Since its premature cancellation after only eleven episodes in 2003, the sci-fi western series Firefly has attained mythic status in fandom spaces. Much like the plucky Browncoats’ fight against the centralized Alliance at the center of the series, Firefly itself has become symbolic of the little guy sacrificed at the altar of network corporate interests. I was absolutely an obsessive Firefly fangirl back in the day (friends in grad school used to call me “the prophet of Whedon”—which I cringe about for so many reasons now). In the intervening 20 years, criticism of the show has become more accepted, in at least some corners of fandom. Main critiques concern the show featuring an Asian-inspired setting with no Asian main actors, the attempt to invoke the vibes of the Confederacy without the inconvenient detail of slavery, and Mal’s patronizing attitude towards Inara’s profession as a companion.
I share all those issues with the series, and I have gotten into more than a few heated online discussions about them with die-hard fans. More recently, though, I have found myself pondering a specific problematic detail of the 2005 follow-up movie Serenity: the fixation on “getting out the signal.” Spoiler alert for a 20 year old movie, but as you may recall, Serenity follows Mal and our beloved crew as they discover the secret of the planet Miranda. The savage Reavers who loom as a threat throughout the borders of the core planetary system were in fact created by the Alliance themselves after a botched attempt to drug and pacify an inhabited planet. The climax of the film revolves around the crew of Serenity trying to “get out the signal” of this truth to the wider planetary system. In the end, they do accomplish this feat. While victory comes at great cost (R.I.P. Wash, you were a leaf on the wind), the sacrifice feels earned in the context of the film because truth won out.
But is getting out the signal really enough?
This is the question I find myself asking more and more about Serenity. The whole dramatic tension of the film hinges on the idea that an oppressive government can be significantly impacted, or even toppled, if only the population is able to know some fundamental truth about them that has previously been hidden. Throughout Firefly, Mal and the crew of Serenity exist outside of any significant political power or influence. Their primary goal (especially Mal’s) is basically just to get another job and keep flying for another day. That changes in the film, where the right piece of secret information about the corrupt Alliance government actually gives them the power to do something beyond continuing to survive. It’s a nice fantasy—but it’s worth unpacking why it’s such a fantasy.
To be sure, the idea of “getting out the signal” is not contained to Serenity. It is actually something of a staple trope in science fiction that aims at exposing conspiracy theories or toppling a corrupt government. We might think of the 1973 film Soylent Green, ending with the iconic scene of Charlton Heston’s character discovering the secret ingredient of the popular food supplement and being dragged away by the authorities while shouting out the famous line: “Soylent Green is people!” Sure, we may not know what happens to Heston’s character after the film ends, but simply uncovering the secret of soylent green and shouting it to anyone who may be able to hear him offers at the very least a satisfying conclusion to the narrative.
A reality-changing piece of knowledge is at the center of The Matrix. Keanu Reeves’ Neo is given the choice by Laurence Fishbourne’s Morpheus to take the red pill or blue pill. Neo takes the red pill and awakes to the whole nature of human reality being an elaborate lie. The idea of “red-pilling” became so insidious that in the 2010s we started seeing “red pill” communities pop up online, specifically to advocate for “men’s rights,” in communities that claim to have seen the underlying truth of the feminist agenda that actually seeks to subjugate men. It’s worth noting that the most significant real-life application of this framework from the Matrix did not expose a conspiracy, but just managed to birth new conspiracies in the realm of the online “manosphere.”
Outside of online conspiracy websites, there is no doubt something compelling in the idea of there being some secret truth in the world (often being hidden by those in power) that we can obtain or share to assert a sense of agency over reality—especially for those who feel powerless. If we just find the right scandal or we uncover the right conspiracy, we actually can bring down bad actors. We can make the people around us see the truth right before their eyes. Can’t we?
I have to confess: it seems like getting “the signal” out does not change very much. We live in a moment when we are in fact inundated with information. It seems like every day there are new scandals uncovered. We can see war crimes documented on our phones as we scroll through puppy videos. New atrocities are reported; a politician gets caught on a hot mic. For years, we’ve been navigating a political and media landscape where it feels like surely this time this will be the moment things change. Evil is not sneaky or subtle in our historical moment! And yet the sudden revolutionary change never comes.
If you’re like me, the fact that so many people in our world (friends, neighbors, family) seem unwilling or unable to process what we think should be reality-shattering information gets pretty demoralizing. It’s depressing seeing people that we love base their lives and their political allegiances on information we know is absolutely wrong. We want to feel like we can save the world (or at least our families) with the right piece of information. We want to believe if we can just win one more debate maybe someone will fundamentally change their fundamental outlook on life. Unfortunately, people do not work that way. Maybe part of the problem is that we have been fed a false narrative about the idea of “getting out the signal.” That narrative is at best naive, and at worst arguably dangerous when applied to the real world.
