An Hour in the Firefly ‘Verse: The Continuing Adventures of the Starship Firefly

Firefly died long before its time, but not before attracting enough fans to fill the largest ballroom with legions of self-proclaimed Browncoats. In Sunday’s “An Hour in the Firefly ‘Verse” in the Marriott Atrium, Nathan Fillion, Jewel Staite, Morena Baccarin, and Alan Tudyk discussed some of the potential twists and turns Firefly might have taken had it continued to fly.

“Alan was really good at coming up with ideas for shows,” Fillion said.

“Yes, and I pitched them to Joss [Whedon] all the time. I went straight to the top,” Tudyk said.

One of the shows the cast would have liked to have seen produced involved recruiting dogs for dogfighting.

Tudyk: “The idea was we would have to go to this planet that was in perpetual darkness on one side where they had these feral dogs, and this guy was going to pay us all this money capture these dogs.”

The Firefly crew goes into the woods with a bag full of musk to hunt for these feral dogs. When Jayne plays with the bag, it breaks open, and suddenly the crew is covered in dog musk.

“So we’re running through the forest, we get back into the ship, and its okay because we trap all these dogs in the cargo hold, and we’re going to make all this money,” Fillion said. “So when we get to this planet, we find out that River has gotten into the cargo hold and domesticated all these dogs, so we don’t make any money.”

Tudyk also pitched a story about how his character survived a series of jails by performing shadow puppet theater for the prisoners.

Another idea involved switching the dominate language from English to Chinese.

“We only used Chinese when we wanted to curse, so it would make sense that we would go to a place [where] the opposite would be true, so most of the episode would be in Chinese, with just a little bit of English when we wanted to curse,” Tudyk said

Staite pointed out a weakness in his idea: “But you were the worst with the Chinese.”

“I know it would be a hard, hard episode to shoot,” Tudyk said.

Regarding the long-simmering romance between Fillion and Baccarin’s characters, it would continue to burn slowly without coming to fruition.

“You can never match them up. It means death,” Fillion said. “It would cause our show to get cancelled.”

Baccarin quickly informed him, “Our show was cancelled.” And the two embraced in a passionate locking of lips to gleeful cries from the audience.

Author of the article

Matt Schafer is an award-winning former journalist who left the land of daily deadlines to pursue a career in novel writing. More on him and his work can be found at firstfolio.blogspot.com.