This, “Objects in Space,” and Serenity, and my rewatch will be done. (Technically, it is done - I finished re-watching Serenity today and am working on watching Joss with the director’s commentary. But I still have the rewatch writeups to finish.)
Heart of Gold is definitely one of my less-favorite Firefly episodes, but I can’t say it’s utterly terrible - Firefly at its worst is still better than a lot of other TV shows. Even so, it’s a fairly weak episode.
There are some nice continuity touches - Jayne doesn’t kiss anyone on the lips - and some cute lines (“Were I unwed, I would take you in a manly fashion,”) but the episode itself doesn’t do all that much. The only long-term payoff, Inara’s departure, is canceled out by show’s cancellation not too long after. I wonder, had Firefly continued, how long Inara would have stayed off-ship (or if she would’ve left at all, seeing as it would be hard to have a main character away from the plot arc for so too many episodes.
Virtual Firefly, which attempted to translate the comics + their own set-up + Serenity into 1.5 seasons of TV scripts for Firefly, used Inara’s off-ship time to set up the introduction of The Operative, which was an interesting way to take things, but I don’t know if Joss would’ve done the same. I wonder if he was planning on having Inara leave, and, if so, if she really would’ve stayed off-ship until the events of Serenity. Granted, Joss did seem to have trouble figuring out what to do with Inara and Book at points, but I also can’t imagine him leaving her out of things for any longer than a few episodes at most.)*
The actress playing Nandi does a wonderful job, and the episode itself is strongly focused around Mal, Inara, and Nandi. Nandi and Mal do have chemistry, and Morena Baccarin gets in a lovely acting scene crying her heart out, but this love triangle is just as unsatisfying as the attempt at establishing a Tracey-Kaylee-Simon connection in “The Message.” While “The Message” fails in pacing and devoting enough time to Tracey, “Heart of Gold” devotes most all its time to Nandi and Mal - and “Heart of Gold” fails just as badly, because in the end, both Nandi and Tracey end up dead. Spending so much time establishing a character with so little payoff is painful: just as Nandi’s about to confront Mal over Inara’s feelings for him, there’s convenient gunfire, and any other development that Nandi could’ve provided is wasted by her death.
Nandi, more than Tracey, feels like a wasted opportunity. What I really wanted were some Nandi and Inara scenes: if not now, then later in the series, provided Nandi survived. (I wouldn’t have continued her Mal relationship beyond this episode, though: Firefly has enough unrequited love between Kaylee-Simon and Mal-Inara, and add in the relationship issues of Zoe and Wash and there’s more than enough romantic-relationship-drama to go around.) But Nandi was wasted in the sense that she knows Inara and knows a good deal about Inara’s past: although the series cancellation made the point moot, a live Nandi would’ve been better for future seasons of the show than dead Nandi.
It would’ve been nice seeing more Inara-Nandi interaction instead of Mal-Nandi. That’s, essentially, what I wanted from Heart of Gold: more insight into Inara and less of the love triangle. I wonder if Nandi’s “You haven’t aged a day” comment really did play into Inara’s illness somehow, and if so, how that would have worked. (I don’t think Nandi had any idea about Inara’s illness.)
The rest of the episode - Wash, Kaylee, and Zoe really have nothing to do, and there’s nothing else that gives any development to any of the other characters. River, Inara, and Simon get relegated to baby delivery. The subplot with Book and a possible prayer meeting gets forgotten.
And Rance Burgess is pretty much the cardboard-cookie-cutout, obligated-to-hate-him, horrible person of a villain. There’s really no depth to him: he’s disgusting and set up so that you can cheer his death without feeling guilty about it. The whole defense of the Heart of Gold is pretty much a foregone conclusion, and it’s not that interesting. Ultimately, that’s really all there is to say about this episode: the actual plot isn’t very interesting, and although Nandi is, she’s dead and gone by the end of the episode, with nothing further revealed about any of our main characters. Of all the episodes, it’s probably the most disposable: all it does is provide the impetus for Inara to get off-ship, and, as she tells Mal, she knew before this anyway.
*If you haven’t read Virtual Firefly, it’s a fan-made series of TV scripts. I strongly recommend it. You can check it out at: http://stillflying.net/
