Should Wash return to Firefly?

Alright, time for me to try talking about something that isn't videogames.

I've been a big Firefly fan for over a decade now. My mum was a fan before me and when I hit my teenage years she made sure to get me hooked on it. Of course, everyone knows the heartbreak that comes with being a Firefly fan - it's so easy to get swept up by it, but there's only one season and a movie. It will never feel like it was enough content, but recently there has been a glimmer of hope, and by a glimmer I mean basically a Supernova exploding in our faces - it looks like we're getting a reboot. 

And yes, I am fully on board with the idea that it's not anything else. The language they're using is far too specific. Nathan Fillion is filming videos where he visits every person on the original crew, minus the late Ron Glass who played Shepherd Book, and they all seem to know what's going on. Something big is on the horizon, and in their words, "it's happening." There's only one thing this can be, with such charged language they are deliberately hyping us up because it's exactly what we're all scared to believe it could be.

There is one addition to the cast that has sparked some interesting conversations, though, and that's Alan Tudyk. In the original show he played Hoban Washburne, the pilot of the ship Serenity, and he was a fan favourite character because... Well, because every character realistically is a fan favourite character, but Alan Tudyk brought a level of likability to the character, as well as just being hilarious. Tudyk has since had many fairly notable roles, although interestingly most of them seem to be in voice acting, such as K2 in Rogue One. I also love the fact that he had a good run going where he just kept voicing animals with no dialogue in Disney movies - the chicken in Moana, the Armadillo in Raya and the Last Dragon and the toucan in Encanto. This actually led Tudyk to being my pick for Yoshi in the Super Mario Galaxy Movie, although I'll say that Donald Glover in that role isn't a disappointment to me.

But anyway, Tudyk returning shouldn't really come as a shock, if not for one small detail - Wash is killed off in Serenity, the film made later to wrap up some of the plot lines from Firefly and, unsuccessfully, attempt to revive the franchise. So if he's in, what does that actually mean? Well, there are a few options.

The first is that he could be working in a more behind-the-scenes capacity. While all the cast seem to be incredibly fond of Firefly, Fillion and Tudyk are the ones who publicly lean into this the most, even cohosting a podcast called "We Used to be Spacemen" in reference to Firefly. Tudyk not being involved would feel wrong, but as Wash is dead, maybe he would actually be in the writer's room rather than on screen.

This is possible, but even if it was, I don't think it would happen without option 2 also happening, that being that he has some form of brief cameo as another character. Maybe a long lost twin brother of Wash, maybe an unrelated character who just happens to look like him. This is definitely possible... But it's not Wash. It isn't just Alan Tudyk that would feel missing if he isn't brought back, it's Wash as a character.

So maybe they could bring him back while still maintaining that he's dead. This could take the form of flashbacks, but that would probably require digitally deaging him and that's more expensive than it's worth. So maybe he could instead be some sort of ghost. Not literally of course, but more a pressence that haunts Zoe, his wife. Maybe she couldn't live with losing him, so her mind invented a version of him that she sees all the time. This could actually work quite well as Wash was never massively integral to the plot of the show. As the ship's pilot he was very rarely in the action, and only one episode really focussed on him as a character, so it wouldn't exactly change the dynamics much for his role to be to provide quips at key moments and deepen Zoe's arc as well. I could see this working, but it seems like a consolation.

There's also the option to have his mind be preserved in some sort of robot or something. This could potentially work, but the problem is that Firefly really doesn't lean into that brand of scifi very much. As Scifi goes, Firefly is fairly grounded and things like sentient robots or mind transfer would feel as much like jumping the shark as aliens suddenly turning up would. 

Of course, there's the option to make Serenity itself non-canon. I'd take this honestly, as much as I enjoyed it when I watched it, it's definitely the weakest part of the franchise and I don't bother rewatching it most times that I watch Firefly. If Serenity was made an elseworld story and they brought back Wash, I'd be happy enough.

