A Few Thoughts on Firefly

I recently rewatched Firefly for the first time in years, and it was interesting to revisit it. When I first watched the series, introduced by my certified-nerd older brother, I didn’t actively seek out a lot of sci-fi on my own. Most of my previous genre outings had been in more of a fantasy realm, and while I knew heavy hitters like Star Wars and The X-Files, Firefly was one of my first real forays into sci-fi that wasn’t already mainstream. But since then (and likely in part because of becoming a fan of Firefly,) I’ve dived into all manner of genre stuff covering a wide range of subcategories and with a heaping dose of sci-fi. My sci-fi love covers everything from my beloved Doctor Who to the mind-bendy 12 Monkeys to my most recenty-viewed Defiance, and in light of that expanded palate, I returned to Firefly with pretty new eyes.

To be sure, I still got a lot of enjoyment out of the series. Most of the characters are vibrantly-drawn and well-performed – even if I’ve since learned a lot more about Joss Whedon’s typical character/dialogue quirks, I’m also powerless against the charms of a ragtag found family in space. Despite the series’s small number of episodes, pretty much everyone gets at least one episode where they really get a chance to shine. This is the show that gave me Alan Tudyk and Gina Torres, and although I haven’t seen Adam Baldwin or Sean Maher in much else, I’ll forever love their performances on this show. (Plus, the movie was my first exposure to Chiwetel Ejiofor, an obvious public service.)

At the same time, there’s annoying stuff too. The whole notion of companions is a fail for me, because the show pushes forth this idea of being so evolved while simultaneously being so reductive, and the less said about Whedon’s infamous original plan for the “syringe” scene in the pilot, the better. While I enjoy the show leanding so literally into the “space western” idea, I think more could’ve been done to play with the nature of what the ‘verse is like. By and large, the show has two aesthetic dials, “space” and “western,” that it cranks to different levels as needed, and the various shifts don’t always have an internal consistency. But today, what I really want to look at is the third dial, slightly off to the side from the others and operating at a more limited range. And that’s “Chineseness.”

On my initial exposure to Firefly, I enjoyed the “flavor” of the old-West space dialogue peppered with Mandarin for a hot second before it started to bug me. I couldn’t help but look at the Chinese swear words, the occasional Chinese article of clothing, and notes of Chinese décor, while simultaneously noting no Chinese characters of any importance to the story, ever. In a ‘verse in which there’s a suggestion that America and China at some point merged as superpowers and cultural elements of both now influence everyone our heroes come across, why are there no significant people of Chinese descent on the show? There are certainly none in the main cast (although Simon and River’s surname, Tam, suggests there was probably an initial intention to do otherwise,) and despite Asian extras cropping up here and there, I would bet there aren’t more than maybe four Asian-American actors who are so much as given lines in the entire series.

Now, I know this isn’t a new revelation – I’m sure there are online thinkpieces about Firefly so old they were originally posted on Livejournal. And as much as we might be inclined to shake our heads and say, “It was a product of its time,” it’s not like Hollywood doesn’t still have major problems with race. Look at all those ambiguously-brown Essos slaves picturesquely thronging around the pale Danaerys Targaryon, look at Marvel claiming they cast Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One to avoid racism, and look at how long it took Star Wars to cast a woman of color to play someone who didn’t look like an obvious alien. Firefly doesn’t have the market cornered on falling short in this area. (It should also be pointed that three of Firefly’s main cast are people of color, so it’s not like the show only cast white heroes.)

But it still annoys me, and watching the series again, it really jumps out as both lazy and dismissive.  Where did all this “Chineseness” come from if not from Chinese people? Did the ‘verse just acquire it through osmosis? Years ago, did a group of Chinese people shoot an unmanned rocket filled with silks, incense, lanterns, and swear words toward the outer rim, and someone cracked it open and it caught on like a craze? It’s so dumb to have the “flavor” and not the human beings.

In a way, including Asian extras makes the oversight among the prominent cast members even more noticeable. It means the show thought about it but, along the way, never went beyond having Asians as “window dressing,” much like the Mandarin dialoge and costume flourishes are. It’s like you see sometimes in period musicals, where there’s a diverse cast in the ensemble but the leads are all white; these chorus members are proof that the production isn’t slavishly devoted to “historical accuracy” when it comes to casting (although as the Twelfth Doctor points out, “History’s a whitewash,”) so then why do the actors of color extend no further than the ensemble? I would hope that, if Firefly were made today and it kept the “Chineseness” aspect, there would be a lot more characters of Chinese descent present in the cast, from the top down. Unfortunately, I know enough to realize this wouldn’t be a guarantee, but this was bad form on the show’s part, and I would like to hope that a hypothetical new version would rectify that.