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Quotes

Inara: I like watching the game. Like a lot of situations, the key seems to be giving Jayne a heavy stick and standing back.

In the celebration at the beginning, the shot where Jayne receives the rain stick, a camera crew is briefly visible just to the right of Jayne's head right before he says "I will treasure this." See more...

Trivia

As Mal is bringing the shuttle in to land at the floating luxury home, as he flies to the left of a tower towards the gardens, behind them flying from right to left is the unmistakable silhouette of an SR-71 Blackbird cruising by. Given that this is a planet for the super rich and the heist is of a well known collector of old Earth artifacts, maybe this plane is part of another collector's collection, like John Travolta and his small fleet of planes including an airliner and other exotic aircraft. See more...

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Movie Mistakes blog

Firefly (2002) - 7 questions

starring Alan Tudyk, Gina Torres, Morena Baccarin, Nathan Fillion (add more)

The "questions" section is for any random questions that occurred to you while watching this film, or anything you didn't entirely understand, and which Google or the IMDb can't help with. Submit them as a question, and hopefully someone will answer (the bold comments in brackets) - check back regularly. If the answer is wrong, or missing information, please use the "clarify answer" option. Don't feel limited - want to know what music played in a certain scene? Whether this was the first film to use a certain effect? Here's the place to ask!

Questions

Season: Whole show 1 All

Across whole show

Question: I've never seen the show myself, but I was wondering what kind of a name "Inara Serra" is. I'm assuming Inara is of Portuguese origin, but mostly because the actress was born in Brazil. Can someone please help me with this?

Answer: Inara is actually Arabic in origin; it means "ray of light" or alternatively "heaven sent". Serra, on the other hand, is Portuguese and means "mountain range" - derived from the same word in Latin, where it means 'saw' (as in the cutting implement, which a mountain range might resemble, rather than the act of seeing).

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Question: How do you pronounce Jewel Staite's (Kaylee) last name?

Answer: State.

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Question: In some scenes, why do the Serenity crew members speak Chinese?

Answer: One of the premises of the show is that the two major Earth societies that survived, and ultimately merged, were the Chinese and Americans. As a result the common language includes much Chinese. Clothing, signage, and building designs also have a heavy Chinese influence.

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Question: I've noticed that on the show, people use "gorram" a lot. Is that phrase used as a euphemism for "God damn"?

Answer: Yes, this was done to allow them to swear without causing a problem with the censors. They also swear quite a bit in Chinese.

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Question: Regarding this question and answer: "In some scenes, why do the Serenity crew members speak Chinese? [One of the premises of the show is that the two major Earth societies that survived, and ultimately merged, were the Chinese and Americans. As a result the common language includes much Chinese. Clothing, signage, and building designs also have a heavy Chinese influence.] Answered by MovieGuy." Survived what?

Answer: It's never made entirely clear. What we know is that at some point, the Earth became unable to sustain those who lived there, resulting in a mass exodus to a new star system. At that point in the Firefly timeline, the two existing superpowers were the Americans and the Chinese. Whether other present-day nations might still have existed is never mentioned.

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Serenity (2) (series 1)

Question: Though as of today I've only seen Serenity 1 & 2, why did Mal trick Simon into thinking Kaylee was dead, and then laugh about it with Zoe, Wash and Jayne on the bridge?

Answer: To tease him. Kaylee is the only one who likes Simon at this point, so the others don't mind playing a rather mean-spirited joke on him.

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Safe (series 1)

Question: When Shepherd Book gets shot and they take him to an Alliance base at first they do not want to treat him but he tells them to look at his Ident card and suddenly they are rushing to help him. What is so special about his ident card or him?

Answer: Very little of Book's past was revealed in either the series or the follow-up movie. He's been shown to know a surprisingly large amount about the criminal underworld, government covert operations, firearms and so forth, which, combined with his apparent priority status with the Alliance, suggests that he, at some point, held a high rank of some nature within that organisation - one theory is that he knows about the covert Operatives (as seen in Serenity) because he used to be one. Ron Glass, with Joss Whedon's blessing, revealed a few details in 2007, including that Derrial Book is not his real name, but was taken from "somebody he killed", that he has at least one artificial body-part, that he is known for "his greatest failure" and that he apparently found God in a bowl of soup. Further details of any of these remain unrevealed. A comic-book series entitled The Shepherd's Tale, which will deal with his back-story, was announced for release in late 2008 but has, as yet, failed to appear.

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