It's not 'The Tholian Web' Says Minear of Firefly
POSTED BY: NewsAdmin
UPDATED: Wednesday, September 18, 2002 01:35
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In an article published on ZAP2IT.COM, Co-Executive Producer/Writer/Director Tim Minear of Joss Whedon's upcoming sci-fi series, Firefly, said that the sci-fi western series is very different from Star Trek.
"We're not doing The Tholian Web," said Minear, "We're not doing a thing where the aliens have put a superplasmic blah-blah-blah around the ship and time will collapse in on it. We're just not doing that." Though, Minear concedes that like most sci-fi fans, Star Trek had a great impact on his life as a writer. "Star Trek was huge for me, in repeats. I would say that The City on the Edge of Forever was maybe the thing that made me a writer. I was a huge Harlan Ellison fan."
What Minear has with Firefly is something entirely different. "We're doing a post-Civil War Western. There are reasons to set the story in the future and out of our particular world, and it's not necessarily for the hardware. It's more for being able to play certain metaphors without having the burden of it being the world in which the audience lives." But don't let all this talk of symbolism and cowboys fool you, "spaceships are cool," said the ecstatic Minear, but not in a Star Trek antiseptic kind of way.
"It's the Nostromo without aliens," said Minear. "God love Star Trek, but not only do our sets not look like Star Trek; the way we shoot the show doesn't look like Star Trek, and the special effects don't look like Star Trek. It's not the stately shots of spaceships rumbling by the lens."
This is especially the case in the Minear scripted episode following the premiere titled Bushwhacked, which he also directed, about the social extremes of the Firefly universe--savages and civilization. "There's a scene in my episode," Minear said, "where we're inside the cockpit of the ship, and there's an explosion outside, but the only sound you would actually hear or feel is whatever's reverberating inside our ship. There are ways to marry the two ideas and to actually play the coolness of the silence."
And what of Firday's Firefly premiere episode, The Train Job, on FOX at 8:00pm? "We have floating trains," Minear said. "It's a big heist. It's pretty cool."
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A great article! Now I'm really looking forward to it. 
I like Star Trek but it'll be nice to have an anti-Trek; I think Firefly will be more in league with a show like Babylon 5 than other sci-fi shows.
The more I hear about this show the more excited I get.
The sound...of Grandpa...
Oops!
The sound...of silence...
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"How will this end?"
"In fire."
--Babylon 5, 'The Coming of Shadows'
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