The truth is that sustained change—whether personal or political—takes real effort and investment in relationships, especially when it comes to changing world views. There is a lot said and written these days about political division and polarization. Those political lines are certainly very real, but we both over and underestimate them when we reduce those differences purely to the realm of ideas and knowledge. More and more our political allegiances have become markers of true identity, as individuals and within our communities. To change a political opinion is not just about a change of ideas but about changing a sense of who we are and how we understand the world at a core human level.
There is an excellent moment in the film Children of Men when Clive Owen’s Theo walks into a raging battle with young mother Key and her newborn child. No child has been born in the world of the film for over eighteen years. That lack of hope for humanity’s future is the driving force of so much violence throughout the film. Seeing this new birth is a moment of awe and wonder for militants on both sides, who immediately pause their fighting. As soon as the moment has passed, shooting resumes. On one level it is not what we would expect from such a dramatic moment. Shouldn’t the soldiers involved now realize they have a common cause to fight for together, not against one another? At the same time, there is something so fundamentally human about that inability to process such instantaneous change at a momentary (even so dramatic) revelation. That scene in Children of Men might be less inspiring than the moment Mal presses play on the broadcast at the end of Serenity, but it feels more honest.
The attraction of a film like Serenity with its “get out the signal” storyline is that it sells the idea of a single dramatic, high-stakes moment as the catalyst for wide-ranging systemic change. In the context of a sci-fi action-adventure film franchise, that triumphant ending may be earned through some dramatic sacrifice (once again, we miss you Wash), but it is still cleanly defined at the moment. Maybe if there’s something I really have an issue with in Serenity it’s that while Mal is inspired by a desire to potentially take down the Alliance, he does not have a deeper interest in helping anyone beyond that. Mal and the crew of Serenity live their lives on the outer rim of “the system.” They’re not resistance fighters. One might even argue that they’re not even do-gooders. That idea of just trying to survive life on the rim (“You can’t take the sky from me” as it were) is a huge part of what made Firefly as a series so compelling, but it also makes the one-off heroes of Serenity feel somewhat hollow. Throughout the series, Mal is motivated primarily by his own internal sense of righteousness. One might even argue that his drive to “get out the signal” was less about helping to create a more just world than it was about the desire simply to prove that the Alliance is, in fact, wrong–if he can “get out the signal,” he has successfully proven himself and his worldview to be correct, and is absolved of that harder, ongoing work of bringing about change day after day. That idea is enticing, but it also sets us up for frustration and failure.
I was thinking about these issues with Serenity when I went to see James Gunn’s Superman. It has to be said that this summer’s newest iteration of Superman falls a bit into the trap, bringing down Lex Luthor by Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen’s investigative journalism outing his scandalous ties to the fictional country of Boravia. I am willing to give the film a pass on the trope, however, as the discovery of Luthor’s involvement in Boravia serves a narrative function in providing information to the audience. Not to mention we get to see Lois Lane’s journalistic super-powers in action. More significantly, the film’s real climax comes when Superman confronts Luthor with a powerful declaration of Superman’s own humanity: “I’m as human as anyone. I love, I get scared. I wake up every morning and despite not knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other and I try to make the best choices I can. I screw up all the time, but that is being human and that’s my greatest strength.” Doing right by the world is a choice we make every day, even when it is imperfect and may not even feel that heroic. It also asks a lot more of us on a personal level.
Despite the tone of this column, I am not a Firefly hater. After all, we wouldn’t have had Alan Tudyk’s robot voice or Nathan Fillion’s bowl-cut sporting Green Lantern in Superman if Firefly had not catapulted them to fandom star status. I do, however, firmly believe that as fans we should be the most aware that the stories we tell shape how we view reality. Dramatic moments or “getting out the signal” might make for a nice, contained narrative in a movie like Serenity. Living in the political reality of 2025, is it worth taking a step back and asking if there is a danger in that narrative. Does the story of “getting out the signal” set us up with the wrong objective—leaving us certain we can find that one piece of information that we can use to change hearts and minds. For better or worse, human relationships ask more of us than that. Maybe that is the message we need to get out.
I feel that a lot of the getting out he critical piece of information can topple the frame work frame grew out of a generation raised on the “great man” theory of history watching events like the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and the Church Committee so they could convince themselves that a single person with a single scrap of information could change the world. Never true, but humans prefer simple myths to complex truths and all those events grew into myths.
Distributing a single fact to change the world is a powerful idea and one that made more sense, never total sense, in a more limited media ecosystem. (If you could get it on one of the three networks the other two would follow suit.) The fragmentation before 2005 and that as only accelerated since makes the whole concept laughable in 2025.
