Looking for a Quiet Drink

Today I'm celebrating Unification Day with the rest of the internet! Well, at least the two thousand other members of the Facebook event page, and maybe a few more. Let me explain.

About a year and a half ago, my dad and I heard an interesting story on the radio on the way to a hike together. It was about a web show I'd never heard of, by a TV director who I'd never heard of, named Joss Whedon. The web show, Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, was an attempt to counter the Writer's Strike, showing writers that they didn't have to use traditional media to get their work shown, and as the report stated, 'you'd either never heard of it, or you loved it.'

The report also mentioned Joss Whedon's other work, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which, yes, I had heard of, but never seen) and a TV series called Firefly, which only aired for one season before being canceled for having low ratings.

With my interest piqued, I looked up both shows when I got home. At this time Hulu had all the episodes of Firefly up, and Doctor Horrible has always been available online. Within an hour (the time it takes to watch all of Doctor Horrible), I considered myself a Whedon Fan, and in a week (the time it took me to finish Firefly) I considered Whedon a genius.

Firefly, if you've never heard of it, is a Science Fiction/Western (According to Wikipedia, the term Space Western is more appropriate). It almost touches on Steampunk, but it's a uniquely different fictional genre of itself. It takes place hundreds of years in the future, in a new galaxy terraformed by the remaining humans after earth gets used up. The planets closer to the center of the galaxy (the Central Planets) form an Anglo-Sino Alliance, with very advanced technology, while the outer planets, who wish to remain independent, survive of the bare necessities (Thus the Western part of the 'Sci-Fi/Western' genre card).

If it wasn't for Joss Whedon's amazing writing and directing, the show could easily have been forgotten in the myriad of fun but pointless television entertainment. As cheesy as the 'Sci-Fi/Western' identification might sound, however, it's an amazing experience - one that fans were only able to get so much of, since it was so hard to sell to the networks and convince people to watch.

Unfortunately, the show didn't gain a real following until after it got canceled. There are over 60 thousand followers on the show's Facebook page now, and that's just the page that I'm a member of. There are thousands more fans not on Facebook, with more growing each day as the title spreads through word of mouth and continues to be re-aired on the Sci-Fi and Discovery: Science Channels.

Meanwhile, on the Internet, a cult fandom has formed. The show is talked about almost constantly, with references to be found across multiple internet subcultures. Every so often, a 'revive Firefly' movement starts up, and occasionally they're successful, sparking the filming of the sequel film 'Serenity' and the publishing of the Firefly graphic novels.

That's where the idea of today being Unification Day springs from. Recently, when prompted what he'd do if his new show Castle got canceled and Fox decided to pick Firefly back up, Nathan Fillion (The actor who plays the spaceship captain) said he'd be willing to jump back into Firefly in a heartbeat, and expressed a desire to buy the rights from Fox and allow the show to be available for free over the internet. Less than a day later, a website appeared, asking fans to pledge money to donate for that exact cause.

In the second episode of the show, the protagonists are in an bar, picking up a contact for a less-than-legal job, and they end up in a brawl with Alliance supporters who are celebrating Unification Day that day. In the next scene, the ship's first mate says the the captain, "Funny, sir, how you always seem to find yourself in an Alliance-friend bar come U-Day, 'looking for a quiet drink'."

With the most recent outburst of Firefly-renewal fire, someone on the internet decided to dub today Unification Day in an attempt to ironically corral the Browncoats (Firefly fans) into a unified support of the show. There are only two thousand members of the event page, but it's a fun excuse for me to wear all brown today and marathon the show all over again.

Happy U-Day!