Riley12 wrote:You can't pick it up from the last episode because, as Whedon said, the movie essentially covered the rest of the TV journey
that he had planned for those characters. You'd have to carry on without Wash and Book.
Sure, it covered the rest of the journey for those characters, but doing that has worked for Star Trek and other shows. No reason it couldn't work for Firefly - just makes Serenity a little side trip oddity, an adventure in a possible alternate (and sad) ending. Having a strange little alternate spur of the story sticking out there as a movie is simply a mute tribute to the travesty of cancelling the program in the first place, like a little memorial to the decade of silence between episodes 14 and 15.
The problem in my opinion (and yea, I keep picking on this a bit) is that you can't really do justice to the story carrying on without Wash and Book. Wash maybe, but arguably Alan Tudyk is a vital component of the crew's dynamic, and it would be severely lacking without it. Also introducing another character to provide that comedic part of the dynamic would feel contrived, forced. You don't do that with a story if you want to see it succeed. I don't have a problem with killing such a character off if that's the whole story, but it's not. Seeing it out to the end, with a continuation of things as the series told it makes more sense. Wash can still die at the end, or even up to a year or two before the final season. That makes sense. But not so early as to leave a void in the dynamics of crew for so long, to simply see him as a footnote in a longer series.
Book, though, I'd argue is vital to the overarching story line. While I don't pretend to know Whedon's plans for the direction of the story, it's fairly easy to imagine Book has an integral part in it, is a key to the whole thing. His past is important, even as we still don't know what it is. We know enough to know that he's far more of a badass than he claims as a "simple man of the cloth". He's comfortable with weaponry, he takes command in contingency circumstances, and he has federation credentials that make one think twice about who he really is. There's a lot more to him than meets the eye. The only aspect of the story that's bigger, in my estimation, is River's back story with the men with Hands of Blue. And Book may just well be tied into that too. As an author, I'd at least consider that angle very carefully.
And there are a lot of aspects to the story that were not explored fully in Serenity, aside from those. Mal and Inara are far more than the uneasy mutual attraction that ended with a sputter in the movie. I'd argue Inara is at least as critical to the rest of Mal's story as any other character, including Zoe. Probably more. We know most of the relationship between Mal and Zoe. That was addressed in the series well.
And Inara herself has a lot of unanswered questions. She's a lot more than what appearances show. Her back story was not told in its entirety, and was really only hinted at. She left a lucrative career and a promising life on one of the main planets behind, but we know goram well it wasn't because of a sense of adventure. She's not scared to go back, but there are definitely areas about it that she won't go into. I'd guess it's more than just man trouble, or a falling out with the guild. There's a lot of potential left there.
So really, there are three or four of the major subplots still left unexplored in the story. The bulk of the subplots, really, and the most interesting of them. That's why Firefly fans continue to clamor for a reboot, and why it makes sense to set the movie aside and continue from the end of the series, rather than include the movie as part of the overall story. It's been done before, series-wise. And story-wise, it's the only way to really address all the story lines, keep the character dynamics in place, and not cheat outrageously doing it.