Vampire Noir and Space Westerns
The hectic world of Tim Minear
-Victor D. Infante

Between minding a vampire with a soul and a penchant for chains on one hand, and a rag-tag band of interstellar brigands on the other, Tim Minear must be the busiest man in television. (Except for maybe his boss, Joss Whedon, who’s got to juggle all of this and a certain blonde vampire slayer, including her forthcoming animated series.)

“I write television,” says Minear, when asked what it’s like to be jumping from such disparate shows as Angel (where he was co-executive producer) and the new space opera, Firefly (where he’s showrunner.) “I used to write Lois & Clark and X-Files. It’s just what I do.”

But he is busy. At the time he was interviewed, Minear and the crew at Mutant Enemy Productions had broken five episodes of both Angel and Firefly, and was set to begin filming on both.

Exhaustion aside, however, Minear is brimming with enthusiasm with both shows, particularly Firefly, which he gets to have a hand in building from the ground up.

“Firefly is science fiction,” says Minear. “It’s also a Western. It’s two great genres that taste great together. You can play all the great metaphors of the great Westerns.”

Despite the fantastic worlds of Mutant Enemy’s previous shows, Firefly more resembles Isaac Asimov’s “Human Universe” than it does to Star Trek’s “Quick! It’s an alien! We need a new forehead!” mentality. Meaning, no aliens at all.

“I’d say the basic premise of the show is getting by,” says Minear. “You can think of it as a Reconstruction era Western, set after a big war to unite planets--totalitarian independents vs. a rebel alliance. The crew would be Southerners. The South has lost, ands they’re all people trying to survive afterwards, although our struggle was for more noble values than preserving slavery.”

The story centers on the crew of the Firefly class transport ship Serenity and it’s captain, Mal Reynolds (played by Nathan Fillion) who, according to Minear, is “basically the guy who lost the war.” Other characters include a mercenary who would betray everyone in a heartbeat, a Madame of an interstellar bordello and a pair of fugitives on the run from the government.

“Sometimes they take legitimate jobs,” says Minear, “sometimes they do crime. They’re kind of scavengers. They’re brigands...This shows less about the art, but the getting by of it.”

Minear doesn’t dwell too much on the fantastic nature of the shows he works on, concentrating more on the humanity of a group of space brigands than the futuristic technology. (Which, by all accounts, will be a little shoddy by Starfleet standards.) It’s the same attitude that allowed him to concentrate not on what make his other noirish hero, Angel, and push him from being a detached onlooker to a full-fledged participant in the human experience.

“He’s physically inhuman,” says Minear, but he’s got a soul. He’s already a guy. You do sort of take your own experienmce and graft it on. What does it represent that he has a past, or feels shame, or feels like he needs to atone for something? These are things that aren’t exactly alien to us.”

Minear explains that an episode of Angel is basically back-engineered, with the writers and producers deciding where they want the characters to go (both in an episode and over the course of a season) and then figuring out how they get there.

“Usually,” he says, “what we do is decide what we need to accomplish with the main characters emotionally. Sometimes it’s some cool visual, sometimes its a metaphor for the thing your trying to say about the main characters... You might have just an image, like with Billy, we figured out that he touched men, infects them with an intense hatred of women.”

At first, the producers considered what would happen if this had happened to Angel, realizing that he’d become an extremely dangerous, remorseless monsterjust like he had done on Buffy. “Then we thought, what if it happened with Wesley? That would be more interesting. We got the image of Wes going all Jack Torrance on Fred, stalking Fred through the Hotel. The catch was that Wesley’s interested in Fred, and afraid that he’s going to blow it. That idea dictated what comes before it.”

The scenes of Wesly (Alexis Denisoff) chasing Fred (Amy Acker) through the hotel with an axe are positively chilling, and well-foreshadow the events of Wesley’s journey from gentle and intellectual ex-Watcher into estrangement from his friends and a descent into darkness.

“We thought he was boring,” says Minear of Wesley. “He was looking shit up, he was being English, and being Giles. He was this weak tea version of Giles, pretty much all we did was let him grow some stubble, take off glasses and slit his throat, and suddenly he’s more interesting.
“We knew this year that Wes would fall in with Holtz this year. We knew Holtz wascoming since episode 9 of season two. We knew, we just didn’t know how. At some point he was going to be a vampire/vampire hunter. We decided it would be more interesting if he was just a guy. That’s an interesting moral dilemma. He’s not wrong. He’s not this evil vampire you can kill. if he is a bastard, if his moral compass is still messed up, its all Angel’s fault anyway.”

Part of the problem with a show like Angel, as opposed to its predecessor, Buffy, is that the overarching metaphor of the show isn’t as clear. According to Minear, Buffy’s metaphor is very clear: high school is Hell. Girl power. The phases of life. With Angel, it’s not that simple.

“In Angel it’s necessary to go through operatic situations. It’s a little more style than substance vis a vis Buffy. Lot of work to keep that level of melodrama. The baby thing worked because it had specific phases. It helped pay off the previous thing with Darla. You don’t get to knock around your ex-girlfriend, have sex with her and almost commit suicide. No, there are consequences. She shows up with a bun in the oven. Sometimes its hard to come up with situations that affect Angel as a character directly but this one left us with some interesting questions. How? What does it mean? Is it human?

“Basically, we took Angel, gave him the thing he shouldn’t have, and then broke his heart. And then sunk him to the bottom of the ocean. Now we have an interesting relationship to play: Angel and his estranged son. We also have interesting new characters to add to mix, to alter the dynamic so they don’t get stale. Angel works best as high melodrama, almost to point of corny. When you play the pain of “YOU TOOK MY SON,” that’s when its cool. Keeping it at that pitch is not a terrible idea for us. Happy ideas Happy characters with no problems aren’t interesting. For instance, most of (Gunn and Fred’s) problems have been reactive to other people’s problems, aside from that thing from Gunn’s past. Looks like that could change. I’m not saying that Gunn dies in episode two of season 4. I’m not saying that.”

Whether Gunn survives or notand remember, this is a writer who’s appeared on fan boards with posts such as “I killed Doyle, and I’d do it again” and “I’m busy killing your favorite characters”Minear claims that one of the themes of next season’s Angel will be “Regression,” wherein there will be stories that reflect a bit on who the characters were, as opposed to who they are now.

“There’s a lot to explore,” says Minear, “The whole question of Angel’s relationship with his son; what does the son mean? How does Wesley fit in, who is he now? What is the new configuration? It’s not as clear as ‘My first year at college.’ It’s based on pieces of soup. What can we make of this that’ll be interesting, melodramtic, epic, bigger than life? I think we do that very well.”

(Victor D. Infante is a regular contributor to OC Weekly and the Worcester InCity Times. His book Learning to Speak: Selected Early Poems is available from Amazon.com, and he is currently seeking representation for his first screenplay, Nihilist Chic. Visit his web site at http://www.quantumredhead.com/victor.)

(c) Victor D. Infante, 2002