Film: Serenity

[Nealithi]

Our 'source' is our own eyes. Why in the world do you think there were so many quasi-Western worlds?

Our eyes follow a group of outlaws. We're not exactly following reliable narrators.

In a TV show what we see should be what it is rather than a character's opinion of it, but we see where the character goes, and of course we still get their opinions. So being outlaws they'll spend more time than average going to the less attractive places. It's thus reasonable to assume that we're not getting a typical view.

What we don't get though, and which may be telling, is any balance trying to portray the Alliance as anything other than how Mal sees it; I'd expect both Shepard Book and Inara to be less biased, but neither seem interested in defending it or offering an alternative view (mind you Book only rarely gives any hints about anything).

So opening with, as I get older I think the movie format is one of the worst for good storytelling. Because you need to truncate everything down and keep your pacing.
I say this because the episode they rob a hospital shows the Alliance is not all bad nor evil. The hospital drugs will be replenished in an hour. When they bring in two corpses, the staff just point to the morgue. They assumed you did all the stuff Jayne was forced to memorize. This is not depraved, this parallels real life. I was taken to the hospital for my stroke the paramedics transferred me to the bed and were back out the door in a very short time. They have more calls to do and the folks at the hospital will do their own checks. The bit where Simon sees an issue with a patient. Again, not evil nor depraved. Humans make mistakes, even hospitals. Read enough horror stories and this hospital was a beacon of doing things right. Jayne trusting an Alliance police officer to keep his word tells you something about the Alliance reputation. Jayne was surprised to be arrested with Simon and River. And the Alliance police? Were not expecting to be terminated by the guys with blue gloves. This tells you there are dark force in the Alliance, but not all levels of it.
Mal just does not want to be crushed under the 'civilization' of it all. I am referring back to the episode where they were salvaging a ship and an Alliance warship caught them. The officer was sure Mal was some dissident with a grudge. (He is, but for different reasons) But the crew was not just tossed in a brig and imprisoned. They were being questioned first. When the Reaver was outed, Mal and crew could go. But the Reaver mess had to be destroyed. (Possibly an Alliance military standing order?)

[bz316]

Our 'source' is our own eyes. Why in the world do you think there were so many quasi-Western worlds?

Our eyes follow a group of outlaws. We're not exactly following reliable narrators.

In a TV show what we see should be what it is rather than a character's opinion of it, but we see where the character goes, and of course we still get their opinions. So being outlaws they'll spend more time than average going to the less attractive places. It's thus reasonable to assume that we're not getting a typical view.

What we don't get though, and which may be telling, is any balance trying to portray the Alliance as anything other than how Mal sees it; I'd expect both Shepard Book and Inara to be less biased, but neither seem interested in defending it or offering an alternative view (mind you Book only rarely gives any hints about anything).

So opening with, as I get older I think the movie format is one of the worst for good storytelling. Because you need to truncate everything down and keep your pacing.
I say this because the episode they rob a hospital shows the Alliance is not all bad nor evil. The hospital drugs will be replenished in an hour. When they bring in two corpses, the staff just point to the morgue. They assumed you did all the stuff Jayne was forced to memorize. This is not depraved, this parallels real life. I was taken to the hospital for my stroke the paramedics transferred me to the bed and were back out the door in a very short time. They have more calls to do and the folks at the hospital will do their own checks. The bit where Simon sees an issue with a patient. Again, not evil nor depraved. Humans make mistakes, even hospitals. Read enough horror stories and this hospital was a beacon of doing things right. Jayne trusting an Alliance police officer to keep his word tells you something about the Alliance reputation. Jayne was surprised to be arrested with Simon and River. And the Alliance police? Were not expecting to be terminated by the guys with blue gloves. This tells you there are dark force in the Alliance, but not all levels of it.
Mal just does not want to be crushed under the 'civilization' of it all. I am referring back to the episode where they were salvaging a ship and an Alliance warship caught them. The officer was sure Mal was some dissident with a grudge. (He is, but for different reasons) But the crew was not just tossed in a brig and imprisoned. They were being questioned first. When the Reaver was outed, Mal and crew could go. But the Reaver mess had to be destroyed. (Possibly an Alliance military standing order?)

See, that's exactly what I liked about the TV show: all the ambiguity. Mal and Zoe can rail on all they want about the Alliance, but the handful of times we interact with it, it looks like a normal society doing normal, reasonable society things. The black ops stuff, along with the human experimentation stuff, is obviously troubling. But, as you said, we don't know a) how widespread this organization is, or b) what their exact function is. We know River appears to be some kind of telepath, which is not a thing that appears to be common in the rest of this world. What kinds of threats might she pose? And as for Mal and Zoe, we can hear tons of war stories from them and their "struggle for freedom." But at the end of the day, they were a couple of grunts on the ground. For all we know, they were ignorant dupes who got swept up by their side's propaganda, without any sophisticated understanding of the actual politics. How do we know that the Browncoat Planetary Coalition wasn't made up of a bunch of local, planetary elites who wanted to do some unethical shit that Alliance Regulations wouldn't allow them to do? The ambiguity was beautiful, and I loved the show for it.

