70 thoughts on “Watching TV With Your Kids Over The Holidays?”

  1. I liked Firefly. I recently watched Babylon 5 for the first time, and my reaction to the early episodes was that their introduction should’ve said, “Babylon 5 is home to 250,000 acting-school dropouts.” It got better, though.

    1. To continue somewhat off-topic, the thing I did not realize about the first season of B5 until I came back to it was how much groundwork was being laid for what was to come later in the series. An extremely good show. Still, I think Firefly is better.

      1. A lot of the best space sci-fi TV shows (Babylon 5, TNG, DS9, new BSG) nevertheless had a very rocky start and a fair number of misses. Firefly managed to pack nearly as much awesomeness into only a handful of episodes, with very few episodes or even moments that aren’t keepers.

  2. I’ve seen ten seconds of FireFly. I know this isn’t enough to judge the show, but I saw a bunch of live cows (steer) being herded off a spaceship. This made me laugh so hard I couldn’t watch any more. Live cows? How about just carrying the DNA code for a cow? Or why not frozen eggs & sperm, or even frozen embryos? Or heck, at least ship meat in the freezer.

    On Earth, in today’s world, do people ever transport live cows by airplane?

      1. It’s the best way to deliver it fresh.

        That might be true, but it would also be counterproductive.

        No one wants to sell fresh beef. Beef is generally aged (wet-aging in supermarkets, dry-aging in gourmet shops and better restaurants) to improve flavor.

    1. What Rand said.
      Couple of airlines I used to work for make very good money hauling livestock. It’s no simple task and can carry enormous risk for high-value animals like race horses.
      BTW, I just watched the entire Firefly series, plus Serenity, not long ago when Science Channel had a marathon. One of those shows I’d never seen but always wanted to (see the aforementioned air cargo jobs…lots of night shifts). Absolutely loved it. Even my wife was pleasantly surprised, and we rarely agree on shows like that.

      1. Race horses and African gazelles and snakes on a plane, I can believe. But cows are commonplace enough that it really surprises me. I was wrong, wrong, wrong.

        1. You would be amazed at the kinds of things that the 747 freighter fleets carry every day (one of the biggest items is cut flowers). Also, just as with people, air transport is the safest way to move livestock. But it’s of particular interest for things like Kobe beef.

          1. You may not understand the degree to which the 747 revolutionized air travel in terms of economics, for everyone and everything. It was the DC-3 of the jet age. We still await the one for the space age. But the payload of the space-age DC-3 will be closer to that of the DC-3 than the 747.

          2. Most laptops made in Asia and sold in the US are flown here on 747’s. Lenovo bought IBM’s desktop production lines here because apparently the greater bulk and weight of a desktop unit, compared to a laptop, makes it cheaper to build them domestically than to fly them across the Pacific.

    2. Well, now that we’ve established that cows fly, is it fair to ask for examples where someone who wants to have a herd of cattle starts with frozen embryos — or a DNA database? I mean, suppose investor A wants to add cattle to the ensemble of livestock produced by a farm in location X that is far from the usual supply of cattle? Suppose that A decides the minimum herd size is N. Does it make sense for A to transport and set up all the equipment for in vitro gestation for N cattle, for feeding for N calves, and then wait four years before bringing any product to market? I’d say that even if mankind ever learns to do this, it will never be economically viable compared to just moving a pre-existing herd.

      Besides, you’re missing the point here. Part of the ineffable charm of Firefly is the incongruity of spaceships and cattle, blasters and six-shooters, holograms and swordfights. And even then, isn’t the unbelievable part about the Firefly universe that the US and China would ever move toward a common form of government? 😉

      1. We are talking about interplanetary or interstellar spaceships, though.Tell me a plausible story about the first 100 cows on Mars. Tell me a story about the first 100 cows on the first interstellar colony. How many of these cows were transported alive? In the Firefly universe, how fast and how cheap can one ship cows between worlds? Is it just like airplanes in 2012?

        1. Apologies to pro-life people — of course frozen eggs, sperm, and embryos are “alive”. I meant “born”. And apologies for using the word “cow” instead of “cattle” or whatever the non-gendered word is — the lack of a singular non-gendered word trips me up. What a mess!

