I think as much as everyone wants to create their own ragtag bunch of misfits to pirate around with is just not really the story of the Verse. The story is the rise and fall of humanity. The story of firefly is about the new rise of humanity as told through the eyes of the losers and that story has been told and done.

New stories should advance the plot of humanity. Personally I find revers kind of boring. They are a good representation of The Core trying to suppress people’s freedom in a mad power grab and immoral science. I think the next chapter has to be told from within the Alliance. A story of the fall of the Alliance has to be told from within. When you are the only super power left the only thing left to destroy is yourself.

In my mind the next chapter would be about Alliance capital ship with a good crew just trying to do their job. Enforce peace. Expand Civilization. Build Relationships. And slowly over a long time hints would keep coming out about how horrible the Alliance really is.

I’m reminded of those star trek episodes when Picard would talk to Starfleet Command. Or better yet Sisko when everyone in Starfleet might have been a changeling. How does a captain figure out what political positioning his superiors are doing? How do Alliance generals secretly build a faction inside the Alliance. What side do you choose when the Alliance breaks in to open war after years of internal cold war?

The story of the Browncoats is over. it was nice but revisiting it forever just seems like Star Wars prequels to me. Better to move forward with a bold reimagining of the same Verse.

As soon as I’m thinking of a mother and her four kids running loose on the ship, suddenly I’m not so worried about cloning Mal’s ship and crew.

But Jon Walton has a definite point here.

Zombies (and orcs, but that’s another story) have long since seemed to me to an easy shorthand for “I want to be able to kill people, but have no remorse for it” and I think that in a good Western, every death should really count.

That being said, I do like the second option a fair amount more, but I might not go so far as to say that they would be willing to communicate, except under the most dire of circumstances. Whatever they are, they must view the other humans in the Verse as something somewhere between sheep and cockroaches. Maybe the crappy spaceships come from a disdain for the trappings of that world they left behind. Maybe there are some kinds of technological advancements (science “forbidden” in the Core, maybe?) where the Reavers excelled, and there are Reaver worlds with thirty foot tall elephants or something.

Getting away from brainstorming an actual implementation, I think that the metaphor we’re hunting for here is more something out of the Cthulhu mythos than the Romero mythos. Of course, given who wrote it and when, I suspect that Cthulhu itself needs to bear up to some intense scrutiny for the same sort of problems with “otherness” as Firefly.

I figured that the Serenity explanation was a little lame, but considered instead that all the Reavers were basically afflicted by the same kind of condition. To them, they look, smell and sound nice, their designs are appealing, and normal people are just horrifying to them, so much so that they go to great lengths to murder them, thinking normal people horrors that must be destroyed.

Anyway, it was just a thought that seemed to fit the idea of them being functional creatures (enough to communicate, fly ships and attack people without simply killing themselves and each other, or being uncommunicative brainless creatures).