trenchant.org - daily

I watched most of Firefly this weekend.

And it's really good - space-western-pirate thing and all. But the not at all subtle American Civil War references seem a bit too much for me at times.

I hate to take anything like television as seriously as this article, but it kind of resembles some of my unease from watching it -

Whedon embraces television as a force for social change. "It's better to be a spy in the house of love, you know?" he told the New York Times. "If I made 'Buffy the Lesbian Separatist,' a series of lectures on PBS on why there should be feminism, no one would be coming to the party." Okay, Buffy's a feminist, but what's the point of Firefly? "Yes, it's a space show, but it's also an intellectual drama about nine underdogs struggling in the moral chaos of a postglobalist universe," Whedon says. "It's about the search for meaning." Danger, Will Robinson! A search for meaning set in an imagined universe that serves as an allegory for the post-Civil War American South but which fails to wrestle with the legacy of slavery?

But really... a show that's about space pirates and smuggling and guns and horses, I really can pretty much overlook its occasional failings.

— August 1, 2005

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