I hold out more hope for “30 Rock.” Let’s play 30 Rock, Paper, Studio 60. Rocks always crush scissors (or 60’s).

I agree that the HP 6 death is done better than the others. Mostly ’cause it involves Snape, who will undoubtedly die a noble death in Book 7.

I disagree with you both on Harry Potter, though. I do get an epic feel, but maybe my standards for epic are entirely different. (I am, after all, a Star Wars fan.) And I love OotP. It’s easily one of my favorite of the books.

http://www.jerrythefrogproductions.com/Serenity.html

The “what do you do with witches? burn them! and what do you burn apart from witches? more witches!” episode is “Safe,” episode 4. That’s also where “Big Damn Heroes” comes from – absolutely wonderful exchange between Mal and Zoe.

Also I forgot to add one small detail about where things could have gone, too – if you look for it, the “Blue Sun” logo pops up everywhere in the Verse: billboards, commercials, food cans, ships, cargo crates, etc.

Since you continued the digression, I’ll respond briefly by saying that I too do not feel an “epic” nature to the HP series. I enjoy the books, and appreciate the cultural value of the series just fine (and also very much like the 3rd movie, mostly because the style and cinematographby is heavily inflenced by the German Expressionist films of the 1910s-20s). But epic? No. I’m not sure I’d go with _gratutious_ as the word for the way she kills characters. For books 4 and 5, I’d go with _sudden_ – both deaths happen in the blink of an eye, with no forewarning, and so it was hard to feel very much when they happened. Book 6, I’ll admit, she got me caught up in the moment there, and the death (whether real or staged) had a good build-up and was well done.

And I slogged though Book 5, disliking it almost all the way. One of the few bright spots for me was Umbridge and her machinations – very good idea to have that year’s DAtDA teacher be so cruel and useless to our protagonists. Even Moody was _useful_ as he was trying to get Harry killed.

And since we’re digressing right and left, I must defend my boy and respond to Dormouse by saying that Aaron Sorkin’s writing is not forced – it’s crafted. Very big difference, at least to me. And now I’ll shut up entirely.

Yes, even though I am visually impaired when it comes to movies, I have noticed the focus on Simon’s hands and the attendant symbolic overtones. I haven’t yet seen the episode where villagers want to burn River as a witch.

Again, I think I would have had less difficulty (and the difficulty that I did have was relatively minor) with a more gradual development of darkness, over the course of the TV show. I’m also with you about being glad the Inara-Reaver episode never happened. Blech. Part of the reason the Reavers are so bone-chillingly scary in Serenity is that the camera never actually focuses on them. We see them, but they remain vague enough to be terrifying. It seems like the planned Inara episode would have interfered with that.

Your comparison to Rowling is interesting, because, since book 4, I’ve felt that she kills off characters rather gratuitously. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy the books, because I do. It could be that I just prefer the Lord of the Rings-type arc, but I think it has more to do with the fact that neither Rowling’s “evil” nor her “good” are very convincing to me. There’s not enough at stake, as far as I’m concerned, to justify killing off characters for epic reasons–I haven’t yet accepted it as epic. I do think Rowling is great at writing about the foolishness and shortsightedness of the Ministry of Magic. She _knows_ that, and you feel it when she writes. Harry’s struggles against Umbridge and Fudge are, to me, more engaging than his encounters with Voldemort. (And you know that’s not because I don’t get excited about mythic good vs. evil, because I do. Witness LOTR.) Hmmm . . . maybe that’s why I like _Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban_ (the book) best–wimpy old Voldy doesn’t make an appearance. The most important adversaries are the Dementors, who, again, I feel that Rowling knows (Think she’s ever been clinically depressed? I would guess so.) Of course, I like the movie of _Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban_ best because Alfonso Cuaron is way smarter and more skilled than any of the other directors of the franchise.

Wow, huge digression there. La la.

