Nightmare Fuel / Firefly

Ladies and gentlemen, these are the Reavers.

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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Firefly:

• There's this classic line about the Reavers:
  Zoe (stoically): "If they take the ship, they'll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into their clothing. And if we're very, very lucky, they'll do it ...In That Order."
  • Right before that, Zoe establishes the threat of the Reavers with three words:
    Simon: Wait, I don't understand.
    Zoe: You've never heard of Reavers?
    Simon: Uh, campfire stories, men gone savage on the edge of space, killing...
    Zoe: They're not stories.
  • It's the entire crew's reaction that really sells the Reavers as a threat: everyone, regardless of their usual level of humor and boisterousness, instantly goes serious, still, and dead silent.
  • In particular, the Leitmotif that plays whenever the Reaver ship appears. The other Firefly themes tend to rely strongly on acoustic guitar or piano. The Reaver music is heavy with percussion and metallic clashing, in a furious tempo. It's Mood Dissonance for the ears.
• "Two by two... hands of blue...". They show up in the episode "Ariel" and assassinate the federal agents in the most terrifying way possible: their teeny tiny sonic wand that makes you bleed from the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and FINGERNAILS as it kills you.
• The Reavers' origin: humans, only just more ....everything. And the fact that they're psycho cannibals who are so terrible that people often kill themselves or beg for death rather than be captured by them.

• "You're worried we'll run out of air, that we'll die gasping. But we won't. ....We'll freeze to death first." Oh, River.
• Jubal Early threatening Kaylee with rape to terrify her into submission in "Objects in Space".
  Early: [looks at engine] That's a beating heart isn't it? Pull off any one of a thousand parts she'll just die. Such a slender thread... You ever been raped?
  Kaylee: [almost in tears] Th-the captain is right down the hall-hallway- He... c-can... hear you—
  Early: The captain is locked in his quarters. They all are. There's nobody can help you... Say it.
  Kaylee: [breathlessly, a tear starting down her right cheek] There's... there's nobody can help me.
  • Not to underplay the nastiness of a rape threat, but he manages to apply an even bigger Break Them by Talking with Simon. He recognizes that Simon will gladly die before he'll risk River's safety, so he points out that if Simon crosses him, he'll kill him, then rape Kaylee, then abduct River anyway. The actor who played Jubal managed to make all these threats much more terrifying by underplaying them. There's no passion in these threats. He's just explaining the penalties for disobedience.
• Niska is not a very friendly guy. He's a bit Faux Affably Evil, but he sure loves his Cold-Blooded Torture. Any scene featuring him will end badly for someone.
  • Mal gets his ass handed to him nearly every other episode and shot in the ones between, gave himself a giant syringe of adrenaline straight to his heart, and makes it through two no holds barred fights with the Operative, but the only time you hear him scream in pain was when he was tortured by Niska.
• Once you see, in "Objects in Space", the way Book's mind works, you can't help but feel your skin crawl. Everyone else sees him as this kindly preacher man, but what does River get to see? Just how twisted could Book really be? Joss said that Book was supposed to have a checkered past, and Jubal says "that ain't no preacher". You can't help but feel terrified of how trapped River must feel, not able to communicate how scared she could be of a nice person. Puts the whole hair/bible scene a few episodes before into a slightly new light. Then go read The Shepherd’s Tale comic to get more new light on the whole thing. He killed countless people including the man whose name he took. Granted it was undercover in the Alliance as The Mole for the Independents, but still, imagine River sensing it all…
  Book: (VERY uncharacteristically angry) I don't give half a hump if you're innocent or not! So where does that leave you?
• River in "War Stories", especially once you remove the Fourth Wall Myopia and see it how Kaylee does. River, who we have never seen hold a gun before, who was playing happily with Kaylee just a few scenes ago, suddenly knows how to shoot people dead without looking. And she's grinning afterwards. Add to that the episode before she rather nonchalantly cut someone with a knife, and suddenly you have a mentally unstable person on board who's had god knows what done to their brains, and if that person goes off you are dead.
  • "No power in the 'Verse can stop me." On the one hand, a pretty awesome Badass Boast. On the other, a horrifying statement that no, if River goes off the deep end, nothing can save you.
• How Simon describes what is wrong with River: "She feels everything; she can't not."
• The Reavers are psychotic cannibals WHO CAN FLY SPACESHIPS. They track down their victims IN SPACE. It's not just the fact that that they are murdering rapist cannibals that makes them scary — it's the fact that they still retain some measure of calculating intelligence that makes them so fearsome.
• In "Heart of Gold", when the prostitute who called the father of Petalline's baby is forced to give him a blow job in front of the entire town.

