A lot of people (self included) feel that the Operative's storyline was intended to give us a glimpse into Book's back story. One person mused that she wasn't sure she liked the notion of Book as a sociopath like the Operative, but that perhaps that was the whole point: that anyone, even the worst person alive, could be redeemed in the proper circumstances.

I like the symmetry of this. Especially after:

Mal: "you'll have to tell me about that one day"
Book: "No, I really don't"

We then get shown a possible backstory for Book, complete with redemptive possibilities - "I'm not their man anymore".

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To me, Wash's death feels like Tara's death, emotional bitchslap and all.

I thought Wash's death was more like Anya's death - quick, shocking, and effective. Except Wash's death got 5 seconds as supposed to Anya's 2, which was nice. But it showed that the stakes were actually high.

I hated Book's death. It was cheap, predictable, and ineffective. And now we pretty much certainly will never learn Book's secret.

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Between the time Mal and the Op. fight and the Op. shows up at Serenity there is a montage where the crew puts Serenity back together and a funeral scene. That indicates the passage of time. The question is were the damage to the ship significant enough so that the time needed to repair it would equal the time needed for broken bones to heal? Maybe they took some time to grieve before the repairs as well. I don't have a problem with it.

Mal was at the canon on the way back. The first time I saw it it struck me since you would think this is something Jayne perfectly suited for Jayne. The second time I saw it I made sure to pay attention and it was Mal.

I still maintain that Wash was chosen to die because of non story reasons. It's not personal, it's just business. As for being the conscience of the ship you can see how Simon would step up and fill in there. Harder to replace would be Wash as pilot as so often it was his skill in that department that got them out of sticky situations.

As far as a Book/Operative connection I thought for sure the Op. was going to announce he was becoming a shepherd at the end.

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It knocked me out of my sense of complacency and surface comfort in my ability to protect myself by second-guessing the plot. The bitchslap put more life into my fiction, and for me, not in a bad way.

Let me be the first to say that it worked for me like this too, in a good way.

Book getting to make his last speech was a bit contrived, sure, but I felt it got redeemed somewhat by him not actually getting to make his point entirely. There's definitely something more to the sentence he's about to whisper to Mal before he kicks. Mal's just left with "believe" and he takes that and runs with it in Mal fashion, which is to believe in the righteousness of his cause. It takes the he's-dead-so-now-I-fight angle and makes it, if not more believable, at least fuller.

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I enjoyed the movie. I didn't love it. Book's death I accept very sadly (I want backstory!) since Ron Glass isn't in good enough health anymore to film another TV series. Wash was a shock, but I like what it did. It made the audience hurt and that's a happy thing in a movie like this. Simon being the one to break out River is like the Mule changing from a 4-wheeler and trailer (destroyed in War Stories) into a modified flying forklift from Batman Beyond (too expensive for our crew to operate), a necessary change to tell this particular story. And the Mule chase was a cool scene, so I'll give them that one without argument.

What I saw Mal do to The Operative was something referred to in combat circles as The Muppet Dance. Break the clavicles and dislocate the shoulders, causing both arms to hang limp so when the person tries to retaliate they look like a Muppet. But the 'two by two, hands of blue' guys were scarier.

As for the grand revelation of the movie I'm left at odds. I thought it was a cheap way out. I also think the crew's actions in the movie would have a significant effect not only on themselves, but on the 'verse as a whole. Maybe not enough to break the Alliance, but certainly enough to severely erode what support they might have had from the border planets. And that would certainly alter the powerbase of the solar system. Perhaps this is what Joss had in mind for the Season 2 (3?) finale, but I think I prefer my 'verse the way it was.

Oh yeah. Hello (again?) folks, it's been a few years since I had martinis with the Atlantic Canadians. Good to be back on Buffistas.

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While skimming, I saw that a few folks mentioned that Wash's death was pointless. In the context of BDM1, it is a little pointless. Where we will really see the point of it is in BDM2 and BDM3 (if we are so lucky).

There was no "to be continued" at the end of this movie. Also, I took from joss' comments, that although he hoped for more, this movie was supposed to be a stand-alone and not part one of a 3-part trilogy. So, Wash's death had to be important to me in THIS film. It wasn't. It was important to me because of the TV series. Because he was the guy with the dinasours. (And actually, I wish that while Wash was waiting for them to come back from the bank robbery, we had seen him do something like play with the dinasours again. He had too little screen time and something like that would have added some weight to the character.)

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Wash was such an accessible character for me (in the series) that I don't even care about BDMs 2 and 3, with him dead. I know there's meta-spec that AT mightn't have been available for future BDMs, but still...

Part of the reason of seeing BDM2 and BDM3 is seeing how the characters move on and deal with his loss. Just like we are. Don't you want to see this?

No. Completely uninterested in a 'verse that contains no Book AND no Wash. Wish them well. Glad there're working. Hope all goes well. I'm done.

That may change, but right now, no. This isn't mourning. It started to be mourning. But this doesn't feel honestly earned, even with the oblique twist Joss is famous for. It's not Jenny's death, or Joyce's death, that leaves me in the story and mourning the death of a beloved character. This is having my face slapped hard enough for believing in a rare good onscreen marriage of real characters to knock me completely out of the story, and past caring what happens to the cardboard images that are left.

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This is having my face slapped hard enough for believing in a rare good onscreen marriage of real characters to knock me completely out of the story, and past caring what happens to the cardboard images that are left.

I'm not quite at that point, but that's close to how I feel.

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Mal: "you'll have to tell me about that one day"

Book: "No, I really don't"

I got all pissy about this exchange after the fact, 'cause that line was totally from Joss to me. Fandom says, you have to tell me that great and intriguing backstory. And Joss says, no, I really don't have to tell you.

The changes to Book & to Simon were the most irksome. Definitely the relationship between Book & Mal was weird. And Book became much less interesting as portrayed in the movie. Simon was completely different (and heterosexual!) and I just sort of ignored him throughout.

With everyone else, it just seemed like I got less of them and less of their characters than I wanted. Not that they were inconsistent in their characterization, just that I was unable to see the subtler nuances that I loved in the show.

Wash's death is upsetting, and mostly because of the loss of the wonderfully portrayed relationship.

But, you know, it doesn't necessarily have a payoff because there isn't necessarily a follow-up. If I never see the characters again, then Wash's death is just a part of the narrative, and not a living breathing thing that we have to deal with.

It's interesting to me that if we do get to continue, that the "weakness" given to Zoe isn't an internal flaw, but an external pressure, a happening. No matter what, I will miss that partnership's dynamic.

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Zoe being the sole exception to my "cardboard" crack. But only by a narrow, narrow thin line, the residue of the respect and belief I had for their relationship, for each of them as characters, and for Torres' fine, rich, textured underplaying of Zoe's grief.

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