My single favorite episode. I broke the story very specifically with Tim. I pitched all of the flashbacks, very specifically the structure and I’m blowing my horn about what I had to do with that episode, because I did not write it and I did not direct, and it really is our best. Tim just wrote an amazing script, David Solomon, who’s been with me since the beginning of Buffy, shot it very beautifully. David Boyd, the D.P., brought in that insane reversal stock for the flashbacks that provided that incredible look. I don’t think anything ever got to the heart of both what we wanted the show to be sort of what a show should be, what the show was and how it was than that one. Apart from the flashbacks, just the very ending, just seeing Serenity from across a crowded room and falling in love, it explains so much about our characters, and who they were and what they wanted. It was such a simple premise: this ship is going to break, we’re all going to die because of something really, really mundane. I just think there was more emotion, surprising humor and a perfect kind of structure to that thing than anything else we did. To me, it was the most moving episode that we did.

That’s probably my favorite episode and probably one my favorite things I’ve written in a long time. I think Joss and I both sort of did our best work on Firefly.

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I remember I was going to write the next episode and Joss had the idea that they run out of gas. I’m like "That’s great, but now I have to write 54 pages. What does that mean?" We looked at it this way, we looked at it that way. There’s a tiny part of the story where this other crew comes aboard the ship, but that was originally going to be the story. They run out of gas and we get to see another scavenger ship with a crew not unlike the crew of Serenity, but they’re bad guys. That was the idea, but it didn’t thrill me. I remember Joss and I went out to dinner. We were eating our steak and Joss said, "Can the episode open with Mal being shot in the gut?" And I said, "Now you’re talking."

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I get a call from the network and they’re confused. They’re confused because it all seems to be taking place out of order. They were asking me if I could put it in chronological order. I had to explain to them that here was no chronological order for this episode. If I put it in chronological order, it wouldn’t make any sense because it’s jumping around like a fever dream and that it has it’s own kind of dream logic. I added that no one who has seen it has been confused in the slightest. But they just assume that people are too stupid to follow something like that, I guess. Basically my feeling was that if they insisted I put it in chronological order, I would just quit. There would be nothing I could do at that point. But, look, there were some people at the network saying that. For the most part, the executives who were covering this show loved this episode. They totally got it, completely protected it and it got to air as conceived.