Our Mrs Reynolds

POSTED BY: AURaptor
UPDATED: Tuesday, December 23, 2008 05:27
VIEWED: 11717
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JONGSSTRAW

Wednesday, January 23, 2008 1:57 PM

First...thanks for the correction on the Elder. I wrote Garmin,'cause it sounded more correct than JSF's Elder Gorham.
Next.. I dunno. You may be right, but I just don't see him doing that. It's clear that Mal & crew know him from the past, & apparently he hadn't betrayed them before. Also I can't believe Saffron would put herself thru that entire ordeal over and over...more likely she got stranded on that rock from some other nefarious adventure (maybe with the bad guys that Mal, Zoe, & Jayne kill in the opening), and saw the Elder's "operation" as a way out by stowing aboard Serenity.

ASARIAN

Wednesday, January 23, 2008 9:07 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Jongsstraw:

First...thanks for the correction on the Elder. I wrote Garmin,'cause it sounded more correct than JSF's Elder Gorham.

Next.. I dunno. You may be right, but I just don't see him doing that. It's clear that Mal & crew know him from the past, & apparently he hadn't betrayed them before. Also I can't believe Saffron would put herself thru that entire ordeal over and over...more likely she got stranded on that rock from some other nefarious adventure (maybe with the bad guys that Mal, Zoe, & Jayne kill in the opening), and saw the Elder's "operation" as a way out by stowing aboard Serenity.

Gommen's collaboration was in the shooting script:

SAFFRON
How'd you find me?

MAL
Only a few places that shuttle could
make it to from where you left.
Happy to find it intact. You always
work for Elder Gommen?

SAFFRON
I work with lots of folk. He's
thrown me a few choice fish. What'll
become of the dear Elder?

MAL
Oh, he'll be laying eyes on me soon
enough. And to think I saved his
town from vicious bandits.

SAFFRON
(smiling sexily)
You're quite a man, Malcolm Reynolds.
I've waited a long while for someone
good enough to take me down.

As you can see, part of the convo was eventually stripped. So it's entirely possible Joss later decided against this plot line. But "Our Mrs Reynolds" was written solely by himself, so this is, at least, what he originally had in mind.

--
"Mei-mei, everything I have is right here." -- Simon Tam

JONGSSTRAW

Wednesday, January 23, 2008 9:22 PM

You're either using un-fair inside info or feminine wiles on me.....thanks!

NBZ

Wednesday, January 23, 2008 9:59 PM

About the people Mal and crew gunned down at the start: I am of the opinion they were also swindled by Saffron (maybe via marriage - from what we have seen it is a recurring theme for Saffron.) Hence the lead guy asking for a go with the wife. Or he really was a moron.

As to others who Elder Gommen betrayed not crying foul - that net thing is supposedly lethal.

HUGHFF

Wednesday, January 23, 2008 10:01 PM

The dialogue cut from the final show was in the Visual Companion.

This is the episode that I use when I teach Firefly to my Y9 class.

www.cpfc.org - my life
www.nbhs.school.nz - my work

JEWELSTAITEFAN

Thursday, January 24, 2008 5:48 AM

After reading the script, as posted above, I had gotten the impression that Elder Gommen (thanks for spelling) knew the bandits included an Alliance bigcheese relative, and therefore wanted an outsider (Mal) to do the job, and then would have Saffron eliminate Mal so Elder wouldn't need to worry about Mal coming back in contention over the Alliance relative killing.
The script seemed to make it clear that everything about the Elder's group was staged to get some dope like Mal to do the deed for them - they weren't the honest hardluck people they played.

SCHOOLBOYSWINK

Wednesday, February 6, 2008 11:47 PM

O.K., so much here I want to say, and to think this isn't even why I clicked on this thread.

First, this is a HI-LARIOUS episode. I have been watching Firefly with my folks (always looking for new converts) when I go to visit, and we watched Disc 2 last night. I never realized how funny that episode was until I watched it with other people so I could hear how much laughing was going one. I always knew it was funny, but not HOW funny.

If IMDB can be believed, this episode is Joss's favorite thing he has ever written, and with good reason.

