YMMV / Firefly

For the original series

• Accidental Aesop: The Core Worlds are peaceful and prosperous, but the government can do damn near anything they want to their citizens as long as they can justify it — such as cut up little girls' brains or dose entire planets with mind control drugs. The Rim Worlds are anarchic and destitute, but you can always look your accuser in the eye and settle it one way or another — or even round up a posse of fellow victims and exact some frontier justice. The argument seems to be that a healthy civilization needs both and any attempt to "rid the world of sin" will do nothing but harm in the long run.
• Actor Shipping: Simon and Kaylee are so cute together that some shippers want Sean Maher and Jewel Staite to get together. That he's gay and she's married doesn't apparently enter into it.
• Adorkable:
  • The first time we see Wash, he's playing with plastic dinosaurs. He lounges around in Hawaiian shirts, punctures moments of high drama with prosaic questions, and spends his whole time under police interrogation describing his wife enthusiastically.
  • Kaylee is not a glamor girl, warrior woman, or 'broken bird': she's meant to be friendly, appealing, and prone to a goofy focus on her favorite subject: machinery.
  • Simon, mostly when he's around Kaylee, and helped along by his Fish out of Water status — notable in that it's quite a change from the calm, collected demeanor he assumed when he first came on board Serenity.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Is Jayne a barely-restrained murderous idiot, or is this a facade created to ensure he has minimal responsibilities and maximum opportunities to hurt people he dislikes? Mal often relies on Jayne to accomplish impressive tasks with no supervision and little foreknowledge — and he always does, Lovable Traitor tendencies notwithstanding.
  • River:
    • How exactly River's psychic abilities work is up to interpretation. The two most common theories are that either she's precognitive and can sense things before they happen, or that she possesses exceptional telepathic awareness of her surroundings which, coupled with her extreme intellect, lets her predict what's going to happen through analysis. Or maybe both at the same time.
    • River herself. Some interpretations, especially post-Miranda, have her as a generally stable person who is coping with her trauma and abilities. Others assert that she is completely insane and needs constant supervision with brief bouts of lucidity, while some would argue that she's just a girl who is struggling to cope with her own trauma and brain damage and wavers wildly between madness and lucidity.
  • Saffron goes through this both in- and out-of-universe. The crew is uncertain as to whether or not she's an absolute sociopath, or if she's got some redeeming qualities. Mal, at least, seems to be convinced that at least part of her breakdown in "Trash" was genuine.
  • Was Mr. Universe just an eccentric who married his own Sex Bot? Or was he Properly Paranoid, knowing the kind of enemies his line of work would bring? And considering his fate in The Movie, it could be argued that having a Sex Bot wife proved to be the right move.
• Anti-Climax Boss: In the post-Serenity comic Serenity: Leaves on the Wind, Jubal Early is revealed to have survived his initial encounter with the crew and marks his reintroduction by effortlessly beating up the soldiers guarding the Alliance Operatives he's meeting with and then slaughtering Bea's entire crew and blowing up their ship. He once again infiltrates Serenity and manages to subdue the crew one-by-one... then he gets blindsided by Kaylee and knocked out in one hit. He's then dumped out of the ship with the rest of the trash.
• Better on DVD: Because you can watch the episodes in the right order, and without them being preempted by baseball games, and see three episodes that were never even aired in the first place.
• Complete Monster:
  • The Blue Gloves/"Hands of Blue" are a duo of independent contractors hired by the Alliance to capture the Tam siblings. The Blue Gloves hunt the Serenity across the 'Verse, killing anyone in their way as they go, and employ a variety of schemes to capture the two, notably allying with Dobson in an attempt to kill the entire crew. The most evil aspect of them, however, is their use of a sonic device that painfully kills their targets by rupturing their insides until they melt, which they use to kill an entire Alliance building, systematically checking all of the bodies and murdering any who still cling to life to ensure none survive the massacre, just because a couple of the guards had interacted with the Tams, and the Blue Gloves seek to keep all information possible to themselves.
