MONDO EXTRAS

The Operative enters Mr. U's chamber again, looking for Mal, looking for the situation, and the Lovebot is activated again. "Mal. Guy killed me, Mal. He killed me with a sword..."

Jayne cocks his gun against the Reavers as they slowly open the door, the grates, pushing each other through one face or head or body part at a time, insensate to the pain, made up of rage. Zoe fires the first shot as one Reaver gets his face through. Pierced, bleeding, animal. This is exactly what will happen in Los Angeles, CA, if Joss fucks up what Grant Morrison did with Emma Frost. I'm just letting everybody know right now: accurate physical demonstration. Not pretty, is it?

Mal enters the generator room, stands across a long, deep shaft, looking at the place in the center where he's supposed to be. "Hard to get to. That's a fact." If you can't picture it: it's like where Luke Skywalker got his hand cut off, but with no way to get there. That's like the only part of those movies I remember.

Outside, Zoe fires at the Reavers finally coming through the door. Eventually, her face a bloody rage, climbs over the trench crates and cocks, shoots, cocks, shoots, stalking closer to them as they pile into the room one by one. She can't even hear Jayne cursing at her to return. She takes one down, stabbing at it over and over and over, destroying its corpse as it falls to the floor. There's no difference -- her grief is rage; she's made up of it. River screams. "Zoe, get your ass back on the line!" A Reaver swipes up her back, dropping her.

The Operative enters the generator room and shoots Mal a little bit. "You shot me in the back! I haven't made you angry, have I?" For two such complexly honorable men, they sure do disagree on the finer points. On the rulebook. "There are a lot of innocent people in the air being killed right now," the Operative says. Mal crossed the line by drawing the Reavers into the ion cloud. "You have no idea how true that is," returns Mal: the Reavers are more innocent than all of us, you and me, River and Mal and Yo-Saff-Bridge put together. "I know the secret. The truth that burned up River Tam's brain. Rest of the 'verse is going to know it, too. 'Cause they need to." The Operative scoffs. "Do you really believe that?" He does. I do too. "You willing to die for that belief?" He really is.