“Someone - and I wish I could recall who - wisely observed that even on the original Star Trek, the Enterprise herself became a character we knew as well as any of the human ones.
“What is even trickier than getting an audience attached to a vessel as a character or even a setting, though, is getting the vessel to be a part of the storytelling toolbox. The views of the Nostromo told so much about the characters in the opening minutes of Alien, before you ever laid eyes on a human character. If someone is known by who - or what - he or she associates with, those slow pans around the corridors and cockpit gave the viewers a look at what kind of company the ship kept. When you saw the interiors in the original Star Trek, you knew these were professional people working in a naval setting, as Spartan as the berths of a destroyer. Star Trek: The Next Generation, well, these were Highly Dignified professional people in a flying office building. And Deep Space Nine? Eh, the space station’s a rental. They never even repainted the thing.
“For my money, there’s been no other spacecraft interior that has helped in the subtle art of describing characters more masterfully than the Serenity.”
– Larry Dixon, “The Reward, the Details, the Devils, the Due,” an essay in Finding Serenity - Anti-heroes, Lost Shepherds and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon’s Firefly.
