Drive It On

So Fox's new show Drive has been on for a couple of weeks now. I missed last Monday's ep, but (i think) i've seen all the rest. It's cool to see some familiar faces from Angel and Firefly. It's almost fanfic-y to see Nathan Fillion and Amy Acker on screen together. Would Mal and Fred hit it off? No way Fred could compete with Inara. And Serenity already had a resident cute brilliant girl in Kaylee. Hmm...

[Also, there's a guy who talks to Fillion at the beginning of Drive's first episode (maybe he introduces him to the Race, i can't remember) who was played by the guy who played the psychotically stoic bounty hunter in the last episode of Firefly.]

So anyway, it has some players i like, and it has cool stuff like muscle cars, and it has characters from my home state who aren't slack-jawed yokels, and it would be great for producer Tim Minear to get a hit show of his own, but it's not grabbing me enough that i feel the need to watch the show every week. Now, that's maybe because i don't follow any shows on broadcast anymore, so take me with a grain of salt on this point.

Not many of the characters intrigue me. I really didn't like the woman in tonight's episode who was saying that God told her she'd win the race. Or i didn't like that she said that. It's just i would hope God isn't spending precious divine intervention energy on cross-country races (and if He did, of course He'd be fixing things so that the muscle car would win, but then, the muscle car can handle that itself). I've never been able to accept the idea that God rearranges the universe so one person can get one rather meaningless benefit.

But, mysterious ways and all that. And i'm certainly fallible. And maybe i just don't buy it because i don't feel like He's ever rearranged the universe to give me something cool i couldn't get otherwise. Not that i'm saying He should. But you could say that creation itself is sort of like that. Apart from any re-arranging, we wouldn't have anything cool without the original arranging. I guess what really bothers me is that anyone would claim that God rearranged the universe on their behalf, because that's saying that you're more special than everybody else.

To bring this back to TV, one thing i didn't respect about Mal on Firefly was his attitude towards God--or more accurately, why he had that attitude towards God. He was so hurt that nobody came to save the day and make sure that his side won the war. Yet, he had seen people die, he had personally killed many people on the other side, and the fact that those people never got to see their hopes and dreams fulfilled didn't shake his faith. No, it was only when God didn't pull his special ass out of the fire that he started to doubt.

That's not to say i don't like the character, just that i don't respect every aspect of the character. That probably makes them a more realistically-drawn character. So...in conclusion to this ramble, go watch Firefly, and think about how we relate to God, and vice versa--not necessarily in that order, though both at the same time might prove interesting.