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''Mal's politics are very reactionary and 'Big government is bad' and 'Don't interfere with my life,''' Whedon explains. ''And sometimes he's wrong -- because sometimes the Alliance is America, this beautiful shining light of democracy. But sometimes the Alliance is America in Vietnam: we have a lot of petty politics, we are way out of our league and we have no right to control these people. And yet! Sometimes the Alliance is America in Nazi Germany. And Mal can't see that, because he was a Vietnamese.''

The show's other central concern diverges intriguingly from Buffy's universe, where fate and destiny loom large. ''I'm a very hard-line, angry atheist,'' Whedon says. ''Yet I am fascinated by the concept of devotion. And I want to explore that.'' (His existential revelation arrived during an adolescent viewing of ''Close Encounters of the Third Kind'' -- an experience soon followed by a reading of Sartre's ''Nausea.'') Mal tells the preacher who is a passenger on his ship, ''You're welcome on my boat; God ain't.'' If Buffy is the chosen one, forced to struggle with a responsibility that comes from outside, Mal is defiant in his belief that his fate is meaningless. ''This is a man who has learned that when he believed in something it destroyed him,'' Whedon explains. ''So what he believes in is the next job, the next paycheck and keeping his crew safe.'' It is a typical Whedonian inversion: much the way Buffy is a demon-killer obsessed with the morality of killing, Mal is a man of action frozen by his conviction that nothing really matters, a man forced to choose his morality at each juncture. ''Whatever I may think of him politically, he's a guy who looks into the void and sees nothing but the void -- and says there is no moral structure, there is no help, no one's coming, no one gets it, I have to do it.''

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