When it comes to something I really like (a good book, or tv series, for example), I carefully pace my consumption of it, much like a good wine, so as to make it last for as long as I can take it. So when I saw the pilot of Firefly nearly three years ago in Seattle, I knew that I would take my sweet time watching this one, especially since Fox (very tragically) canceled the show prematurely, before the end of the season. About 6 months after I partook of my first taste of the Western-Sci-Fi, I got my hands on all the episodes and it took me about 2.5 years to finish off the other 14 episodes.

The show created quite a stir, amassing an underground cult following that helped spearhead the movie production after Fox axed the show. Clearly, the crew had a blast filming the show, and they bonded. This passion came through the screen, this passion the glue taking hold of the audience and I was myself infected by it. But aside from the energy of the show, there were three other elements that I positively loved.

One was how it tweaked with the question of time. While the show had a clear futuristic component with funky spaceships and laser guns (minus the aliens), Joss Whedon brought us, the viewers, smack into the present, into a state of immediacy by melding the future with familiar scenes form the past. By keeping temporal planes in plain view and in play with each other, he collapsed temporal frames and also showed that novelty arises more from the interplay of the new within the framework of the old, instead of breaks in time.

If Joss Whedon collapsed time by keeping various temporalties in plain view, he was also able to play with the themes of freedom and constraint particularly well. The story takes place on a ship, bearing the name of Serenity, and like most ships, whether it is flies through space, or sails on water, they are usually run hierarchically with a captain in charge. And Serenity was no different, with Malcolm Reynolds steering the metaphorical helm (he could not fly the ship), commandeering away with near full authority. But even within such rigidity, Whedon convyed that this was a space of freedom, in which every person was living freely, according to their temperament, predicament, and abilities. United by some unstated and sometimes unclear mission (perhaps just to survive independently in a galaxy run by the “alliance” so that they were at least politically free and did not have to do things like pay taxes), their lives as outlaws were rich and free even while constrained by hierarchy and being confined within a ship. And for me, since I lived in the same sort of situation, ship, captain (no reevers though), I can relate. For some reason, I never felt more free all the while I was beholden to an extremely strict schedule, a captain, and 80 feet of ferro-cement and I have never seen this paradox of constraint and freedom captured so well as Firefly.

Finally, many of the stories not only left you sitting at the edge of your seat in anticipation of some twist (and they were usually quite clever), but as interesting was the moral subtext. The question of what was “right” was never clear cut (especially since there was a fair bit of violence in the show) but was presented with more subtlety and complexity than some simple formula. Ethical choices were thus not deontological but contextual, and I appreciated it.

Probably my favorite episode, in part because it captures delectably the three elements I just described, was The Message . At the end, I actually cried a little. But since I watched it for the first while commuting, I thought I was just tired and susceptible to Hollywood manipulation into a weepy reaction (riding the the NJ transit late a night after a chaotic and long day in the Big Apple will leave just about anyone vulnerable like that) but I saw the episode again last night and even with no tiring train ride as an excuse, I was left pretty sad.

So if you are a sucker at all for Joss Whedon, Westerns, soap operas like character dramas, or science-fiction and you have not watched Serenity, take the next three years to watch 14 episodes. It is well worth your sweet, attentive time.