Thank you for the excellent, thoughtful and clear-eyed essay! I believe The best use of fandom (outside of comfort and distraction) is to help us see and understand ourselves and our world better.
The only time I saw the Firefly TV series was when I stayed up all night watching a marathon screening at a local movie theatre. I was definitely smitten, but carefully avoided the film when I heard about Wash.
@tarbis I also immediately thought of Watergate and the dramatic gathering of damning verifiable data as the foundation of monumental change. I still believe in the heroic nature of ethical, fact-based investigative journalism, but it can only be a tiny (if sometimes crucial) piece of the puzzle of moving towards change.
This is literally a changing times issue. A scandal breaking used to be enough to destroy the career of politicians from both (American) parties. Then Republican voters collectively decided they didn’t care anymore. Democrats have somewhat followed suit because it’s hard to be the only side that kicks out its powerful members. Serenity made sense in 2005.
You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. I didn’t know that people have started turning against the show. There’s something very sad about that. Alas, the overall point of this article was a good, if cynical, one.
I don’t see the article as cynical, but realistic, and even in its own way hopeful: For whatever reasons, and they are many, “getting the signal out” in and of itself is not enough to effect change. That only comes through time and investment in relationships. That’s not an easy fix, but is at least a possible way forward.
Great article!
I always felt that “You can’t stop the signal” was never about anything more than crediting fan support for getting the movie made.
So…am I the only one who remembers the ending of the movie differently?
The Operative (a single person) is convinced by the recording, and calls off those under his command, granting Mal and the others a reprieve to get medical attention and some much-needed ship repairs…but that’s it. He warns them that while he’s hurt the Alliance, they are not gone, and they will not forget.
It’s not exactly a “we got the word out, now everything will change” moment. I’d say it’s fairly close to realistic (for a film about space cowboys, anyway).
One important thing that people miss about Firefly/Serenity is that the Alliance was not meant to be an evil empire. It was just a government, like any other, with some corrupt elements within it but mostly meaning well. Mal saw it evil because he was the equivalent of a libertarian anti-government type who sees all regulation, taxation, etc. as evil. But here’s the thing: Mal wasn’t someone we were necessarily supposed to root for. Whedon created Mal because he wanted to explore writing a character he disagreed with. Firefly was a show about criminals, not heroes. They were unreliable narrators and weren’t necessarily on the right side. (For instance, we were absolutely not supposed to agree with Mal’s denigration of sex workers. We were supposed to understand that it was one of Mal’s many character flaws and problematical beliefs.)
Basically, Firefly was the equivalent of a show about Star Trek‘s Federation from the perspective of the Maquis. The Maquis saw the Federation as the bad guys because of how it had failed them and let them down, but that doesn’t mean it was evil all around. In FF, we saw that Inara and the Tams lived happy, fulfilled lives within the Alliance until the individual circumstances that sent them on the run. We got glimpses of the more benevolent side of the Alliance, the side that a libertarian like Mal found too controlling but that lots of people would have been perfectly content to live under. Yes, there were corrupt factions within the society and the government, like the Blue Hands and the people behind Miranda, but they were conspiracies within the system, not the whole system. The Alliance was neither good nor evil, just an imperfect human institution like any other.
So in that context, it is plausible that exposing the truth of a conspiracy would prompt the more honest people within the government, and the public they represent, to investigate and bring down the conspirators. That’s how it normally works when there are enough people in government who actually care about doing their jobs, as there were at the time of Watergate and the Iran-Contra scandal and most other historic scandals before the past decade.
Have to agree. The importance of a signal depends on the context in which it is received. For example, if at the time of Watergate Congress had been controlled by the Presidents party, rather than by his opponents, it would probably have been a lot more reluctant to impeach him. Most people treat their allies differently from their enemies, so the same information will be used differently by an ally or an enemy.
Hmm, I dunno. Back then, there were still Republicans who had integrity and wouldn’t have wanted a criminal leading their party. After the tapes came out with their “smoking gun” evidence against Nixon, he lost a lot of support among Congressional Republicans, and many of them came around to supporting impeachment. As long as they could believe the charges were just politics, they stood by him, but unlike today’s GOP, they abandoned him once they knew he was guilty.
Ugh, did I really write “failed them and let them down?” I should’ve done another editing pass before posting. We need longer edit windows.
It wasn’t even enough in Firefly. In the authorized comics that followed Serenity (including a bunch written by Whedon’s brother), the whole Miranda thing caused a brief flurry in the news nets, some people lost their government jobs, and it sank back off the public’s radar within months. The Serenity crew was still very on the outs with the Alliance law enforcement, so the only long-term change was that things got worse for them.
