getting the message

The Message (Firefly)

"The Message" is the twelfth episode of science-fiction television series Firefly created by Joss Whedon. It is the second of three episodes that were not broadcast in the original 2002 Fox run.

A former Independence soldier who had served with Mal and Zoe returns in a dramatic manner, with a vicious Alliance officer chasing after him for some unusual smuggled goods.

Synopsis

The show opens on a space station, inside of which there are people wandering about in a kind of carnival. A barker extols an exhibit featuring "proof of alien life". Inside the exhibit, Simon and Kaylee stare at a tall, illuminated cylinder that holds a strange and apparently dead creature. The doctor declares that it is a mutated cow fetus, not an alien. Simon uses this moment alone with the engineer to attempt to get closer to her, but once again puts his foot in his mouth when he mentions that the other women he knows are either married (Zoe), professional (Inara), or related to him (River), and Kaylee leaves in a huff. As Kaylee departs, Zoe and Wash enter. Back in the concourse, Inara tries to convince Mal to let her help fence the Lassiter they stole in "Trash", but Mal insists on keeping her out of that side of the business. Mal checks in with the station postmaster, who passes along two packages along with Serenity's mail.

Jayne arrives to find that his mother has sent him a home-knitted cap, and he proudly dons it. The others observe the hideous headgear with a mixture of amusement and sarcasm. The other shipped item is a huge crate addressed to Mal and Zoe. They open it to discover a dead body.

Flashback to seven years earlier at the Battle of Du-Khang. As a young Independence soldier, Private Tracey, calmly prepares a meal behind cover, an Alliance soldier sneaks up on him. Just as the latter is about to shoot, Zoe appears behind him and cuts his throat. While she lectures the boy about stealth, Sgt. Reynolds comes screaming (literally) over some obstacles and crashes into their position. Tracey is injured when the Alliance zeroes in on them. Mal and Zoe grab Tracey and their shell-shocked lieutenant and bug out.

Back in the present, the two ex-soldiers puzzle over the "indecently preserved" corpse of their former comrade. Hauling the box aboard Serenity, they find a recorded message from Tracey. He apparently anticipated trouble from some unsavory associates, and has asked them to ship his body home to St. Albans.

Back on the station, an ominous Alliance soldier, Lieutenant Womack, threatens first to imprison, then to burn to death the postmaster, who quickly tells the man and his aide who left with the encoffined body.

On Serenity, Jayne waxes surprisingly philosophical about death to Shepherd Book, who contemplates a modest ceremony for the dead man; Jayne notes that he always gets the urge to 'do stuff' when he sees a corpse he didn't kill, prompting Book to speculate that Jayne likes to prove to himself that he's alive after witnessing death. River arrives to make herself comfortable by lying on the casket. Meanwhile, Mal and Zoe entertain Inara with a hilarious tale about Tracey's antics during the war, such as when he 'stole' an officer's moustache and stuck it on his face. Suddenly, the ship is shaken by a near miss from an Alliance craft. Lt. Womack hails them and demands to board Serenity. The crew mistakenly think that Womack is after the Lassiter. When Womack mentions "that crate", however, Mal realizes he's after Tracey's box, and stalls for time while they take apart the crate to discover what secrets it might contain. Finding nothing, they decide to have Simon autopsy the hapless soldier, but the doctors' first incision causes the "dead" man to leap up and struggle with the gathered crew.

After he calms down, Tracey confesses that he is smuggling illegal internal organs. He was supposed to deliver the implanted organs on Ariel, but he got a higher bid. Unfortunately for him, the original buyers killed the new customer and are now after their stolen "merchandise". Another shot from Womack reminds them of their immediate peril. Wash takes Serenity down to St. Albans, where they try unsuccessfully to elude their pursuer in a narrow snowbound valley. They finally come to rest inside a hidden cave, but the Alliance ship drops explosive charges into the valley to flush them out.

