The People Have Spoken!

To celebrate our blog reaching 15,000 hits, we put up a poll to decide whether I should expose Alex to the harsh vacuum of space in the form of Star Trek or Firefly/Serenity. I will admit to having been a little sneaky; when Firefly/Serenity started to take the lead, I sat Alex down to watch the first episode of the series.

Mere seconds after I started the episode, I was reminded of why I'm so incredibly fond of this show. The visuals, the attention to detail, the characters, the dialogue... This will be my third time through the series, and I keep finding new ways to appreciate the series now that I know the plot well enough to analyze the fine details and pay more attention to what's going on in the background. Now that I had conned Alex into watching Firefly with me, I knew it would only be a matter of time before he, too, became a Browncoat.

I reasoned that Alex, who is already a fan of Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, might appreciate another Whedon production that, for all intents and purposes, is a Western that just happens to take place in outer space. I also reasoned that we'd have a head start on watching the series in case the majority of voters leaned in that direction, and that, if he really hated the show, we could throw it out altogether and watch Star Trek instead.

We took a brief break about halfway through the episode. "I'm really enjoying this," Alex said. Or something along those lines. I'm no good at directly quoting people; for all I remember, he might have said, "I'm really enjoying this graphic novel I'm reading, and I hate your stupid TV show."

What I do remember for sure is that, after finishing the episode, Alex said to me, "That was a kick-@$ show! Why didn't you tell me there would be so much action?"

To which I replied, "I told you it was basically a Western!"

And he responded, "Yeah, but I thought you were lying!"

We make a great team, we do. So now Alex is committed to watching two episodes of Firefly per week, followed by the movie Serenity. I also plan on throwing a few Serenity graphic novels into the mix for good measure. I won't go so far as to say I'll get him to play a session of the Serenity roleplaying game, or that I can get him to dress up as Badger for the next convention we go to, or that I can get him to start speaking the lingo, but if I could...

Well. If I could, that'd be pretty gorram shiny.