Serenity:

• The ending to Serenity, where River is standing over a pile of slaughtered Reavers, blood dripping off her weapons, eyes wide and perfectly projecting how deadly she is at that moment, and then very calmly, slowly turning toward the Alliance soldiers, ready to slaughter them, too, without a hint of emotion. Right then, you know what they meant when they called River a "living weapon."
• Let's face it: when River isn't defining The Woobie, she is terrifying.
• The fate of the majority of citizens on Miranda. The entire planet was used as a test environment for the government's experimental chemical Pax, intended to make people happy and peaceful. Most of the citizens became so apathetic that they just lay down and let themselves die. Those who didn't starve to death were torn apart by the tiny fraction of the population that turned into Reavers after exposure to the chemical.
  • Even before you know the story, there is something so terrifying about Miranda. Just the white, sterile planet, covered with the decaying bodies of people who lay down and died right where they were.
  • Made worse by the fact that the officer recounting what happened still does not get it. She still believes in what they were doing and sees it as a flawed execution, rather than a fundamentally wrong concept.
• To give a sense of how much Nightmare Fuel the Reavers are, there's a scene in Serenity where The Operative, who besides River is arguably the biggest badass in the Firefly universe, sees an entire Reaver fleet following Serenity out of an ion cloud and he is visibly TERRIFIED.
  • "Target the Reavers. Target the Reavers! Target everyone! Somebody FIRE!"
• As Serenity floats through the Reaver fleet, the terrified screams of Reaver captives over the communications. Along with, of course, the fate of Miranda.
  • The scene on Miranda where they watch the hologram. The scientist is visibly terrified out of her mind as she explains the fate of Miranda, punctuated by the sound of Reavers pounding on the door. It ends with her attempting to shoot herself as they break through, only for a Reaver to overpower and drag her to the ground as the recording devolves into blood-curdling shrieks of pain.
  • Jayne, watching the recording, grimaces and blurts out "Turn it off!" Jayne couldn't stand it.
  • The way the camera pointedly cuts away from the hologram and focuses on the crew's reactions adds to the horror, as it leaves to the imagination exactly what the Reavers are doing to the unfortunate woman.
• The entire Academy scene at the beginning, too. During the series itself, you only got a few hints as to what they were doing to River, but then you actually get to see what they put her through. "Disturbing" is an understatement.
• More Miranda goodness: River crying, screaming, and pleading as the millions of dead invade her mind saying "nothing".
• When Mal orders everybody to take the dead bodies of their very close friends of Haven and strip them to blood and bone to attach to their ship so they could disguise as Reavers.
• Just when you thought it was safe to land...WHAM! Harpoon through the sternum. Way to kill off the funny guy.
  • Now remember whose idea it was to invite them.

The R. Tam Sessions:

• Or the R. Tam Sessions. Summed up best by the very last words: "Can't tell it. I'll have to write it down. *holds out hand for a pen* " Summer Glau should not be this freaking terrifying.

• "You cut it out! You CUT IT OUT, YOU CUT IT OUT YOUCUTITOUT-"
• And the fact River murders her interviewer BY SHOVING A PEN THROUGH HIS THROAT. And worse, the fact we don't know if she was really acting on an order she had been given, or she had dreamed it up in her psychosis because she was just that fucking crazy.
  • Or, she could have been striking back at her tormentors the only way she could.
  • Worse yet, it could have been one of her daydreaming fantasies and she did not see the pen as a pen or the interviewer as a person.
  • Since the Alliance's goal was to turn her into an assassin (and they continued to experiment on her), the murder was probably considered a good sign regardless of how she got the idea to kill the interviewer.

Comics

• It's easy to imagine Zoe having a fair amount. Imagine encountering a machine that looks, talks and acts just like your dead husband. Not to mention Washbot himself. Imagine your whole identity being built around someone else's and you have no idea who you really could be outside of their life, name and memories.

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