The idea that people would just change the channel if the got Mal’s message is a sobering one.
First, brilliant insights and thoughts!
Second, it’s a sorry statement on our world that the true truth is not enough anymore. As now people talk about ‘their truth’ like it’s different for everyone what the facts are. As a data analyst this drives me crazy. There is only one factual answer. Skewing it to meet a narrative need doesn’t change the fact, it just repackages it (and omits data points, usually) to confuse people.
If only all we needed was the truth… then maybe I wouldn’t live in a country that is being ‘proposed’ (aka: threatened) with annexation because we happen to sit atop USA and have valuable natural resources. I certainly wouldn’t live in a time when industries are floundering because no one ever foresaw the day Canada and the USA weren’t allies.
If ever a time helped me understand the point of so many science fiction stories, it’s today.
Perhaps getting the signal or message out is even more important now than ever. The trick is marketing it amongst the misinformation to stand out and tell the real truth so strongly no one can refute it. In a world where a convicted felon leads a major country I feel that may be an impossible task.
I think it’s important to remember that the current state of affairs in the US is the result of decades of right-wing media systematically brainwashing an entire generation to believe an alternate reality, reject fact-based reasoning, and embrace a mentality of kneejerk paranoia and intolerance. It’s not a natural state of being for a human population, it’s the result of decades of deliberate psychosocial engineering. If we mistake it for the normal way a human population behaves, then we’re just buying into the propaganda.
I think you’re correct that part of it is that beliefs have become markers of collective affiliation more than anything; but another major consideration that needs to be noted is not the signal but the noise. Contemporary authoritarian governments use a technique known as the “firehose of falsehood”: spewing out so many lies, so quickly, so repetitiously, and on so many channels that the truth just becomes another factoid.
I think the posters mentioning Watergate here are exactly right; but the twentieth century was anomalous in that ownership of its dominant modes of media production were limited, by the physics and economics of radio and television, to just a few hands. You could have a clear signal then, because there were only a few channels available, and they were regulated. (The flipside of this, of course, is that film and radio were instrumental to the rise of totalitarianism in the first part of the century for exactly the same reason). Such a thing simply couldn’t happen today, first of all because of the Internet, and secondly because new technologies like generative AI make it easier to spew out bullshit than ever before. Most of it is still easily disproven, but that’s not the point; it’s not to fool you, it’s to destroy the public’s faith in truth itself. And I’m not actually convinced that Watergate could have gotten much purchase in the age of 19th century “yellow journalism” either.
never heard the critique about a “Confederate vibe” before. never got that type of vibe myself. I always thought of it as the rugged pioneer opening the West vibe – which is subject to it’s own critique, but is far from some wannabe ‘lost cause’ kind of thing.
Oh, that was always built into it. From a Joss Whedon interview in Serenity: The Official Visual Companion (Titan Books, Sept. 2005), p. 8: “The basic tenet was that it was [analogous to the post-United States Civil War] Reconstruction era. Mal had fought for the South — not for slavery, I can’t stress that enough [laughs], but for [the losing side].” Although he adds he also drew on the post-WWII experience of Jewish partisan fighters from the Warsaw uprising, and even the accounts of present-day Alaskan fishing boat crews, the closest modern thing to the “life on the edge” frontier experience, as well as drawing heavily on the Old West. So he wasn’t trying to evoke any single historical ideology, just to draw on the general experience of defeated warriors and people living on the fringes. Trying to draw on a Civil War vibe and pretending that it can be entirely divorced from slavery seems disingenuous in retrospect, but at least it was just one historical analogy out of many.
Isn’t the denouement of Shockwave Rider the release of secret government files?
I don’t know, I think “Getting out the Signal” can be a success if you define that success differently than “the whole world changes overnight”. If the right information reaches the right people, maybe it can start something or at least reach an even wider audience. Like people boycotting the World Soccer Championship in Katar. Enough watched that is was called successful, but enough didn’t that they had to address it.
And the worst offender in “Getting out the Signal! is still The Expanse’s James Holden. Enough that it’s a running gag.^^
I’m pretty sure Kessler isn’t arguing that investigative journalism is inherently pointless. Speaking of Watergate again, it wasn’t just the news of the original burglary that brought Nixon down. It was the many other incriminating facts discovered in the wake of that crime that did the job.
The trouble is, how do you reach people who don’t want their understanding of the world shaken or altered? See: those who take the strenuously asserted opinions of America’s right-wing infosphere as fact. Maybe “Serenity” would have been a better movie if it started with Mal’s accidentally discovering the Alliance created the Reavers and trying to both learn more and figure out what to do with the data.
Thank you for a thoughtful and timely article. Your signal reached me.