Jay Kristoff points out something that escaped the notice of Firefly fans: Mal Reynolds and his crew were the bad guys.
Now, when Firefly first went on the air, Joss Whedon was pretty explicit about the fact that Mal was a science fiction analogue to an ex-Confederate soldier going west because he couldn't abide the damnyankees imposing Reconstruction on a defeated South. Despite this, and despite the various crimes Mal and his crew committed, Whedon had the show's fans cheering the crew of Serenity on every step of the way.
And that is the dark joke at the heart of Firefly: Whedon had us all rooting for Cliven Bundy, and we never even noticed.
1 comment:
I never watched the show, but one of my favorite novels, Charles Portis' True Grit, makes it clear that Rooster Cogburn was a nasty piece of work- having participated in the Lawrence, Kansas massacre, and (in an aside by the narrator) went on to a career driving homesteaders off their land... maybe he was one of the villains in Shane.
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