  • Adelai Niska is a Soft-Spoken Sadist proud of his feared reputation amongst the criminal community, and is obsessed with ensuring the horror stories surrounding him are all true. When he first meets the crew of Serenity in "The Train Job", Niska shows off the mutilated corpse of his wife's nephew to solidify his reputation in their eyes and to show them what price they'll pay should they fail him in stealing a shipment of medicine intended for sick settlers. In his next appearance, in "War Stories," Niska carves up another failed employee, before getting his hands on Mal and Wash, whom he proceeds to torture for hours. Eventually Zoe, Mal's first mate and Wash's wife, offers to buy Niska's captives off of him, but Niska tells her that with the money she has, she can only afford one of them and tries to force her into a Sadistic Choice. When Zoe ruins his fun by immediately picking her husband, he responds by saying there is enough money for some of Captain Reynolds. He then cuts off Mal's ear and gives it to her. Niska then starts torturing Mal to death, only to use advanced technology to bring him back to life so Niska can have the pleasure of torturing Mal to death for days.
  • Jubal Early debuts in "Objects in Space" as an aloof yet sadistic Bounty Hunter seeking to turn in the Tam siblings for the reward on their heads. Incapacitating the crew of the Serenity and threatening to rape and torture Kaylee to keep some in line, Early is seemingly beaten after he is revealed to be a Psycho for Hire who only has his job because he enjoys hurting others. Returning in the comic book Serenity: Leaves on the Wind, Early kills an entire staff of security guards just for prohibiting him entry to a meeting, and later bombs a smuggler ship in another attempt to capture the crew of the Serenity, killing a dozen innocent people in the process. Despite his claims that he follows a code and is only doing his job for the money, Early is actually nothing but a cruel bully who views killing people as a "passion".
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • The whole "pretending Kaylee's dead to screw with Simon" from "Serenity", which Simon sums up best:
    Simon: That man's psychotic.
    (Ironic Echo Cut to Wash, Zoe, and Mal laughing their asses off)
    Wash: You are psychotic!
  • "The Train Job":
    • Niska is an awful person through and through, but you can't help chuckling when he grumbles resignedly about how he's going to get an earful from his wife at dinner for killing her nephew—i.e. the upside-down corpse he just showed Mal as a warning not to screw with him.
    • The scene where Crow is introduced to Serenity's engine intake is likely to have this effect. A hero killing an unarmed, defeated villain for refusing an offer (and a little bit of mouthing off), can be shocking. Following that up by taking the next mook, planting him in the exact same spot, and starting to give him the same offer delivered in exactly the same tone, with said mook rushing to agree with the hero before he's even finished a sentence is pretty hilarious.
  • From a scene in "Shindig" where Malcolm wins a duel with a truly obnoxious and stuck-up opponent that had it coming:
    Malcolm: Sure. It would be humiliating. Having to lie there while the better man refuses to spill your blood. Mercy is the mark of a great man. (lightly stabs him with sword) Guess I'm just a good man. (stabs him again) Well, I guess I'm all right...
• Cult Classic: The fact that it was a Space Western that was developed by nerd icon Joss Whedon that got massively Screwed by the Network and canceled after just one season all but ensured this fate for the series.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Jubal Early shows signs of schizophrenia: some of his stranger points of conversation could be interpreted as talking back to voices that only he can hear.
  Early: I don't think of myself as a lion. You might as well, though; I have a mighty roar.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • River, who went from being a secondary character — who still had quite a bit of focus on in the main series — to being one of the two leads in The Movie.
  • Jubal Early. Only appeared in the final episode, and yet he's probably the single most iconic character in the whole series who's not one of the leads.
  • The Reavers. Newcomers to the series might be shocked to learn that they only appear in two episodes before the movie, because they're one of the most iconic features of the entire franchise.
  • Saffron is popular for two reasons: because she's one of the few recurring antagonists in this very short-lived series, making her an individual Arch-Enemy, and because she's a hot, buxom redhead played by Christina Hendricks.
• Evil Is Cool: The Operative plays this trope straight. He is impeccably polite, handsome, well-dressed, philosophical, unflappable, pragmatic, extremely good at what he does, and he knows it.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: The deleted scene from the pilot where Zoe tells Simon about the Battle of Serenity Valley is considered to be a good character moment that fleshes out some aspects of the characters which are never said out loud. While it was deleted due to its tie-in with the original (also deleted) opening, many feel it would have worked fine as a follow-up to the revised opening.
• Genius Bonus: The opening line of the song is "Take my love / Take my land" and goes on to say that the singer doesn't mind because he's still free. Machiavelli's The Prince says the two things you can't take from people without inciting revolt are their women (love) and land.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • From "Shindig", when Zoe and Wash are Talking in Bed about what to do if Jayne decides to take over the ship. Just try laughing at Wash joking about how to properly eulogize Zoe after watching her at his funeral in the Big Damn Movie.
