If you have not been in the SF fandom community very long you may not have heard or experienced the devoted base of fans, known as ‘Browncoats’ for the failed television series Firefly.

Created by disgraced talent and Buffy creator Joss Whedon, Firefly a space western inspired by Whedon’s reading of The Killer Angels ran for 11 episodes on the Fox network before being canceled mid-season. Three years later Universal released feature film, Serenity, written and directed by Whedon, who hadn’t yet torched his reputation and career, wrapping up one of the show’s central plot lines while dispatching a couple of the main characters. From there the cast dispersed to their various projects and careers, while fandom possessed enough of an interest and hunger for the series that it lived on primarily in comic book and graphic novel form.

Now, more than two decades after the show’s aborted run on television and its middling performance as a feature film its central star Nathan Fillion has announced that the series is being revived as an animated series with all of the surviving cast returning to voice their characters. Ron Glass who portrayed the mysterious Reverend Book passed away in 2016. Whedon reportedly has blessed the project but also is reportedly not involved with this reincarnation of his creation.

I was a fan of the series when it aired way back in 2002. I recognized some of its shortfalls and limitations and thought it leaned a little too heavily into its mashup of the Western genre with the SF elements. Its science was patently preposterous but that I had long accepted as the price for seeing any SF on television at all. I mourned its premature cancellation and attended ComicCon in San Diego to see the panel discussion with the cast prior to the release of Serenity, so while I am not a ‘Browncoat’ I am not hostile to the series. I even own it and the feature film on BluRay, but for me this announcement stirs no excitement.

All art is a product of its time.

The people who made Firefly in 2002 lived in a different world than the one we live in today. Everything that is in the artist’s world, the grand and world changing to the small and scarcely noticed impacts on who they are influencing how they perceive humanity and its place in existence. Making Firefly or Doctor Who or Star Trek today will not recreate those properties as they existed in the early 2000s or in the 1960s. That presumes that the creative team on the animated series, sans Whedon, were the team that crafted the original series, and I haven’t seen any reports that those writers are returning. Which means that the writing will be done by people whose connection to the characters and settings is one driven by nostalgia, creating yet another layer of transformation beyond that imposed by the passing years. The actors have been changed by time as well and that will change how they interpret their characters, it is an inevitability.

Perhaps this animated Firefly will fly high and stun everyone who watches with its insight and engaging stories, but it will not and cannot be the same as that beloved cult series. Time flows onward and you can never truly go home.