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The Alliance has dispatched a skilled and deadly Operative to reclaim River—and the secrets locked in her damaged psyche. The Operative believes his mission is to protect the Alliance at all costs, which makes him far more dangerous than a paid assassin. “The Operative thinks of himself as an instrument,” feels Whedon. “The idea that he doesn’t have a name becomes to me something that is both creepy and weirdly ennobling.”
When he kills it’s with a sense of purpose. “His mission is to create a world where nobody is mean, where nothing bad happens,” says Whedon. “He sees what evil is, and he hates it. He knows that he does evil, yet he allows himself to step outside of his own moral structure so that he can accomplish what he needs to accomplish, which has made him something less than human. And that is both weird and sick and kind of beautiful.”
The Operative’s promise to the Alliance is that no matter how far and fast the crew of Serenity flies, he will find a way to flush them out and retrieve River. Not a simple task, Ejiofor explains. “The Operative realizes something about Mal, which is that he’s not capable of backing down.”
Whedon explains, “River exposes all the rifts within the crew, and the holes in the ship…as it were…because she brings the weight of the Alliance down on them in the form of The Operative, and also because she is unknowingly an agent of the Alliance—a weapon of theirs—and could basically kill everybody on board if they decided to make her. And so Mal has, in his own way, put them in the exact kind of danger he’s been looking to avoid for the last few years.”
Mal’s resistance to the Alliance and the manhunt by The Operative have put his friends in jeopardy. The Captain still harbors deep affections for a beautiful Companion named Inara Serra (MORENA BACCARIN), whom The Operative uses to lure Mal out into the open. “A Companion is essentially a futuristic geisha,” explains Baccarin. “They live in a time in which prostitution is legal and it’s seen as a classy profession because of the trade, because of what they learn and what they know. Inara has learned many different languages and dances and archery. She can fight and at the same time is very sophisticated.”
“You see Inara and her sophistication, and right away you know why she and Mal have never been able to get together,” says Whedon. “They’re both strong-willed, completely different and perfect for each other.”
Two other remnants of Mal’s checkered past provide him with guidance. Shepherd Book (RON GLASS) is a man of faith with mysterious knowledge of the Alliance and the ways of The Operative. Rounding out the cast, Mr. Universe (DAVID KRUMHOLTZ), monitors the signals that race across the galaxy from a remote hideout he shares with his female “lovebot.”
Even greater dangers await Serenity’s crew on the outer limbs of the solar systems—Reavers, vicious creatures that haunt the edges of space. “On one side we have the Alliance, embodied by The Operative, who is utterly intractable morally and will kill anybody,” describes Whedon. “On the other side, we have the Reavers.”
“If you encounter a Reaver, that’s it,” shares Fillion. “You’re done for. That’s how bad they are. They don’t want to kill you; they want to kill you slow. They want to eat you; they want to skin you. There’s just no end to their evil.”
“Their mind is so far gone that they don’t realize the violence they do—it’s just their way of life,” adds Staite. “In that way, they’re scarier than monsters or aliens because there’s a human being underneath all that insanity.”
But the real threat to the crew may be aboard the Serenity herself. “Mal’s whole motivation is just to survive the day, and here comes this kid that he has no connection to at all, whom he has no reason to care about,” says Glau. “If anything, he needs to get her out of his life because she’s only going to cause trouble. And somehow he just can’t do it.”
Beset from all sides, Mal’s choice is to give up his troubled, possibly deadly passenger or to take a stand and pursue the secret the Alliance is fighting so hard to protect. “For all of them, it’s about freedom,” Whedon says. “This movie is really about Mal discovering if there is in fact something worth believing in and something worth fighting for again.”
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