But I very strongly believe this doesn't have to be the case. I believe that it would be possible to have Serenity be canon while still having Wash die. Sure, the injuries he sustained looked pretty unbelievable to survive, but the rule of any media is that if you don't see a body, never write off that the person could somehow still be alive. After all, we see him dying, but we don't see him actually die, and while we see his funeral, we don't know that his body was ever retrieved. There's still a lot of leaway to play around with.

The first question is how he managed to survive. This is a big stumbling block, of course, but we could discover that some shady group of people found him before it was too late and managed to heal him. From there maybe they imprisoned him, or maybe they made him the captain of one of their ships, or maybe they could even have ended up brainwashing him. Either way, you need to justify not only how he survived but why he hasn't reunited with the crew before this point.

But that's actually the easier bit to justify - the hard part is trying to bring him back without completely undermining the death. Bringing back a character from the dead is an infamously bad idea because it makes that death meaningless. Death is a big deal, but did it really mean anything if the character just comes back? And yeah, that's usually true, but I don't think it has to be the case. Death is the ultimate consequence, so if you're gonna revive a character, it has to create some other consequence. The character gets a second chance, but it comes at a cost and it isn't just something that can be ignored a few episodes later. Off the top of my head, I feel like Vision in WandaVision is a great example - he's revived by the end of it, but his death still caused Wanda to fall off the deep end which led to her committing some horrifying acts and, eventually, dying. A character was revived, but the death still had a massive impact.

How could this work for Wash? There are a few ways. For example, just having been away for a long time could cause tension between he and Zoe. Maybe Zoe has been so broken by losing him that she can't help but irrationally have some resentment that he never came back to them. That would work best in the case that he was employed as some pilot for some organisation, where he maybe could have looked for Serenity but didn't know how. Or, puffing the shoe on the other foot, maybe in the time between Wash seemingly died and being brought back, Zoe had maybe found someone else, or even just had a sting of lovers, while Wash always stayed faithful, and this creates some sort of resentment from Wash. To be honest, I don't like this option and I don't think it fits either character, their marriage has always been steadfast and I don't think anything should be done to change that.

One interesting idea would be that whatever they have to do save Wash comes with a massive consequence. The best bet would be that Zoe has to kill a lot of people in order to bring him back - maybe including innocents. I actually think the brainwashing angle works better for this, as you could say that to break the brainwashing on Wash she has to break it on a lot of other people as well, and maybe those people would die thanks to it. It would take the edge off because our hero killing a bunch of innocents is a pretty hard thing to get on board with, but if they were brainwashed you could at least justify that she's putting them out of their misery. Either way, though, she would be left with the guilt for making that choice in order to save Wash, and maybe the rest of the crew would be far more cautious of her as a result.

That works well enough, I think, but I think there's one option that's so much better, and it's probably very obvious, even something that was covered in the comics, but not many people have been talking about it - what if Zoe fell pregnant very soon before the events of Serenity? This kid would now be an adult and likely on the crew, and while Zoe would probably embrace Wash rising from the dead, would their child feel the same? That would be a much more interesting angle to explore, because they would have heard all about Wash but would the reality compare to all the stories Zoe told them? Or would there be resentment from them because Wash has been absent their entire childhood? Or maybe they would have little real interest in Wash at all initially, as they already have a family in the rest of the crew. Whatever angle they end up taking, it would mean that Wash's death isn't consequenceless and it has a long standing impact. Even if his child ends up becoming close to him, he still missed their entire childhood and that can never be undone. So yes, you are undoing the death - but that death still matters, and that's what could make it work.

There are a lot of traps they could fall into here, a lot of ways it could fall flat or feel poorly handled. Ultimately, my stance is that regardless of how they do it, the show will just be better for having Wash in it so no matter what they do and how they justify it, as long as he's there then we're winning. But I hope they try to make sure that if they undo his death, they still keep it important in some way.