OK, finally watched the Serenity movie. It was disappointing, as several readers had warned me. Nothing like as good as the TV Firefly. I thought Jayne was being held back from being his true, obnoxious, terrifying self, we didn’t see enough of Inara (can one EVER see enough of Inara?), and what on earth did they have to go and kill off Wash for? Wash? I mean, really. All right, Book got killed off, too (oh, I’m supposed to have said ***SPOILER*** up there somewhere); but he’d left the ship anyway. (And was that really Ron Glass? Looked like a different actor to me.)
For some reason the nonsensical science was more apparent in the movie, too. Serenity has a problem: between them and the planet Miranda is a nest of Reavers. Now, for something to be truly, impassably BETWEEN a spaceship and a planet, it must be in entire occupation of a spherical shell of space around the planet, radius R, and at least (I would think) twenty miles thick. Since, from the visuals, Serenity seems to be around 20,000 miles out from Miranda, that shell would have a volume of a trillion cubic miles. That’s a lot of Reavers. What do they all eat? No, don’t go there. Anyway, it is a measure of my disappointment that I did that bit of arithmetic in my head while watching the movie.
Rosie watched with me, her first exposure to Firefly culture. (I watched the Firefly series alone, in the privacy of my study.) Could she understand the spoken Chinese? “Not a word.”
Next day I watched the first Firefly episode again. It looked better than ever. Some things are just made for TV, I guess.