Series

Firefly episodes ranked best to worst

firefly-title-screen

The science fiction TV series Firefly, well known for its loyal-to-fanatic following among fans and for its early cancellation after a single season, has few enough episodes that it’s easy to watch and rewatch them all and to analyse and compare them individually. What follows is my very subjective opinion on ranking the episodes, from favourite to least favourite. I’ve kept it spoiler free so that anyone can read it (even though the people interested in this would probably have watched all the episodes anyway, and this is not a viewing order recommendation for first-time watchers).

This list does not consider Serenity – either of them. The first episode “Serenity”, and the 2005 film Serenity, bookend the whole series: they couldn’t go anywhere else than the beginning and the end (cough cough, “The Train Job” isn’t the first episode, you hear?), and their style is different from the other episodes, not just a continuation or a one-job episode, but respectively an introduction and a conclusion of sorts.

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The Death Gate Cycle

It has probably been twenty years since I last read The Death Gate Cycle, a seven book series written by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. I recently reread the series and here my quick impressions and past remembrances about each book. This is less of a review of the series (which as a whole is good and worth a read) and more just my musings of each book, ala Harry Potter Movie Marathon Highlights.

Dragon Wing:

The Air World. Definitely the book I remembered the most about, although that isn’t saying much for everything I forgot. The world building is great and the mystery around the Sartans and the Patryns really kept me going. In hindsight, the renaming of dwarves to dregs was pointless, as all the other books refer to them as dwarves, and even when they come back to this planet, they have started calling themselves dwarves. 

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Giants Series

The original three books of the five book Giants series are a pretty good read. Unfortunately, the time lag between book three and four (ten years), and then the even greater lag between book four and five (fourteen years), make those last two books seem detached from the original trilogy. 

I purchased the books as ebooks, and they come as “The Two Moons ( Inherit the Stars and The Gentle Giants of Ganymede), The Two Worlds (Giant’s Star and Entoverse), and then the third/fifth is Mission to Minerva
Confusing when I went to buy. “Get all 3 books in this 5 book series!”

The first two books ( Inherit the Stars and The Gentle Giants of Ganymede) are the most enjoyable, as they are kind of told as scientific mysteries. Inherit the Stars, published in 1977, has this description: 

The man on the moon was dead. They called him Charlie. He had big eyes, abundant body hair, and fairly long nostrils. His skeletal body was found clad in a bright red spacesuit, hidden in a rocky grave. They didn’t know who he was, how he got there, or what had killed him. All they knew was that his corpse was fifty thousand years old — and that meant this man had somehow lived long before he ever could have existed.

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Netflix’s Space Force

IMDB’s sad description:

The people tasked with creating a sixth branch of the armed services: The Space Force.

First and foremost, is Space Force science fiction and/or fantasy? A recent question on Scifi.SE “How realistic is it that a Russian agent would be working at Space Force?” forced (pun intended) the issue. The question was initially closed, but after some discussion, re-opened.

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