Joss Whedon: The Biography Read online

  Yet Tara’s death—and the deaths of Joyce Summers, Doyle, and quite a few other ill-fated characters over the course of Joss’s writing career—are not merely narrative necessities. They all speak to Joss’s need to ground his tales in truth and human experience. Prior to Buffy, television series, especially sci-fi series, often put their characters in danger but rarely exposed them to true peril that might lead to death. The X-Files regularly set up Mulder and Scully to be attacked by assorted monsters and creatures, and they always made it through to the following week. Viewers had become conditioned to this; they would watch each episode through the veil of “she’s a main character, she won’t die”—their emotional attachment still strong but their fear muted.

  But in real life, everyone dies eventually, and many will die suddenly, leaving loved ones behind to deal with an intense devastation in a very personal way. Joss knows what it’s like to be forced to deal with such a loss, with no possible explanation that can make sense of the pain or ease it in any way. He lost his mother to a brain aneurism, and several years later a Riverdale friend, the writer Joe Wood, went missing on Mount Rainier and was never found. Joss designs each death in the Whedonverse to make viewers feel the despair and ache of loss—because he spent so much time creating an emotional connection that brought them joy and love in the first place. When Joss kills a character, it hurts because it is designed to hurt.

  Still, fans took Tara’s death particularly hard—in part, perhaps, because of a trick Joss played on viewers at the beginning of her last episode. He added Amber Benson, who had played Tara on a recurring basis for the past three seasons, to the opening credits, a position usually reserved for full-time cast members. “I realized, just the other day, that I have this terrible reputation for killing people not just because I killed Tara, but because I was such a dick about it,” Joss laughed. “[Adding her to the credits] was just mean. Tara may be dead, but she haunts me still, because now all anybody ever talks about is the fact I kill characters off, and I think, ‘I do other things as well!’”

  Another episode from late in season six felt like a return to form for the series—and it came from outside the current writers’ room. Diego Gutierrez had left his job as Joss’s assistant at the end of the previous season to pursue his own writing career, but years earlier, he’d pitched the idea for “Normal Again.” He’d been fascinated by the idea of psychosis and mental breakdowns, which led him to imagine how Buffy would look to someone unaware of the hidden world of magic and demons. “If you heard her talking [about her life] at a restaurant, you’d think she’s totally nuts,” he says.

  He conceived of a story in which Buffy is attacked by a demon whose venom puts her into an extreme hallucinogenic state. She then floats between two worlds: one in which she’s a Vampire Slayer in Sunnydale; the other in which she’s a patient in a mental hospital, where she has been in a schizophrenic catatonic state for six years. Both of Buffy’s parents attend to her at the hospital, hoping that she’ll break free from her deranged beliefs that the world is filled with demons and she is a Vampire Slayer.

  Joss liked the pitch, but for a long time, nothing came of it. He told Gutierrez later that he’d been trying to find a plausible way to do the story. When Gutierrez’s assistantship was nearing its end, he was working on a packet of spec scripts in hope of landing a staff writing job, and one of the scripts was a spec version of his asylum idea. He was excited when Joss agreed to read the script and give him notes. However, he did not expect Joss to say that he wanted to buy the script and bring him back the following season to work on the episode.

  A year later, Gutierrez took a short break from his new job writing for Dawson’s Creek to return and work on the script with Joss. He suggested that they scrap his original, ambiguous ending, which instead of showing Buffy in Sunnydale, fully recovered from the demon’s venom, closes on a shot of her in the mental hospital. Joss surprised him when he said, “Let’s end it in the asylum … let’s fuck with them.”

  “Joss never undermined the intelligence and the respect between the fans and the show,” Gutierrez says. “He was always making sure that even if he wasn’t giving you what you wanted, you were always getting something that was cool and interesting.”

  In the end, Buffy chooses to leave her parents and a chance at happiness behind to live in a nightmarish world filled with demons and daily battles. The final scene, in which she has returned to her catatonic state in the hospital and the doctor declares her “gone,” is indeed jarring. The viewers are left to wonder which of the two worlds is real for Buffy, and thus Buffy.

  “Normal Again” would have been a brilliant ending to an uneven and uneasy season. It could have set up questions about sanity and reality that echoed throughout the following year. Instead, the brain-twisting events were confined to a stand-alone episode, like Joss’s despised “reset television,” in which storylines never really progress and characters never learn any lessons.

  The actual conclusion to season six returns to the key Whedonverse notion of chosen family, asserting that it’s this community who will support us even when we falter, love us when we don’t feel like we deserve it, and stand by us in our worst moments. In Willow’s worst moment, she tries to kill those responsible for Tara’s death and then attempts to destroy the world in order to bring an end to her agony. And it is Xander, the one without great strength or magic, who comes to her, letting her lash out at him physically and verbally, and repeats over and over that he loves her no matter what she has done. His love lessens her fury and she breaks down in his arms.