          1. The singular is “beeve”. Only brightlighters and vegetarians think that “cow” refers to all cattle.

        2. Tell me a plausible story about the first 100 cows on Mars.
          Heinlein did that for Ganymede (Farmer).

          In the Firefly universe, how fast and how cheap can one ship cows between worlds? Is it just like airplanes in 2012?
          Most definitely not. There are significant government regulations involved here in 2012 that are impossible to circumvent. Not so in the Firefly system.

          1. There are significant government regulations involved here in 2012 that are impossible to circumvent. Not so in the Firefly system.

            Hmm. If only the Alliance had been able to enforce those pesky regulations requiring annual inspections of compression coil catalyzers….

          1. The easiest solution would have been to record the probe’s message, play it to the whales, record the whales’ answer, return to the future, and rebroadcast the whales’ message to the probe.

            As the movie’s story went though, I think the two reintroduced whales are going to go through a genetic bottleneck that could prove fatal or at least crippling.

            I guess you want to hear me complain about whales on spaceships. That’s not my beef, so to speak. I just found herds of living cattle to be implausible. But I aim to please: Why not use transporter technology to scan the Whales in the past, and re-create copies in the future? While they are at it, scan other whales, and recreate them too, so there will be better genetic diversity.

            Finally, if the people of the year 2286 wanted whales on Earth, they would have already recreated them from preserved DNA from our era. So, while saving the Earth from Cetaceaphilic alien probes is a noble goal, reintroducing whales looks like unwanted meddling. I predict that the whales will be quickly recaptured and put in a zoo.

        3. I’m still not getting the implausibility here. If it’s feasible to transport people by the shipload to colonize planets, why not livestock? I mean, by your argument, the government should have sent frozen human embryos on little bitty cargo rockets to the outer planets to colonize them.

          1. I haven’t figured it out either. It’s like suspecting that people would want to travel to distant planets, yet they had no interest in eating. Colonists need to eat, and all of human history provides example of people carrying livestock with them on long voyages. Still, its interesting exploring the mindset.

          2. Here was my thought: once the freezer was invented, slaughterhouses moved much closer to where cattle was raised. If someone in New York wants beef, you don’t ship live cattle from Kansas to New York – you ship beef.

            If you are using mass sensitive vehicles like spaceships (or airplanes), you particularly don’t want to ship heavy inedible parts like bones. In the case of spaceships, where travel times might be long, you don’t want to provide life support either, and regardless of travel times, realistic spaceships are going to be particularly mass sensitive. Since mass matters, you sends seeds (or the animal equivalent — frozen sperm and eggs, or frozen embroyos. If we’re talking about spaceships, it seems implausible to send food to a planet where you can grow food.

            And yes, for interstellar voyages, frozen human embryos have often been considered — interstellar travel is really hard, and every gram counts.

            Also: biological advances are often neglected in science fiction, even while vehicular engineering (and even basic physics) advances in leaps and bounds. Anti-matter for fuel, interstellar ramjets, even way-out ideas like wormhole travel and FTL hyperspace travel are commonplace in SF, but artificial-yet-tasty meat or artificial wombs or building a living animal from just DNA code and a 3d printer, well, not so common. Hence livestock on spaceships….

  3. One more thing…Bob-1, you may well have a point regarding the reality of something 500 years in the future. But the trick with writing fiction in that setting is in keeping it accessible and familiar, so that your audience relates. It draws them in better than someone carrying a crate of frozen embryos would.
    A major premise of Firefly was that people who ended up on the losing side of the war had isolated themselves from the gov’t, making do with whatever technology was available.

  4. That was 10 seconds of episode 7. You should at least commit an hour and a half and watch the pilot before summarizing FireFly as a bunch of live cows being herded off a spaceship (though in the end that’s a snapshot I would accept). There are plenty of others available on youtube; google “I aim to misbehave” for one (from Serenity).

  5. There’s always a Firefly festival on Netflix and Amazon Prime Instant Video. Just sayin’.

    Serenity costs some on Amazon, but its included on Netflix.

  6. My favorite line of the whole series is in Serenity.

    “Do you know what your sin was?”

    “I’m acquainted with all seven of them, but right now I’m kinda partial to Wrath.”

    A close runner-up is the line about wanting something between her legs that isn’t powered by batteries. Priceless.

    1. Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that, too. Explaining Inara’s profession could get a little tricky. I’m pretty sure my 12-year old has heard about stuff like that from his friends, and I’d rather talk about it with him than have them explain it…

      1. If your 12 year old has not had the basics of sex explained to him, better get on it pronto. This book is not for everybody, but I found it a pretty acceptable basis for discussion when my boys turned 11 or so. And I think I’m relatively conservative.

