A rather grim episode after the hi-jinx (and naked bottom) of the previous episode. Like the previous episode, there is a lot going on but most of it doesn't hang together well.

At a space station, Mal receives a large crate in the mail. Inside the crate, Zoe and Mal find the body of a former comrade from the war. The coffin also contains a message telling Mal to return the former comrade to his homeworld. Feeling obliged to do so, the Serenity heads off to transport the body. Meanwhile, a brutal gang of alliance soldiers are also in pursuit of the body. Back on the Serenity the body turns out not to be dead...instead the ex-browncoat is caught up in an illegal organ smuggling scam. Things get complicated from there...

I'll note first that Firefly is once again turning to medical economic scarcity as a theme and as a motive driving events. Having said that, ex-corpse ex-corpsman's plan only makes less sense the more you think about it. We are given a character-based reason for that as the episode progresses and Tracy (the not-so-dead soldier) turns out to be a magnet for bad decision making.

It's overall a weird episode. There's some good character work by the crew but a lot of the plot depends on a backstory that is largely disposable. The focus on Mal and Zoe's role in the war doesn't really expand on what we already knew. Mal's actions to defend his crew above all else, is already well established. Simon and Kaylee's potential romance hits a few bumps but in the end it amounts to just a bunch of stuff that happened. Jayne's hat is the bit I liked the best, as it was the first thing that made me like the character a bit more.

Interestingly, because of its weird broadcast history, this is one of two individual Firefly episode to be a Hugo Award finalist. Because it wasn't broadcast on Fox in 2002, it wasn't seen until 2003 on the Sci-Fi channel and along with the next episode was a BDP short form finalist. 2003/2004 was arguably peak-Whedon in the Hugo Awards, with three of the short form slots taken up by either Firefly or Buffy but whereas Buffy had won in 03, the novelty finalist of Gollum's acceptance speech took the rocket in 04. By 2006 Doctor Who had rolled into town and while Whedon related properties would win other Hugo spots (Doctor Horrible, The Avengers), the TV dominance had passed.

Maybe I'm being a bit hard on this episode but in the context of a run of quite strong episodes in this second half of the series, it felt more like filler.

  1. Episode 3: Bushwacked
  2. Episode 7: Jaynestown
  3. Episode 8: Out of Gas
  4. Episode 11: Trash
  5. Episode 9: Ariel
  6. Episode 10: War Stories
  7. Episode 2: The Train Job
  8. Episode 6: Our Mrs Reynolds
  9. Episode 5: Safe
  10. Episode 12: The Message
  11. Episode 1: Serenity
  12. Episode 4: Shindig
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