About as big a labor of love that I’ve ever done and definitely one of the two or three episodes that I’m proudest of that I’ve made of any show. But not unstrange. It’s an odd little episode in some ways. It was very much an existential statement on the meaning of objects in space and how they contain meanings within themselves; how we approach that and about two people that see them in a way that every day people don’t, and what the essential difference is, which is that one of them, the bounty hunter, is innately bringing evil with him and one of them, River, is innately bringing love. That was sort of what I wanted to say with it; what I wanted to get into. It comes with probably the most pretentious, repetitive, and probably incoherent commentary that I have ever done. I really tried to explain exactly what it was I was trying to do and some of it defies explanation, because the ecstasy of meaninglessness is something that you can’t really convey very well in a boring commentary. But I think the episode itself does it beautifully. I love the way it plays with space and the way it plays with her as a sort of a formal device. She just flaws me in this episode; you see so much of the dancer in her in this episode. The way she moves around the ship, the way that touching every wall affects her, is truly beautiful. And the whole sequence in the beginning where she’s seeing into people’s thoughts was just such a delight to shoot; so ethereal. That’s where my wife looked at me and said, “You son of a bitch, you shot your ballet.”

And then we had Richard Brooks, who just flawed me. He so embraced what I was trying to do and was hilarious and menacing. He was everything he needed to be. I loved writing that character. The episode was very hard to write. I had written “Our Mrs. Reynolds” and was, like, “Oh, I just type and they talk,” but then halfway through I was, like, “I have no structure, what am I doing? I was a fool.” But eventually it came together. Part of that process was me going on the ship, climbing up in the rafters, standing on a railing - doing all the things they were going to do physically. That’s the great thing about TV, being able to be there physically be there, I could just walk through the ship, experience it the way I thought they would and then go back and write it down. His voice, his bizarre sort of existential questioning of everything, was just so much fun to write. Every moment of it he nailed. I also think the exchange between Mal and River on top of the ship is the heart of the show incarnate. I love that.

Joss wrote and directed. I remember he had a lot of trouble writing that episode. He called me and said, “I’m not sure what this is about, I can’t figure this out.” He knew he wanted to do something with River. I said, “Well, can’t it just be Bobba Fett?” He made fun of me for a long time because of the way I pronounced the name, but he did say, “Okay, now I know what it is,” and he went off and wrote it. And there’s such beautiful filmmaking in this episode.