        Having said that, I was more uncomfortable about the (only slightly veiled) references to, and images of, homosexuality (e.g. in War Stories). But hey, it’s science fiction, right? Of course two women can make out — that’s only slightly less plausible than interplanetary cattle herding, right?

    2. I was thinking of a few other issues, primarily that of sympathetic characters commiting a number of heists. The “antihero” concept is a tough nut to crack with the kids when the antihero enters morally grey territory for justifiable reasons (e.g. The Outlaw Josey Wailes). But when the morality is black-and-white and the antihero chooses wrongly?

      The torture scene in the second episode featuring the Ludwig von Hayek lookalike villain (first introduced in “The Train Job”) is too intense for some young audiences.

      Then there’s Mal’s issues with religion. He blames God for the Browncoats’ loss in the rebellion, he’s bitter, he’s a jerk about it, and the show isn’t sympathetic with his jerkiness. Kids better be old enough and parents better be objective enough to understand what’s going on.

      The show does offer an opportunity to demonstrate to older teens how a Companion-like life means rejecting companionship. That’s something they don’t teach in sex ed.

  7. If these quotes don’t trigger an immediate visual for you, then you’re not a true browncoat….

    “Sure would be nice if we had some grenades, doncha think?”

    “My days of underestimating you are definitely coming to a middle.”

    “Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!”

    “I’ve been out of the abbey two days, I’ve beaten a lawman senseless, I’ve fallen in with criminals. I watched the captain shoot the man I swore to protect. And I’m not even sure if I think he was wrong. I believe… I just… I think I’m on the wrong ship.”

    Big damn heroes, sir!”

    “I like watching the game. As with other situations, the key seems to be giving Jayne a heavy stick and standing back.”

    “Grav boot ain’t your trouble. I seen the trouble plain as day when I was down there on my back before. Your reg couple’s bad.”

    “I’m trying to put this as delicately as I can… How do I know you won’t kill me in my sleep?”

    “No power in the ‘verse can stop me!”

    1. “What did you go an order a dead guy for?”

      “This food is problematic.”

      “I aim to misbehave.”

      “Is that even possible? That sounds like science fiction.” “You live on a spaceship, dear.”

      One thing I always enjoyed about Joss’s shows was the wordplay.

    2. “I’ve been out of the abbey two days, I’ve beaten a lawman senseless, I’ve fallen in with criminals. I watched the captain shoot the man I swore to protect. And I’m not even sure if I think he was wrong. I believe… I just… I think I’m on the wrong ship.”

      I could never buy Book’s transformation. At the start of the series his character is revealed to be exactly as it appears: naive and vulnerable. Halfway through we see that he’s harder than concrete, but not by virtue of the experience we see; it happened before, like some kind of retcon. Disappointing.

  8. Wash: “A man walks down the street in that hat, people know he’s not afraid of anything.”

    Jayne: “Damn straight.”

  9. Frozen embryos might be attractive to expand genetic diversity if you already had a herd. For starting a herd live cattle would be more practical. Also, what if the small ship that would deliver the frozen embryos had the capacity to carry 100 live cattle? The firefly class ship is on the small side of what exists in the way of long range ships in that universe.

    1. When those calves are born from the embryos, where are they going to get colostrum and all the milk they need for several months? If a calf can’t eat, or doesn’t get those crucial bacteria in colostrum, it dies.

      You can only ship embryos if you have live cows to provide milk for them when they’re born, on any practical scale.

      Also, a buyer has a much easier time judging the health of an animal that he may purchase (or not) when it is right there breathing in front of him, rather than frozen in a test tube.

      1. Milk: When women can’t breastfeed, or choose not to, artificial formula suffices. Are calves different from human babies? I’m not a rancher, but I did google calf formula, and learned that veal are typically raised using artificial formula.

        In any case, a future with starships might plausibly also contain artificial wombs
        , and certainly should include decent baby formula. And artificial-yet-tasty meat doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch for a culture that can build starships.

        As for judging the quality of the meat, a known industrial food product created from a known genome would have much better quality control than flying cows.

        1. It would be hard to argue against the practical considerations you are bringing up. It is the logical and rational way to handle such things. In the Firefly universe, I’m sure that’s exactly how things are done on the Alliance controlled worlds, all neat and tidy.

          Mal Reynolds and his crew don’t go to such places and hang out with such people. The folks they deal with have forsaken such niceties (willingly or otherwise) in the pursuit of what they consider freedom. It’s not rational and (in practical terms) it doesn’t always make a lot of sense, but they are dedicated to doing things the hard way (if they have to) just to stay outside of Alliance control. If that means using impossibly powered space ships to shuttle live cows from place to place, so be it.

        2. Bear in mind that these are transports on the edge of “civilized” space, with less that the most up-to-date technology. The easiest and least technical way of transporting and growing embryos to term, is in them what makes ’em.

    2. Another point against transporting embryos is that only a few of the worlds in Firefly have “modern” technology. Most of the planets Mal & company traveled between had only 1860’s-1890’s level tech, barring a few exceptions (Comm gear and the like, the odd Bobcat skid-steer). A case of calfcicles isn’t worth much without an IVF center.

        1. Eh. I like my science fiction to have characters, dialog, and stories, but more than that, I want it to have interesting science speculation/extrapolation.

          If the same stories could have taken place without the science, it doesn’t seem like very good science fiction.

          Could Firefly’s stories have been told in an 1860s-1890s setting?

          One of the criticisms of Firefly I’ve seen frequently in SF discussion groups is that Firefly ells post-Confederate stories (with pro-Confederate dogwhistles) but set in somewhat futuristic outer space context to avoid all that ugly racism. I haven’t seen the shows. I don’t know.

          1. That said, two of my favorite SF novels are the post-apocolyptic Earth Abides and that commie trash The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin. The latter is really really commie — you’d just love it! Usually I like hard science novels with detailed descriptions of propulsion schemes, but I think the science in the Dispossessed is one or more of the social sciences, which is also the case for Earth Abides. When I watch Firefly (which I suppose is inevitable), I’ll watch for any insights into squishy sciences like “political science” or economics or anthropology.

          2. The avoidance of all that ugly racism has nothing to do with the outer space setting. The civil war related “criticisms” are in relation to the book that Whedon read that gave him the inspiration to create Firefly. Had he never revealed the fact that that particular book was his inspiration, you would never have read those “criticisms”. Or anything about pro-Confederate dogwhistles. But if “ugly racism” is your chosen boogey-man, you’re going to be inclined to see it anywhere I guess.

          3. I have to call foul on that one. You won’t find any of the main characters on the show talking about how wonderful the past was before the Alliance came and ruined it all. They all live very much in the (their) present. The resentment Mal has for the Alliance has nothing to do with any supposed good life it might have taken away from him. He’s not pining away for the life on the plantation. He fought in a war for a cause he believed in (freedom)and lost. He resents having lost to people he knows are wrong.

          4. Typical modern liberal – analyze the shit out of something, make it fit all your preconceived notions, but don’t bother reading / watching it. Did you learn that technique in college, Bob-1?

          5. Eric, I failed to avoid seeing commentary on firefly, but..

            For whatever it is worth, my liberal friends (and my liberal wife) all love Firefly. No dissenters among those who have seen it. One reason I haven’t seen it yet is because my wife has already seen it. On the other hand, they all liked Buffy (same writer) because of the dialog/wordplay/etc, whereas I found the artificial dialog jarring. And they all enjoy fantasy, whereas I usually can’t tolerate stories about magic, no doubt due to some mental deficiency on my part.

          6. Eric, I failed to avoid spreading rumors about firefly, but..

            FTFY.

            FYI, Firefly is “Josey Wales In Space” FFS! It’s amazing how peeps can blow shit out of proportion, but that’s “deconstruction” for you…

          7. It is not a rumor. People really do say that Firefly is full of pro-Confederate dog whistles. You might not agree with that assessment and it might not strike you as fair or accurate, but the assessments themselves are not rumors.

            Would you like me to post links here, or would it just upset you too much?

            My liberal friends who like firefly found the criticism interesting, but didn’t agree with it. It didn’t particularly upset them.

          8. You’re confusing states; “upset” is not the same as mildly detached amusement. Which for you is actually progress.

          9. Now you’re just being obtuse: the rumor exists, and you’re spreading it further. On our planet, we call that spreading rumors.

          10. There is a difference between an interpretation of art and a rumor. I’m genuinely surprised you don’t agree about that.

          11. My OS usually requires a referrer to actually have sampled the content in question before it renders any meaning to it.

          12. This is really a bizarre conversation.

            First, I said I didn’t know and wasn’t judging — I was fishing for your opinions, not your attacks on me.

            But more importantly, do you think everyone who reads movie reviews (or watched Siskel and Ebert, Ebert & Roeper, and other such review shows) has already seen the movie? On the contrary, many people turn to reviews to see if it is likely be something they might enjoy.

            And as my reference to Lem’s reviews of imaginary books alludes to, there is even some pleasure in reading reviews for their own sake. Nevermind Lem’s fun and games: many people have said over the years the New York Review of Books is more interesting than the books that are reviewed, because the reviews go well beyond the particulars of any one book.

            If you’re not interesting in having that kind of conversation about SF and Westerns and so forth, I think that’s just fine, but it seems peculiar to criticize referencing criticism itself, calling it rumor, and getting up on your high horse about which should come first, the art or its review, as if there aren’t two completely normal ways to go about it.

          13. Dang it Bob. That wonderfully entertaining, thoughtful and informative New York Review of Books piece on Firefly (the one that revealed all those ugly, racist, slavery, confederate, kitten torture dog whistles) was supposed to remain a secret. Curse you.

  10. I bought “Firefly” on DVD. I watched it once and enjoyed it, but never had a desire to watch it again.

    Later, I wondered why that was. I like westerns and I like science fiction, so in theory, I should have liked it better than I did.

    Finally I decided the problem was too many gunfights. Not that I have a problem with gunfights, but what makes a Western gunfight interesting isn’t the actual shooting, it’s the buildup — the simmering conflict, the dramatic camera angles as the characters walk out into the street, the tense exchange of words, etc.

    In Firefly, the producers seemed to be trying to prove how big their ammo budget was in every episode. More bullets does not equal more drama.

    (This same principle applies to sword fights. One Jedi knight versus one Sith master is good, especially if the Jedi Knight is Sir Alec Guiness. 100 Jedi knights versus 100 Sith masters is not 100 times better, no matter what Mr. Lucas thinks.)

    1. I’ve found certain shows that I really like, I can’t watch again. Mostly because I can remember too much, and the lack of anticipation ruins the movie.

      I do have to admit that Firefly took awhile for me to enjoy. I watched the first two episodes about 3 times each before I moved through the series.

    2. In Firefly, the producers seemed to be trying to prove how big their ammo budget was in every episode. More bullets does not equal more drama.

      No, but it’s not necessarily unrealistic. In an actual combat situation, it is commonly estimated that about 1000 rounds are expended for every round that hits an enemy.

      You sound like someone who might object to Star Trek on the grounds that a starship captain shouldn’t be involved in so many fistfights with aliens. SciFi often requires much more than a mere “suspension” of disbelief.

      1. Actually, in Vietnam the statistic was over 10,000 rounds fired for every enemy killed. When just about everyone in a squad is carrying a selective fire weapon (M-16) and people are shooting at you, the natural inclination is to rotate the selector two clicks and go full rock-n-roll.

        Snipers were the exception. Their average was 1.4 rounds per kill.

      2. You sound like someone who might object to Star Trek on the grounds that a starship captain shouldn’t be involved in so many fistfights with aliens. SciFi often requires much more than a mere “suspension” of disbelief.

        That’s a strange comment, since I never once mentioned realism. You did.

        If you watch a John Ford or Howard Hawks western, you’ll see a lot of historical anachronisms. Events set in the 1870’s, with 1880’s uniforms and 1892 Winchesters.

        What you don’t see are constant, non-stop gun battles thoughout the film.

        In Wagonmaster, for example, no one ever fires a gun except in the opening scene and again at the very end. I don’t think that was because Ford was a Star Trek nitpicker.

  11. Carol and I watched Serenity first at the movies. I almost wasn’t going to go but we did and I thought it was the best 2 hours I spent in the movies in, well, for ever. At the end the credits mention “thanks to the cast and crew of Firefly”. I suddenly realised that that was the “Firefly” that Jerry Pournelle had mentioned once or twice which I had not got around to investigating. Ordered the box set. Had to wait 6 weeks as it sold out in Australia(best selling DVD for quite a few weeks). After viewing recommended to one of my nieces. She complained that her husband didn’t come to bed until 4 am after she bought it for him.
    Loved it all.

Comments are closed.