As for some of the fine points:
1) I doubt Saffron sent TOO many ships into the net. She is not a ship thief per se, she is a con artist, and you can't run the same con too many times before word gets out. I imagine the Net crew have other agents as well, and remember, Mal said it's A net not THE net, while book referred to "some of the newer ones." So it is possible that any given operation might have 4 or 5 in different areas, each within the operating range of 1 or 2 agents. As for Saffron, I doubt she met Monty in this kind of operation. She could have been playing him for anything. Her avoindance of having the deaths of others tied to her name (I didn't kill you; Nobody died; I didn't kill him (the computer guy she ran off with)) leads me to believe that many (most?) of her operations are not as lethal as the Net scam.
2) I don't necessarily accept the Elder Gommen bit as cannon, since it didn't make it into the final show. Granted, a lot of things get cut just for time or clarity, but I have had writing projects where I've turned villains into allies, or even heroes, during the first re-write after the rough draft because of a change in the story or need for different kinds of characters in different roles, or even just a change of heart. Remembering that Firefly is very much about home and family, and making them where you find them, maybe Joss liked the warmth of the bonfire scene with the settlers and didn't want to wreck it by turning them all into crooks (or at least their leaders). That's obviously just speculation; the fact that we can never know Joss's/editor's motives in changing things from the script is why I tend to favor only that which we actually see on the screen.

FINALLY, the reason I opened this thread, and sorry if it's been said fifty times elsewhere. The bit with putting Vera in a spacesuit is unnecessary; guns (at least modern firearms) will shoot just fine in a vacuum. They do need oxygen for the powder to burn, obviously, but what they need is already contained within the chemicals of the gunpowder and inside the casing itself. After all, the slug is sealed tightly enough into the cartridge, if external oxygen was needed, it couldn't get to the site of the reaction quickly enough to support cumbustion even in normal atmosphere. (Thanks to Cecil Adams' "Straight Dope" website on that one. It was something I suspected for a long time, but couldn't confirm until I read it there.)

"When you can't do somethin' smart, do somethin' right!" -Jayne Cobb quotes Shepherd Book

JEWELSTAITEFAN

Thursday, February 7, 2008 7:51 AM

No matter how much Saff proclaims she has not killed anybody, most viewers understand she is LYING! If not for Jayne and Vera, everybody aboard and including Serenity would be dead, just as she intended. She can claim she didn't kill Durran's chief geek, but Mal nor anybody aboard believes her. I would assume that everybody she claims she didn't kill is in fact somebody she did kill (or valiantly tried to, like BDH). Maybe, like Mal says, she hides behind "set them up to be killed by somebody else", but still it was her doing that killed those people.

How is word going to get out about her killing ships and crews? Everybody is dead! Apparently everybody she worked this scam with succumbed to the net which Vera disabled - so they are all dead, and Elder Gomman gives her another choice fish next time, until out BDH come along.

I will continue to assume that all of her scams are of the lethal variety.

SCHOOLBOYSWINK

Thursday, February 7, 2008 11:35 PM

First, I have to flatly disagree that Mal doesn't believe her when she claims she didnt kill Durran's computer tech. His response to that line is, "No, I don't imagine there's many you've killed. Just set them up to die easy." That, at least to me, indicates that while he does hold her responsible, he also believes that she didn't kill him herself. (And my point in the previous post was about her killing people PERSONALLY, as I will elaborate further below.)

Still, the point isn't really whether she is lying or not. The point is that she doesn't like having people's deaths on her conscience. If she didn't care, she easily could have killed Mal and Wash while they were unconscious, taken Mal's gun as a precaution and shot Inara in the shuttle entrance, since by then she would have been close enough to make a clean getaway when the shot alerted the crew. Had she done those things, she would have gotten away scott free, but she didn't. I don't mean to say that she isn't responsible for many deaths, but she needs that justification, that layer of direct participation insulating her from the actual killing. She likes playing people, humiliating people, CONNING people, not killing them. That said, I think she herself is the one mark she can never lie to; no matter how many excuses she makes, on some level she knows she is responsible, and I will always think that given the choice between pulling a job where lots of people die and one where nobody dies, she would choose the latter, as long as they didn't threaten her anymore.