[Scififan]

I think the average citizen of the Alliance is just a person going about their day just trying to get buy. It's like in D&D with the alignment system. Most people are not Lawful Good or Chaotic Evil, they are for the most part just Neutral. They are just people.

[FaxModem1]

We have to keep in mind that, for better or worse, the show leans heavily on US Civil War and Reconstruction imagery, to the point that their black scifi bounty hunter was named Jubal Early, who was in RL a Confederate soldier and politician who was a key figure in the Lost Cause narrative. This is not coincidence. Whether the show runners chose that in support or defiance of the Lost Cause narrative, they were clearly mining the subject matter for material and inspiration.

The Alliance, as presented, are supposed to be a mixed bag. The Alliance is supposed to be better than the outer planets. As Joss Whedon even says in an interview, they bring new technologies, medicines, democracy, and better philosophies, but they do so at the point of a gun.

The times we see the Alliance Navy, they're either going out to rescue colonists (such as the fake ones Wash sends out a distress call with in the pilot or the Reaver trap in Bushwhacked), or they're providing medical aid once ID is verified(see Book's surgery in Safe or dropping off medicine in Train Job).

Mal's perspective is colored by his past, and his backstory is that his family owned a ranch on Shadow, a Browncoat world destroyed in the war. The question of whether he's supposed to be a Good Ole Boy who owned a nice plantation with servants aplenty before the Alliance wrecked it or a small nothing piece of land on the frontier is up in the air. But Mal has all the shadings of a former Confederate Gentleman who lost his fortune and social standing in the war, and is trying to stay away from those damn Space Yankees who freed up his land and robbed his family of their inheritance/legacy.

The film Serenity, for all it's dressing, does not have Malcolm Reynolds lead a neo-Browncoat revolution to overthrow the Alliance. It's Mal's journey to find himself and his cause, and being willing to fight again. And he uses the Savage Indians stand-in as cannon fodder to fight the Alliance. As Chuck noted, it's order vs chaos.

If they had gotten sequels and been a bigger box office success, we may have seen Mal overthrow the Alliance. We may not have. We'll never really know.

[Nealithi]

We have to keep in mind that, for better or worse, the show leans heavily on US Civil War and Reconstruction imagery, to the point that their black scifi bounty hunter was named Jubal Early, who was in RL a Confederate soldier and politician who was a key figure in the Lost Cause narrative. This is not coincidence. Whether the show runners chose that in support or defiance of the Lost Cause narrative, they were clearly mining the subject matter for material and inspiration.

The Alliance, as presented, are supposed to be a mixed bag. The Alliance is supposed to be better than the outer planets. As Joss Whedon even says in an interview, they bring new technologies, medicines, democracy, and better philosophies, but they do so at the point of a gun.

The times we see the Alliance Navy, they're either going out to rescue colonists (such as the fake ones Wash sends out a distress call with in the pilot or the Reaver trap in Bushwhacked), or they're providing medical aid once ID is verified(see Book's surgery in Safe or dropping off medicine in Train Job).

Mal's perspective is colored by his past, and his backstory is that his family owned a ranch on Shadow, a Browncoat world destroyed in the war. The question of whether he's supposed to be a Good Ole Boy who owned a nice plantation with servants aplenty before the Alliance wrecked it or a small nothing piece of land on the frontier is up in the air. But Mal has all the shadings of a former Confederate Gentleman who lost his fortune and social standing in the war, and is trying to stay away from those damn Space Yankees who freed up his land and robbed his family of their inheritance/legacy.

The film Serenity, for all it's dressing, does not have Malcolm Reynolds lead a neo-Browncoat revolution to overthrow the Alliance. It's Mal's journey to find himself and his cause, and being willing to fight again. And he uses the Savage Indians stand-in as cannon fodder to fight the Alliance. As Chuck noted, it's order vs chaos.

If they had gotten sequels and been a bigger box office success, we may have seen Mal overthrow the Alliance. We may not have. We'll never really know.

Given how the show has him knowing how to handle cattle but not 'proper' dance, etiquette, and sword play. I think he was not a plantation owner. Maybe the equivalent of a farm hand or other works for a living type.

[Frustration]

There were lots of innocent people in the Confederacy, too. Yet Atlanta burned.

[Madner Kami]

There were lots of innocent people in the Confederacy, too. Yet Atlanta burned.

youtu.be/OYj9CSxlGSk

[clearspira]

The only difference between ''general'' and ''war criminal'' is the winner.

[Riedquat]

The only difference between ''general'' and ''war criminal'' is the winner.

Nope.

[clearspira]

The only difference between ''general'' and ''war criminal'' is the winner.

Nope.

Absolutely, yes. It has only been in the last couple of years since I learned about Winston Churchill's part in the Bengal famine. Why? Because that shit wasn't taught for the last seventy years. We were only told about how he led Britain to victory and that's that.

Or Russia. You think its history books will record Ukraine accurately? Or China. You think its history books record Tiananman Square accurately?

The winner determines what is taught. The winner determines what title you go by. The winner determines the punishment. Sorry, but you seem to live in a sugar-coated world that actually teaches its children its own history accurately instead of propaganda.