The episode we were shooting when I got to tell everybody that we were cancelled. I love that episode because it dealt with war, Mal’s morality and a dead body, which is always fun. It bears an enormous sadness considering it’s all about death and betrayal and honor and sadness - it all worked out fine considering things. It bore that because everybody knew that it was over. Except me, who still refuses to admit it. It’s part of my charm, really. Tim and I wrote it together and I wrote the flashback. I was waiting for word and Peter Chernin had a call in to me and I didn’t know what was happening, so I wrote a joke flashback that was basically me and Tim in the trenches, waiting. The privates were all executives that kept coming in and putting us on hold. I gave it to Tim and it was actually an incredibly emotional joke, because it basically ended with the two of us waiting together to hear word; listening to Mulan Rouge on hold in the trenches. It was really Mal and Zoe, but Tim and I knew who it was, though neither of us will say which one of us is Zoe, because we both want to be her.

........

Gail Berman called me and the only thing I had to say was, “Will you allow me to try and take this somewhere else?” She said yes, I thanked her and that was it. Then I went to the set and made the announcement.

Great effects in that episode. There was a pretty exciting chase in a snow canyon between two spaceships. Which is amazing now that I’m working on another show where we can’t afford to have a room. Now it’s like, “Can I have a room with a table?” “No, it’s too expensive.” Joss and I wrote this episode and we were sort of writing it while I was directing. The scene that I remember the most is when I was shooting a certain scene on the bridge, Joss showed up on the set, pulled me aside and said, “They’ve cancelled the show. Do you want to tell people now or do you want to keep shooting?” I said we should tell them. We gathered everybody around and Joss said they pulled the plug on the show, they’re not going to order anymore and he vowed to fight for the show in any way that he could, which he has been doing ever since. So everybody went off and got drunk, I guess, and then we came back. This was a Friday night and I stopped in the middle of shooting a scene. We came back on a Monday and the first scene back I had to shoot - when people look at the DVD, they should look at the scene where it’s Mal and Inara and Zoe sitting around the dining room table, laughing their asses off as Mal is recounting a funny story about his dead privates [soldiers]. So the first thing we had to shoot with these people after telling them they were cancelled was a scene where they had to laugh hysterically. That was good acting. The thing is, it never became depressing in a way. We still had fun shooting the rest of that episode and I remember that the last thing I shot was the flashback to the battle scene, which is one of the things I’m proud of because it looks really cool and Joss wrote that scene.