*A Toxic Text* Serenity

Joss Whedon's film Serenity tells the story of Captain Malcolm Reynolds and his crew onboard the Firefly class spaceship Serenity as they uncover a government plot. The plot details the exploitation of a colony planet and its inhabitants through the experimentation of chemicals in the atmosphere. When we were discussing Buell's Toxic Discourse and the different "toxic topoi," this film jumped into my head as an example of of all four parts, but for the purpose of this post, I'm going to focus on #2: the inescapability from the toxin.

One of the main groups of enemies the crew of Serenity faces are the Reavers. Reavers are shown as insane people who are so violent and mad that they are no longer thought of as human. "Who are the Reavers?"

Later, when the heroes find themselves on a planet called Miranda, the truth comes out. The people of Miranda were subjected to a chemical that was supposed to "weed out aggression." Of course, as with any other potentially dangerous drug created by the government, it has negative effects. For most of the population, the drug works; however, not only does it prevent aggression, it also prevents any desire or need to do anything else. 30 million people just let themselves die.

The thing I like about this particular take on experimentation is that it shows not only what the drug is designed to do, but also the possible extreme opposite effect. Ten percent of Miranda's population reacted with an enhanced violence.

In the world of Serenity, planets are prepared for human habitation by the use of terraforming technology. For Miranda, the chemical called Pax was added to the mix. Everyone was affected by the Pax. There were two extreme outcomes to the experiment, and the film highlights the potential realities when facing this type of experiment. In Toxic Discourse, Buell quotes Carson's Silent Spring: "for the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now being subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals...until death," and this seems to be the basis for the ideas behind Joss Whedon's Serenity and its history of chemical experimentation.