Kaylee gets to know and even flirt with the young soldier whose words mesmerized her earlier. Book does some checking on their Alliance pursuers and discovers some anomalous behavior. He ultimately recommends to Mal that they allow the Feds to board the ship. Tracey overhears some of this conversation and pulls a gun on the crew. Mal expresses disgust at his former subordinate's attempt to force them to get him out of his own mess, and orders Wash to call the Feds. As Tracey fires at Wash, wounding him, Zoe shoots the ungrateful man in the chest. Wounded but not slowed down, Tracey grabs Kaylee for cover and heads for the cargo bay. When Mal confronts him about his treacherous behavior, Tracey lays into his former superiors about being "saps". Jayne comes up behind him, and as Tracey turns to shoot him, Mal fires instead, knocking the young man to the ground.

Lt. Womack and his men enter the cargo bay. He tries to cow the smugglers with his Alliance authority, but an unarmed Book arrives to explain why he won't be using that authority, given the pains he's taken to keep his extracurricular organ-dealing activity from the local Feds. Faced with a surprisingly direct threat of death from the preacher, Womack decides to depart, dismissing the "damaged goods" in Tracey's gravely-wounded chest.

Tracey belatedly realizes that Book's confrontation was part of a plan, one that he screwed up by threatening the crew and getting himself shot for his efforts. He asks Mal and Zoe to really deliver him home this time, then dies. Accompanied by a gloomy music and voiced-over excerpts from Tracey's message, the crew of Serenity solemnly returns the fallen soldier to his grieving family.

Production notes

"The Message" was the last Firefly episode filmed, by which time the cast and crew knew the show had been cancelled. The final scene, in which Serenity's crew return Tracey's body to his family, marking an end to the former soldier's journeys, therefore had an extra poignancy for them, according to the DVD commentary.
According to the special features on the DVD box set, Greg Edmonson, composer for the show, wrote the musical piece that is heard when Tracey is returned to his family not only as a farewell to Tracey, but as a farewell to the series itself.
While Tracey is in sickbay, right after Simon has hooked him up to an electrocardiogram, you can hear his heart beating in the background. His heart rate noticeably quickens when Kaylee enters the room.

DVD commentaries

Kaylee has expressed romantic interest in two men thus far — Simon and Tracey — who have threatened her life. Simon refuses to treat her gunshot wound unless they protect River from the Alliance in "Serenity" (although Kaylee believes he was bluffing), and now Tracey holds her at gunpoint. Joss Whedon wryly observes in the DVD commentaries that one quick path to Firefly drama is to threaten the relentlessly sweet engineer. (A tactic he also admitted to using in early Buffy episodes, where he said that putting Willow in danger was the surest way to win over the viewers.)
In the DVD audio commentary for the episode, a joke is made at how the postmaster is apparently the only Jewish person in space; calling him a 'Space Jew', or 'Spjew' for short. Having seen Mr. Universe in the film, Serenity, it can be confirmed there are now at least two.

Allusions to earlier episodes

Inara suggests to Mal that she use her contacts to help him fence the Lassiter, the antique laser pistol they stole with Saffron's help in "Trash".

Foreshadowing

Shepherd Book proclaims that he believes Jayne will be around long after he himself has died, foreshadowing his death at the hands of the Alliance in the feature film, Serenity.

Planets, moons, and space stations

The places visited in this episode include an unnamed space station and the icy moon St. Albans. St Albans was the first major town on the Roman road leading out of Londinium, which is also the name of one of the two primary core-worlds of the Alliance.

Guest stars

Series creator Joss Whedon appears onscreen in an uncredited cameo appearance, as one of the mourners at Tracey's funeral.
Jonathan M. Woodward, who played Tracey, is one of Joss Whedon's "hat tricks", having appeared in all three of his shows. First in "Conversations with Dead People" during the last season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as vampire shrink Holden Webster, and then as Knox, Fred's assistant and Illyria's Qwa'ha Xhan, in the final season of Angel.

Reception

"The Message" was nominated for a 2004 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form.

Footnotes

As of this episode, in the Firefly universe, humans have found no other significant alien life thus far, or at least none have been revealed by the Alliance.