Episode Review: “The Train Job” (The second pilot)

Despite having run ads for weeks that focused on scenes from the original Firefly pilot episode, “Serenity”, Fox opted to have the Mutant Enemy staff create a second pilot, “The Train Job.” Instead of having two hours to introduce viewers to the world of Firefly and the entire nine-person crew, ME had only one hour.

The crew gets a job from a well-known criminal kingpin, Adelei Niska, to rob a train on a nearby planet (thus, “The Train Job”). Though the actual robbery goes relatively smoothly, the crew runs into problems when the captain and Zoe are stuck on the train, where they learn that they’d just stolen medical supplies desperately needed by one of the local towns.

“The Train Job” is one of my least favorite episodes (though that’s praising with faint damnation, so to speak — even the worst Firefly episode is better than most television shows), but that’s likely a result of its origin as a replacement for the much better “Serenity”. “The Train Job” tries to work in all of the facts that establish the Firefly universe (our crew is relatively poor and not above criminal activities, Mal fought against Unification, Simon and River are fugitives), and it suffers from that. It does, however, introduce Niska, which earns it bonus points, since that will pay off in spades in a later episode, “War Stories”.