Given my obsession with Castle and Beckett, it’s probably natural I check out Firefly, and find out how Nathan Fillion does in the Joss Whedon series that boosted him to cult status.
Not bad, as it turns out.
I’m a huge science fiction fan. I’m not a western fan at all. This series is an odd mixture of both, but it’s a mix I was happy to go along with, because it’s such an unexpected one…that in hindsight makes perfect sense.
There’s a few very obvious romances in the series that never had time to develop properly because the series got cancelled toward the end of season one. I kept waiting for some nice pulse stopping moments, because I know that Fillion has the 
chops to pull ’em off, and there were plenty of story line possibilities. But the object of his affections never let him get a chance to build any pulse pausing moments with her, alas.
There was one really good high tension moment that had me holding my breath a little…well, two, if you count the episode where Captain Reynolds (Mal) spends a lot of the episode sitting on a rock buck naked and contemplating how badly wrong the job has gone…
But I digress.
<sigh>
Strangely enough, the high tension moment doesn’t happen between Mal and Inara, his true love. It actually occurs in the episode “Our Mrs. Reynolds,” between Mal and Saffron, the woman to whom Mal finds himself accidentally married (long story). Now he’s trying to force-generate a back-bone and sense of independence in the sweet, innocent and entirely clueless girl before they dump her on a big metropolis planet to fend for herself. Saffron just wants to serve her husband properly…in all ways.
Mal has a moment of utmost temptation, where a naked Saffron runs rings around him intellectually and physically, while he does his best to hang onto the simple notion that he isn’t going to give in to her demands to “serve” him. You can see his mind creaking as he does mental battle with himself.
I won’t ruin the rest of the scene for you. It’s a doozy.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any images from that scene, or the one where he’s sitting on the rock naked, contemplating the disaster snatch job. By the way, the naked-rock-sitting is also more of Saffron’s doing, in “Trash”. (grin)
You have to watch the movie! Serenity ties up a lot of loose strings! Just gotta love capt. tight pants!
Hi Julie:
I have, indeed, seen Serenity.
They were trying very hard to wrap up all the loose ends that the show left hanging with its abrupt departure from the airwaves, and they did a nice job of finalizing things, even if they did so with some ambiguity (Reynolds and Inara, for instance).
It was a nice way for the series to bow and leave the stage, unlike other series that have been cancelled — The Sarah Connor Chronicles is a good example.
Cheers,
Tracy