Anybody remember "Encounter at Farpoint?"

Eeewww.....

While I don't think "Serenity" was quite as good as the best couple of Firefly episodes, I'd hardly consider it a sucky or unrepresentative pilot. Seems to me that liking it and liking the series as a whole went hand-in-hand for most people.

While I don't think "Serenity" was quite as good as the best couple of Firefly episodes, I'd hardly consider it a sucky or unrepresentative pilot. Seems to me that liking it and liking the series as a whole went hand-in-hand for most people.

Yes, this. I recently showed the series to my GF, starting with "Serenity." Even though she was willing, and wanted to watch, when "Serenity" started and the Battle of Serenity Valley unfolded, she was really not liking it. She fired off a number of reasons it was not doing it for her, but, being a trooper, she kept going.

By the end of "Serenity," she was HOOKED. She would gleefully watch two and three episodes at a stretch, loving the whole thing, and regularly talking back to the screen about what was happening at any given moment. Usually tsking the characters over their failings. She was very disappointed in Jayne during "Ariel."

While I don't think "Serenity" was quite as good as the best couple of Firefly episodes, I'd hardly consider it a sucky or unrepresentative pilot.

I didn't say it sucked, just that it was a pilot, as was "The Train Job," and that pilots have to demonstrate certain aspects of the show. But I can understand connie neil's reaction (post #4065) to it---to the point that I sometimes recommend "Our Mrs. Reynolds" as an intro to the series when I loan my DVDs.

But...what happens to the pilot functionality?

I am staying with it, on the strength of the amusing quotes and the opinions of folks here. And I've got people over on LJ tossing plot bunnies over my rabbit-proof fence (must go to Idaho and win the lottery). There's oodles of potential in that world.

Connie, it just gets better and better. That's the truth. Though for pure quality it probably peaks at the 3/4 mark.

I love the Serenity pilot. I thought it was everything the series needed for a launch.

I fell in love with the show, never to recover, on the scene of Wash with the dinosaurs.

I watched it for the first time with 3 friends, and I was the one urging to do the watching, based on recommendations here and massive curiosity. The first scene, of the big battle, really didn't do anything for me (I can never keep up who is who in scenes like this, where everybody is dirty and it's all dark and they're all shouting). It turned completely off friend#1. By the time of the stealing, right afterwards, friend#2 was all "OK, it's cool, but we've seen stuff like that already all the time". Then there was Wash and the dinosaurs and I fell in love so I paid much less attention to actual people and quite more attention to fictional characters on the screen.

By the time the first half of the pilot was over, however, all three of us were completely hooked. Through the end, neither of the friends answered their cellphones (which, for an Israeli, is a huge thing). We were cheering and gasping and totally inside what was happening in that world and to those characters.

Friend#1 never watched an episode again (to her defence, she has 3 kids, not nearly enough sleep, and is sorry she never borrowed it from me). Friend#2 not only watced the whole way through, but also converted her husband. Friend#3 is the one I kept watching with, and she was probably the one of the ver first Israelis to own the DVDs. Oh, and I went nuts on the internet with too many ramblings. But then again, it was here, so you already knew that.

The pilot worked perfectly, for me, in the sense of introducing the characters, with more than just "this is X and his job is Y". Each one of them had, if not a full personality (that I felt like only seeing part of), enough to make me interested and curious about what that personality may be (Book, River). I think I understand the decision to open with the big battle and abandoning scene, the framing of the whole state-of-affairs and state-of-mind for anything that happens afterwards, but still. And it's all a "me" thing, the difficulty to associate with these sort of scenes.

Did those who don't like the battle opener prefer the originally filmed rescue scene? I thought Mal's superstitious bit in the splosions version was a neat bit of exposition, but prefer the original opening that FOX rejected.

Did any regular SF readers have problems with The train job not introducing things propper like?

Did any regular SF readers have problems with The train job not introducing things propper like?

I thought this was a huge problem. For all that I love the show, I'm pretty sure The Train Job was intended to be the "new" pilot. And while I know the network wanted less exposition, I can't help but think that our boys could've at least worked in, say, INARA'S NAME. (I'm pretty sure they never call her by name, not through the whole episode.)

ETA: First chapter of the Serenity novelization is online. It looks like it is fairly spoiler free, as it is essentially narration of the first scene of the episode "Serenity," not the movie. It does reveal that Zoe has a last name (possibly I'm the last person to discover this). [link]