In this original pilot episode, the crew transports passengers to another planet to sell salvaged goods only to discover that an undercover Alliance agent is on board the Serenity.

Series Information:

Firefly is an American science fiction television series created by writer/director Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, under his Mutant Enemy Productions. Its naturalistic future setting, modeled after traditional Western movie motifs, it presents an atypical backdrop for the science fiction narrative. Whedon served as executive producer, along with Tim Minear.

Firefly premiered in the United States and Canada on the FOX network on September 20, 2002. It was canceled after only eleven of the fourteen produced episodes were aired. This may be because FOX aired the episodes out of order. Despite the series' relatively short life span, it received strong sales when it was released on DVD, and has impressive fan support campaigns. It won an Emmy in 2003 for "Outstanding Special Visual Effects for a Series". The post-airing success of the show led Whedon and Universal Pictures to produce a film based on the series, titled Serenity after the fictional Firefly-class spaceship featured in the show.

The series is set in the year 2517, after humans have arrived at a new star system, and follows the adventures of the renegade crew of Serenity, a Firefly-class spaceship. The ensemble cast portrays the nine characters who live on Serenity. Whedon pitched the show as "nine people looking into the blackness of space and seeing nine different things".

The show explores the lives of people who fought on the losing side of a civil war and now make a living on the outskirts of the society, as well as the pioneer culture that exists on the fringes of their star system. In addition, it is a future where the only two surviving superpowers, the United States and China, fused to form the central federal government, called the Alliance, resulting in the fusion of the two cultures as well. According to Whedon's vision, "nothing will change in the future: technology will advance, but we will still have the same political, moral, and ethical problems as today."

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