Now that was quite a ride.
We open with a with a typical day onboard the good ship Serenity. Inara and Kaylee are playing cards, Simon is preparing dinner, Jayne is being rude and crude, and River freaks out and tries to slash Jayne with a knife -- like I said typical. After River attacks Jayne, Mal has a talk with Simon. River is getting worse and he wants Simon to control her or they're off the boat.
"It's a Core planet. It's spotless. It's got sensors. And where it
ain't got sensors, there's Feds. All central planets are the same."
-- Zoe
Although Wash is anxious to visit Ariel, this week's new planet which is one of the central planets that make up the core of the infamous Alliance, Zoe refuses to set one foot on it. Mal agrees with her. The only reason they are here is to drop off Inara for her annual check up -- it's "Guild Law." Book apparently got off on a monastery for some meditation a few planets back.
The first look at a central planet is quite pretty combining industrial and futuristic elements quite nicely into the cityscape as Serenity lands. Inara informs Kaylee that the Companion policy on dating is "complicated." As far as Mal is concerned there "ain't no job worth havin'" in Alliance territory. But Simon has a rather intriguing job for them. He wants them to pull a heist at a local hospital. The medicine stored there means the heist will "pay for itself ten times over." That's the payment, the job is to get him and River into the hospital so he can use a "3-D nuero-imager" to figure out what they did to River at the Academy where she was held.
"It's all very sweet. Stealing from the rich, selling to the poor."
-- Wash
The beauty of the scheme is that being a government facility, the hospital will be quickly restocked by the Alliance and they'll never miss the stolen medicine. The problem is getting around hospital security. So we see a long planning session with Simon going over his plan. There are many volunteers for the leave the ship to get supplies part of the plan. Kaylee and Wash get stuck with the root through the garbage dump for hospital equipment and manage to score a discarded air ambulance that looks like a helicopter with no rotors and twin jet engines. Jayne gets the bribe people in exchange for uniforms, badges, and ID cards.
The next part involves Mal, Zoe, and Jayne playing paramedics. This leads a to a funny blooper style scene with them practicing their medical technobabble. Meanwhile Kaylee and Wash have the air ambulance looking like new -- I hope they keep it for a while.
"Now all we need are a couple of patients."
"Corpses actually. For this to work, River and I will have to be
dead."
"I'm starting to like this plan."
-- Mal, Simon, and Jayne
The plan initially goes off without a hitch. They don't even have to use the medical technobabble -- Jayne is so proud of finally getting his part right that he blurts it out anyway -- as they are waved through by a nurse. Or maybe he's just nervous because he's double crossing his people. He makes contact with a federal marshall who promises to make him a rich man once he delivers River and Simon to him.
On their way to the hospital's Diagnostic Ward, River reads a doctor's mind and realizes that he is giving a patient the wrong medicine. The patient goes into cardiac arrest and Simon rushes to his aid. He saves the patient and chews out a very confused young doctor who has no idea who he is.
Mal and Zoe are confronted by a suspicious doctor. Mal tries to reason with him while Zoe chooses the more subtle method of zapping him with paddles. They move on to the hospital's medical storage bay where they help themselves to its valuable medicine which they dump into the body shells in which they brought in Simon and River.
The special effects for the 3-D neuroimager are pretty cool. Simon can see and manipulate a 3D representation of River's brain. She's been lobotomized several times. The part of the brain which allows her to repress emotions has been removed -- turning River into a reverse Vulcan, unable to repress her emotions.
Jayne tells Simon that the plan has been changed and that they need to leave sooner. This allows him to turn them into the federal marshall who arrests Jayne along with them and decides to take the reward for catching River and Simon for himself.
River starts babbling, the Christmas metaphor of her rant shows that she knows about Jayne's betrayal and the union marshall's double cross but is unable to express it. While they are transferring them to a holding area Jayne attacks the marshalls and manages to kill one of them and they escape.
Mal realizes that something's wrong and tries to mount a rescue. Meanwhile, the Blue Hand Group from "The Train Job" arrive. The marshall informs them that they spoke to the prisoners. One of the Blue Hands pulls out a small antenna-like tube and the marshall and his men start bleeding from every orifice and die quite gruesomely.
River senses an exit and runs for it. After they hear the screams of the men who are being murdered by the BHs, Jayne and Simon follow her. Jayne has stolen a fancy alliance laser gun and tries to blow open a door with it. The gun proceeds to fizzle -- take that, traditional scifi! It doesn't even make a particularly nice club for beating down the door. It's up to Mal and Zoe with their obsolete projectile weapons who come to their rescue by blowing the door lock from outside.
"How was your check up?"
"The same as last year. What's going on here?"
"Let's see. We killed Simon and River. Stole a bunch of medicine. And
now the captain and Zoe are off springin' the others who got snatched
by the feds. Here they are now."
-- Kaylee and Inara
Everybody returns in the air ambulance, Wash prepares to take off, and all is right with the world. Simon heaps praise on Jayne for his heroic rescue when they got captured by the feds. Mal has a reward for him. He knocks Jayne out with a wrench and sticks him in the airlock.
He realizes that Jayne tipped off the feds about the Simon and River. Mal opens the airlock and starts venting the atmosphere -- his version of the ancient keel hauling of the traitor ritual. "You turn on any of my crew, you turn on me," is his explanation. Jayne asks Mal not to tell the others about his treason after he's dead. His sense of honor satisfied, Mal closes the airlock and leaves Jayne in their to think about what he's done. A corny but sweet moment between Simon and River closes out this excellent episode.
- Interesting bit of trivia: The official name of the alliance appears to be the Union of Allied Planets.
- Corruption appears to be widespread in the Alliance.
- The lasers versus bullets argument gets addressed in this episode. We see that the wealthy central planets do indeed have energy weapons. But we also see that they are unreliable. Or rather they work in a way that is completely unexpected. The weapons used by the Alliance officers appear to use high frequency sound waves to knock people unconscious. Consequently, when Jayne tries to use it to blow the door, it proves to be useless.
- There was a strong sense of closure to this episode. While I'd hate to see Firefly canceled, this episode would make a nice swan song for the series.
