Cowboys Like Us

My love for the series “Castle” is well-known, and I’m not shy about promoting the show to other prospective viewers.  Over the years I have also seen Nathan Fillion in “Desperate Housewives,” “Pasadena,” and “Waitress”, so wasn’t it inevitable I’d eventually get around to watching “Firefly”?  Thanks to a friend who sent me the DVD set for my birthday, I was able to view it.  The foremost question, of course, was would I enjoy it?  I love “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” and “Lost in Space” and “The Twilight Zone”, and the fifteen or so episodes I was able to see of “The X-Files” were great, but I don’t, as a rule, seek out science fiction.  Call me a lazy viewer: sometimes I just can’t commit to something with that much mythology.  My impression after viewing “Firefly” is that you either get it or you don’t—thankfully, I got it.  I was fascinated by the idea of a space western:  cows and horses and taverns and spaceships and futuristic weapons.  Fillion’s Captain Malcolm Reynolds was a layered character who didn’t take crap from anyone, and the show was imbued with a lot of heart, humor, and even pathos.  There were plenty of unexpected twists and turns, and I find myself wondering, with every short-lived show, how a second season might have looked. I still need to see the follow-up movie, “Serenity.”

Back to my point about “getting it”.  It reminds me of a show that I loved as a kid, “Eerie, Indiana”, in which the lead character and his best friend seemed to exist in an alternate universe in which they were the only keen observers.  So much of life is subjective, including television shows, because we reflect our own set of feelings onto the characters and their plights.  If I didn’t already have a fascination with westerns and the cowboy lifestyle, or an appreciation of Nathan Fillion, my enjoyment of “Firefly” may have been much less.  Thanks for the laughs, Serenity gang—I needed them.

Yes, I know this capture is from "Desperate Housewives".  It's what was in my DVD player at the time.