All I can come up with is: maybe his dinky little stun gun couldn't get the job done from the distance where the fight started. Once they were on the central platform, he didn't have time while fighting Mal. Once he thought Mal was defeated, there was no need to destroy the transmitting equipment.

It's probably the same type of stun gun that the Alliance had in the series, which only affected people. Like the one Jayne couldn't shoot a door with.

Yeah, the room Mal was in didn't have Reaver gunfire ricocheting all over it.

I did wonder what good the blast doors were going to be in sealing out the Reavers if they were going to pop open automatically a few minutes later. River didn't key them open, she was posing dramatically halfway across the room.

It's the selection of the marriage to kill that I don't trust because of author issues, not just the character I "like" best, because I don't necessarily like Wash best, and the older character, which is after all a Hollywood cliche which I think could stand to be inverted.

I can't argue that older characters getting killed off isn't a cliche, but for "happily married couple" I've always parsed it down to "happy couple", and I can't think of one of those that ever ended well in any Joss-verse (that was made up of major charaters that I cared about - I'm ignoring Willow/Kennedy like a thing to be ignored).

I'm much more satisfied that Wash died than that Zoe/Wash broke up at some point, which is by far the more usual route per Joss.

She killed the door with her brain?

Man, the quote generator just threw up Zoe talking about her and Wash's beautiful baby for me. Sob!

Matt, I also thought it was funny that River must have opened the door, then posed dramatically.

Let's see. She was exhausted, and used the point of one of the weapons to reach over and hit the door-open button.

Wait. Kaylee said she sealed it so it couldn't be opened from the outside, so the Reavers couldn't get in. I can believe River could override it, but not without putting down the dripping weapons of heroism.

River can do a lot of shit we don't necessarily know about. I have no problem with wanking that she opened it psychically.

Maybe it was on a motion detector? So the standing-still (or being stone dead, on the Reavers part) would have triggered it if held long enough?

Today's Unshelved comic is about Serenity.

Yeah, but River hasn't been shown to be able to move things telekinetically. I could buy the motion detector thing, though. I love that dramatic moment, so I'm willing to wave logic for it, but it would be nice to have some logic, even so.