Nathan Fillion Reveals a Crazy Opening Scene for FIREFLY That Was Never Shot
This past weekend I attended Long Beach Comic Con where a Firefly reunion panel took place! As you know, the classic sci-fi series only lasted 14 episodes before Fox prematurely pulled the plug on it. Since then fans haven't given up on saying that they want more.
Nathan Fillion (Captain Malcolm Reynolds) was in attendance along with co-stars Summer Glau (River Tam), Adam Baldwin (Jayne Cobb), Jewel Staite (Kaylee Frye), and Sean Maher (Dr. Simon Tam).
During the panel, Fillion revealed a crazy pitch for an opening scene of an episode that was never made. It's a shame because it sounds so cool!
"Joss once described an opening scene to me where we are looking at a planet with a ring around it and as we come in close, we see the ring is actually rocks and pieces of ships and old derelicts. It's a junk ring. It's the junkyards... we mentioned it in Firefly one time. We see little bits and we're jumping slowly from bit to bit and as we get closer we see Serenity floating lifeless and these little people getting on and coming through it, and as they get into the airlock and they close it, they come and there's Malcolm Reynolds, bleeding and cut, strapped down with giant guns and not looking great. He's got these two giant guns, and he says, 'Get off my ship.'"
How freakin' badass is that!? I would have loved to see that scene play out, and maybe one day we would have had the show not been canceled. Fillion also talked about what it was like after he found out the show was canceled:
"We had three more days of shooting after we were canceled and I remember thinking, 'this is going to be the worst. Every day is going to be painful reminder of what we're losing and it's going to be one of the saddest, most horrifying three days of the shooting.' And it turned out to be amazing. Everyone was determined to squeeze any last remaining drops of joy we could get from this wonderful experience. I was really impressed with how people pulled together."
I love that they all had this great positive attitude of finishing off their series strong. It was so sad to see that series end, and it would be so cool if we got some kind of limited revival series like Fox did with The X-Files, but I doubt that will happen. When talking about the fans wanting more, Fillion said:
"I totally get wanting more. I hear it all the time. 'Is there going to be more? When is it? Could there be? What if there was?' And I get it. At the same time, we all had, what I would call, my dream job. It was the perfect position. Everything was great. Even the challenges we faced, we faced them together. We were all in it together and we were all pulling for the same thing, to make a great show. And I loved every minute of it. It's really hard to look at that kind of stuff and say 'give me more.' Because enough is enough. Oh my god. It was everything. It was everything. How can everything not be enough?"
In a way, it hurts to hear him say that because Firefly could have been so much more had Fox let it keep going. But I completely understand what he's saying. Firefly has its legacy, it has its hardcore fan base, and we will alway love what Joss Whedon and his team did with this series n the time that they had to do it.
Thanks to THR for the quotes.