I fell in love with Firefly's Captain Malcom Reynolds for many reasons, including his face, his build, and his grin, but mostly because of who he was. Mal wasn't Hero Guy in the large sense; he was a regular guy who was often called on to act heroically, and he did the best he could to rise to it, even if he didn't really know what the right thing was. He had to do things he didn't want to do, and hurt people he didn't want to hurt, and deny himself so many things . . . all because he essentially wanted to keep his home and family safe.
I will never be Hero Girl--I'll never be Buffy or Meg Murry or Hermione Granger or even Anne of Green Gables, but I am very much a woman on her own, struggling to figure out how to keep a home a family safe. I know the stakes aren't as high or precarious for me as they were for Mal, but his story is my story in a lot of ways. His struggles are my struggles--how to to lead when you're not sure of the right way? Which risks do you take? When can you relax when you always have to be looking forward to see what's coming next--what you have to protect your loved ones from, and what you have to be confident they can handle on their own?
Mal messes up and gets angry and frustrated and acts like a jerk sometimes. But he works hard to do his best, and THAT is heroic (and more than a little inspirational) to me.
I love Zoe and her strength and wisdom, I love Wash for his Wash-ness, and I love their marriage. I love that Kaylee is allowed to be a single woman who is capable and dirty and smart, but also girly . . . and totally sexual without the least bit of embarrassment or punishment. I love Jayne for his Janyne-ness and his arms and shoulders. I love Simon for his dedication to his sister above all else, and I love River because she's crazy and cool. I love Shepherd Book because he's wise and mysterious, and a great representation of a person of faith. I love them all because they can be so funny. But more than anyone, I love Mal.
And I don't care if there are spaceships. I don't care about aliens. I don't care about any of the setting at all, really. I love that hot guy, struggling the way I struggle, caring about the very same things I care about.
4 comments:
Ahhh, Captain Mal. I love him, too.
It's time for me to re-watch the series. It's been a couple of years.
(Have you seen Torchwood? I think Captain Jack is so very similar to Mal in that they both have to keep others safe and they have to make hard decisions to do it.)
I've been told that Torchwood is too nihilistic to watch unless you're in the right mood. And . . . don't you have to have watched Doctor Who?
When the dead folks talk about there being nothing out there after life, it does depress the hell out of one. While those scenes were really disturbing, I still enjoyed the heck out of them.
I watched Torchwood never having
seen a Doctor Who episode. There were some things I didn't catch onto right away (like when he talked about his Doctor, I was always like, WHAT Doctor? [I can't believe I missed that one.]) but it wasn't hard to follow along at all.
Re: Torchwood ... It's not, for me, so much about the dead people talking about there being nothing out there after life* that makes the nihilism problematic. Rather, the problem is that the Torchwood characters proudly proclaim that they are "outside the government, beyond the United Nations," above and far beyond the ignorant masses of the world ... and yet, for all that power and "wisdom," they fail to present any sort of philosophy or cause to replace those that they spend so much time criticizing.
I mean, the show spends the season three miniseries showing The Evils Of Government Officials ... but in the end, it's Captain Jack, more than anybody, who becomes the monster, as he morphs into Jack Bauer and commits a horrible atrocity to save the day (in a move the Doctor NEVER would have approved of). He's set up to be a hero, but the problem is that he's a hero who doesn't particularly _stand_ for anything.
It's as if the show, so eager to prove that it is smarter than all those foolish Optimistic Hopeful Deluded Fools out there, forgot that if you're going to criticize what average people value and stand for, you have to present an actual ALTERNATIVE to those values and beliefs to really have an argument going for you. And "Torchwood," to me, never manages to do that. (They actually DO do it in the season one finale, but then they proceed to spend the next sixteen episodes UNdoing it.)
To put it another way? It's no good having a hero TV show where everybody fights to save the world ... when you keep insisting that humans really aren't worth saving because we're such utter shite.
That's my beef with it, anyway. :P
* If you're wondering how dead people are talking, you haven't watched enough sci-fi yet. XD
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