I have to agree with the level of torturedness displayed by Mal in the movie. I like Dark!Mal, but any darker and I would have been saying "WTF, why aren't these people mutinying?" As it was, I asked that a couple times in the movie, anyway! The only excuse I had was having knowledge of the series, and there's a percentage of the people who went to the movie who didn't have that to refer back to. As much as I like Dark!Mal, I wonder how many viewers were turned off by him?

Thinking about DarkMal, take a look at recent TV shows. House, Criminal Minds, The Inside, Lost.. all with dark elements. Its just time.

(and yes, there are lots more shows that I didn't name)

Hmmm. Yeah, but there's a certain level of dark the general viewing public won't go for. And, The Inside is another good example. It got cancelled, too.

I don't find Lost dark -- and certainly none of the leads are. I barely find House dark either.

ita is me. House is just bitter but with a heart of gold and someone in the corner pukes blood because of a disease -- hardly the stuff real darkness is made of.

And Criminal Minds? Where's the dark in that?

House is curmudgeonly.

Lost is chockful of the pretty.

I've never seen Criminal Minds.

Never seen House, never seen Lost, basically liked The Inside, so this comment isn't about any of those series per se, but I do think there is such a thing as too dark. Not necessarily in a character, but in a series.

In other words, I am fine with having a main character as broken and as dark as Web, as long as the series itself offers something that approximates redemption/reason for living. Millenium was too dark and nihilistic for me.

I like dark and nihilistic, but I like it with some humour. I'm trying to think of examples, and I can't. Um, Fight Club, maybe. American Psycho? In tv I guess not so much. Oh, there was a sketch show called Jam a few years back that I really liked. It was very bleak, and bizarre, and hilarious.

You can't have a light without a dark to stick it in.

I liked dark shows like Millennium and The Inside, but I don't think a darker Mal would've been a good thing. Movie Mal seemed much like Pilot Mal but without the "I love my captain" factor the gooey inside was harder to see.

The thing is, though, to put it context: the Alliance has just burned down to the ground all the places the crew visits, killed their friends, and Book. They are being hunted down like animals, and they WILL be killed.

So he makes a decision. To try to pass through Reaver space. And then only way to get the crew to do that is to take charge. I don't think he would have ever shot any members of the crew at that point, at all. But the threat was there.

How much are you willing to have taken from you before you fight back?

If Mal had been prancing around, kicking people through engines and such at that point, and then decided to fly to Miranda and Jayne had gone along with it... I'd be like, hang on.

I do agree there's a limit to how far a series can go into the darkness - the humour has to be kept (something Angel season 2 demostrated doing well, for example). I don't think the edited lines pushed Mal too far into the dark, personally - it just added to the moments.