Controversial Mal characterization
POSTED BY: SpaceAnJL
UPDATED: Saturday, January 3, 2009 06:12
VIEWED: 42749
PAGE 8 of 12
[DELETED - added to earlier post (3 up from here).]
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I don't want to give any spoilers away, but I think you'll like the new CE commentary, NBZ.
Ron and Nathan try to pry some info out of Joss(for our benefit, I'm sure) and Joss is like NO, NO, WRONG, WRONG and NO and WRONG again!
He definitely has things planned out, like you said, and he's not giving it to us until he's ready. He does slip at times, but he catches himself quickly. I had to hit the back button a few times.
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Woo! Nbz - doing some posting last night LOL! Which means it'll be a good hour before I get on with work today, because I've just got to reply to this and the other thread...
You make a very good point that the things Zoe says are Mal through her filter, and not necessarily Mal. That's not something I think of a lot.
I agree that Mal's cheer about his ship's name was odd. But I gotta disagree that Serenity Valley was worse for Zoe than Mal - I mean, look at Mal's face in the pilot! I do think his heartbreak continued during the next few years, but it all started when he saw his army (and his God?) desert him.
I don't see Zoe as so emotionally involved in the war as Mal. She was career military, doing her job. Mal was a volunteer, protecting his home and his way of life. I'm sure losing sucked for her, but I don't think it crushed her spirit the way it did Mal.
So why is Mal so cheerful? Well, the man can make humor out of anything. He doesn't wear his bitterness on the outside, which is how he's managed to survive and not turned into some lonely drunk.
About the ship's name, I've got my own theory...
I think it would be perfectly like Joss to have another flashback episode a season later where we learn that Serenity's name initially was Happy Sunshine or something cheery and stupid. But then there was some dark angsty string of events and afterward Mal changed the name to Serenity.
Huh. Yeah. I wish I'd written that out LOL! It would at least fit my take on things - Mal sees this ship as a new life after a few very hard years, but then has some reminder of how much the war changed him, and how he won't be just leaving it behind. So he changes the name of the ship.
Dang. I wish I had written that! I even know what the events would be... a later standalone, maybe!
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I sort of figured Mal's deision to name the ship Serenity was in a similar vein to Robert DeNiro's qoute in Raging Bull, "You never knocked me down." Naming his ship after Serenity Valley is a big poke to the Alliance that they may have won the battle and the war, but Malcolm Reynolds is still standing. He and his people did do the impossible, held the Valley to the point where the Alliance practically had to nuke it to dig them out. In Mal's mind, that't a point that the Alliance needs to be reminded of.
Similar in a smaller scale to Thermopylae. What people remember is how well and bravely the outnumbered Greeks fought, not the fact that they lost.
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Quote:
Originally posted by schooner:
I sort of figured Mal's deision to name the ship Serenity was in a similar vein to Robert DeNiro's qoute in Raging Bull, "You never knocked me down." Naming his ship after Serenity Valley is a big poke to the Alliance that they may have won the battle and the war, but Malcolm Reynolds is still standing. He and his people did do the impossible, held the Valley to the point where the Alliance practically had to nuke it to dig them out. In Mal's mind, that't a point that the Alliance needs to be reminded of.
Similar in a smaller scale to Thermopylae. What people remember is how well and bravely the outnumbered Greeks fought, not the fact that they lost.
That rings true to me. I can't see him re-naming it. Jayne... ya, but not Mal. I think Wash woulda named it Ivan.
Whoa... lotsa good points here. Mal taking the war personnaly while Zoe, like a soldier makes all kinds of sense.
To me, the war is like an old injury to Mal. It hurts and eats at you, but if you live with it long enough, while you don't forget about it, you cope and every once in a while you do something that triggers the pain.
Mal had humour before the war, it only makes sense that he still has the humour, beaten battered and bruised, but it's still there.
While I've never been enlisted, I do know a thing or two about injuries.
_______________________________________________________________
"Got a headful of lightning
And a heart full of rain
And I know that I said
I'd never do it again
Oh and I love you sweet baby but I always take the long way home."
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Yeah, can see plenty of people disagree slightly with me. Keeps things interesting. I at times deliberately look for a different understanding. As long as it rings true with the facts, I will consider it. And if something is a default by any means, it must be questioned before acceptance. That is my motto. Or it would be if I stuck to one.