  But to many fans, this heart-tugging redemption story was too little, too late. At this point in the story, Willow and Xander hardly talked to each other. They were not the best of friends they had been in the series’ first few seasons. And yes, people change and grow, and relationships transform after high school. But for two people who still spent a significant amount of time together, they barely seemed to register what was going on in each other’s lives. (A few episodes earlier, in “Hell’s Bells,” Xander and Anya call off their wedding; Xander mourns the breakup alone in a motel, while Willow, Buffy, and Dawn discuss the couple elsewhere.) So it’s difficult to accept that this Willow, who had been so devastated from the loss of Tara that she wanted to take out the entire world, could be talked down by someone who was her best friend and confidant, many years earlier.

  Still, there is undeniable poignancy in watching these two friends, who have known each other for a lifetime and whom the audience had known for six years, reconnect so purely and transcendently. After a season in which so many characters lost their way in convoluted and clumsy storylines, it gave fans hope that the next season would be a return to form, and a restoration of the characters and relationships that mattered. In that way, season six had finally started to ascend.

  17

  WE AIM TO MISBEHAVE: FIREFLY

  Joss created Buffy the Vampire Slayer to introduce a character he had always wanted to see in a horror movie but never had. For his next television series, he turned his attention toward something he found lacking in televised science fiction: “a gritty realism that wasn’t an ‘Alien’ ripoff.” In Firefly, he combined his love of outer space sci-fi with his affection for a much more rough-and-tumble genre—westerns, “particularly the ’70s westerns, the immigrant stories, the ones about ‘this is all we have out here, so we might be dead soon.’”

  He first conceived of the series when he wasn’t supposed to be thinking about television at all, during a nonworking trip to London with Kai. Joss had brought along Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize–winning historical novel The Killer Angels, which told the story of the soldiers in the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War. What drew him in was how Shaara recounted the minutiae of the soldiers’ lives; it made him think about how everyday people got by in an age when their needs weren’t prepackaged and instantly available.

  Under his deal with 20th Century Fox, Joss needed to delive
r them a new series. He suddenly knew that this was the idea that he wanted to explore. “I wanted to play with that classic notion of the frontier,” Joss said. “Not the people who made history, but the people history stepped on—the people for whom every act is the creation of civilization.” And he wanted to do it on a spaceship.

  That concept, he hoped, would elevate Firefly above the average sci-fi series. Though he’d clocked countless hours watching movies set in faraway worlds, most TV examples of the genre failed to engage him. Even his love of British television didn’t extend to science fiction. “Never watched any British sci-fi,” Joss says. “People were always talking to me about [Blake’s] 7, Red Dwarf, even Doctor Who, and I just never watched them. I watched one episode of Doctor Who and I was like, ‘Did they film that in my basement?’ because it looked cheesy.” His series aimed to be anything but.

  Firefly would be set in a distant future in which the Earth has been “used up” and can no longer support the whole of the human race. Humanity survives by homesteading terraformed outposts in a new planetary system, simply called “the ’verse” by its inhabitants. Joss would introduce us to not just one but a series of worlds recovering from a civil war between an antiseptic, Orwellian government called the Alliance and a band of outgunned rebels called the Browncoats.

  Joss characterized his story as an exploration of “how politics affect people personally. And the personal politics are the only politics that really interest me. I’m not going to make this big, didactic polemic—I’m just going to say, ‘When there are shifts in a planet, those tiny little guys are the ones who are affected. So let’s hang out with them—not the Federation heads or the Jedi Council.’”

  True to that mission statement, Firefly’s heroes are the nine crew members and passengers aboard a ramshackle “Firefly-class” spaceship called Serenity. The crew barely scrape by on odd smuggling jobs and the rent they charge their regular passengers, who all have reasons to retreat to deep space to escape the authorities of the Alliance. Joss had originally conceived of a smaller ensemble, but he increased the character count after being inspired by another western, John Ford’s 1939 movie Stagecoach, which likewise follows nine characters—a driver, a marshal, and seven strangers—as they cross the open and fairly unsettled frontier between Arizona Territory and New Mexico Territory.

  In fact, literature professor Fred Erisman later identified quite blatant parallels between Ford’s film and Joss’s new tale: “Buck, the serio-comic driver, becomes Wash, the pilot,” an unabashed geek who plays with dinosaur action figures set up on Serenity’s console during his downtime. “Drunken Doc Boone becomes the up-tight surgeon Simon Tam,” who is in hiding from the Alliance along with his sister, River, after he rescues her from a government lab that was engaging in horrific human experimentation. “ ‘Reverend’ Peacock is replaced by an actual cleric, the enigmatic Shepherd Book,” a preacher with a mysterious dark past. And “in an especially telling reversal, the prostitute Dallas becomes Inara Serra,” an elite sex worker known as a Companion “whose presence aboard the ship gives it ‘a certain respectability.’”

