Mal Reynolds has a ship and a crew, but he doesn't have a cargo. After acquiring one from the Alliance, his attempts to get shot of it come to naught when his contact explains that the produce is marked for the Alliance, and Mal must find a new buyer, and some passengers to keep afloat. Sadly, his new passengers are about to cause nothing but trouble.

For once, I'm forced to agree with Fox. While I'm not with them on their decision to cancel Firefly, this pilot isn't really all it could be. Okay, so showing it now after 10 episodes of the series is unlikely to help matters, but the explanation of how the crew arrived on board the ship is better told in flashbacks like those in Out of Gas rather than seen in living technicolour here. The war sequence with Mal and Zoe is fairly tedious and superfluous, and some of the other introductory passages slow the pace of the episode badly and make it quite heavy going. The second pilot was a stronger lead-in to a series.

Returning to my earlier point, the positioning doesn't help. Most of what we find out about Inara, Jayne, Kaylee, Simon, River and company is stuff we've already picked up from watching the other episodes, so their secrets come as no shock to anyone who's been paying attention. Most of the story revolves around discovering that one of the new passengers isn't who he appears (ooh, guess which one?), and that Simon's smuggled his sister on board in a packing crate. Neither of these is likely to amaze anyone who's seen an episode, and I'd rather learn more about Mal, or about how Zoe and Wash's past. While the actors do seem on form and settling in nicely here (although Simon's a little more gung-ho than he's been before), it's difficult to be interested in a slow-moving story where the major twists involve things we're already aware of.

As a pilot, yes, it introduces all the elements into the series pretty smoothly, although the surprise appearance of the Reapers towards the end seems to be a little too much after getting the crew, the Alliance, and some criminals Mal knows from past deals. They're clearly there as a little taster of the nasties to come, as we never learn just why they're so feared, but again it's all water under the bridge at this point. This pilot might have been fine at the start of the series, but turning up now just as the show comes to a close, it seems anachronistic and pointless. It also lacks some of the snappy Joss Whedon humour we've come to expect, even if there is the occasional flash of the old magic. Zoe's line "Excuse me captain, but I need this man to rip my clothes off" is simply superb, but it's a drop in an overly large ocean of bits and pieces that have little use now. A shame, really, and I'm willing to believe this episode is better than it appears now, but there's not really a lot of point in sitting through it.

**

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