lol, haven't been in here in a while... QMX finally allowing preorders, got mine yay! Browncoats unite
And yet, never once, does he wave a flag...hmm.
the flag is a metaphor... he waved it every time he stuck it to the alliance- which was pretty much every episode.
You can be as hard core patriotic as can be, but you have to recognize that OFFICIALLY flags represent nations, not ideas, as societal ideas change over time the flag does not...If he's waving a flag, he's waving some governmental symbol.
I think you're leaving out the coolest flag ever:
and this one:
and this one:
I could go on and on... flags are used for many purposes, not only to represent nations. Flags are symbols. They mean things to people. Thats it.
Regarding Badger, you don't think that Whedon and the writers could have possibly set Badger up to be wrong about Mal? To give the audience a possible misdirection, to allow viewers to learn that Mal CAN'T be pegged right off the bat by some shady guy that just met him? So you're saying someone who watched the first episode and heard Badger's depiction of Mal has the full picture of Mal? Admittedly its been a while since I've seen that episode, but I don't think so at all.
I just watched the first episode of King and Maxwell last night and they did the exact same thing. Lots of shows do this. They tell you nothing about King and Maxwell, then a smug FBI agent shows up and says "yeah, I know all about you two... kicked out of the Secret Service for not playing by the rules, for not protecting blah blah blah" From this statement we learn that 1- they are former secret service, 2- they don't play by the rules, and 3- somebody died on they're watch. The FBI character didn't matter at all, he was a plot device used to smoothly introduce the characters to the audience. Now, as a watcher, I want to find out more about those characterizations and I set my TIVO.
Badger is the FBI agent. We learn that 1- from Mal's face and Badgers goading,-the war is a touchy subject, 2- that Mal never let go of the past "he's still a Sargent", and 3- forever the soldier, he sees himself as a man of honor who hates having to deal with lowlifes -All in the space of a few sentences so that we identify with the character and set our TIVOs. I wouldn't think it a smart thing to misdirect your audience in a pilot episode.