Joss Whedon: The Biography by Amy Pascale

Author:Amy Pascale [Pascale, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2014-08-01T07:00:00+00:00

The official news of the cancellation came on Thursday, December 12, 2002, while they were filming the episode “The Message.” In it, a former soldier (Jonathan Woodward) who served with Mal and Zoe in the war with the Alliance has his corpse sent to them with the request that they bring him home. The taped message that he includes with his body recalls an oft-quoted mantra of their unit but breaks off early: “When you can’t run anymore, you crawl, and when you can’t do that …” Mal and Zoe silently acknowledge the missing ending to the line and, always loyal to their men, decide to honor his request.

“We were on the bridge shooting,” Tim Minear says, “and Joss showed up on the set and he pulled me aside and he’s like, ‘They just canceled the show.’” Joss then asked if he should announce it while everyone was gathered or wait until shooting was done. Minear said to tell them immediately and they’d all wrap for the day.

“I’ve never seen him so mad,” Adam Baldwin recalls. “He looked at me and said, ‘I don’t have good news. They pulled the plug and this is the last episode. And I wanted you all to know immediately.’” After Joss informed his cast and crew, nobody felt like working, so they all went to Fillion’s house to get drunk and drown their broken hearts.

“It was right before we were going to break for hiatus and go home to our families for the holidays,” Jewel Staite recalls. “We all had a good feeling that we were the underdog that year, but it always felt like our impending cancellation was just looming over our heads, and I think we were all waiting for some sort of shoe to drop. It was still devastating, though. Kind of like when you jump off a diving board, and instead of going headfirst in the pool, you twist your body the wrong way and hit the water with your belly instead. It felt like that.”

But they still had to finish production on the remaining episodes. The next day everybody was hung over, and the first thing they had to shoot was a scene in which Mal, Zoe, and Inara sit around the dining room table laughing hysterically as Mal tells funny war stories about their comrade. “We’ve just been canceled and they have to pretend like they’re having a laugh,” Minear remembers. Ultimately, Joss and his cast and crew decided that joking around was exactly what the situation called for. They were going to have the best time they possibly could have, and then it would be over. “We would screw things up, you know—like, not get something right—and the joke was always ‘What are they gonna do, cancel us?’” says Morena Baccarin.

Baccarin also recalls how during the later days of filming, Joss helped her reach a deeper emotional truth and find an emotional release. In “Heart of Gold,” Inara tells Mal that she will be leaving Serenity. “I understood how that scene was really sad, and I did it a few different ways.

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