16 "Objects in Space"

Very strange to rewatch the series! Strange how much I'd forgotten about this specific episode, one of my favorites. 

For ages I couldn't understand how the show didn't make it, because I loved it so much, but now I get it. The tone and angle of the episodes are all over the place. One heartfelt, one silly, one dramatic, one truly violent, one horror, one a heist, and so on. I could see how that would make the money people extremely nervous. How would an audience know what to expect?

I suspect the fans like me were there for the characters and the world more than anything else. If you're a character person, you'll take anything that lets you spend time with those characters. Not that there's anything wrong with these stories! They're all wonderful. But they are unpredictable. Compare to a sitcom or a procedural or a regular drama. They deliver the same goods every week. This does not.

Anyway.

"Out of Gas" is the episode I wanted to look at specifically because it's about treating people like objects. 

There's a bounty hunter, Jubal Early, who is after River and Simon. He shuts the crew in their bunks and then runs into Kaylee. He says truly appalling things to Kaylee and threatens her with rape. There's no earthly reason to have that in the episode, obviously--he beats up Mal and Book and Simon, so non-sexual violence is on the table--so I have to wonder whether it's the treating people like objects theme that's doubled as Early treats River as an object to be retrieved and returned for the bounty, not as a person. 

In the end, Mal throws Early (in a spacesuit) off the ship and into space to die. He will become an object in space himself. 

Early says something about Serenity's design as he is forcing Simon to search the ship for River, something about how he likes the ship's design--people don't appreciate the shape of things, objects in space--but he says a lot of weird things in passing and Simon lets it go. 

Objects in space is such an odd phrasing. What ISN'T an object in space? Everything is. But I suppose what it means is: the way things fit into and belong in the spaces they're in.

I removed two chairs from my living room today. You think that didn't entirely change the nature of this space? It's astounding. Space and the way objects fit into it or obstruct it or clutter it. Mise en scene. Oh the relief when I take anything extra or awkward out of my house.

Early is an invader of Serenity when they're far away from everything. He invades the ship, but then when they can't find River, she gets on the comm and says she isn't on the ship, she IS the ship. Simon jokes that he can't keep track of her even when she's not incorporeally possessing a spaceship. It's River's disappearance and her mysterious takeover of the comm that lets her communicate with everyone, almost telepathically, and organize their resistance and attack and success.

Space invaders, crossing boundaries, obviously the overt spoken threat of rape, identifying the spaceship with a body and entering it against everyone's will, then River becoming the ship and organizing everyone to kick Early out and kill him. There's so much in this episode about bodily autonomy and violence. It's a simple story: invader enters, hurts people, locks everyone in or ties them up, but then they organize and kick him out and kill him. So is it a rape revenge fantasy? Maybe so. 

Early treats all of the crew as objects. Look what he does. Beats up Mal, drops him down into his bunk. Locks Mal, Jayne, Zoe, and Wash into their bunks. Beats up Shepherd Book. Threatens Kaylee with rape and ties her up to use as leverage. Knocks Simon around but needs him to find River. Beats up Inara and locks her into her shuttle. River is the ninth character but she escapes. We never see her go. She just disappears. 

Want to talk about the fantasy that Firefly thrives on, of being mobile and independent and able to get away from anywhere you don't want to be? This is a huge fantasy of mine. I used to have dreams of a shuttlecraft from Star Trek: The Next Generation. A runabout from DS9. Any mobile, independent self-contained space, with power, heating and cooling, a bathroom with bathtub, a kitchen, a couch, a desk/table, a bed. Make it a caravan of a diverse crew of misfits that form a found family. Just like DS9, Farscape, STTNG, Battlestar Galactica. No coincidence, all my favorite shows. 

Mind blown. I want it!