firefly ‘objects in space’ 

This episode was a fanbreaker for me; as in it split my fanwank for this show in half - one side ‘what an interesting, well-structured and character-developing episode’ and one side ‘what the fuck was all that racist misogynistic bullshit all about?’ 
The latter side: Why? ‘Cause they had the black man come on board and threaten to rape the little white girl, slap the other white girl, and try to kidnap the THIRD white girl. Yup. The black man. Threatening your white women, yo. And poor Mal, the great while male protector, he gets beaten up by the black man because black men are threatening to white male sexuality and place LET’S PERPETUATE SOME HETERONORMATIVE PATRIARCHAL NONSENSE, RIGHT ON JOSS WHEDON!
And then the former side was excited to see Simon shirtless and being a snarky brat to the guy trying to kill him and kidnap his sister. 
But.
Um.

Now Firefly is a little bit hard to enjoy, because there’s just too many thoughts like ‘of course they portray the black man as ‘innately evil” and ‘why does Mal keep calling Inara a whore? that’s not very respectful of him’ and ‘Zoe is so underused as a character, why are they shafting the black woman’s character development’ and so on and so forth.
 It IS fun to watch and all, but only if you don’t let yourself think too hard about the way women and minorities are depicted and treated. In Zoe’s case, how minority women aren’t depicted. Ugh.

Next week why M’gann is awesome and all the YJ haters need to shove it.