What I like most about the show is the caper aspect, and the smart-ass aspect. It's a crew of seven or eight guys and gals on a Firefly-class space ship, which is named Serenity after a battle in the lost war against the Alliance. The crew of Serenity goes around the galaxy doing banditry and heroics and kicking bureaucrats in the groin. Even though it's the far future, the guns have bullets in them, not laser--so that people can actually shoot each other instead of beaming special effects at each other. Everybody speaks Western-twang plus Chinese (the Chinese when they want to curse, it seems; no, I don't know whether it's Mandarin or Cantonese, and please stop asking). Whenever the show looks like it's going to take a TV-show-cliché turn, expectations are foiled and anti-PC muscles are flexed.

Every character is my favorite when the camera is on that character--they're each completely individuated and compelling--but I can't get over Jayne, the towering gunslinger for hire with the name that sounds like "Jane." Jayne is simultaneously a little slow (in some things) and very savvy; a lot unscrupulous but not so much that the captain, Mal, can't keep him in line enough to keep him on the team. All in all, a damn potent ruffian.

The episode in which Jayne becomes a worshipped god on some planet he once escaped from is pretty good. But perhaps my favorite bit with Jayne occurs during a caper in an episode in the middle of the run, when the crew must con an Alliance hospital into letting the doctor, Simon, bring his sister River in for an examination. In order to pose as emergency medical technicians carting the "dead" bodies of Simon and River to the hospital's morgue, crew members with no knowledge of medical science must memorize a few lines to explain what happened, should they be challenged. An extended sequence shows Mal and Jayne, especially Jayne, struggling to get a handle on the boilerplate explanation.

When they get to the hospital, though, the bored and preoccupied doctor-clerk at the front desk just says "morgue's that way" and returns to her clipboard. The ruse doesn't need any bolstering at all. Well, Jayne'll be damned if all that struggle to learn his line is going to go to waste. He ponderously but smoothly announces, "We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient." He even smirks a little as if he knows full well that uttering the line is pointless and even a little risky--but, hey, this is his only chance to put it to use. This, while he's also been planning to betray two of his comrades in order to collect a reward from the Alliance. But more about that perplexing development when you see the show for yourself.

David M. Brown is the publisher of The Webzine, a general-interest Internet magazine, and runs the blog for the Laissez Faire Books web site.