Hmm, so a couple of days back I posted about my favourable first impressions of Firefly having watched the pilot episode. Since when I’ve watched…well, after writing this piece I’ll be onto episode three of disk three, which will be my tenth of the fourteen installments that made up the series. After which I’ll give renewed attention to the Serenity feature film spinoff which I will view again with added insight into it all.

Last time I watched that much of a show in a short space of time was when I got into The Shield. Which raises the question of exactly what Joss Whedon has done to give his show such a strong pull. Firefly maintains my attention throughout, more so than Buffy even, which had more than its share of off-centre episodes. (Interesting, the distinction between off-beat, which can be good, and off-centre, which isn’t.)

Part of the skill is in getting the audience to root for the characters. As with Buffy, they’re an interesting bunch — and rather than go for obvious conflict between them, as so many shows do, what bonds them is just as important as what pulls them apart. Conflict for its own sake can be dull, but with characters who play valuable roles in each others lives, and depend on one another, those bonds are just as important as the potential for breaking them. And those bonds run deeper than the technical function of the character roles.

Look at the interaction of Captain Mal Reynolds and Companion Inara for instance. At first sight, he seems to look down on the interplanetary escort girl. Look a little further, and you realise Mal has a touch of insecurity about sexually independent women. And their relationship is more than professional. It’s all beautifully depicted in the episode Our Mrs Reynolds, written by Whedon himself. Mal is duped into marriage by a woman who first seems a naive farm girl, but turns out to be a sophisticated con artist who knows exactly which buttons to press to get the results she wants. She uses a toxic lipstick to knock Mal out, and Inara kisses the captain in an attempt to bring him round, which sends her woozy too — a kiss born of genuine attraction as much as for medical reasons. Only, Mal goes for the easier conclusion that Inara was affected by the lipstick since she kissed the conwoman — his edginess about Inara being bisexual, and more sexually sophisticated than he is, won’t allow him to see that Inara really is drawn to him.

Fantastic stuff, beautifully played — but the above sounds like soap opera more than science fiction. Well, truth is that the science fiction aspects of the show are very much to do with the environment and trappings. This is not drama that comes from scientific concepts — science is not one of Firefly’s drivers at all. Not in the sense of episodes being based on stuff that the writers have picked up in New Scientist anyway. But there’s a rich story universe here, with the characters flitting between planets that mostly resemble the wild west because they’ve been terraformed to look that way. And there’s a backdrop involving a semi-evil Alliance that won the war against the Independents Mal fought for. You can tell they’re the bad guys because of their love of red tape, and they’ve done something unspeakable to the doctor’s strange sister, River.

Firefly proves that all a series needs to work is interesting and well-played characters. Sure, the fact that they flit about in a spaceship is fun — but a lot of that stuff is set dressing. More than anything, this is a series about how people get on in their very different ways, and how enjoyable it is to see that when those people are more or less functional and typically inclined to look out for one another. As such, it’s a more human and compelling future than those offered by most tv science fiction shows.