Float Out review

Serenity: Float Out is a one issue comic, set after the movie Serenity, and "expanding" upon the character of Wash. I put expanding in quotations because of how spectacularly it fails to do this.

In this comic, three new characters are about to christen their new ship, when one of them mentions Wash, who has recently died. They spend five pages standing there, expositioning at us about their new ship, which is pointless as these characters are ones we have never seen before nor will ever seen again. They have no personalities, and these pages do nothing for the story. This exposition is very bornig, and what makes it worse, it is the most predicatble backstory imaginable. It just feels like padding.

Then these guys decide, for literally no reason, to share stories about Wash. They take it in turns to tell a story which makes Wash into Jesus. (If Jesus were the pilot of a spaceship. Which he surely will be after the second coming. But I digress.) While this, kind of, makes sense for people reminiscing about a dead friend, but it does nothing for the reader. It just makes these stories less usefull for connecting us to Wash.

In the first story Wash pulls off the impossable, literally, in order to escape some Reavers. In the second, Wash pulls off the impossable, literally, in order to escape some Pirates. In the thrid he dumps his smuggled cargo so a friend can escape a trap.

This is really boring.

Wash does things out of character. He was makes jokes when the real Wash would be serious, due to haviing to concentrate on the whole not dying thing. He pulls stunts that the real Wash would know are impossable. The story does not develop Wash, it just has three guys tell us he was a great pilot. It does nothing to build him as a character, or devlop him in anyway. And it is really boring. This comic is a huge let-down.

This is what I hate about post-cancellation Firefly. You cannot just stick the name to it and call it Firefly. It goes deeper. Serenity was a great sci-fi film, but it was not Firefly. It was clearly not in the same 'verse.

If everyone is just gonna act out of character, then what is even the point of using those characters?