Firefly Episode 8: The Ship Breaks Down in Space. What Next?

Mal, expecting to suffocate alone on the ship while the other crew members escape, relives the life that brought him there

This episode starts out strong, but gradually breaks down. We open with Mal collapsing onto the metal grating of the ship’s hull. He’s bleeding and the lights are off.

We don’t know what happened but we witness a series of flashblacks consisting of three separate timelines: events in the present, how Mal found himself in his current predicament, and the deep past where Mal is first gathering his crew. The episode is essentially an abbreviated version of how the crew got together, sandwiched between a doomsday scenario for Mal.

The trouble starts when the crew is celebrating Simon’s birthday. Suddenly, something blows up inside the ship. A couple of hallways are engulfed in flame and Mal and the others just barely get the living quarters’ doors closed in time. For me, the most interesting moment during this episode occurs when Jayne opens the hull doors which sucks the flames into space. This was neat to watch except that the mechanics of it doesn’t make any sense, given what we’re told later.

At first, I thought they’d merely suffocated the flames by sealing off the living quarters and opening the ship’s hull, cutting off the oxygen. But Kaylee later says that the ship’s engines are down, along with all the life support systems. So they have only the air which wasn’t sucked out with the flames.

This is strange because, once they resealed the hull, they opened the living quarters which should have dispersed the air. Given the size of the ship, there should have been too little air to breathe. Plus, how did they even reseal the doors in the first place if once the engines died, everything shut down? If everything didn’t shut down and they had emergency power, why couldn’t they reroute that power back to the life support systems?

This was a little irritating because it looked like the episode was going to be about what happens when a ship such as theirs breaks down. But it became apparent that the episode was nothing more than a contrived crisis to justify Mal reliving his life and thereby giving us some exposition of the crew’s origin.

The truth is, little thought was put into the doomsday scenario. That became even more apparent when the the ship’s peril originated in a small part the size of a forearm. For one thing, it’s hard to imagine that this one tiny part should cause a chain reaction which not only killed the ship’s engine but also shut down both of its life support systems. For another, the show goes out of its way to mention the insignificance of this part, vaguely referred to as a “calibrator.” If this part is considered unimportant and therefore, presumably, cheap, why didn’t they have extra calibrators? It seems as if they had no spare parts whatsoever, which seems incomprehensible if you’re traveling through the void of space.

Plus, there’s another annoying trope in this episode. The writers do their best to convince us that there’s no hope. Wash says repeatedly there is absolutely no way help is coming. They are too far out, and nobody can hear them. Then, once the rest of the crew take the two shuttles in search of rescue — leaving Mal to go down with the ship…or rather, suffocate with the ship — surprise, surprise, Mal just so happens to receive the help he needs…sort of.

Mal had come up with a plan to boost the distress signal at the expense of its clarity. But that would slow down any help that might come, making the plan pointless. By the time the theoretical rescue vessel translated the signal and reached the ship ,the chances were they’d all be dead anyway. In theory, the rescuers might have heard Mal’s scrambled signal or maybe, the crew just got lucky. But the scriptwriters never let us know, one way or the other.

At any rate, some space pirates show up, whether they are rescuers or not. They just so happen to have a spare calibrator (it can ruin your ship if it breaks, but nobody pays attention to it). But even the writers must have felt bad about such an obvious contrivance so, just to shake things up, the pirates double-cross Mal. But before they do so, they toss Mal the new calibrator. Only after that, do they bother to shoot him. Why not shoot him when he opens the door? We all know why. The plot needs to happen.

Anyway, Mal finds a gun and scares the pirates off, then collapses on the grating — which gets us back to the opening scene. The rest of the episode is pretty straightforward. Mal limps to the engine, replaces the calibrator, and wakes up to find the crew hovering over him because they felt bad about leaving him in the first place.

This was a poorly written episode though I didn’t find it quite so annoying as Episode 5. At least the revolvers weren’t shooting lasers for some random reason but the disaster sequence was poorly done. As for the flashbacks, they were good, funny even, and very well acted, thanks to a strong cast. I wouldn’t recommend it necessarily but it’s not bad in the sense that it regresses the characters or undermines the core narrative of the story, and we do get some much needed exposition of the history of the crew, regardless of the lousy delivery of key scenes.