  Rounding out the ensemble are Serenity’s captain, Malcolm “Mal” Reynolds, a former sergeant who fought on the losing side of the civil war; and pilot Wash’s wife, Zoe, who fought alongside Mal and remains his loyal second in command. When the ship breaks down or needs repair, Kaylee serves as its able, salt-of-the-earth country mechanic. And Jayne is a hired mercenary with questionable loyalties. Finally, Professor Richard Slotkin’s influence on Joss can once again be seen as he transformed the looming threat of the Apaches into the Reavers, the brutal savages who live on the outskirts of civilized space.

  Although Firefly’s dystopian sci-fi elements might seem a drastic departure from Buffy’s world of fantasy horror and privileged teenage angst, its central theme is quite familiar: A group of seemingly disparate individuals, each just trying to get by in a universe that really isn’t smart enough to appreciate his or her exceptional talents and quirks, are tossed together by extraordinary circumstances. Occasionally, and sometimes by accident, they manage to save the world(s).

  Firefly’s cast of characters is filled with the archetypes that pop up in much of Joss’s work: the loner with a distinct sense of justice, although his sense of right and wrong may not mesh with society’s; the stalwart and dependable comrade, who may question the hero but will always have his back; the stuffy, book-learned one who finds that real life often does not adhere to the facts he was taught; the one with faith, who has left an organized group but still works to apply its tenets for the benefit of those around him; the mercenary who’s always up for a fight; the confident one who is often just trying to get through the day in the most pleasant way possible; the well-trained one whose strength is not fully understood until she is pushed; and, of course, the young woman coming to terms with her new power and the responsibility that it entails.

  In the case of Firefly, that last archetype is filled by Simon’s sister, River, a onetime child prodigy whose mind has been damaged by the experiments to which the government subjected her, but who in her rare lucid moments over the course of the series will shock the crew with her fighting prowess and psychic predictions of doom. It would be the most familiar element of an unfamiliar concept, akin to Joss’s numerous movie ideas that all tended to revolve around adolescent female superheroes. Joss designed Firefly to be different, “about Joe Schmo, everyday life,” he said. “And then of course I introduce River, the young female superhero. Let’s face it, I’m just addicted.”

  But he was glad that, for once, his female superhero would be merely one character among many. “It was nice to have a show that was about different perspectives and to really get to explore all of them. I was excited that I was going to have a happily married couple that was not boring. Because that’s just so rare in fiction and it’s such an important thing in life. And yet apart from [the] Thin Man [film] series, I think it’s never really been adequately represented. And I had a preacher on board, to explore the concept of faith, people who don’t have it and people who do.”

  That exploration of faith would become an important aspect of the series, embodied in the relationship between the pious Shepherd Book and the lapsed believer Mal Reynolds. Captain Reynolds “is a man who has learned that when he believed in something it destroyed him,” Joss said. “So what he believes in is the next job, the next paycheck and keeping his crew safe.” The series pushes past the idea that a belief in God is necessary for a moral life, and questions the definition of morality that others want to impose. Mal, to Joss, is a “guy who looks into the void and sees nothing but the void—and says there is no moral structure, there is no help, no one’s coming, no one gets it, I have to do it.”

  Mal is also a character his atheist creator strongly identified with. “Of course the captain was the me figure,” Joss joked, “because he’s very tall and handsome, but cranky and also slim.” But in actuality, all of the characters, all the archetypes they embodied, are facets of Joss himself. And perhaps that’s why he would fall in love the hardest with Firefly—because he poured every bit of himself into these characters, and developed relationships between them that mirrored the relationships and friendships in his own life.

  He was even willing to walk away from the show rather than alter one of those relationships, the marriage between Zoe and Wash. “Wash is an absolute contrast to Zoe, yet a perfect mate for her,” he explained. “Rather than playing out every little romance in its infancy the way shows usually do, I thought it would be nice to show a happily married couple, who would have their fights and their troubles, but would stay married.” But when Fox executives were deciding whether to pick up the series, they saw a stable marriage as dramatically limiting, and they pushed him to break up the couple. “The last thing that Fox said was, ‘We will pick up the show, but they can’t be married.’ And I said, ‘Then don’t pick up the show, because in my show, these people are married. And it�
��s important to the show.’”

  Gail Berman, the former Sandollar Productions executive who brought Joss the idea of a Buffy television series back in the mid-1990s, had joined the Fox network in 2000 as its president of entertainment. In December 2001, she greenlit Firefly with an order for thirteen episodes. A month later, Mutant Enemy was given $10 million to develop and shoot the pilot. But before he could go behind the camera, Joss had to find the right cast.

  Every ship needs a captain, and Serenity was no different. Nathan Fillion was coming off a recently canceled ABC sitcom, Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place, and had been offered a “talent holding deal” by 20th Century Fox; the studio wanted to keep him on retainer so that they could find a new role for him on one of their upcoming shows. He was brought in to meet with Joss about the Mal Reynolds role.

  After failing to get past the first cut for the part of Angel on Buffy in 1996, Fillion had run into some of the actors who were cast in the series at parties, and they would talk about the adventures that they were having and the stories the show was telling. He was intrigued, and tried to catch the occasional Buffy episode. But he never met Joss until casting director Amy Britt brought him in for Firefly.