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Well, I admit to the ‘Law and Order’ (all 3), ‘CSI’, ‘Monk’, ‘Mythbusters’, ‘Cold Case’, and on the SF/fantasy front, classic ‘Outer Limits’ and ‘Twilight Zone.’ If we got the Hallmark Channel, I’d confess to ‘Perry Mason’ reruns.
Spike is still a vampire, and he still has that chip in his head. He now has a soul, and it’s a bit like Hannibal Lecter suddenly gaining a conscience. Remember, Spike was a nice (if pathetic) chap in life, given to writing bad poetry, before Dru bit him. So I’m sure he’s feeling a boatload of guilt over his actions over the years. No wonder he tried to cut out his soul (you’ll notice that the scars are where that demon touched him to return it).
If I understand some of my reading correctly, handheld ‘ray guns’ are impossible. There is considerable heat from the energy beam, and the power requirements are beyond any currently known form of portable energy storage (batteries or power cells). So that’s two problems to solve: how to keep both the weapon and the user’s hand from burning up, and how to produce enough power to make the weapon worthwhile. The result that comes to my mind looks like a ‘Ghostbusters’ backpack, with a firing unit with long handles, coolant tubing, and lots of flanges to radiate the excess heat.
Unless the heat and power problem can be solved, the hand-weapons of the future will still be firearms. As long as the people who use them have metallurgy and chemistry, firearms and ammunition can be maintained and manufactured. So Whedon might not be as ‘retro’ as he seems.
Simpler weaponry is the weaponry of choice in many ‘fringe’ areas of the world. The AK-47 is easily-maintained and can take a beating that the M-16 can’t take. Wouldn’t surprise me at all to pick up the paper one day and read of a modern Western military unit roundly defeated by ‘ill-equipped’ locals, because the Westerners’ toys were too complicated to use, or were vulnerable to local conditions.
The outer regions in which ‘Firefly’ is set are outside the main Alliance trade routes. The people would be using and repairing older equipment, or even reinventing ‘primitive’ equipment such as gear-driven clocks, vacuum-tube radios, bicycles, and printing presses.
Whedon’s show does acknowledge one thing: no sound in a vacuum. You may have noticed that there are no sound effects for explosions, gunshots, or exterior shots of docking ships.
Oh, Inara is a Registered Companion. Evidently, prostitution is a regulated, legal enterprise in this future. They’re respectable, which is why Inara could save Mal’s bacon by calling him her ‘indentured man’. There need be nothing smarmy about the fictional indentured servitude, either: the implication could easily be that she bought up his debt to another, which he is now paying off (just not in any sexual manner).
