Hello everyone and welcome to another Firefly discussion post, this time looking at episode 13, Heart of Gold. The “cold opens” of sorts on this show are always good and throw you right into a new scenario. This one involved a guy flanked by men on horseback while he was riding in a hovercraft that was very remeniscent of the ones in Star Wars The Phantom Menace. The guy in the hovercraft was in no way likeable, using painful looking DNA samplers and being generally derogatory to woman for most of his tenure during the episode. I didn’t even feel bad when the mother was an absolute savage and shot him in the head at point-blank range. The lines to her baby about saying hello and goodbye to his daddy in quick succession were brutally brilliant.

Inara is the one who the ladies (who Inara makes clear are whores rather than companions like herself) and I loved the line “I can’t guarantee that they’ll handle it particularly well” when offering the crew’s help. She knows Mal Will help though and that said a lot. They played up the will-they-won’t they relationship between Inara and Mal a lot this episode and I didn’t realise how invested in their possible relationship I was. After Mal slept with Mandy it just seemed that Inara was annoyed when pretending she was fine but I felt so bad for her when she started to break down and cry! And then at the end I thought they were finally going to get together but instead she decided to leave the ship. There is one episode left to resolve this so they better do it! They are both as bad as each other and they really need to sort this out.

It was weird but also very satisfying to see the whole group strut out to help, but they were all given some good moments, including some unexpected and light-heated comedy from River. Book was somewhat underutilised but I guess there was only so much you can do in forty minutes. Jayne did exactly what you would expect Jayne to do at this type of establishment but it was the little interaction between Kay-Lee and Wash discussing whether people thought she was pretty that made me smile. It seems that you can group these characters which ever way you want and you are always going to strike gold in some way. Speaking of Wash, they can’t just start teasing him and Zoe wanting a baby and not follow up. I demand a happy ending with her being pregnant before we get to the end of all this. Will they though? I guess I’ll just have to keep watching to find out.

DD Rating: 8.5/10