    Wash: I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
  • Wash's fantasy about being rich in the "Better Days" comics that take place in-between the show and the Big Damn Movie. In it, he's piloting a luxury cruiser big enough to "land a planet on" and takes a break to play with his child. Thanks to his death in Serenity, only a small part of that comes to pass in later comics: The one-shot comic "Float Out" (which, ironically, was collected in the same volume as "Better Days") reveals that Zoe became pregnant before his death, and during the events of "Leaves on the Wind", she gives birth to their daughter, Emma.
  • A lot of the more sadistic jokes like the gory and sudden demise of characters, take on an uncomfortable light in the wake of Joss Whedon being exposed for abusive behaviour, even turning one instance of having made a crewmember cry into an anegdote, making these scenes feel like he was indulging himself.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • After seeing the "Aliens Live Among Us" exhibit
    Inara: So, do aliens live among us?
    Kaylee: Yeah. One of them's a doctor.
• Ho Yay:
  • According to Adam Baldwin, there would have been deliberate Homoerotic Subtext between Simon and Jayne if the series had not been canceled. Sean Maher also stated in a convention interview that he believed Simon had a crush on Jayne, something that would likely have been used in a future storyline.
  • Mal also refers to Simon's mouth as "pretty" at least once in the show and once in the movie.
  • Between Kaylee and Inara and Kaylee and River, with the former especially noticeable in "War Stories", the latter in "Serenity" and "Objects In Space". Inara is canonically bisexual and is close friends with Kaylee, a Tomboy with a Girly Streak who is often curious about Inara's business as a Companion, and there's a rather intimate, though platonic, scene of Inara brushing Kaylee's hair in "The Train Job" with her Companion leitmotif playing over it.
• Hype Backlash: Some people find the series' continuing popularity overblown.
• I Am Not Shazam:
  • Firefly is the name of the class of ship, not the ship itself. Serenity is the name of the ship, the first(ish) episode and The Movie. And as Inara points out, it's not The Serenity, it's just Serenity.
  • One page on This Very Wiki briefly called the preacher "Sheppard" Book. That's not even the right spelling, let alone his first name — "Shepherd" is his title, much like "Pastor" or "Father" would be for figures in a similar role. ^note  Pastor means Shepherd.
• Iron Woobie: Mal Reynolds and the full weight of The Chains of Commanding. He lost his entire homeworld to war, lost most of the people he ever cared for, then lost the war. After that he embarked down a life of crime that chafes at his principles, and alternates between Rage Against the Heavens and looking after his crew, often at the expense of his health.
• Jerkass Woobie: Jayne, at least in the moments where he shows a softer side, which almost always only happens when something terrible has happened to him.
• Like You Would Really Do It: In "Serenity", everything is set up to make the audience think Kaylee has died, up to and including a main character outright stating it. Even those familiar with Joss Whedon's Anyone Can Die Signature Style probably didn't really think he'd kill off a top billed character in the first episode. Nope: her "death" was actually just her going back to sleep after surgery, and Mal was just messing with Simon for laughs when he told him she died.
• Memetic Badass: RIVER TAM BEATS UP EVERYONE
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Many of the lines wound up becoming memes. Some examples include: "I'll be in my bunk.", "Also? I can kill you with my brain.", "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!", "Mine is an Evil Laugh!", "This food is problematic", "Big Damn Heroes, sir!" Etc., etc.
  • Jew-bal Early◊
  • A Cracked.com article on Real Life people with Improbable Aiming Skills elicited the comment that "they killed them with math". Some poor, deprived soul didn't get the joke and it had to be explained to him.
• Moe: Kaylee. Joss Whedon himself has said that everything becomes happy and shiny when she smiles.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Jayne comes very close to crossing it in "Ariel" when he tries to sell Simon and River to the Feds. He comes within seconds of getting Thrown Out the Airlock, but his regret and shame afterwards show that he is not completely irredeemable.
  • Niska crosses it in "War Stories" when he kidnaps Mal and Wash and starts torturing them to death. Bad move.
    • Alternately, the point where Zoe jumps the gun on his Sadistic Choice and he responds by giving her "small refund".
    • Hell Niska pretty much invokes this within five minutes of him first appearing onscreen, showing Mal and Zoe a guy he's got chained up in a meat locker being tortured, just to prove that his reputation of a man you do not want angry with you is more than just "people talking."
    Niska Now my reputation for you is fact, is solid.
