heart of the picaresque novel (a descendant of the adventure novel) exists a rogue or servant on the road, a character reminiscent of Captain Malcolm Reynolds (Mal). In the picaresque, as in Firefly and Serenity , moments in the protagonists’ lives become one with their “actual spatial course or road—that is, with [their] wanderings” (Bakhtin 1982, 120). As the and lush greenery of the core planets (the “beacon of civilization”) to the desertlike conditions of the “savage outer planets” (one of which is depicted in the spreading shadow of an Alliance cruiser). The voice-over, we learn, is...

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