Jasmine & Miranda

Warning: Serenity spoilers below the fold. If you have not seen Serenity, stop reading now and go rent the DVD.

I recently re-watched the entire fourth season of Angel, and it hit me: Miranda is Jasmine.

Well, actually the Alliance is Jasmine, but that's not as catchy. Anyway, the broad outlines are the same. Jasmine is the god, or Power, who goes to great lengths to become manifest in our world and bring Peace and Love and Happiness to us all. The downside is that she, um, eats people. The bigger downside is that she robs people of their free will, making them an extension of herself.

On Miranda, the Alliance tries to create the perfect society--to make people better, as Mal puts it--by dosing them with a drug that suppresses aggressive impulses. Instead, everybody dies, except for the few who become insane hyper-aggressive space cannibals. Big downside.

In other words, they're two stories about exactly the same thing: the inherent monstrosity of the utopian impulse.

Joss Whedon is a big squishy liberal (yay!), but as I understand it Tim Minear is more of a libertarian/conservative type. The tension between these two worldviews, implicit to one degree or another in Angel, is at the forefront of Firefly and Serenity. The Alliance is every libertarian's nightmare, but things aren't exactly grand in the libertarian paradise of the outer planets: the strong brutalize the weak, the corrupt victimize the honest, and life in general is nasty, brutish, and short. The Firefly verse is not drawn wholly from either worldview, but from the conflict between the two--which is one reason why it never comes off as merely political allegory.

The Jasmine and Miranda plotlines, though, are both firmly rooted in Tim Minear's libertarianish vision. The signal characteristic of the Alliance is that (as River says) they meddle; they fight a war to extend the 'benefits of civilization' to the unwilling and ornery outer planets. The meddling, even on Miranda (especially on Miranda) appears to come from benevolent impulses, but has (has to have) monstrous results.

But here's the thing: whatever Minear's political beliefs, the basic point is (I think) indisputable. It's one of the very few things conservatism (and here I mean classical conservatism, not the bastard child of Marie Antoinette and Al Capone that now calls itself 'conservatism') has to teach liberals. Every action, no matter how benevolent, has unintended consequences. The utopian impulse, if it gets anywhere, if it doesn't strangle on its own idealism (see, e.g., the long-gone utopian communes of the mid-19th century), always has monstrous results.

[That's all, folks]