  • "Heart of Gold". Rance. Willing to take out the entire brothel just to get to his kid, and is willing to be sexually serviced in public, because he thinks that's what women are for. Rather telling for someone who doesn't even survive the episode.
• No Yay:
  • An extremely creepy one-way version of this between Jubal Early and River in "Objects in Space". Pretty much all of his lines regarding her can easily be interpreted as sexual in nature, and that's before you factor in the rape threats he made to Kaylee. Not to mention River's line, "You crawl inside me uninvited," which does NOT help things.
    • A decent case can be made for River and anyone on the show. She's 17-years-old, traumatized and brain damaged, and the extent to which she improved after the events of the movie is unclear.
  • Jubal/Kaylee also gets the same reaction, in no small part because the sexual/rape subtext in his conversations with River crosses the line from subtext to text with Kaylee, due to him coldly threatening to rape her, something he says he neither desires nor undesires, just a thing that he will do if she doesn't cooperate.
  • Hilariously, this is how the entire crew reacts to the prospect of Mal/Zoe. Even the shockingly crude, meat head mercenary Jayne. ("Now, somethin' 'bout that is just downright unsettlin'.") Even Mal and Zoe themselves react this way.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Murphy in "Shindig". Could also qualify from his snarky lines as a Cool Old Guy.
    Murphy: Forgive me. I cannot abide useless people.
  • Monty, Mal's old war buddy, fellow smuggler, and fellow victim of Saffron.
    Monty: I shaved my beard for you, devil-woman!!
• Retroactive Recognition: Four years before High School Musical made him a star, Zac Efron played a younger Simon Tam in a flashback in the episode "Safe".
• The Ship's Motor: River/Jayne shippers often use the idea that Jayne's thoughts are "clear" or "simple" as part of the reasons River might be attracted to him.
• Sliding Scale of Social Satisfaction: Categorized as "Revolution is the Key". The show's tone is very anti-authoritarian, critically pointing out how despite the Alliance might think Utopia Justifies the Means, they are only restricting people's freedom, justifying genocides by biological weapons, and overall don't know what's best for the people. Previous revolutions have only tightened the Alliance's grip on society. However, it's proved that the smaller rebellions hold meaning still — one can go against the current on a scale as small as a ship's crew and defy everything the totalitarians stand for. It might not impact the world but it shows a revolution's spark is very difficult to completely extinguish.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • Bennett the Sage points out various similarities between Firefly and Outlaw Star here.
  • Alien: Resurrection, as pointed out by Michael Marano in the essay River Tam and the Weaponized Women of the Whedonverse. Firefly and Resurrection share many character archetypes and plot elements (notably the "Weaponized Woman" in the form of Clone Ripley and River Tam). It's evident that Joss Whedon had his work on Resurrection in the back of his mind while he was working on this series.
• Stoic Woobie: Simon has to deal with pretty much everything his sister is going through, and received little to no support from either of his parents when he made his move to get her out of the Academy. This is also Zoe after the movie, and depending on how badly the war affected her, possibly before and during the series as well.
• Too Good to Last: Probably the most infamous example in television history, as it had a rabid fan following and critical acclaim, yet it couldn't accrue the viewership Fox expected. Whether or not those expectations were actually reasonable, of course, is another matter.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: People seem to want to read politics into Firefly everywhere, with critics interpreting it as everything from an anti-Big-Government libertarian parable, to a racist, pro-Confederate perspective on the Wild West. The show is, in fact, fairly apolitical; with the exception of the feminist overtones which are one of Joss Whedon's Creator Thumbprints, Firefly does not seem to have one specific political "message" as much as people would like to believe. Whedon even qualifies that, if anti-government messages do sneak in, that is because the story is essentially Mal's story, and it all comes from his perspective as a bitter ex-soldier who fought against a government that he personally considered evil.
• The Woobie: River. Between her madness, the fear the others show around her, and her traumatic backstory (plus Summer Glau's excellent acting) she gets tremendous sympathy from the fandom. Kaylee also gets similar treatment thanks to the fact that every villain seems to be laser-guided to target and hurt the sweetest person on the whole ship. Wash has some Sad Clown tendencies. Book doesn't really know where he belongs in life, and what with an abusive childhood never really had a family. Inara may also qualify, given her secret.

For the All New Firefly comics

• Fanfic Fuel: How did the people of Canton react to Jayne’s death in? Might’ve taken it pretty hard depending on if they still looked up to him any after “Jaynestown”.

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