Moreover, I don't want my probably more critical point to get lost in this noise, the point which was: She's not a killer or a thief by trade, she is a CON ARTIST. She has a lot more moves in her playbook than running ships into Nets; whatever she had going with Monty had, to me, the feel of a "long con," and the Lassiter is a classic second-story job, cat-burgler work combined with conning her partners in crime. Whether anybody lived to discover her or not, she isn't going to run with the Net crew for very long without either playing them or moving on before they play her. Clearly Serenity was not her first such job, but I still see it (and always will) as something that she'd seen a good opportunity to do a few times, not a standard M.O. that she has repeated ad naseum. If nothing else, she would at the very least get bored with it before that point.

"When you can't do somethin' smart, do somethin' right!" -Jayne Cobb quotes Shepherd Book

ASARIAN

Friday, February 8, 2008 12:54 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SchoolboysWink:

First, I have to flatly disagree that Mal doesn't believe her when she claims she didnt kill Durran's computer tech. His response to that line is, "No, I don't imagine there's many you've killed. Just set them up to die easy." That, at least to me, indicates that while he does hold her responsible, he also believes that she didn't kill him herself. (And my point in the previous post was about her killing people PERSONALLY, as I will elaborate further below.)

Still, the point isn't really whether she is lying or not. The point is that she doesn't like having people's deaths on her conscience. If she didn't care, she easily could have killed Mal and Wash while they were unconscious, taken Mal's gun as a precaution and shot Inara in the shuttle entrance, since by then she would have been close enough to make a clean getaway when the shot alerted the crew. Had she done those things, she would have gotten away scott free, but she didn't. I don't mean to say that she isn't responsible for many deaths, but she needs that justification, that layer of direct participation insulating her from the actual killing. She likes playing people, humiliating people, CONNING people, not killing them. That said, I think she herself is the one mark she can never lie to; no matter how many excuses she makes, on some level she knows she is responsible, and I will always think that given the choice between pulling a job where lots of people die and one where nobody dies, she would choose the latter, as long as they didn't threaten her anymore.

Moreover, I don't want my probably more critical point to get lost in this noise, the point which was: She's not a killer or a thief by trade, she is a CON ARTIST. She has a lot more moves in her playbook than running ships into Nets; whatever she had going with Monty had, to me, the feel of a "long con," and the Lassiter is a classic second-story job, cat-burgler work combined with conning her partners in crime. Whether anybody lived to discover her or not, she isn't going to run with the Net crew for very long without either playing them or moving on before they play her. Clearly Serenity was not her first such job, but I still see it (and always will) as something that she'd seen a good opportunity to do a few times, not a standard M.O. that she has repeated ad naseum. If nothing else, she would at the very least get bored with it before that point.

Very well put. And I completely agree. Saffron ain't no killer. It's exactly like you quote: just sets them up to die easy. Saffron, hot and articulate and all, is a con artist. But you can't play a player -- including yourself. :) Even though she tries to convince herself otherwise. Heck, she even turned it into a philosophy: "Everybody plays each other. That's all anybody ever does. We play parts." But saying it and believing it are two different things. We see her quite uncomfortable at:

MAL
No. That ain't it at all. You'da
knocked him on the brain, were that
the case. You don't want him knowing
the truth. Unlike all the -- I'm
gonna go with hundreds -- of men
you've married, you actually want
this one to think well of you after
you've gone.

Part of that was play on her part, too (especially the breakdown in the shuttle, of course); but I reckon part of it was real: given the choice, I think she'd rather just think of herself as a playful hot chick conning a few horny men out of whatever it is she wants, than to face the real, and no doubt often dreadful, conseqences of her actions. The fact that she'd rather not have Durran know what she did is quite telling, IMHO.

P.S. Q: WHY does she want Durran to think well of her? A: Because so very few do! Even though it's based on an illusion, still, it shows that she needs that sort of 'confirmation' to sustain the lie of it to herself.

--
"Mei-mei, everything I have is right here." -- Simon Tam

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