One thing I love about Firefly is that even the throw-away stuff is pure gold.  Consider this quote, from a deleted scene in the pilot episode, “Serenity”:

Simon:  "If the battle [for Serenity Valley] was so horrible, why'd he

            name the ship after it?"

Zoë:       "Once you're in Serenity, you never leave...

               ...you just learn to live there."

    Simon and Zoë are discussing the history and psychology of Captain Malcolm Reynolds…an honorable, upbeat, resilient, faithful man who was absolutely broken at the battle for Serenity Valley.

     Now, when we join his story all he’s got left is his honor, his ship, and the unwavering loyalty of Zoë, his second-in-command.  His only value is protecting what’s his, no matter how little of it there is.  His only future is the next destination, the next job, the next breath.  His only goal is to stay in the sky.

     Mal is not a nice man.  He’s dangerous, unsympathetic, and extremely unpredictable unless you are Zoë.

     He can’t go back to being the man he was before Serenity Valley, because he has been disillusioned.

     There are certain things…certain bedrock concepts of human decency and decorum that make up the “floor” of our civilized world.  They are only real because we believe them to be.  Because we as a species, civilization, society, whatever, agree and accept their reality.  They are a mass hallucination.  A fiction we tell ourselves so that we can live together without questioning every single little aspect of our existence.  You can’t live like that.  Society can’t function like that.  So we collectively decide that certain things are “human”, and set them as a baseline.  We accept necessary fictions as fact because they are necessary…not because they are fact.

     If you are never taught these things, or if you experience the fact of their unreality…you fall through the floor.  Welcome to Serenity Valley.  The pre-packaged mass-produced truth is gone.

     And when you find out just how much of our existence is fiction…it’s hard to believe that anything is true, real, or meaningful…

     …but unless you want to be a crazy socio-path, unless you embrace chaos and completely reject decency…you have to accept some things as true.  Not for anyone else, because frankly, right about now you’re thinking “screw everyone else”.  After all, they’re all either evil or deluded, and you’re standing here with the scales off your eyes, all disoriented and lost and as far as you can see, there’s only people who desperately want you to play along with their charade, or eat you for lunch.

     So you have to decide what’s real for you.  What is your baseline?  What is the fiction you will not live without?  What is it that makes you human?  What is it that makes you someone you can live with?  And what are you willing to risk by allowing it to be important to you?

     That’s what you need to live in Serenity Valley.  Nothing more…and nothing less.  Those are the things you defend with your life, and those are the things that you cling to.  It may be a chosen reality, but it’s yours.

     The crew of Serenity make their place and their lives in an area of space called “The rim”.  The rim is a thin band of new colonies on the edge of the Galactic Alliance and the “core planets”.  The Galactic Alliance is a surgically clean, pristine, highly regulated area of space.  It was Alliance forces that annihilated Mal and Zoë’s comrades-in-arms at Serenity Valley.  The Alliance has to be so heavily regulated because the social fiction has become so restrictive that it is impossible to maintain without very tight surveillance and repressive enforcement.

     On the other side of the rim is dead space, where The Reavers prowl.  The Reavers are human…kinda.  They are insane barbarians.  They have no human decency.  None.  Nothing more than animals in space ships with opposable thumbs and human intelligence.

     So Mal and his ship and crew fly a thin line between a society so based on social fiction that it has to be enforced at gunpoint, and total feral barbarity.  The rim is also Serenity Valley.

     Serenity Valley is where you live when you can’t believe the social fictions that allow you to live as other people do…but you refuse to become a monster.  Once you can no longer believe the social fiction, you can’t go back.  There’s nothing for you to do but gather up what’s yours, and dig into Serenity Valley for the long haul.