Firefly — 1x07 — Our Mrs. Reynolds
Synopsis
Mal, Jayne, and Zoe drive away some bandits from a settlement on Triumph, leading to a raucous celebration. The next morning, the Serenity crew takes off, only to find themselves with an additional passenger: Saffron, who claims she is Mal Reynolds' wife, part of Triumph's payment for services rendered, apparently. Book verifies that a portion of their drunken revelry was a marriage ceremony.
Mal finds himself in a quandary: He is saddled with a wife he doesn't remember marrying and who is devastated by his rejection, and a crew that is alternately teasing and excoriating him. He tries to free her, but her insistence on being a proper wife wears Mal down to the point where he kisses her.
That's when things get really bad: Mal falls unconscious after their kiss. Saffron is a con artist who wants to sell the Serenity for scrap, and she comes dangerously close to doing so...
Remarkable scenes
- Mal discovering that he was given a wife.
- Everyone's reaction to Mal's new wife.
- Mal making his new wife cry.
- Book explaining how Mal got married.
- Saffron: "Are you gonna kill me?" Mal: "What? What kind of crappy planet is that?"
- Mal: "Don't you ever stand for that sort of thing. Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill them right back."
- Saffron being extremely domestic.
- Jayne offering his favorite gun in exchange for Saffron.
- Saffron naked in Mal's room.
- Saffron knocking out Mal.
- Saffron coming on to Wash.
- Saffron unable to quite fool Inara.
- Book: "They're not looking to deal with survivors." Jayne: "One day you're gonna tell us all how a preacher knows so damned much about crime."
- Jayne shooting at the net and killing the operators.
Review
A fun but fairly shallow episode. No long term plots get serviced here; instead the point of the story is to laugh at the absurdity of Saffron's character. Both at her extreme domesticity and then later at the extreme measures she takes to be a successful con artist.
Interestingly, the penultimate scene of the episode seems to imply that she does the con artistry not necessarily for the reward, but for the fun of it, which makes her motives actually something that might have been interesting to explore in more depth. However, by the time we get to that scene the episode is essentially over.
Particular kudos should be given to the way the crew solved their electric death net problem which was grounded in very real science and portrayed very realistically. Other than that, the episode has little else to offer except some petty Inara / Mal failed romance scenes and some immature humor rooted in sexual tensions.