As much as I love the characters in Serenity/Firefly, I'm not sure I get this conversation.

Seems to me that in a good screenplay of any given genre, a well-developed story and well-developed characters serve each other -- that is, the story derives from how the characters would act in a given situation. If they're long-established characters and they suddenly act against type in order to further the story in some complicated way and then they revert to type after the story has been altered, that's bad.

I'm going somewhere here, I promise.

The reverse is also true: If the story goes someplace interesting and the characters don't evolve or change in a natural fashion to reflect how that journey might've changed them: Also bad. You can see this in a thousand bad sitcoms/dramas where something life-changing happens one week and the next week everybody's carrying forth as though nothing happened.

Lots of stories put their characters in mortal danger time and again, and yet everybody comes through unscathed because ... well, not really because it serves the story all that well, but because the character is popular. Or the actor who plays the character has some sort of leverage.

I've read somewhere that Han Solo was supposed to die at the end of Return of the Jedi -- and that Harrison Ford deeply urged it. (Perhaps because he's always had a slightly misanthropic streak, from what I can tell, that's unusually open for an actor of such popularity.) He thought that rather than having a village of Fozzie Bears dancing around at the end, the death of a favored (and important) character in such an all-encompassing struggle against the Most Powerful Enemy Ever would, realistically, give viewers some flavor that such victories are often accompanied by unspeakable losses. Such a development in ROTJ, I think, might've deepened that movie a little bit. Would it have been a disrespectful act to the character? Since it would've come in the context of a war story, I don't think so.

Same for the developments in Serenity that you're trying so very hard not to spoil five years after the fact. (I'll play along, though I think five years is long enough not to worry about such things personally.) The characters who meet untimely ends in the movie do so in ways that, yes, are shocking -- but also make a whole lot of sense in the context of the events going on around them. And the result is that our heroes, in the end, have a victory ... but one tempered by a bit of melancholy, knowing they have paid a steep price to do the right thing. I don't think it's ill-serves the characters at all.

If we view our entertainments as (sometimes) a means of passing along instruction and inspiration, I'd submit that it's wonderful and wise message to find. In real life, doing the right thing can often come with a steep price. It's rare that everybody gets the victory they want and the entire gang is intact to have a great new adventure next week. And I wonder if the prevalence of that kind of story structure in our culture doesn't infect our political discourse somewhat; it's rare that entertainments depict somebody having to choose from a range of really awful choices and picking the one that -- instead of doing the greatest good -- ends up doing the least harm. But that's not so rarely the options available to our political leaders. Somehow, though, we expect it of them.

All of which is to say: I felt an ample twinge of regret when one of my favorite characters died near the end of Serenity. But I understood the choice, and I thought it served the story well.*

*Oh lord. Did I really just write that many geeky words on a geeky topic?

I will put my cards on the table: my wife and I loved the characters, and the world of Firefly. Were gladdened by the return to the Big Screen of Serenity. Were saddened by the destruction of some of our favorite characters.

No critical analysis was involved. We were being as selfish as those who wish Lewis had written 12 Narnia books, all with Peter, Lucy, Edmund and that other kid. Or that Alice could have returned to Wonderland over and over, or Bilbo could have all the adventures in Middle Earth.

We are stupid, selfish creatures of habit.

Kill 'em off, but give 'em another three years of television episodes first! ;o/