The show was very conservative in its political and social viewpoint.
Throughout the series there is sexual tension between the captain and the incredibly hot “companion”. He constantly ribs her about her basically being a whore but you can tell it’s because he cares and it’s pretty darned obvious they both like each other.
So they go to this planet where a “rogue” companion runs a “whore house” very much as an american old west thing. The companion seems to be a close friend of Firefly’s companion. And she eventually gets to bed the captain.
Our companion sees him coming out of her room the next morning. It’s awkward but she says she is very glad he did it and that her friend was the perfect one to do it with after all these years of him apparently being celebant. And they walk away.
The next scene shows our girl sitting in a corner of a room sobbing her eyes out.
The show does not hide from our humanness and try to champion progessive nonsense about the nature of man and how God wired us. At the end of the day, in spite of all her training, the man she loved slept with someone else. The training was moot.
I did like that one. It was a great series, and it's been several years since I watched it on DVD. Gonna have to watch it again.
It was neat to see Adam Baldwin show up as a guest star on Fillion's new series "Castle".
The followup to that scene being the Madam telling Mal that she wouldn’t have slept with him if she’d known Inara had feelings for him too. And Mal being “Whaaa??”
I’ve never heard a good reason for the show being cancelled. Always believed that the suits didn’t like how, as you pointed out, it had such a decidely Conservative bent to it.
Whedon strikes me as, if not a “Conservative” then a Classical Liberal (or even Objectivist). With a good perspective (for a Hollywood type) on religion. Recall the scene in The Avengers where Black Widow warns Captain America about going after Thor and Loki because “they’re basically gods” and Cap replies “Theres only one God, ma’am, and I’m pretty sure He doesn’t dress like that.”
My favorite scene was when Mal intends to kill Jayne for betraying a member of the crew. The situation, the dialogue the character development was wonderful. Were it not for a simple small act of contrition on Jayne’s part, he’d have been a smudge on an airlock.
It doesn’t treat good and evil as a simple cartoon. Good men are good. Evil men are evil. They can look a lot alike to an unsophisticated eye but they are different. Mal is a good man who keeps his wayward crew in the light. He cares for them like a shepherd. He loves them. All of them. Anyone tries to hurt them he will move heaven and earth to protect them.
A very deep character who Fillion shined as.