A good opening is the key to hooking audiences into any story. The first few frames of a movie, the prologue of a novel, the first episode of a TV series – they all serve the same purpose: to get the audience interested. Firefly, the single-season sci-fi saga whose cancellation fans still mourn today, executed this perfectly (or at least it would have, had the network aired the episodes in the correct order). The show’s pilot episode introduced characters, concepts, factions, settings, allies, enemies and more – all through the ancient writing tenet of “show don’t tell.”

What I realized after watching the movie though was most of my memories of the show itself had been replaced by ones from the movie. On the show, River is a mystery and a bit of an annoyance, save for one or two moments. In the movie, she’s not just the star, she’s an unstoppable force – the badass she was surely planned to be all along, which is how I remembered her. The Reavers; the main villains of the film, are only mentioned in the show a few times and seen once, which clashes with my strong memory of them. And that hat Jayne wears, the one you are guaranteed to see at any comic book convention, is only in the TV show for a few scenes, and even less in the movie. If it never became a “thing” in fandom, you probably wouldn’t even remember it.

NOVAGRASS Catches FIREFLY We’re not going to be seeing the “Firefly” pilot Joss Whedon wrote and directed until December, when Fox airs a version augmented…