Could Firefly return from the dead?

One of my favorite TV shows of all time was Joss Whedon’s Firefly.

It shared the same wit and narrative scope as Whedon’s show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but threw in a cool science-fiction/western aesthetic that I really loved.

Sadly, Firefly got swatted out of the airwaves before the first season had finished airing – the victim of cable television’s very short-sighted attitude towards television shows.

Fans – who call themselves ‘browncoats’ after the defeated revolutionaries from the TV show – were expected to be satisfied with the (admittedly sublime) movie adaptation that followed.

But apparently, there is a chance Firefly will fly again.

Star Nathan Fillon, who plays the Han Solo-esque Captain of the starship Serenity, joked to Entertainment Weekly that he’d buy the rights to the show if he won $300 million on the California lottery and start producing new episodes himself. Devoted Browncoats read that promise – and promptly started fund-raising.

Entertainment Weekly calculated that it would cost just a tenth of Fillon’s hypothetical lottery jackpot to score the rights to Firefly – but that depended on 20th Century Fox being willing to part with them. In addition, you’d need a pretty hefty change jar to fund a series, even on the Internet (unless you wanted it to look like the plucky, but underfunded Browncoats: Redemption fan film.)

Nevertheless, even the possibility is exciting. Firefly was so beautifully written that it’s a crime its no longer on television. The characterization was perfect, the scripts were laugh-out-loud funny and the onscreen action was intoxicating.

My favorite episode was Ariel; the ultimate heist scenario.

In that episode, the Serenity crew stole medical uniforms and infiltrated an alliance medical center to steal supplies.

True to Whedon’s style, the treacherous Jayne donned a hospital nurse uniform and promptly attempted to sell two of his crew members to the authorities.

Meanwhile Simon Tam – the only one actually qualified to wear that doctor uniform – discovered the severity of the medical experimentation performed on his traumatized little sister, River.

To pack all that into a single hour-long episode was outstanding production work – easily the rival of anything on TV today.

Maybe, even if 20th Century Fox are unwilling to part with the rights to Firefly, they’ll see from the devoted fan-following just how much promise the show holds and return it to our screens in short order.

After all, the devoted fan sight fighting to raise the money already has 100,000 subscribers. If that's representative of the ones willing to donate their time and effort - how many other fans would be willing to tune in?

UK to doctor the water to improve 'mentality?'

It's an old theme, even by the standards of science fiction - a repressive government that's reduced to drugging it's citizens.

That concept served as the starting point for 1978's 'Blake's 7' and recently revealed itself as the conspiracy at the heart of the awesome Joss Whedon movie 'Serenity.'

Well, life is now imitating art. The BBC have reported that studies have revealed the positive affects of adding lithium to drinking water - a considerably lower rate of suicide.

Now governments, including ours, are thinking of adding the silver-white alkali metal to our drinking water to 'improve the mood' of the population.

In sci-fi, of course, this sort of plan never ends well. In Serenity, the sinister 'Alliance' added a drug to the atmosphere of a terraformed planet to curb aggression - instead, it killed 99.9% of the population and turned that last tenth of a percent into homicidal cannibals and rapists known to terrified neighboring planets as 'Reavers.'

Similarly, adding lithium to the water is not without risks. While lithium is used with considerable success in the treatment of depression and mental illness, therapeutically useful doses ( 0.6 to 1.2 mmol/l) are only slightly below levels considered to be toxic (>1.5 mmol/l).

Side effects include muscle tremors, twitching, bone loss, high blood-pressure, kidney damage, nephrogenic diabetes insipidus and seizures.

"Any suggestion that lithium should be added, even in tiny amounts, to drinking water should be treated with caution and researched very thoroughly," Sophie Corlett, external relations director at Mind, said, but nevertheless, the idea "certainly merits investigation."

Personally, I think the entire concept is terrifying. I can understand adding supplements like fluoride to water, as they alleviate physical problems like tooth decay... But lithium?

When you talk about adding a chemical that changes people moods - essentially alters their personality - then you have to start worrying.

"It's the Pax. The G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate that we added to the air processors. It was supposed to calm the population, weed out aggression. Well, it works. The people here stopped fighting. And then they stopped everything else. They stopped going to work, they stopped breeding, talking, eating. There's 30 million people here, and they all just let themselves die."

Dr Caron, Serenity

Firefly or something like it...

*Dull Explosion*

Mal: What was that?

Wash: Did you see that?

Mal: Was that the primary buffer panel?

Wash: It did seem to resemble...

Mal: Did the primary buffer panel just fall off my Gorramn ship for no apparent reason?

Script of Serenity, by Josh Whedon

Twenty five miles an hour on Livingstone Avenue and there was a crunch, followed by the 'ding' of metal bouncing down the asphalt.

It wasn't a primary buffer panel - but it did appear that a relatively significant piece of my Lincoln Town Car had decided to divorce itself from rest of the vehicle.

Now this didn't unduly worry me. American cars have a large amount of redundant bits attached to their undercarriage which drop off (or stay on) depending on the weather. But it did remind me of Mal's speech at the end of the movie Serenity. His words of advice to wayward River reminded me of my philosophy towards my slightly-less-than-reliable automobiles:

You can learn all the math in the 'verse... But you take a boat in the air that you don't love... She'll shake you off just as sure as the turn of the worlds.

Love keeps her in the air when she ought to fall down... Tells you she's hurting before she keels. Makes her a home.

Now I do not claim this to be a WISE philosophy behind ownership of classic automobiles. But a deep sense of affection is definitely an advantage when owning a vehicle which occasionally costs more and runs less than anticipated.

For all her many failings (there was that week when she returned an appalling 11.8 mpg) my shiny red Lincoln manages to turn heads and spark conversations that a more sensible Honda or Toyota could never do.

And I've learnt that the more you love your inconvenient, but magnificent automobile - the more other people seem too, as well.

Which is handy, since remarkably, the more loved she is, the better she runs. The more reliably she starts. And for some unknown reason, the less petrol she drinks. Right now, we're hitting a down-right puritanical 16.9 mpg.

That must be a lot of love at work.