Jayne’s possible story line if “Firefly” was allowed to continue.

Monday, February 19, 2007 4:33 PM

So, I decided to take Asian Religions this semester at my university because my public school education was very limited when it came to eastern cultures. I have already taken Western Civilizations my freshman year, so I felt I’d be wasting my time taking another history class like Eastern Civilizations. So, when it came time to pick a philosophy course, I thought that perhaps the best way to learn about a culture is through its religions, thus the Asian Religions course.

(If I’m wrong anything in the fallowing on Jainism, please feel free to correct me. What can you really learn about a whole religion in a 50 minute class?)

Today we learned about Jainism (pronounced like Jayne-ism), which some would say is sort of like a sister religion to Buddhism. The root for the name Jain comes from the Sanskrit word “jina” meaning “conqueror”. A jina is an enlightened being who has conqured material existence, and he/she is release from the cycle of rebirth and moves onto a higher spiritual level of existence. Jains don’t believe in a god, but a jina becomes something like a god, though no prayers or devotionals are offered up to them by mortals. Jains also believe in non-violence (which is a philosophy that influenced Mahatma Gandhi and later Martin Luther King, Jr.). Jainism was founded by a series of 23 tirthankaras, who are people who lived 2500+ years ago and became jinas. The most recent of these tirthankaras was a man named Mahavira (599-527 BC). The Sanskrit roots of his name are “maha” meaning “great” and “vira” meaning “hero”. (“Vira” is pronounced the way Jayne called his favorite gun, Vera. See the “Our Mrs. Reynolds” episode.) Jains are also vegans.

So what does all of this have to do with our man Jayne? I’m thinking that Joss was planning something very interesting for him. I think he was going to make Jayne into some sort of enlightened monk or religious leader. I’ve learned in screenwriting that the most interesting stories are the ones where a character grows from one way of thinking into another. So, going from an uncivilized, violent mercenary to a non-violent monk does sound like an interesting storyline. Note that Jayne’s name and his gun Vera have root connections to Jainism. (“Vera” also comes from the Russian root meaning “faith”.) Knowing Joss’s practice of killing off his characters, Jayne might have been killed off in peaceful protest after reaching spiritual enlightenment. But we may never know that…

Damn you FOX! Damn you to Hades! … [undistinguishable curses]… DEVIL NETWORK!!

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