Have you seen Firefly? We’re going to talk about it in-depth, expecting that you’ve seen every episode and can recite it word for word. If you haven’t seen it, watch it, love it, and come back later. Or click here for the essentials. Released in 2005—the same year as Revenge of the Sith—Serenity is likely the last great Star Wars film we’ll ever get, which is unfortunate, considering it isn’t affiliated with the franchise in any way. The film underperformed at the box office because, quite frankly, that’s what happens when you make a movie to conclude the story of a cult TV show that only lasted a season (after Fox did the production equivalent of putting a hundred-pound weight on its back, putting it into rapid waters, and telling it to swim).  That’s not to say the show deserved to fail, as it’s fourteen episodes of pure perfection, and it mixed Western and space opera long before The Mandalorian was a twinkle in Jon Favreau’s eye. If you’re a fan of the series, Serenity is an epic and surprisingly satisfying conclusion to the story. Then, on the other end of the spectrum of concluding stories, there’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

Five years later, that title still doesn’t make any sense. We won’t go on too long about bashing Disney’s Sequel Trilogy, as everyone has discussed the flaws with them at great length. When it comes to Star Wars, people still seem to deal in absolutes—sidestepping the obvious reference—where they either love every show and movie that comes out or think everything released under the Disney banner is the worst thing to come out of the franchise. The one project, however, that everyone seems to agree is a mess is The Rise of Skywalker. With its rapid-fire pace and obvious damage control of trying to undo everything that The Last Jedi established—which in itself was undoing a lot of what The Force Awakens set up—it’s clear and on the record that the trilogy didn’t have an overarching plan in motion from the start and the constant course corrections made the series suffer for it.

The burden that The Rise of Skywalker had to bear was that a bunch of story threads were resolved or brushed off in The Last Jedi, so the story didn’t have anywhere to go besides stopping Kylo Ren and defeating The First Order. They had to rush to the finish line by establishing stakes that should’ve carried over from the second film. Instead of rolling with the punches of working things out that people didn’t like about that film, they just hit the proverbial Control-Z function on their computers until the keys broke. That’s the thin line that both The Rise of Skywalker and Serenity had to walk. They both had one movie to find resolution in their respective stories. Whereas The Rise of Skywalker—the more you hear it, the worse it sounds—had to start from scratch and scrap the original script written by Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly, and try to appease both people who didn’t like the previous film and general Star Wars fans, Serenity didn’t have that problem.

Serenity is essentially a season’s worth of material that had to be crammed into two hours, but the filmmakers had the foresight to stick with what mattered to the fans to get a satisfying resolution. Writer/Director Joss Whedon originally had a script that was 190 pages that paid off all the major plot points that were set up through the course of the series, but considering that meant the movie would’ve been well over three hours, he and producer Barry Mendel had to trim the fat and only keep the essentials. This likely meant things that fans were clamoring for, like Shepherd Book’s backstory and Mal and Inara getting together, were left by the wayside—quiet down, nerds, comic book continuations don’t count—but it led to a more streamlined story. Keep in mind, even though this was a movie that was made for the fans to get some catharsis of finding out how the show they love would end, this is still…you know, a movie that Universal wanted to make money with, so it also had to appeal as a standalone space adventure. So while, ugh, The Rise of Skywalker had the unenviable task of trying to win people back and wrap up the story, all Serenity had to do was wrap up the story.

Something that both films have in common is that they’re written and directed by filmmakers who made their name in television (and both share a penchant for snappy dialogue). Sure, they both had screenwriting credits before each of their respective movies, but the credits they’re most associated with are TV, which shows in the stories’ presentation. The Rise of Skywalker starts in the middle of the action with Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) snatching up the not-Sith Holocron and going after Palpatine. Serenity begins similarly by introducing The Operative (Chiwetel Ejiofer) as the antagonist and establishing that he’s looking for River Tam. They both operate like a story is already taking place, and we’re just being dropped in the middle. The opening of Serenity could’ve easily been a cold open for Firefly, and where Serenity has a leg up is that since the show has always had a slightly episodic nature to it, having a “Villain of the Week” isn’t that much of a stretch. The Operative isn’t set up as The Big Bad; he’s just the natural progression of the Alliance trying to find River. They don’t treat him like he was behind everything all along; he’s just the next problem the crew has to contend with.

The Rise of Skywalker falters because, even if you were blissfully unaware of the headache that was people’s polarizing opinions of Star Wars between 2017 and 2019, the appearance of the Emperor comes entirely out of nowhere. Because the trilogy was always on damage control from movie to movie, there wasn’t a central throughline to keep a central threat, so his appearance and revelation that he was the overarching villain felt rushed and unearned. As people have pointed out, him being the primary villain, in theory, isn’t the problem; it’s the slapdash way of executing it. Where Serenity organically introduced its villain, The Rise of Skywalker reinserts its antagonist in a way that feels desperate.

For his limited screen time, The Operative feels like a full-fledged character with his own set of ethics and brings more to the story than just being an opposing force that the heroes have to go up against. He’s self-aware of how monstrous he is—even admitting that he’s a monster in a line of dialogue—but he also sees the necessity of why he has to do it, making him lament his humanity. It’s not that he’s evil; it’s just that his job requires him to do evil things. He and Mal only have two interactions before the climax—one of them is practically a FaceTime call—but across the few interactions they have, they build a rapport between each other that by the time they face off at the end, the animosity between the two feels real and it makes the end fight feel more gratifying.

