Firefly - Out of Gas
What an amazing episode.
I never heard of Firefly until early 2005, three years after Firefly ran on Fox TV. I found about it because many of the very diverse Internet forums I frequented were raving about it. The firearms web sites, the coin collecting web sites, the computer geek web sites -- they were all talking about it.
My wife and I had been renting DVDs from Netflix for about three years at that time. Movies, of course, but lots of tv shows, especially British mystery series.
We also watched all of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes.
We tried Babylon 5 twice, but couldn’t get past the first few episodes. I hear it gets really good -- by the second year.
Next: Farscape. This show had interesting stories, but finally I couldn’t take the aliens: they were muppets, and the more muppets, the less interested I was in the show.
Battlestar Galactica was really good ... the first couple years.
Firefly: love at first view. I got it immediately. I watched every episode in order, as I rented each disk from Netflix.
Firefly Disk 3, episode 1: Out of Gas. Out of all the tv series my wife and I watched on our Netflix DVDs, most of which would have four hour long episodes on a DVD, this was the first and only time I watched an episode a second time before proceeding to the next episode. Usually with a tv series on DVD it’s just click-click-click-click, watch an episode, then the next three, then send the disk back to Netflix. I was immediately struck by the astonishing brilliance of what I had just seen, and wanted to see it again. Just amazing: the story; the background filler of Jayne, Inara, Kaylee, and Wash; the fantastic way the writers had fit three separate timelines together (emphasized with three different color highlights) with wonderful segues from one to the next; the music soundtrack.
Objects in Space; Ariel; War Stories; Trash; and Serenity (the pilot episode) are also extremely good.
