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Date Posted: 09:48:10 11/02/02 Sat
Author: Darby
Subject: "Shindig" Impressions, with spoilers.

Warning - this is going to be fairly negative.

Shindig kind of followed up on my questions about Companions, which was nice (I definitely see confirmation of Rob's hypotheses), but you can't put a thriving metropolis together like they had without actual women, and are we to believe that Companions are respected but none of the movers and shakers on this world are female? Was Kaylee the only woman at the party not paid to be there, the only one that had a career not involving ego and other types of stroking? This is a sad, sad future.

I don't like the passive-aggressive attitude being expressed as a main attribute for Mal. The progressing-toward-a-fight scenarios are already repetitive and annoying, and for someone who wants business in a low-profile venue, it's just stupid. The exchanges with Inara about her work have the same passive-aggressive slant and are more annoying than revealing - how long are we going to have to watch this dance, the equivalent to punching the little girl in the shoulder to show that you're interested in her? For someone who is supposedly trained in dealing with immature clients, Inara should not be playing this game - she should have either shot him down or made him honest a long time ago. The only thing we have left is the tiresome tv-thing of watching a painfully slow progression from interested but alienated (thanks to the guy's dumbness and the gal's reticence) to maybe-something in a season or twelve.

Could the "defending her honor" have been any lamer? How many times have we seen this scenario played out on film, down to the apparent defeat of our hero turned on the bad guy, who the hero spares? A few points...

No experienced soldier who trades in barfights with whole bars would be so stupid with a sword, I don't care how unschooled. When the other guy has something that can kill you, and is better at using it, someone with Mal's background should be ultra-careful, but we get bad Happy Days material. I'll give them fairly silly fight choreography - it's entertainment, not reality - but this just flies against the character we're supposed to be dealing with, the supposed pragmatist. But the progression of the fight - the slicing of the arm, the wound that slows but doesn't really debilitate, the disarming of the hero turned upon the gloating villain - this was old when Tyrone Power held the sabre. And we're supposed to believe that a man who could kick a potential enemy into an engine would hold off from following custom to eliminate a possible enemy, someone who could conceivably hurt not just him but Inara - and someone who his potential new client happens to hate? That's following formula to the detriment of what's being built - the scene just lacked the attack to the hero's back that forces him to do the deed, but that's tough with seconds involved.

So what did I like? Hmmmm...the peripheral character stuff was okay. Wash was funny (but is becoming a bit of a one-note comic relief) and the bed scene helped to explain his and Zoe's relationship a bit. Crazy-girl-goes-native was intriguing if a bit convenient, although her ability to deliver dialect lines so that they could be understood was vastly weaker than the other guy's. The slimy intermediary was a potentially interesting character, a notch too low on the charm meter to be really fascinating but something to maybe build on, and the new patron has potential as well - he'd be good in a long-term arc that gradually removes his snakiness only to bring it to the fore at a most inopportune moment. That is, if he turns out to be the true snake hinted at in this episode, and not just tempted momentarily but drawn back by the feisty crew's friendship.

Kaylee showed some interesting depth - I can forgive the high-school (and bad teen movie) cattiness of the women at the party since it led to her finding her niche there. Is anybody else finding the girl-woman mixes here just a bit disturbing, though? I know that many sexually-active women well past the age of consent can still seem very kittenish, but there's a certain creepy factor in there with the sign over her quarters and certain aspects of her persona. Maybe it's the way the girlish aspects and womanish aspects have been treated very separately rather than in an integrated way that bother me, but that's certainly fixable.

Overall, I have to say that perhaps I'm not looking for what they're selling - I came to this Joss Whedon show looking for sophistication and layers, and find I'm watching Bonanza in Space. It continues to be fairly entertaining - my wife really liked this episode, the stuff that bothered me was barely a blip to her, so maybe I'm way out on the fringes here - but I expected Joss' signature touch beyond interesting dialogue, and so far the show doesn't really seem to be about anything.

Okay, c'mon, let me have it. I'm not expecting anyone to agree with me, and maybe I'm missing stuff here - what did you get out of this Shindig?

- Darby, still liking John Doe better (although this weeks ep there was subpar too).

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