FOX Broadcasting Company: Firefly

ON ‘ARIEL’
By Jose Molina

Hello, everyone --

I’ve been asked by our cyberfriends at Fox to pitch in with an article detailing how “Ariel” came to life. So here I am. About to detail.

Cairo, 1843. Wait, that’s wrong.

Santa Monica, September of 2002. Yeah, that’s better. To quote a famous dead guy, I was nervous. Very, very dreadfully nervous. I’d been a fan of Buffy and Angel and the whole Mutant Enemy camp for years, and this was my first shot at showing the best writers in television that I didn’t suck. Still waiting for confirmation on that one. Um... guys?

So, it started with an idea from Joss: he wanted to do a story where Simon hired the crew for a heist. The rest was up for grabs. But since the folks around the office didn’t take kindly to my random grabbing, I decided it was best for everyone if I worked at home.

After approaching the story from a few different angles, the staff and I finally landed on a take we liked. I pitched it to executive producer Tim Minear, who in typical Tim fashion said “That’s great! What else ya got?” He was kidding. (I think.) We spent the next couple of days hammering out the details, then rolled on over to the Paramount lot to pitch our ideas to Joss, who was in the middle of playing spin the bottle with David Boreanaz. Or he was directing “Spin the Bottle” for Angel, I get confused. He said something along the lines of “me like” and producer Ben Edlund and I trucked back to our Santa Monica offices to put the finishing touches on the outline. At around 1:30 that morning, we finished the outline and cracked a celebratory beverage. I think Ben enjoyed it more than I did because he was laughing on his way out the door; it might have had something to do with the four days I had to write the script. He’d recently written “Jaynestown” in about that amount of time and he was anticipating how much fun I was about to have. That must have been it, right?

So I spent four crazy days writing constantly, cursing in Chinese, sleeping very little and having dreams about playing bocci ball with Adam Baldwin. I love Adam dearly, but in my dreams he cheats. When I emerged from my cocoon on Monday, I had a script... and an epiphany. Despite all my anxiety, I actually had tons of fun writing the script. I loved writing these characters, I loved living in this world, I loved everything. YOU GUYS! (sniff)

I also loved being done! And watching as the best cast and crew in town turned the pretty pictures in my head into reality was a blast. I’m extremely grateful and indebted to everyone who worked their gluteal regions off to make this episode as cool as it is. It’s a bit of a departure -- we have a Core planet, sonic rifles, and some big bad villains swooping in to complicate things. It’s sort of Ocean’s Eleven meets The X-Files in space. Or Curse of the Mummy meets The A-Team. Also heavily influenced by Chico and the Man. All right, I don’t know. Just watch it and you can tell me.

I hope you enjoy the show as much as we enjoyed making it. I think you will!