Firefly’s ‘Out of Gas’ is the perfect flashback episode

In a post coming up later this week — remember, it’s Firefly week, everyone — we here at CliqueClack discuss our personal favorite episodes of the short-lived series. I named “Shindig” as my favorite, but the truth is that almost every episode of the show is neck-and-neck for the number one spot. Another episode that inches so close to number one for me? The flashback episode “Out of Gas.” And it’s honestly the most perfect flashback episode I have ever had the pleasure to watch.

First, let’s talk about the non-flashback elements of the episode. Most flashback episodes I’ve seen on other shows go along the lines of a Family Guy joke — except instead of “This is like the time I met Iggy Pop at a Starbucks,” it’s “This is like the time I met my best friend/coworker/wife.” The non-flashback parts are all passive storytelling and, more often than not, not very interesting. Not so with “Out of Gas.” Mal is shot, running out of oxygen and all alone on the ship. Inter-spliced are scenes  from earlier in the day (technically flashbacks, but I don’t think of them that way) when Serenity’s systems crash, Zoe gets badly wounded and Mal ultimately makes the decision to stay with the ship while the rest of the crew escapes. If the “real” flashbacks weren’t included and this was only about Mal saving the ship, this still would have been a strong episode. But the flashbacks … man, the flashbacks.

Besides the characters brought on to the ship in the pilot, we get to see all the characters’ pasts in the flashback, most of them when they first met Mal. There are a bunch of hilarious moments, but they also tell you so much more about the characters. Zoe didn’t like Wash when she first met him … which blows my mind considering his awesome white guy mustache. Like Lily and James Potter, we never get to see when she finally warms up to him. My favorite is Kaylee, for a number of reasons I mentioned in the greatest Firefly moments roundtable post. Joss Whedon is just so good at showing the strength in women, and her one-upping Bester kills me every time. Mal immediately seeing her natural talent shows a lot about him, too.

It’s fun to see Inara and Mal butt heads so early in their relationship. She unapologetically uses her status to get a better deal on the rent, but the fact that Inara specifically bars him from calling her a whore makes every time he calls her a whore for the rest of the series that much better. And then there’s Jayne, who shows his own talent for being a bad guy, despite his less-then-average intelligence. That flashback in particular shows Mal’s own instinct for improvisation … it takes a very special man to calmly offer a job to one of your captors and get him to accept.

There’s something I never quite realized until I started writing this post. While we as fans of the show loved seeing these first meetings, the flashbacks weren’t just there for us to enjoy; Mal was thinking of them as he pushed himself to fix the ship. He found the strength to fight off death by thinking of the people he loved the most … his crew.

And along with his crew, he thought about his love for Serenity herself. And here is the real genius of the episode. The whole time, we hear and see a very short scene between Mal and the man who ultimately sold him Serenity. We keep hearing the man say, “She’ll be with you for the rest of your life,” and we think he’s talking about Serenity. But at the very end of the episode, after Mal is rescued and begins to fall asleep in the infirmary, we finally see the whole scene with the salesman … and he wasn’t selling Mal Serenity at all.

He was selling him another ship — one that was newer, sturdier and easily more practical. But Mal can’t take his eyes off of something in the distance. And even before the ship is revealed, we know it’s Serenity just by the love in Mal’s face. Behind the scenes here at CliqueClack, we’ve been lightly teasing Ivey for naming Serenity as his favorite character of the show (although many of you agreed in the comments). By the end of “Out of Gas,” it’s clear that Serenity has something in common with the members of its crew: it’s something most people wouldn’t take a second glace at that is actually quite extraordinary and wonderful.

Just like Firefly itself.

Clacked by Katie Schenkel
on Jun 15, 2011 @ 09:00 EST5EDT