“If you take sexual advantage of her, you’re going to burn in a very special level of Hell. A level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theatre.”
Another Joss Whedon script, then. I like Joss Whedon scripts a lot. They’re good, they’re witty, and they always contain the phrase “not so much”. What’s not to like?
We have a river which looks an awful lot like the Mississippi. We have a hold-up of a stagecoach. Well, a marine stagecoach thingy. Yep, that’ll be a Western in space, all right. It’s an amusing sequence, as is the party with more Irish dancing. Then it’s back to Serenity, and Mal appears to be married…
This is the first time I’ve seen this episode since I became familiar with the excellent Christina Hendricks (well, I managed to keep up until part way through Season 2, but I’ll be marathoning it for this blog one of these years). It seems that Mal has his own domestic servant-cum-“nubile little slave girl”, except he’s far too much of a gentleman to take advantage of that. We think. It’s interesting to observe how this pans out, knowing Joss Whedon’s reputation for undercutting and playing with traditional gender roles. In fact, anybody with a passing knowledge of Whedon’s stuff would probably guess from the start that Saffron isn’t what he seems to be.
It’s fun to see everyone reacting, of course. The bit where Zoe calls everyone to see and have a good laugh is fun, but it’s interesting to see that Inara is immediately and obviously jealous. She also gives away, to the viewer at least, that she cares an awful lot about Mal when she sees him unconscious. So far this has only been hinted at, albeit fairly blatantly. It’ll be interesting to see how things develop between the two of them, but I suspect the whole thing is far too slow-burn, sadly, for a programme with such a limited life expectancy.
Mal’s starting to fall for Saffron a bit, though. He even starts to tell her of his upbringing, on a ranch on the planet Shadow. We eventually get to an hilariously awkward bedroom scene (“Oh, I’m going to go to then special Hell!”), ending with Saffron kissing him. Her lipstick’s poisoned, of course. I bet that’s where Steven Moffat got the idea from, for River Song.
Now that we, the audience, have had our suspicions confirmed, we get the fun of watching Saffron trying to seduce other members of the crew. Wash, being very, very married, isn’t falling for it, and has to be karate chopped from behind. Inara isn’t taken in by the Sapphic charms of Saffron, though, much as it seems otherwise at first. But she ends up kissing the unconscious Mal, must to her later hysterical denials! Morena Baccarin is great in this episode, where she gets a wider range of material. We can’t have her just being poised and graceful all the time.
Interestingly, we’re told Saffron has been to companion academy, but she remains mysterious. It’s a fascinating last conversation between her and Mal, though, about individuals “playing” each other versus people sticking together. Is this a coded message in favour of social democracy as opposed to the dangers of right-wing individualism?
The last scene is perfect, of course. Mal draws completely the wrong conclusion. Of course, Inara would find it truly intolerable if only he knew! Their relationship is shaping up in a rather nicely ‘40s screwball sort of way…
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