Who was Shepard Book?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Friday, November 23, 2007 11:21
VIEWED: 14404
PAGE 2 of 6
Quote:
Originally posted by rallem:
That is a very imaginative guess Jongstraw, and I am willing to bet you are at least partly correct. Let's say for arguments sake that you are completely correct, what do you think was his light to turn him from that life into that of a Shepherd? We saw in Serenity that Operative turn when he glimpsed his better world, so I wonder what catalyst forced Book’s change.
I really don't know....everything I have proposed is just speculation. I'll bet there's encyclopedias of stuff people have written about Book over the years.
Maybe it's something just as simple as he had "enough killing"....."enough violence"....enough pain & hurt to others. Or perhaps it was a true calling by God. Maybe he had a personal crisis in his life and he begged God for a chance to do right.
I remember in Star Trek...original series.....the episode Bread & Circuses...there was an ex-gladiator Flavius Maximus ( Rhodes Reason )...he listened to the words of the Son of God after years of slaughter, and he vowed to be a man of peace after that.
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He did board Serenity before the Tams and I believe he honestly chose the ship by its name, and I believe in his other life he studied Shan Yu.
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Jongstraw's theory fits for me as well. I think, whatever else happened, Book did give up his former life and he gave it up willingly.
Which of course means he must have been very, very, high up the pecking order to have been allowed to leave when he had so many secrets. Of course, that's underscored by the Alliance officer's reaction to his identicard in 'Safe'.
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I am developing a little story about this. Would anyone care to see my synopsis and possibly help me flush it out some? Here it is:
This is a story of Shepherd Book and how he turned from an Operative of the Republic to that of a Shepherd. Operative Book was a devout follower of Shan Yu for forty years and then he was tied up and held over a volcano and that was where he met God. Operative Book who really had no name, adopted Book as his Surname because he originally followed the teachings of one book and now those of another. During those forty years the Operative now known as Book followed the teachings of Shan Yu, his job was to hunt down and torture until death special targets sent to him via the republic. On his last mission as an Operative he caught up to a man and crew very much like Mal and the crew of Serenity on a volcanic moon and after a long and hard fight the Operative was beaten and left helpless hanging over the rim of a volcano. The last act of the Captain before collapsing was to pull in the Operative after hearing him plea to God for mercy and vowing to change. Operative/Shepherd Book gave the crew of the Firefly class transport a proper Christian burial on that volcanic moon, and flew the ship to a junk yard where it was abandoned.
In the beginning of the story, the crew of Serenity will here the plea of a Captain’s daughter asking for the remains of her father and crew be found and if possible retrieved. The daughter who is now a wealthy Doctor gives Mal her father’s diary which was handed to her by a stranger who she feels is somewhat responsible for her father’s disappearance. She will tell the crew at that time that the stranger took it upon himself to get her the grant and to set up her mother with a stipend so she could live fairly comfortably in her remaining years.
What do you think? Can you please help me by asking questions to help me flush this story out some?
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Quote:
Originally posted by rallem:
I believe that Book is the biggest single mystery remaining after Serenity, but I do not think he was the most dynamic character, and I think his death in the movie was the less tragic of the two the crew experienced. Now the reason I feel this way between the two deaths is that Book did seem to have a long and prestigious past, and if Firefly were to go back into series run several episodes could be written of the crew researching the Shepard’s former life. If the crew were to revisit Wash’s past, there might be a few minutes of him flying for the war, and being a prisoner of war, and in all maybe an entire episode of his relationship with Zoey. Perhaps that episode would show the depth of the pair’s arguments and their passion for one another with the culmination of Zoey giving birth to Wash’s child, but other than that I cannot see any more future episodes with Wash’s character present and that is why I feel his death was the most tragic of the two.
I agree with this and I'd also like to add that there is another possible source of information for the previous life of Shepherd Book... River! There is every chance she 'gleaned' some information from him, but of course that would make for a storyline not dissimilar to the BDM.
I for one do not really want to know Book's past without him there to defend himself, as I felt that his reaction to the revelations would have been one of the most interesting parts of his past being divulged, whether voluntarily by him or through some other source.
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I like your thinking, Rallem. I can't say it's the direction I would go with it, but it could be really good. You asked for questions, so here's a couple:
Did he ever have a faith in God before that time?
Did he ever question his position in life before that?
Anyway, there's a few things to start with.
Just for kicks, here's what I thought would actually make for an awesome sequel to Serenity. Book was a duplicate. Not an operative (mostly since Joss said he wasn't), but something similar. One of his duplicates (cue Ron Glass!) was there in the battle at the end of the movie. He got Wash out just in time to save him (and there's the rest of the cast!). This duplicate has most certainly never been through any kind of religious conversion. He is about as evil as they come. And he is using Wash to get to the crew of Serenity. There's my two cents.
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Thank you. I am still in the initial scene of this story. I am writing it like a screen play. I am not so much worried about dialouge right now, and am just saying what needs to be said in the conversations to get my point across and will go back through them to edit the statements to better reflect the characters later on.
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Honestly, I think it's all been done.
I always thought Book was an Operative of the Parliment - just lke the one in Serenity. Maybe the Op from the movie went off to be a shepeard, huh? I dunno, but I also don't really want to.
I think the mystery that is the most interesting is why Inara left Sihnon...but that's just me. I just think that NOT knowing Book's past makes him that much more a desireable character. I wouldn't have liked Book if there was no mystery behind his character, and when he died - thinking that I would NEVER know...well, that wrapped it up for me, and I like it that way. It leaves you with no closure, and, thus, you remember the character as a mystery, and he just seems so much moreenigmatic - it makes him seem like he has more and more layers to him. When you peel back those layers, the result may be exactly what you were expecting, and then, maybe even dissappointing. I think that whatever you DON'T say makes peoples' imaginations go off the deep end. Whatever we imagine may or may not be right, but we won't ever know, and that makes us wonder...
We all assume that he had to be something spectacular - and he probably was - but when we DON'T know, we think of the character as something much more spectacular than anything we could imagine.
As for the script idea - not bad, but like Book himself said about the volcano's edge, "I imagine he was being poetical." It sounds like a pretty solid way to tell a Book backstory - but if you write it like a screenplay, I suggest that you keep the fact that Book is the one they're investigating about a secret. I know if I was watching it, and they reviled that Book was the one who had killed these people, it would be way more of a "whoa" moment.
Well, there are my thoughts, if anyone cares...
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Just a random thought.
Someone ordered the bio-bombing of Shadow that turned it into a scarred and burnt wasteland, a poisoned world where nobody could live. Someone, several someones, accepted that order, and carried it out.
That might weigh heavily upon a man's conscience.
So might being part of a programme, where men and women of peace with a real desire to do good in the 'Verse, decided to make a better world. Book does know about Reavers - in 'Bushwhacked', he's the one to insist that they are just men.
Though I think Book was something very senior in law enforcement, the equivalent of Homeland Security or the FBI, and probably in the IA side. He knows way too much about bent cops and graft.
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Well according to the BDHs who spilled at a recent con in California, Book was a former Alliance cop. Joss supposedly told Nathan on the phone that it was okay to spill the beans, so that is what they passed on to the acre of browncoats in attendance.
The former Alliance cop angle fits with Books knowledge of firearms, hand to hand combat, criminal activity, Niska, how Operatives work, and the thoughts that River picked up on from him. Seems he was corrupt or saw to much and that is what drove him to become a sheppard.
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