Up the Down Slide (A ‘Firefly’ Audio Commentary)
I’m currently doing a rewatch of the 📺 series Firefly and having just reached Jose Molina’s “Ariel”, I thought I’d repost here an audio commentary track I recorded for the episode back in 2006 for Big Damn Commentaries, a website I ran for fan-recorded commentaries. Since Micro.blog sites without the podcasting package have free microcasting through April, I thought I’d share this here but you also can always find it on the Internet Archive, which is where I’d hosted the audio files back in the day. Below you can read my original show notes for this commentary track.
This commentary takes its title from this particular line from the episode itself because much of it is about differences between the series and the movie as it pertains to Simon and River.
When it became apparent that Joss had rewritten River’s rescue from the story Simon told the crew in the pilot episode, many Browncoats worked on bringing the two versions into compliance once again, eventually developing a fanwank later adopted by Joss himself: Simon lied to the crew, and withheld information from them.
In this commentary, I explore Simon’s words and actions in “Ariel” from the standpoint of the new canon of Simon’s deceptions.
Since we all had to work backward from the movie into the series in order to develop that fanwank, we were, in a sense, going up the down slide.
Note: You should start playing this commentary at the same moment you press “play episode” on the DVD menu.