I’ll take just half a second to mount at least the start of a defense of Simon, though I must admit he isn’t my favorite character either. Have you ever noticed Simon’s hands? Well, you should – they’re noticed by the camera in almost every episode, and constantly in episodes that he’s a major part of. Sometimes he even enters rooms hands first. Why this focus on his hands? Because (like Wing Biddlebaum in “Winesburg, Ohio”) he’s a _giver_ who primarily interacts with those around him by _touch_. He’s a surgeon. His hands are always the first thing that reach River when she’s distressed. What’s Kaylee’s complaint about their tentative, barely-there relationship in the TV show? – that they get along well, like each other, but he “goes all stiff.” He prevents himself from touching her, even though he wants to. It’s part of the respect for her that he has, even if she doesn’t realize that and needs to be told. It’s amazingly important that her legs are across his lap in one of the first scenes in “Objects in Space,” exactly when River reads/projects him saying that he’d be there, in the hospital with his work and his friends, right now, ie. if not for River. River’s not the fish out of water on Serenity – it’s Simon, and Simon knows it. Where is Simon effective? Only on Ariel, a Core planet. Not dealing with Early, not with Dobson, not even really with the villagers who want to burn River as a witch. The most he can do is die with her there, and though that’s noble and heartbreaking, it won’t move the villagers to stop the sacrifice. Simon isn’t a Big Damn Hero. But what little he can give: comfort to his sister, physical healing to the crew, he gives. There’s a definite journey between when he tells Mal to run instead of immediately helping Kaylee when Dobson shoots her, and when he can admit his feelings – his one regret – to Kaylee when they all expect to die. It’s partly about him and Kaylee, but mostly it’s about something much more, which is what River recognizes when Simon gets shot and she says “You take care of me, Simon. You’ve always taken care of me. My turn.”

Okay, that was more than half a second. I really love this show. Anyway, two tidbits to share with you. First, in the original draft of the movie, Wash didn’t die. Joss realized what Dormouse said, that the real catalyst for action has to involve pain, and as Dormouse already noted, the innocent suffer – Book and Wash. (And Mr. Universe, but he’s, well, meh, especially with the 30 pieces of silver line.) I haven’t seen Buffy or Angel (vampire stories really aren’t my thing) but I have no trouble believing what Dormouse was saying about what Joss puts his characters through. An interesting idea for a parallel would be J.K. Rowling with Harry Potter – she herself has commented that why characters with increasing closeness to Harry keep dying in books 4, 5, and 6, is because she is following the epic stories of old (e.g. Odyssey) where the hero is slowly stripped of all his/her companions before the final evil. Mal is alone against the Operative, River alone against the Reavers. And that line of heroic myth has backing. Then again, there’s also Tolkien, who makes as strong a statement _against_ such an idea: Aragorn is aided by Gandalf and Legolas and Gimli (these last two friends of a depth that has not been seen before in elf and dwarf) against the armies of Sauron, and Frodo is not alone against the Ring (and Shelob, and Gollum) because he has Sam. In fact, what will doom Frodo is his choice _away_ from Sam, to be alone with the Ring, which he makes, before Gollum attacks for the final time.

Lastly, a note about the darkness in the movie. One, it’s the movie, bigger and with more ability for sounds and lights and effects, so the story has to be bigger and weightier. Second, the show was going to darker pretty fast on its own if it had continued. Do you remember in “Serenity” the episode how when the Reaver ship is passing by, Inara is in her shuttle and takes out a box with a syringe? Many people have assumed (as I did for a long time) that it was a poision that would have killed her before the Reavers could get to her. Tim Minear, Joss’s producing partner on the show, revealed at one point that late in the first season, there was going to be some kind of situation where a Reaver invades Inara’s shuttle (probably at some point where she was separated from Serenity) and attack her. She is able to inject herself with the syringe, and the Reaver then rapes her. But the Reaver dies before he can mutliate and kill her, because what’s in the syringe is a poison given to every Companion in case of a forced sexual encounter – the poison does not act upon its host, but upon whoever has intercourse with them. Pretty grim and awful, and I really would have had a very hard time watching that episode if it ever had been made. Frankly, I’m thankful it wasn’t. But all that to say, the show would have gotten very dark by the last few episodes of season 1.

Joss had originally planned for the story arc of River and the Reavers (name similarities intentional) to last over the first 2 seasons of the show. After that, he had ideas, but has never shared them with the Browncoats. He has said that a lot of things had to get dropped from compressing another season and a half into a two hour movie, one of them being the Hands of Blue, who were initially going to play a major role in the first 2 seasons. A hint of how they were going to – and part of what the future might have held – is within the 3-part comic book series “Those Left Behind” which Joss wrote the summer before the movie came out, and bridges the story between “Objects in Space” and the movie. But I won’t tell you what the hint is – you’ll have to find the comic books on your own. A second 3-part comic book series is going to happen at some point in the next year or two, and the current info says it’s supposed to happen in-story, no idea where, but definitely before the events of the movie. As to other places the series could have gone, Niska and Saffron are still out there, and Book’s backstory was never really explained (which could well catch up to the crew even after Book is dead), and of course Inara’s almost unknown backstory, and Mal’s more-known-but-still-sketchy backstory. We also have no idea what made Zoe join the Browncoats in the first place either. There’s really lots of places to go…

Lastly lastly, in order to succor good graces from you for writing such a horribly long post, here is a link you will love: the abbreviated Serenity: