Objects in Space

I'm rarely annoyed with Stephen Colbert, but his recent bid to have the newest node of the International Space Station named after him irked me. NASA's solution -- to name a treadmill after him and invent a silly acronym: the COLBERT stands for Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill -- was great; until, however, I realized that they weren't going to name the ISS node Serenity, either, which was the suggestion receiving the second largest number of popular votes and which is also the name of the spacecraft in Joss Whedon's now legendary short-lived TV series Firefly .

(NASA decided on Tranquility, after the Sea of Tranquility on the Moon and site of the first -- non-fictional -- Moon landing.)

If you think this is unfair, remember that the Starship Enterprise was named after a real aircraft carrier launched in 1936 (some folk apparently believe that the later eponymous shuttle craft was named in honor of Gene Roddenberry). Americans -- well, lots of folk, actually, although many of us think it's OTT to say so in public -- love it when life imitates art. Many of us, for example, know what to say in any given situation because we heard the most apropos response in a movie ("truth? You can't handle the truth!").

I know how to order toast when it's not on the menu thanks to Jack Nicholson, too; and when explaining code switching in language I like to quote Bruce Willis saying "Yippy-cay-yay, Motherf#*ker!", as it is so short and easy to remember. When someone gets hurt in rough-housing play? Think Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck; "it's all fun and games, until someone gets shot. . . ."

I knew, when told recently what a medic was going to do to try to set my broken forearm, to say "I know, I know; but could ya just be DONE?" thanks to Richard Dean Anderson in the Season One episode of Stargate SG-1 entitled "Solitudes." If I hadn't had that quote to hand I might have come up with something rather more rude. And whiny .

There are sublime moments in art when a piece trancends its milieu and becomes timeless. Something exqusite takes place (ex + the past participle of quaere , to seek; hence the word is literally from what is sought after); in this work, whether it be a van Gogh painting or a polonaise by Chopin, the artist can speak to all of humankind in any century (for me, it's Goya's Tres de Mayo, 1808 and Barber's Adagio for Strings -- although some Eric Clapton moments are not far behind).

Now, the word "exquisite" should be used sparingly. If ever.

It isn't one I would readily ever apply to TV -- movies, yes: there have been many masterpieces in both monochrome and full-blast techni-glare. But TV? A few of the Play for Today or Play of the Month pieces on the BBC had moments -- "Edna, the Inebriate Woman," springs to mind -- but for technical brilliance (Patricia Hayes's acting and Jeremy Sandford's writing are what excelled in that particular work, although I now realize that the camera work was pretty darn good, too), for realistic technical brilliance we have to look toward the US or Australia. Don't get me wrong: the UK is masterful at using its natural resources to full effect in the medium of television. But for sci fi? Not, to quote the pop culture expression, so much.

Once at a concert given by a young tenor who was on vacation from music school I was moved to give an ovation. No one else stood, and I was very embarrassed; the young singer himself caught my eye as if to say "hey, lady; I ain't that great -- yet." But when I thought about it afterwards, I wondered whether my honest reaction to something exquisite was out of place; indeed, why should we wait until the experts judge artistic excellence before we chime in with our own opinions? If I knew nothing about singing, or concert etiquiette, I could be dismissed as an embarrassing yokel; but while I have not studied the art of the motet or tonal gradations, I know when someone sounds as good as Placido Domingo, even if only for one piece in the repertoire.

What I'm gearing up to here is an opinion about an episode of a TV show that I thought to be particularly fine. As good as the episode in Lost about Locke's backstory, or any of Aaron Sorkin's finely scripted shows. With great filming, editing, and special effects that all added to the theme of the piece and effortlessly illustrated the title: "Objects in Space."

Although it originally aired tenth in the season, this is episode 14 of 14. It is a graceful -- almost balletic -- movement of people around the inside of the ship, as well as outside, in the elegant silence of space.

The placement of each character is important to the action and to the characters' perceptions of each other, so the episode begins -- after a shot of a planet in the distance, and the craft moving below our point of view, followed by one of those meticulous zoom shots that come in through the hull and follow the contours of pipes and conduits to a final honeycomb grill above a sleeping girl, voices audible, last one saying ". . .just floating. . . " -- with River (a young girl rescued by her brother from an Alliance "academy" where they literally were messing with her head) in silent review of the ship's company, exhibiting her ability to read thoughts and feel sensations in direct juxtaposition to what the characters are saying aloud.

This is an excellent piece of exposition; it allows the camera to follow River around the inside of the cargo ship (it's a great set: yes, it's better than any iteration of the Enterprise) and it allows for quick character notes on each individual, beginning with River's brother Simon uncharacteristically kicking back and telling a story about his graduation from medical school that has the besotted engineer Kaylee laughing; to the galley, where Reverend Book and the delightfully dim-witted Jayne are discussing celibacy ("like; they don't cut it off or nuthin'?"); here, River continues to have others' thoughts impinge on her mind: Jayne's "the money was too good" -- denotes both his attempt to sell out River and Simon to the Alliance and his fear of retribution, while Reverend Book's is the most surprising -- he "doesn't give half a hump" whether she's "innocent or not" this, with a couple of other details in the series, serves to imply that Shepherd Book has been (or still is) something rather darker than a man of the cloth.

River next glimpses Zoe and Wash kissing passionately on the bridge and is overcome for a moment by the strength of their feelings. From the venial to the emotional, now River is witness to Mal and Inara's pain over the latter's decision to leave Serenity to avoid a shipboard romance. She hears what they cannot say aloud.

At each point in her tour of the hearts and minds of the others, River has become more and more isolated from the pairs of characters in her reactions to their thoughts and feelings and also more alienated: this sequence culminates in a surreal scene that is not typical of the way the show has previously been shot and therefore stands out briefly as a silent foray into River's mind. The cargo deck is strewn with leaves, and she is holding a small branch -- no more than a large twig, really -- saying: "it's just an object; doesn't mean what you think." Cut to a noisy deck where Mal and Simon are trying to get a fully loaded weapon away from River and Kaylee is backing away in fear, having previously witnessed River's precision with guns on the mission to rescue Mal from Niska's space station.

Mal's conclusion is that the girl is a liability and that they are in danger, being "alone out here." Cue shot of outside of ship, as before, but now a smaller craft swings into alignment above them, proving Mal partly wrong. . . .

bbbeard [sic ], in his blog (Delicate Balance) entitled "Objects in Space," comments in passing that Whedon admitted Sartre as an influence for this episode, which can be seen as an exercise in existentialism: can we call River's room "River's Room" when she is not in it? muses the pensive Early. The episode is full of such philosophical questions, harking back to the twig in River's hand and further expressed when it becomes apparent that River has been subsumed into the ship (in reality she is hiding from the bounty hunter aboard his own craft). Is anything here what it appears to be to each individual?

The questions are not asked for merely rhetorical purposes -- perception itself is key. Early mishears the softspoken Simon on a couple of occasions ("so -- you're a bounty hunter." "No: that's not it at all. . .I'm a bounty hunter," as well as the "Alliance/lion" error), proving that what looks to us like a loaded weapon might well appear to River to be a twig, if her perceptions are as skewed as Early's.

It must be said in passing that Early, played by Richard Brooks, is an exceptionally fine villain. His almost politely voiced, detailed plans make him a more formidable opponent than the Operative of the sequel movie, Serenity . Given that he is clearly pathologically violent, his musings on obejcts as they exist in space are even more chilling, as is the almost conversationally toned but heart-stopping question he asks Kaylee ("have you ever been raped?") before he ties her up. He is not to be fooled with, intimidated, or patronised; indeed, it takes the combined efforts of Simon and River to rattle him on a psychological level and it takes the superior intelligence of River to outwit him, once he has been rattled.

That he is insane is further highlighted by the editing: what elsewhere, in another situation, would seem heavy-handed -- the repeated quick stop/alter some of his expressions -- is here used to good effect. Early relishes what he can perceive as having physical heft and weight. He does not deal well with psychological conundrum ("where'd she go?" "I can't keep track of her when she's not incorporeally possessing a spaceship; don't look at me"); at first skeptical, he becomes rattled when River "reads" his personality and pegs him for the psychopath he is.

Appropriately, she is in his craft above orchestrating events below her, positioning Kaylee and Mal, and, in thematically poignant honesty that recalls her alienation from the rest of the crew, we believe her plan to accompany Early, leave Serenity, and allow her brother the freedom he has denied himself by rescuing his sister in the first place. That allows us to relish even more what actually does occur -- Mal is positioned outside to push the unwary Early off into space, and welcome River on board again.

Early's last words, "well, here I am," as he drifts off into the void, are at once funny and almost poignant. Samuel Beckett would have chuckled.