Dakota
Williams
Ms.
Chambers
ENG 1001
12
September 2012
SSI
Firefly is
an American Western space television series written and directed by Joss
Whedon, and originally aired on FOX in September 2002. The show is set in the year 2517 and follows
the lives of Captain Malcolm ‘Mal’ Reynolds and his crew aboard their ship Serenity. Mal and his crew
are the remains of the losing side of a civil war and now make a living flying
on the outskirts of their society. In
this particular episode, “The Train Job”, Mal and his crew have agreed to steal
cargo off of a train without being told the specifics about what that cargo
contains. After successfully stealing
the cargo, Mal and his crew discover that it was medicine for the town of
Paradiso where the populace was ravaged by disease.
One of the main
issues the show Firefly, and
especially this episode, investigates are the stereotypes that our society has
on criminals and their morality.
For example, in the
episode when Mal has just decided that he wants to return the medicine to the
people of Paradiso. Mal has just
returned to the ship and he and his crew are in the cargo hold looking at the
stolen medicine. One of the crew members asks Mal what they should tell Niska,
the person who hired them to steal the cargo.
Mal says that they can tell Niska that the job went badly when they go
to give Niska the half of their payment he gave them in advance. At this point, Wash tells Mal that if he
wants to tell that story then now would be good time. Mal turns to find a group of Niska’s men
walking into their cargo bay. One of
Niska’s men points out that they didn’t make the rendezvous, then accuses Mal
of trying to steal Niska’s cargo and his money.
Mal quickly dismisses the claim that he was trying to get away with the
money and the cargo by saying, “Interestingly, neither.”Niska’s man doesn’t
understand what Mal means by this. From
here things get heated and a fight breaks out between the crew of the Serenity and Niska’s men. Mal is facing
defeat when a member of his crew shoots the man that was about to kill him in
the leg. Mal then returns the medicine,
which is elaborated on more later on in the essay, and the final scene is Mal
talking to Niska’s last remaining man.
Niska’s man is tightly tied up on the ground. Mal holds up a wad of all the money Niska
paid them in advance and tells Niska’s man to return it to Niska. Niska’s man spits in disgust at this request
and mal attempts to reason with the man by saying, “We’re not thieves. Well, we are thieves. Point is, we’re not
taking what’s his.” Niska’s man
continues to refuse so Mal pushes him in front of their ship’s engine and he
gets sucked in and is killed.
Mal’s actions in
this scene speak very clearly on his moral character. Mal could have easily kept the money and ran
away after defeating Niska’s men, but since they didn’t actually complete the
mission by delivering the stolen cargo to Niska, he didn’t want to take his
money. Mal easily could have run away
with the money after defeating Niska’s men, but felt obligated to do the right
thing by returning the money. Mal again
shows his morality when he says, “We’re not thieves. Well, we are thieves. Point is, we’re not taking what’s his.” What Mal means by this is that they steal
when they are hired to do so, because they need to make money to stay
alive. They don’t steal things just to
steal things, they only steal when they are hired to do so.
Another example is in one of the final scenes
of the episode when Mal and Zoe, one of his shipmates who helped him steal the
cargo, are riding an ATV with cargo attached to the back along a dirt road at
night. The two stop and get off the ATV
and Mal says that they should drag the cargo from where they stopped, and leave
it just off of the street. Mal then says
that they can call and notify the sheriff where the cargo is once they’re
safely away in space, at which point the sheriff comes out of hiding and says,
“Why not tell him in person?” The
sheriff and his deputies then all come out and inform Mal that they had
received word of a ship just outside of town.
One of the deputies then begins inspecting the cargo they had brought
back while the sheriff talks directly to Mal and says, “Didn’t expect to see
you comin’ back.” Mal then says that he
didn’t expect to be coming. At this
point the deputy has finished checking the cargo and informs the sheriff that
nothing is missing from the medicine supply.
The sheriff then ponders for a second and says (referring back to an
earlier scene) that Mal told the truth back in town and that these are hard
times. The sheriff then says, “A man can
get a job. He might not look too close
at what that job is. But a man learns
all the details to a situation like ours (referring to the town of Paradiso and
the disease that plagues it)…well…then he has a choice.” To this Mal responds by saying that he
doesn’t believe that a man does have a choice.
At this point the sheriff simply says to his deputies that they should
move the crates back to town and Mal and Zoe return to their ship.
In this scene the
sheriff said that once you learn the details of a situation like Paradiso’s,
like Mal had earlier when he saw how bad the disease in the town was, then that
person then has a choice. When Mal says,
“I don’t believe he does,” he is referring to his moral opinion that after
seeing how the disease was affecting the town, the right choice in his mind
would be to return the medicine. Mal
felt that it was his moral obligation to make up for the wrong that he had done
when he stole the medicine by returning it to the people of Paradiso. Mal didn’t have to return the medicine. He could have easily just looked back at the
situation and seen that he had done wrong.
But instead of just looking back he understood what he had done and what
he had to do to make up for it even after breaking the law in the first place.
The writers of Firefly use these many instances of Mal
and his crew doing the right thing to argue that, just because Mal and his crew
are breaking the law on this mission, people assuming that they will do immoral
things is wrong because not all people who break the law can be classified into
one big group. The real world
implication of this argument is that stereotyping people to be immoral based on
characteristics they possess is unfair.
As mentioned before,
stereotypes that portray a group, or groups, as being immoral based on their
characteristics are evident in our society all the time, and they are often
extremely unfair to those being stereotyped against. The following articles help backup the claim
that the stereotypes our society has on groups of people are unfair.
Kimberly Maclin is a Psychology
professor at the University of Northern Iowa who specializes in research about
Criminal Stereotypes. In her article "The Criminal Stereotype"
Maclin talks about two studies that she conducted in which she asked students
in El Paso, Texas to list the first 10 things that come to mind when they hear
the word "criminal." She then used the information from her first
study to create a questionnaire about what characteristics a person would
associate with a criminal, which she gave to a new group of students. The
results of her studies found people to believe that 40% of criminals are
African-American, 30% are Hispanic, 20% are Caucasian, and 10% are Asian. Other
common benefactors people associated with criminals that the study found were
baggy clothes, short or no hair, and tattoos.
From these two studies Maclin derived that "Because criminal stereotypes may interfere with fair treatment and
fair allowance of opportunities towards those individuals who fit our criminal
stereotypes, being aware of criminal stereotypes and understanding what they
consist of has important implications for the criminal justice system."
This effectively
portrays the argument that it is wrong to stereotype a certain group of people
to be immoral because, as Dr. Maclin said, those criminal stereotypes lead to
the unfair treatment of those being stereotyped. And the studies that she
conducted showed that we as people stereotype certain characteristics to be
those of criminals, such as race, tattoos, hairstyle, and the size of their
clothing. Read those again in your head.
Think about how ridiculous it is to know that somebody would assume a
person to be a criminal simply because their clothes are baggy, or because they
happen to be a certain race. The study proves that we stereotype. You might not have needed the study to tell
you that, as you probably have some stereotypes of your own, as does everybody.
But what if a judge, or a police officer or a juror, stereotype a person based
on any of those characteristics? Those
stereotypes could ruin a person’s life.
This is why it is unfair for us to stereotype people. When we judge a
person based on a stereotype, we have already put them in a hole which they may
not come out of.
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