RX

Firefly is licenced to write drug prescriptions?

Firefly is licensed to write drug prescriptions?

Firefly is a drug prescription.

OK, I just effused myself into a coma.

Arby, sfmarty doesn't enrage easily. Not to worry.

This is interesting when applied to Mal. Because on the surface he projects the male value set (values the skills of Kaylee, Zoe, Simon, Wash) and his explicit unquestioned authority. But in action he frequently (almost begrudgingly) exhibits the female value set: makes exceptions (doesn't space Jayne, takes on Simon and River despite the inherent danger to his ship), and obviously values relationships (perhaps most explicitly with Kaylee, though clearly also with Zoe).

Another thing about Mal is that while he doesn't brook anybody questioning his orders, he does actually listen to this crew and make adjustments.

Yes, exactly! This is what I saw that made me buy into "raised by momma, had a bunch of men around, bossed some of them" canon. Wasn't Joss raised primarily by his mom? I'd think if anybody did, in this cast, Mal would have the largest share of Joss' alter ego.

About Zoe, I can only go on what I observe filtered through my own experience. I'm southern, I know families that were "ruined" by the Civil War and Reconstruction. Some of them recovered their finances, they never lost their social standing, I grew up and went to school with members of some of those families, their lives were constantly chronicled in the local newspapers. Big frog, small pond, noblesse oblige, that sort of thing.

I think ita could be equally right with the martial arts family backstory. There is the same physical awareness and control, the same mental state, the same emotional masking in Zoe that would also occur in my backstory. But I don't get military off her. I think the military was all picked up during the war.

I think that she lost all she'd known. She happened to find herself assigned to Mal, and she looked to him to give her direction and purpose. Zoe'd quickly observe Mal had a knack for keeping his troops alive, more than other commanders, perhaps. He was sure and decisive and mostly right. Having lost her childhood moorings, she'd fasten onto him--thus, the loyalty and the near-telepathic communication.

That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.

Zoe and Mal have the same body language. Complete confidence in how they move. Book has it to a degree, but none of the others. There is a calmness about the three of them, each in their own way. To me it is obvious that whoever parented them, mom, farm hands, tutors, they gave the children a sense of worth.

And this! Yes!

Whatever their backgrounds you know that if something was needed, and they didn't have it, they could invent a substitue without much fuss.

Yup. Self-sufficiency and self-confidence. Kaylee has this, too--but only as it applies to engines. Elsewise, she's very coltish and wide-open and admiring of all the new stuff she's getting to see and experience.

I emailed that OSC review of FF to some friends. One of them forwarded it to her Dad who is an OSC fan. He has now requested to borrow her FF dvds.

OSC gets a toaster!

Take me some time, Nilly, but I'll work on it. Anne? You remember any of this? I could use the help remembering. I seem to recall we had a difference of opinion about Wash's background, but not what it was, right now.

Erk! I'm trying to remember as well. I think I saw Wash as someone who came from a lower middle-class family in a blue-collar city (think Pittsburgh, Baltimore, etc.), had a decent, but not great, education at something like a tech school. Or something. I'll see if anything pings my memory.

Anne, that's about how I saw Wash, too. Tech school being flight school, in that case. The pollution on his planet that kept him from ever seeing stars makes it sound like an industrial planet, low-tech (comparatively) enough not to have non-polluting technology. Not on the Rim, maybe, but not in the Core, either. He had enough money to get into flight school, which probably isn't cheap, or else he was skilled enough to get a scholarship. He has done his share of crap work, which he wasn't very good at - fired from a fry-cook job, for example - so maybe he worked his way through school. I see him as from a blue-collar family, with his only real ambition being getting the heck off that planet. The only thing I don't really understand about him is why he doesn't seem to have any qualms about taking up a lifestyle on the wrong side of the law. Maybe his family was doing some shady deals all along, so he's kinda used to it?

Maybe his family was doing some shady deals all along

He struck me as the type who came from a family just not-well-off enough that when they needed to fix an appliance or something were the type to jump the junkyard fence and find what they needed. The whole family was probably good at stretching things to meet. Wash may even have done a little on planet smuggling at home in exchange for piloting lessons. His family lived as much by bartering as by buying things outright.