"She's a liability! If you were counting on her to cover your back you'd be dead!"

Yes. That's the point. Nobody on the team is omnipurpose. Mal, Book, Zoe, and Jayne are the gunslingers. Jayne is as dumb as a box of ammo. I don't want Jayne fixing the engine and I don't want Kaylee at my back in a gunfight.

It would be really annoying if everybody on the team were omnicompetent.

It would be really annoying if everybody on the team were omnicompetent.

Of course. Anything else would be sloppy story-telling. "Look at the super heros!" But that means it would be lovely (for me, anyway) if Kaylee would be self-aware enough to realize her limitations. She's great at the family-types of things, she's a genius mechanic, but she shouldn't try to get in the middle of gunfights.

She doesn't try to get in the middle of gunfights. She picked up a gun, possibly for the first time, in War Stories to try and help rescue Mal. She freaked out at a crucial moment, probably because she'd been shot before, and was ashamed of herself for doing it.

She does seem to have an unfortunate tendency to walk into the middle of them, though.

Buh? I so don't get that, from the show.

I'm not sure I noticed that the show does actually display her fantastic body (with those cheeseburger-added pounds) before.

Nutty and Betsy and Zenkitty say what I wanted to say.

Or perhaps that just means she isn't closed-off and duplicitous.

In "Objects in Space", in the scene in which we get to see things from River's point of view, Kaylee is the only one who doesn't seem to radiate something completely different to River than the words she's actually physically pronouncing at the moment. I think that's also a sign of her lack of hiding her thoughts and emotions.

In "War Stories" I thought it was quite explicit that the only reason Kaylee even got near a gun was because she wanted to take part in the effort to save Mal, because he would have done the exact same thing for any one of them. She wanted to do something for a dear beloved friend, and found out later that it was not a thing she could do.

Of course, it risked the whole crew. But so did the missing piece of equipment that they didn't buy in "Serenity" which ended up breaking the whole engine in "Out of Gas". That's part of the point, for me - that they're living on what they can find and have, improvizing when they have to, having to trust what they can find, because there's nothing else for them to use. That's sort of what life in space/the frontier seem, in my eyes - you have to get by with what you have, or you fail, and the chance of failure is always present, and at the smallest slip.

I like the character of Kaylee, including the fact that Kiba pointed out, about how she is so quick to huff at others. She's so open and honest about her own emotions and thoughts, she can't hide any facet of them, for better or for worse. And I don't think that having a passion for life and an ability to enjoy what the world has shows a simplistic character. Straight-forward, a lack of hiding thoughts and emotions that people mostly hide - yes, but again I don't think it means you lack depth if you have no problem of sharing it.

I'm not sure I noticed that the show does actually display her fantastic body (with those cheeseburger-added pounds) before.

I may be the only one, but I think she looks better with the extra weight.

I don't think you're the only one.

Interview with Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon.

Don't know if it's spoilery for Mirrormask or Serenity yet.

eta: It's not.

I hear Jewel was not required to regain weight for the movie.

Kiba, you're definitely not the only one.