Blog #9 - Serenity Prospectus

I plan to do my analytical research paper on the Firefly movie, Serenity. Although I have yet to watch the movie, as I wish to see it after I finish the series (this weekend), I have read enough about it to decide what I want my paper to be about. The movie focuses primarily on the corruption of the government through two aspects. The leading cause of the conflicts in the series are caused by illegal government testing. They tested a new drug on a planet, leading to the Reavers, and they tested on River Tam, which she escaped from. This leads to the second point of corruption, as the government tries to have River assassinated. Although Joss Whedon has stated that the Alliance is meant to represent the American government is some fashions, I want to research the actual practices of governments in this field. This will be rather difficult, due to the fact that it's not a common practice for such information to be revealed, but there have been enough practices of the sort throughout history to glean enough information. On who and for what reasons are scientific tests done without consent? Who is assassinated by the government and why? Firefly provides us with a government that does things on a wide scale, and we can see the darker undercurrents that move some of their actions. While it's not so obvious in the real world, I think it raises a bunch of interesting questions. A good scene to use would be one where they discover how the Reavers were made.