Gorrammit! I had a dream about Firefly and I woke up before it ended!
What's that? You want to know what I dreamed? Well, all right...
It opened with shot of one of the scrubby towns that populate the Firefly 'verse, with a subtitle that this world was called Ozark.
The camera panned to a bunch of townfolk shouting "They're back! The strangers are back! They must have returned for the gold they buried!" and then hustling off out of town in the direction of what was, presumably, the location of the gold.
As they scuttle off, we see that there was a little redheaded girl in pigtails, no older than 13, listening intently to the group of men. After they leave, she looks around to make sure no one is watching her, and she gets on her bicycle and goes the other way.
(What's cool about this bicycle is that there's a second chain from the rear tire to a spinning rod -- basically a horizontally-mounted drop spindle -- that is spinning or winding yarn out of a collection of fiber located in a basket over the rear wheel. My thought in the dream was literally "Oh, cool! As the kids ride their bikes, they're spinning wool into yarn! What a neat and totally Firefly-esque way of doing things!")
So the little girl -- who wasn't named in my dream but who I'm calling Jessie because she reminded me of the Toy Story character -- pedals to a warehouse-like building at the edge of town and sneaks inside. She makes her way through a collection of rusting farm equipment, and it's obvious she's looking for something... or someone. Her eyes widen as she sees (but we don't) what she's looking for, and there's the sound of activity ahead. She creeps towards one of the pieces of heavy equipment which is now sputtering into life and trying to idle, like it hasn't been run in a long time.
As Jessie gets next to this thing -- which looks like some kind of backhoe-forklift thing -- it begins shuddering violently before breaking down in a violent self-disassembly. She screams, covers her face with her arms, and everything goes black as the working arm falls toward her.
(This is probably where the title sequence would go.)
Can you believe that the opening credits for Firefly cannot be found on YouTube?
I blame Fox. Anyway, this is the best I could do -- and it's nifty besides.
Jessie wakes up with Simon tending her and saying things like "She'll be all right. It's just a mild concussion, I'd like to keep an eye on her for a few days, though," to a very agitated and rather guilty-looking Wash. Based on the state of his clothes and the grease stains, it's apparent he was trying to fix the fork-hoe and didn't do a good job. Mal, Jayne, and Kaylee come back from somewhere (I get the idea they were scouting -- Mal as brains, Jayne as backup and Kaylee as "You're the engineer, what kind of tools are we gonna need to do this?" -- and see Jessie waking up. Kaylee immediately goes to fuss over her, Mal has an expression of "WTF is she doing here?", and in proper style, Jayne goes over to the makeshift kitchen and starting making a sandwich for himself.
Then there's some dialog that I couldn't quite follow. I got the impression that this was either a sequel to an earlier episode, or this was referencing events that happened to the crew before the TV series. Anyway, what I pieced together was that the crew had been to Ozark before, and that they'd stolen a shipment of gold ore from the local mine, and that they'd used Jessie in their heist as "local kid who knows what's going on and can be our eyes and ears", and that something had gone wrong during the heist and that they'd ditched the train car full of gold in some really bad location (like, off a cliff and into a river-filled ravine bad) before leaving.
When Jessie comes to her senses, she is pissed -- at the fact that the crew left without saying goodbye! (And without giving her her share of the take.) Still rattled, she reaches into her overalls and pulls out a small lunch to eat on the counter. River helpfully points out Jayne's fixings and says "These potatoes are rust-flavored." Jayne replies, with a mouth full of sandwich, "Hey now, let's respect our guest's bad decisions." Obviously he didn't want to share his potato chips.
There's more discussion as Mal asks Jessie what's happened to her in the years since he'd seen her. She mentions that times are even harder for her folks since the last time the crew was on Ozark, and that she'd had to take a job at the local horsehouse.
"Whorehouse?" Mal asks, with murderous intensity in his eyes. "A little [Chinese word] like you? I'll kill whoever put you there." Jessie rolls her eyes.
"No, no. HORSE house. It's like a hotel for horses. I'm the stable girl there."
Mal has a kind of "Oh. Well. My bad" expression on his face, there's kind of a musical "womp-wooomp" as Kaylee and Simon look at him whimsically like "Oh look, we caught the big bad captain acting human for a moment and now he's embarrassed"...
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