Have you listened to the commentary at all? It's pretty interesting - for starters, the episode is apparently an attempt by Joss to use abstract ideas out of Sartre's Nausea mixed up with emotions. Oh, and he's a bit obsessed with River's feet.
If I remember it rightly, a lot of it is about how people see objects and how the very fact of an object is mind-blowing aside from any meaning assigned to it (which now reminds me of Caz at the end of Curse of Chalion, interesting). Early and River are very deliberately mirrored as both outsiders who don't see objects like the rest of the people on the ship, and in the way they are very tactile with objects and the way they move through the spaces. They're both not quite right, both dangerous and dangerously intuitive (though River is pyschic and Early apparently just has super-intuition). But River sees the gun as a branch, she gives it a meaning outside of being a weapon while Early sees it purely as functional, something finely crafted for a purpose of hurting.
It hadn't occurred to me that Early could have been an Alliance experiment too, that's a very interesting theory. Especially since in the commentary for Serenity, Joss makes a point of saying all the people who are pure products of the Alliance - River, Inara, the Operative - are very intuitive as well. It doesn't necessarily mean he is Alliance purpose-built/controlled, but it does imply he is very much part of an Alliance culture.
I don't know much about it, but there are comics written by Joss and someone else that fill the gap between the series and film, and I'm about 95% sure I'd heard Early was in those, because I remember thinking "but surely he died?" so it looks like someone picked him up.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2007-08-19 07:46 pm (UTC)If I remember it rightly, a lot of it is about how people see objects and how the very fact of an object is mind-blowing aside from any meaning assigned to it (which now reminds me of Caz at the end of Curse of Chalion, interesting). Early and River are very deliberately mirrored as both outsiders who don't see objects like the rest of the people on the ship, and in the way they are very tactile with objects and the way they move through the spaces. They're both not quite right, both dangerous and dangerously intuitive (though River is pyschic and Early apparently just has super-intuition). But River sees the gun as a branch, she gives it a meaning outside of being a weapon while Early sees it purely as functional, something finely crafted for a purpose of hurting.
It hadn't occurred to me that Early could have been an Alliance experiment too, that's a very interesting theory. Especially since in the commentary for Serenity, Joss makes a point of saying all the people who are pure products of the Alliance - River, Inara, the Operative - are very intuitive as well. It doesn't necessarily mean he is Alliance purpose-built/controlled, but it does imply he is very much part of an Alliance culture.
I don't know much about it, but there are comics written by Joss and someone else that fill the gap between the series and film, and I'm about 95% sure I'd heard Early was in those, because I remember thinking "but surely he died?" so it looks like someone picked him up.