Compare that to the Emperor, who, throughout the film, is just this looming threat that needs to be destroyed. The Emperor has never been a complex character; if anything, he’s fun to watch because he’s pure evil and enjoys it, but by the time Episode IX came around, he felt more like a plot point than a character. The climax echoed Return of the Jedi, but whereas in that film, where it felt like Luke being tempted to the Darkside was an actual possibility, here, the audience knew that Rey wouldn’t turn, so it was just a case of going through the motions when he becomes the central threat. His involvement in the story doesn’t cause any significant character growth, and he doesn’t change by the end of the film, so his involvement feels hollow.

We’re focusing mainly on the Emperor rather than Kylo Ren for this argument because while he’s the antagonist across all three films, he’s never the one at the top of the hierarchy of antagonism. First, it was Snoke, then the Emperor. And because the film is about playing it safe, it was a foregone conclusion from the beginning that he would be redeemed rather than killed. That being said, we’re not going to bash Kylo Ren. There are a lot of things wrong with those movies, but Adam Driver’s performance isn’t one of them. Neither is Daisy Ridley’s, for that matter. Give her a break already.

Speaking of climaxes—there are better ways to phrase that transition between topics—the two contrasting third acts are a good depiction of how higher stakes don’t always mean more investment from the audience. By the end of The Rise of Skywalker, we’ve reached our FOURTH superweapon in Star Wars, wherein some madman practically has a gun pointed at every planet in the galaxy and is threatening to pull the trigger. In this case, it’s a bunch of supped-up star destroyers with mega-cannons. As many have pointed out, the idea of a planet-destroying weapon already ran its course by the time Return Of The Jedi came around, so doing it a fourth time across six movies (chronologically speaking) makes the threat feel routine. It’s just another one that the heroes have to blow up. That’s where Serenity has a leg up, too.

Throughout Firefly’s run, the stakes have never been egregiously high. Often, the stakes are about finishing a job/heist so the crew can get paid or to avoid pissing off some bespectacled crazy man with an accent of questionable origin. The biggest threat the crew faced on the show was protecting a brothel from a sadistic landowner who wants to abduct a baby when it’s born—just in case you forgot the show was a Western—but even then, that was still a moral cause to help a friend of the crew. The crewmembers each have consciences that they have to contend with and have the capacity to be heroic in their own small way, but in the show, they’re not heroes.

The Serenity crew is often on the defensive and just trying to keep flying. In proper episodic TV logic, their idea of winning is for things not to get worse than when the episode started. That makes the climax to Serenity hit so much harder; they stop running and decide to take a stand for something and do what’s right. They’re not trying to save the galaxy at the end of the movie; they’re trying to speak for thousands of people who died because of a failed experiment of the Alliance and to be sure that everyone in the Verse knows about it. The threat is higher since they have to face down an army that The Operative has put in their way, but the stakes are equally high because the characters now have the agency to step up and face that large of an opposition. It’s also a direct response to the death of Shepherd Book, whose dying words were pleading for Mal to believe in something, so his belief that this is the right thing to do gives Book’s death some added weight and shows his importance to Mal. Compare that to the death of Princess Leia—another elder character who provides guidance to the lead—which could’ve been cut, and the story would’ve missed nothing. No disrespect to Carrie Fisher; there’s only so much to be done with unused footage of a performance from another movie.

Serenity is also considerably less manipulative in winning over the audience. The Rise of Skywalker was focused on winning the audience back by retconning past decisions and incorporating imagery to illicit fan service. The most blatant being when Chewbacca gets a medal for no reason other than that’s bothered fans for forty years. Serenity could’ve fallen into the same trap and tried to get applause moments from Firefly fans—“celebration” is the romantic term used when movies are flooded with easter eggs to existing entries in a franchise, to various degrees of sincerity—but the movie operates as if the audience is 50/50 on fans and newcomers so there are next to no callbacks to the series. That’s easy bait that no one would fault it for indulging in, and it shows a certain level of confidence in the material not to do it. It almost goes too far in the opposite direction, where it tries to play like a standalone film, with Firefly not being a part of the title. Universal did something similar with Army of Darkness, and in both cases, it didn’t work as far as the box office is concerned (both are great movies, though). Even the original trailer played it up like a space rebellion film rather than a space western. It didn’t reference that it was the conclusion to a pre-existing show, focusing instead on it being made by the same guy who made Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.

The film operates as if it’s aiming to give a satisfying conclusion to fans of these characters and this universe in an abridged way while trying to entertain newcomers. It flows because it comes from the same mind that thought up the original series, so it doesn’t feel conflicting or contradictory to the original spirit of the show. It presents itself like a truncated version of what would’ve probably been spread out over several seasons of television, but it only kept the crucial elements. That’s where it feels so different compared to The Rise of Skywalker. Both films work with what they have, but one comes from a sole filmmaker’s vision and roadmap of where he wanted to take the story. The other is trying to balance multiple previous filmmakers’ ideas and audience reactions in an attempt to please everyone (which ended up pleasing no one). Ultimately, the two films contrast what you can do when you have a plan and are working with restraints. Hold on… If you just heard the sound of glass shattering, that’s the audio cue of a horrifying realization: Disney technically owns the rights to Firefly… let’s keep that information to ourselves, shall we?