I saw Serenity Saturday night. It is a fantastic movie and I recommend it to everyone, and if you are planning on seeing it I highly recommend you get your hands on a copy of the Firefly DVD set and watch all of those first. The world of Firefly really isn’t about the setting or the technology, although the setting plays a large role. It is about the characters. In very few shows have I really cared enough about the characters to want to know their background.

To be able to pick up in the first few minutes of Serenity that the characters are acting a little strangely and be perturbed about it, is a testament to their development in Firefly episodes.

Every single character is unique and has a rich character with an intruiging background. Even shallow characters like Jayne grew from the first episode to the last. I watched a few bits of the pilot episode last night for fun and was surprised at how much all of the characters had changed. The people in the first episode were not the people in the last episode.

It is unfortunate that Fox canceled the show. In some of the special features on the DVD set it mentioned that Fox was unhappy with how Joss Whedon was doing the plot. They wanted to throw the characters into the middle of the story and quickly introduce them to the audience. I don’t believe that Firefly really does that and I am glad. Instead of introducing the characters and then running through through a series of independant events. You learn who they are over the course of the 14 episodes. Each episode has its own independant plot, but the character development flows across each one.

This is driven home even more after seeing Serenity. If one had not seen Firefly before watching the movie, so many elements would be lost.

So, go watch Firefly, and then go watch Serenity. And hope that Joss Whedon gets a chance to continue telling the story of these people.