Several weeks ago my sweetie-wife and I engaged in a re-watch of cult television show Firefly. The first series from Joss Whedon set outside of his successful Buffy The Vampire Slayer universe Firefly is a science fiction story following the adventures of a band of smugglers and outlaws as they attempt to scrape out a living in a civil war that tore their planetary system in two. Inspired by the book The Killer Angels about the U.S. Civil war the show leans heavily on a southern US cadence for its dialog and the settlement of the American West for it setting and tone. Airing from 2002 through 2003 the Fox Network canceled the show after less than a complete full first season. Unresolved storylines were tidied up by a feature film release titles Serenityand the show lived on in a comic book adaptation. Episode 7 of the 14 released on home video was the comic/tragic Jaynestown in which the crew of the Serenity discover that Jayne Cobb, the most criminal and violent member of the cast, is idolized, quite literally with a statue, by a town of indentured workers who years earlier mistook him for a Robin Hood style vigilante after he jettisoned strongboxes of money over their town in order to keep a crippled craft airborne. In a parallel that provides the crew with their method of escape when the local authorities freeze out the ship’s control the character of Inara, a woman of respectable status due to the society’s unusual view of sex work, engages professionally with the son of the local head of government. Her client is a man 26 years old but who, much to his father horror, has remained a virgin and the father has commissioned Inara to correct the situation. Over all Jaynestown is one of the series’ best episodes. Written by Ben Edlund it presents sharp in character comedy but lands on a note of pathos about the nature of hero-worship.

That said the episode has a timeline issue that had always bugged me. The young man with Inara is twenty-six years old and he speaks about when he was growing up that this man – Jayne- robbed his father and dropped the money on the people. We learn from another character that the heist took place just four years earlier, when the virgin was twenty-two. Hardly an age that most people would consider as part of their ‘growing up.’  Had they made the young man 18 then he could have been 14 when Jayne performed his robbery and still be old enough to dodge any issues that Fox’s Standards and Practices might have had about the whole losing his virginity sub-plot.