"Firefly": "Jaynestown" Trivia Quiz

Answer: Having ransacked the infirmary in search of medical tape, he is now attaching a gun to his stomach.

Jayne has a moment of smug satisfaction at Simon's loss of temper ("So you had to tear my infirmary apart?" "Apparently."), but it lasts only until Mal arrives to point out that he'd specifically ordered that no guns be brought to the surface. (Canton, it appears, is a gun-free zone.) Jayne protests -- "I was in Canton a few years back, and I might have made me a coupla enemies thereabouts" -- but Mal is unmoved. We get a shot of Jayne's face as he begins to strip the tape from his abdomen, and Simon could not have wished for a better revenge.

Answer: Mud (or clay) for ceramics

The first thing our intrepid crew notices is the smell -- "I vote we do this job really really fast," Wash proposes, speaking for his crewmates. But the smell is only a signature of Canton's mud-based economy. Kaylee, as usual, knows a great deal about it; she quiets Simon's disbelief by observing that even "Serenity's got more than a few ceramic parts in her." A little later, when Simon is posing as an interested buyer, the site foreman goes into more detail about the mud's amazing properties: "... You add the right catalysts, kiln it proper, this stuff is stronger'n steel ten times over, at half the weight." No wonder it's so popular! And it's cheap, too: "We got over two thousand workers, mostly indentured, pay 'em next to nothin', so we can pass the savings directly on to you, the customer ..." The indentured workers nearby do not look thrilled by this arrangement.

Answer: To collect contraband from a middleman named Kessler and deliver it off-world

"Kessler's our man," Mal explains soon after landing, "he's holding the goods we're to deliver. We go in, we make contact. Easy peasy." But when has anything been easy peasy for this crew? Soon enough, they learn from a local smuggler that Kessler is no more, having been executed by the foreman and his gang on suspicion of handling contraband.

The goods are still safe in their hiding place, but it won't be easy to get them off-world.

Answer: A heroic statue of Jayne Cobb, nearly life-size

After a moment of shocked silence that spans the opening credits, Mal is the first to speak. "You want to tell me," he asks, in slow and measured speech, "how come there's a statue of you, here, starin' at me like I owe him somethin'?" Jayne demurs, Mal insists, and finally it emerges that Jayne has no idea why anyone would build a statue to commemorate a failed robbery years ago.

His crewmates, however, will not allow the opportunity for teasing to pass. "This must be what going mad feels like," Simon posits. Wash believes that "They've really captured him, though, you know? Captured his essence." Kaylee adds, "He looks sort of angry, don't he?" Says Wash, "Kinda what I meant."

Answer: Fess Higgins, son of the Magistrate

Magistrate Higgins -- owner of the moon, and victim of the robbery Jayne had tried and failed to pull off -- meets Inara himself in front of his mansion. Having a very narrow definition of what makes a man a man, he has hired Inara to make one out of his twenty-six-year-old son, Fess.

The father is not optimistic: "I have a feeling it will take all your arts to deal with this particular problem." Naturally, once the Magistrate has been removed from the situation, Inara easily develops a rapport with Fess.

Answer: Armed with a pencil, she is "fixing" his Bible.

"Bible's broken," River explains brightly. "Contradictions, faulty logistics--it doesn't make sense ... So we'll integrate non-progressional evolution theory with God's creation of Eden -- eleven inherent metaphoric parallels already there ... Noah's ark is a problem ..." She's having a great time, but Book is not best pleased.

After she tears out a page, he launches into a sermon about how faith "is not about making sense," but she is having none of it. The two of them tug at the torn pages; finally, Book lets her have them. (Later, in a sweet beginning to a funny scene, River comes to return them: "I tore these out of your symbol, and they turned into paper -- but I want to put them back, so --")

Answer: A busker with a guitar begins singing that famous ditty, "The Hero of Canton, the Man They Call Jayne."

The first verse of the song (which prompts Simon to correct his earlier statement: "No, THIS must be what going mad feels like") is worth repeating here: "He robbed from the rich, and gave to the poor, stood up to The Man, and gave him what for / Our love for him now ain't hard to explain, the hero of Canton, the man they call Jayne!"

As the story told in the song continues (with the bar patrons singing along more and more excitedly to the chorus), Jayne realizes what's going on. He'd stolen vast amounts of cash from Magistrate Higgins, plus a hover-plane to transport it in -- but he didn't make a clean getaway, and was hit by anti-aircraft fire. In a desperate (and ultimately successful) attempt to stay in the air, he ditched everything he could to try to save weight -- the seats, the fuel reserve, the life support, and finally the money. That money must have landed in the middle of town -- and the mudders managed to keep it.

Answer: Stitch Hessian, the partner whom Jayne betrayed

Well, it turns out that the account of the robbery that Jayne gave his crewmates (see Question 7) wasn't entirely accurate. You see, he had a partner in this robbery: Stitch Hessian. And before he tossed the money overboard, he tried to make up the weight by tossing Stitch. Poor Stitch, one-eyed and injured from his thirty-foot fall, has been living in a box in the Magistrate's prison ever since then.

The Magistrate, assisted by the foreman, goes out and frees Stitch the very night that Jayne Cobb is spotted in town. He returns Stitch's clothes, belongings, and even his gun -- and tells him, pointedly, that his old partner is around. Stitch's intentions are clear.

Answer: Simon

Simon, Kaylee, and Jayne have stayed in the bar all night. After Mal and Wash returned to the ship to plan their next move with Zoe and Book, Jayne spent the evening with his adoring public, learning the words to his own theme song; Kaylee and Simon spent the evening a bit tipsy, flirting sweetly.

But when Mal returns in the morning, Simon puts his foot in his mouth while trying to defend Kaylee's honor, and the hurt engineer orders him to stay in the bar and have breakfast while Jayne addresses the town and the others use the diversion to collect the contraband. Simon is thus alone when Stitch (surprisingly strong for having spent years in a box!) arrives, looking for a lever to use on Jayne. Stitch beats the doctor up and drags him to the town square, facing off with Jayne Cobb.

Answer: A hero-worshipping mudder leaps in front of Jayne and takes the bullets.

Jayne's and Stitch's conversation makes clear to everyone that Jayne is not a hero -- but a young mudder man, who had befriended Jayne the previous night, takes a bullet for him anyway and dies. Stitch's surprise at this event is all the opening Jayne needs to take him down, after which he stares in horror at the corpse of his friend. He cannot stand to be thought of as a hero after this; he topples his own statue in the town square. "All of you!" he yells to the crowd. "You think someone's just gonna drop money on you, money they could use? There ain't people like that! There's just people like me."

The crew returns to the ship and lift off (with some help from Fess, who releases the ship from Port Control and explains to his angry father that he must be a man after all). Mal finds Jayne brooding in the cargo bay, trying to make sense of it all; he figures "they're probably stickin' that statue right back up," despite everything that's happened. He's haunted by shame and guilt. Says Mal, quietly, "Ain't about you, Jayne. It's about what they need."

Jayne pauses, absorbing this information. "Don't make no sense," he says at last.