Firefly 1.11 – Trash

I mentioned in earlier posts that Fox aired Firefly out of its intended order. The funny thing is, owing to actor and location availability, the last four episodes weren’t made in the intended order, either. “Trash,” which features the return of Christina Hendricks as the villain who sometimes is called Saffron, was the thirteenth story filmed, and the producers would have liked for it to have aired on Fox as the eleventh installment, on December 13, 2002. About ten days earlier, Fox announced that they were changing the schedule and pulled the last of the completed hours, “Objects in Space,” up to show on that date instead. “Trash” and the next two stories never aired on the network.

(Actually, just to confuse this nonsense even more, Fox had actually originally announced that it was “Heart of Gold” – the second-to-last of the completed hours – that was going to air on December 13. I didn’t know that until I dug around on the auld rec.arts.sf.tv newsgroup and found Lee Whiteside’s essential-in-the-day “SFTV: Upcoming Episode Schedules & News” posts. I was not watching much television in 2002, but six or seven years previously, I inhaled that guide when it came out.)

And by this point, the show’s continuity is really important to understand what the characters are referencing, and extremely entertaining. This one calls back to the events of “Ariel” a couple of times. While it stinks that broadcast viewers never saw this one, at least Fox didn’t air it out of order like they did the October-November episodes.

So Fox viewers really missed out. “Trash” is completely wonderful, and the kid was thrilled throughout. It’s a fun story of who’s double-crossing who, including the magical line “Also, I can kill you with my brain” among its jewels. Our son mused about how at this point, our heroes have three recurring villains: Saffron, Niska, and the dudes with the blue gloves. Shame there’s so little of it left for any of these baddies to take a final bow. But he also said the other day that he hopes they run into the Reavers again. Hmmmm.