Firefly solar system? WHAT?

[Mayabird]

Okay, so I was rewatching Firefly last night with some of my friends (scene: three sci-fi fangirls watching Firefly and SG-1) and I caught the blurb at the beginning, with the Shepherd saying that after Earth was uninhabitable they moved to a new solar system and terraformed hundreds of new worlds. Now the way it sounded, that would make all the planets in Firefly in the same solar system, and that's just insane. There's no way even with mass terraforming of moons that they could fit all those planets in one solar system. It's like saying all twelve colonies of Battlestar Galactica are twelve planets in the same solar system. Stretches my suspension of disbelief a bit.

I could understand, say, they moved to a new solar system and then started settling outer worlds from there. The central planets would be the ones colonized first (and understandably close to a "center" of colonization) and the outer worlds would be the ones farther away from the central solar systems.

So what's the deal?

[Stofsk]

The upcoming film confirms that it's a single solar system.

There's apparently no FTL in Firefly, so devil knows what the explanation is.

As for the number of moons/planets in the solar system, my completely groundless off-the-cuff explanation is that it's a natural rosette formation of more or less equal sized worlds, with various moons and asteroids in orbit of either the planets or outer planets. The only problem with this is that a rosette is practically impossible to occur naturally.

Which necessitates that it was arranged like it was by either the Human colonists, or by some alien intelligence in the distant past. Since aliens are not a part of the setting, as yet, that falls back to Human endeavour.

[Knife]

Really? The movie will confirm that? To bad. I chalked it up, in the series, as 'working the kinks out'. Besides, in the 'intro' he also says some thing akin to 'we made a thousand new earths', its hard to believe they found a system with thousands of planets where some of em could be terriformed into habbitable ones.

[Josh]

In the deleted scenes for 'Our Mrs. Reynolds', Mal says (Memory paraphrase here) 'There are sixty-nine worlds spinning, and the meek have yet to inherit one of them.'

I love this show. In four episodes, it knocked B5 out of my all-time favorite science fiction on TV slot.

But the 'single system' concept makes my head throb, and I have to just ignore it in order to enjoy the show.

[Stofsk]

Really? The movie will confirm that?

It's a minor spoiler and it's apparently revealed in the opening seconds of the movie by a narration of sorts.

[Stofsk]

In the deleted scenes for 'Our Mrs. Reynolds', Mal says (Memory paraphrase here) 'There are sixty-nine worlds spinning, and the meek have yet to inherit one of them.'

I love this show. In four episodes, it knocked B5 out of my all-time favorite science fiction on TV slot.

But the 'single system' concept makes my head throb, and I have to just ignore it in order to enjoy the show.

I'd like to know what makes the Reavers 'Reavers' if you get what I mean.

As for the single system concept, I'd argue that some kind of FTL is necessary in order to get from Earth to Wherever They Ended Up.

Anyway, who knows what Joss is thinking? Perhaps he'll bother to explain it in a future film.

[Josh]

As I recall, basically he's just put it down to sort of a space opera handwavium, single system suits his purposes or somesuch.

The Reaver issue is explored in the movie. Further than that, I cannot speak without spoilerizing.

[Stofsk]

In the deleted scenes for 'Our Mrs. Reynolds', Mal says (Memory paraphrase here) 'There are sixty-nine worlds spinning, and the meek have yet to inherit one of them.'

Is it wise to consider deleted scenes 'canon'? I was over at the BSG site earlier this evening and read Moore's blog, and he basically said that there won't be anything like a 'director's cut' of the episodes - there's something like 9 mins of cut footage on each episode - because as far as he's concerned, he edits the final cut to be his vision. That means what gets cut never happened.

He relates this to continuity, in that future episodes will refer back to the aired episodes and the aired material when keeping continuity clean, rather than go back to cut film which didn't make it. Should we hold the deleted scenes of Firefly to a similar standard?

[Pcm979]

Since most cuts are done because of time constraints, the only way to be sure is if a later episode overrides something in the scene. In this case, it's actually being backed up by the movie.