(A bit of repetition, but) In the OoG flashback Mal seems to have a name picked out for the ship, with a wistfulness when he mentions it to Zoe. There is no bitterness in that tone. So if it was Serenity, it is not IMO for the reason of "You never knocked me down". It just does not fit with my understanding.
Or as Mal4Prez said, he could have (been forced to) change it later.
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I can just see Joss using the misdirection. "I got a name all picked out..." and we all think we know what it is. Then a later episode has a shot of Mal smiling proudly as he paints some really stupid name on the ship and Zoe stands to the side shaking her head...
Or maybe that's just the only way I can make sense of Mal's light-heartedness in OoG.
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Well, they did also have a genius mechanic shortly afterwards...
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Quote:
Originally posted by nbz:
It is not that they are about Mal, but that they are said by Zoe. I think she truly believes that and the other quotes, but they are more about her than Mal.
Why does Zoe have to always always know and understand everything about Mal? IMO she is trying to understand Mal through her own demons. That does not mean she is accurate in any way at all. (Yes - Joss was trying to get a message across through Zoe, but that don't mean what Zoe thinks is fact.)
That is the worst thing that had happened to her, and her coping mechanism is "Mal went through worse. He survived. I hold on and I will too."
If you watch the scene in OoG, Mal does not pick the name for Serenity out of spite or bitterness. You hear hope in his voice. (I am of course assuming that "Serenity" IS the name he had picked out, not some other name he got talked out of or something. That does not show to me that Mal is as bitter about the war as we all assume. Then there is his banter in The Train Job. "Superior numbers. That is why we lost." Once again, not showing much bitterness.
I agree with you to an extent about Zoe, and it goes back to nine people seeing nine different things. There is a deleted scene with Zoe talking to Simon, telling him how Mal lost his humanity and mercy in Serenity Valley. It really nagged at me for a while, because everything in me screamed "No, that's not true!"
Serenity Valley hurt Mal deeply, I believe that. But not the way she put it. Seems to me she tries, just like everyone on the ship, to understand certain things about Mal. Sometimes they understand him right, sometimes they understand him wrong. But I have to (probably) disagree about it affecting him less......tell me this isn't a pretty devastated Mal:
The not-bitterness....I see that as partly Mal's having moved on, having healed to an admirable extent. The other part....this is the Mal who asks Niska if he's starting a book club. This is the Mal who dodges enemy fire grinning and whooping and cracking jokes about "they don't like it when you shoot 'em." Mal has a playful attitude towards life, and while it sometimes falters, he never loses it completely.
How many people react this way to being stripped naked and being dumped in the desert for their crew to find? Heck, how many of us would think to write this as his reaction? How many comments do you think we'd get calling it unrealistic or out of character?
http://www.serenityverse.com/images/albums/userpics/10001/normal_PDVD_
054.JPG
We tend to write Mal's broodier sides or his sweeter sides in fics, I've noticed. His playful side is harder to capture, possibly because it's hard to reconcile with this supposedly hardened man. Truly hard times tend to knock the playful out of most folk. That's one of the reasons I go against the grain of calling Mal "broken." I just can't watch the light, playful part of him and call him a broken man. He is too much of a survivor; he may be traumatized to the core, but nobody has ever been able to break that playful self.
Mal is a broody sort, but also more lighthearted than Zoe. In my mind, Zoe desperately needs both Mal and Wash's humorous attitudes towards life to keep her own demons at bay.
"Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down, tells you when she's hurting 'fore she keens. Makes her a home." .......We love you, captain.
"This is the captain. We may experience some slight turbulence and then.....explode"
www.serenityverse.com - Zoe necklace replicas, Serenity dogtags, jewelry, image gallery w/ custom DVD covers, other goodies!
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Quote:
Originally posted by mal4prez:
I can just see Joss using the misdirection. "I got a name all picked out..." and we all think we know what it is. Then a later episode has a shot of Mal smiling proudly as he paints some really stupid name on the ship and Zoe stands to the side shaking her head...
Or maybe that's just the only way I can make sense of Mal's light-heartedness in OoG.
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I'm pretty sure you are exactly right. In the script published in the Firefly Visual Companion, Zoe starts laughing off screen. That didn't make it into the episode, but it shows the intent.
"Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down, tells you when she's hurting 'fore she keens. Makes her a home." .......We love you, captain.
"This is the captain. We may experience some slight turbulence and then.....explode"
www.serenityverse.com - Zoe necklace replicas, Serenity dogtags, jewelry, image gallery w/ custom DVD covers, other goodies!
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