I've just discovered Firefly, and I'm boggled by its near perfection. This was a show that appeared on Fox a few years ago, only to be cancelled even before the end of its 14-episode run. Proof that 
Life Is Really Not Fair. I'd blame my TiVo for not finding it for me, but I didn't have TiVo when Firefly ran--otherwise my TiVo would surely have realized how much I'd love it. This show is set 500 years in the future, but it's only casually futuristic. Sure, there are cool things like space transporters and ray guns and smugglers sell bars of high-protein, intensified nutrients instead of gold, but that's all a kind of afterthought. The characters speak in English, but every so often they express a thought in Chinese. Just because.
Also, the universe has been populated on hundreds of planets and solar systems, so the show is a combination of science fiction, western, World War II, Star Wars, and a bunch of other highly entertaining stuff all rolled into one. The opening scene contains a shot of a space ship buzzing a wide-open plain filled with stampeding horses. It's enormously, fabulously creative, and there's even a token older guy in the cast.
You have to rent the DVD of this show, since it's not TiVo-able. But I discovered it by accident, 
when my brilliant TiVo recorded Serenity for me, and I was entranced by this movie version of the TV show. (It was made after the show was cancelled, thank goodness, to help ease the cancellation pains of rabid fans.) So now I'm watching the TV show, made by Josh Whedon, the man behind Buffy, which I never 
watched. The cast is great, with Nathan Fillion as the hero/captain, a Harrison Ford for the new century. (See, there he is on the left, a bit fuzzy but definitely Harrison-ish, only better.) There's also Sean Maher, who looks a lot like Keir Dullea, when he was in 2001: A Space Odyssey. And, finally, Morena Baccarin, an incredibly exotic young actress who plays a Companion, a futuristic fancified hooker. So, here's Sean, the Firefly good guy surgeon who is protecting his unhinged-but-brilliant sister from the evil forces of the Alliance. (Think of them 
as the Nazis, or else the Dark Side, same thing.) Now here's Keir, from Kubrick's movie about outer space travel, which in retrospect seems so old-fashioned. But
for Boomers, when that movie was released in 1968, it seemed the height of futuristic prognostication and sophistication.
If you think about it too hard, of course, shows like this collapse under the weight of all the illogic. In reality, any kind of human life and progress 500 years from now is literally unimaginable. Would anyone living in the year 1507, say, have been able to predict what our lives are like today? Even just sitting at this computer writing this for anyone anywhere to see would have been beyond the ability of even the most prescient genius. But what the hell. Just don't think about it too hard.
