Serenity Villain Personifies the Sinister Side of Star Trek’s Politics

As disparate as they may feel today, Star Trek and Firefly started with similar impulses. “Wagon Train to the Stars” is how Gene Roddenberry pitched his show to producers, evoking the TV series about explorers on the Western frontier that ran from 1957 to 1962. For Firefly Joss Whedon looked to a perhaps more storied Western to mine, 1939’s Stagecoach. It’s the John Ford movie about strangers on a ride through Apache territory who hate each other along post-Civil War dividing lines.

That distinction of Western influences would portend to how the series’ execution would be lightyears apart. Star Trek focused on the best that human society had to offer, highly capable experts living in a utopian future. By comparison, the crew of the Firefly-class cargo ship the Serenity, who are led by the uncouth Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), exhibited both a rebellious streak and hearts of gold. Yet the two properties didn’t have much to say to one another until Firefly made the leap to the big screen for the 2005 movie: Serenity. Which is about to turn 20.

In addition to tying up the show’s final plot points, the movie articulated the series’ individualist ethos not just by giving more attention to the Alliance, which already vaguely resembled Trek‘s United Federation of Planets, but by giving the giving the multi-planet big government a true believer in the form of Serenity’s villain, an empathetic assassin called the Operative, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor. The implications of the choice reverberate evermore today.

A Rebel Yell Across the Stars

Released about three years after the show’s ignoble cancellation, Serenity had to both please the cult following built up around Firefly and general audiences who had never heard of it. Writer-director Whedon did so, perhaps counterintuitively, by leaning into the show’s mythology. The series proper began with physician Simon Tam (Sean Maher) hiring Mal and crew to transport his gifted but troubled sister River (Summer Glau) away from the Alliance. Simultaneously Shepherd Book (Ron Glass) joined the crew, a religious man of peace with a vague past connection to the Alliance.

Important as it was to the genesis of the series, the Alliance itself rarely appeared in full during the show’s single season. Dangerous, officious men wearing blue gloves would materialize in ominous scenes, and occasionally Serenity would run afoul of specific agents. But like the Reavers—the cannibal savages and stand-in for Indigenous American stereotypes who fully appeared in only one episode—the Alliance was more like a mythological boogie man than a proper antagonist in the series.

Because the audience was left to speculate about the bent of the Alliance, it’s no surprise that they drew parallels to the United Federation of Planets from Star Trek. The specifics of the Federation developed across the three seasons of the original season, and found full articulation in the movies and in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Although certain stories did show how some planets balked at the requirements imposed upon members, and the series did occasionally show the dignity of opposing organizations such as the Klingon Empire and the Romulan Star Empire, the Federation was largely presented as an ideal of enlightened progress.

The Alliance of Firefly and Serenity preached the same ideals. However, Mal Reynolds and his first mate Zoe Washburn (Gina Torres) are both Browncoats, veterans of a war against the unification of planets that created the Alliance. To them the Alliance represents forced conformity and the loss of freedom, qualities made all the more clear when the Alliance sent an Operative (Ejiofor) to hunt for River Tam and the Serenity.

Fighting the Federation

During his first scene in Serenity, the Operative could be mistaken for any high-ranking member of the Federation or of its military/exploratory arm Starfleet. He closely reviews archival footage of River and even when he dresses down an Alliance administrator (Michael Hitchcock) for failing to prevent Simon from rescuing his sister, the Operative remains calm and dignified. Reasonable.

Already a master at embodying wide-eyed empathy, Ejiofor somehow manages to make the Operative’s clear condescension to the official feel like genuine concern. The Operative even maintains this sense of warmth while making the bureaucrat literally fall on a sword. “This is a good death,” he comfortingly tells the man, looking calmly into his scared, dying eyes.

As demonstrated by the sword he wields, the Operative represents the edge of the Alliance and, by analogy, the Federation. The Operative works as a villain because he’s a true believer. The Operative eventually expresses that ideology late in the film too. When Mal confronts him via video call for killing every man (including series regular Book), woman, and child who sheltered the Serenity, the antihero righteously fumes, “I don’t kill children.”

“I do. If I have to,” responds the Operative, with calm assurance. “I believe in something greater than myself,” he continues. “A better world. A world without sin.” There’s a softness in Ejiofor’s voice as he delivers these lines, and the creased eyebrows and sense of resignation in his body language suggests disappointment. Not disappointment in himself. He realizes that his actions make him exactly the type of person who cannot be in that paradise.

“There’s no place for me there,” he tells Mal. “I’m a monster. What I do is evil. I have no illusions about it, but it must be done.” No, the Operative is disappointed that Mal just cannot see the goodness of the Alliance.

Through his assurance in a greater moral good, the Operative draws the clearest connection between the Alliance and the Federation. To be sure, Star Trek does at times critique the Federation. Ro Laren’s arc in Next Generation, and stories about the ex-Federation resistance group the Maquis, who appeared in Deep Space Nine and Voyager, focus on people who reject the organization’s ideals. Firefly‘s contemporary Enterprise depicted the messy founding of the Federation. More recently Strange New Worlds devoted an entire episode to a character questioning the moral value of the Federation.

And yet, as that Strange New Worlds episode demonstrated, Star Trek fundamentally believes that the Federation is good, and it just does not understand why anyone would disagree.

Against Unity

At this point, Trekkies might raise reasonable objections to Serenity‘s critique. Even leaving aside Whedon’s well-documented abuses and the social media presence of Adam Baldwin (who plays tough guy Jayne on the show), Firefly and Serenity cannot escape the nasty implications of the Western tropes they adapt.

Whenever Mal and Zoe talk about the glory of the way of life they fought to preserve, only the most ignorant viewer would fail to see the connection between the Browncoats and Confederate gray. The language of Mal and Zoe copies rhetoric of the “Lost Cause,” the romanticizing of the antebellum South as a place of agrarian harmony and not a brutal economy based on slavery. Worse yet are the Reavers whom, by Whedon’s own admission, replicate the role of Indigenous peoples in Westerns. Even if Serenity reveals them to be settlers driven mad by the Alliance’s meddling, the Reavers function exactly like the Apaches depicted in Stagecoach or, before that, the savages conjured by Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative or the pretexts of Andrew Jackson’s policies.

Yet for all these problems, Serenity‘s critique remains valid. The Federation does adhere to a particularly Western notion of progress, and thus springs from the same root as the enlightenment colonial project and expanse of capitalism. It’s not hard to point to instances of sexism and racism within episodes of Star Trek to see the problems with taking this perspective as an inherent and unquestionable good. It is also hard not to see how excesses, failures, and even atrocities committed by a civilization can and have been swept under the rug because of rose-tinted ideals reaching toward “the greater good” and “manifest destiny.”

With his earnestness and killing kindness, the Operative represents the hidden horror of the Federation. Twenty years later, when Firefly and Serenity have once again become cult objects and Star Trek carries on as a massive franchise, that critique is all the more necessary, and all the more cutting.