The richness of Firefly's story is that just about any one of the characters who make their home on Serenity could carry their own fully realized series. The only real exception would be Kaylee, who is more or less having her first adventure away from home with Mal and his crew. Everyone else is a show unto themselves. If one were to take the story of Simon and River Tam as its own, stand-alone feature, it would still be a compelling tale of a brother and sister braving the unknown and surviving by little more than their love for each other. This is why the little glimpses of that story we get in the handful of Firefly episodes are as interesting as they are. Simon and River, like everyone else on Serenity, are already fleshed-out characters who have a complex story to tell.

"Safe" isn't the only episode of the show to give a lot of time to Simon and River (episode 9, "Ariel", is a nice counterpart to "Safe" in a lot of ways), but it would have been the first real glimpse into the Tams' lives viewers got in the original airing. In fact, "Safe" and "Ariel" aired one after the other in October 2002. Going into this episode we don't really know much about Simon and River except that Simon is a doctor from one of the core planets and River is a deeply damaged genius Simon rescued from a secret Alliance facility. In a series of flashbacks throughout "Safe" we get to see Simon and River as children as well as the dangerous conformity of their family. Stuck on the fringes, these little interludes show us just how far from home the Tams truly are. All of the creature comforts of their sheltered lives are gone, but so is the sense of security that came from having the support of their respected, prestigious family. Unwilling to rock the boat in even the smallest way, Simon's father effectively disowned his children rather than question the authorities that tried to hurt them.

Without their true family, Simon and River spend much of the series settling into the Serenity crew as surrogates. The ride is a bumpy one, though. Simon shows disdain for the rinky-dink world Mal and company inhabit, if only because it's a constant reminder of what he's lost. Months before the events of Firefly he was a top surgeon in a clean, privileged world. In "Safe" he's reduced to tagging along on an illegal cattle sale on a backwater planet so small and easy to ignore that circumstance has rendered it a facsimile of the 19th century American frontier. His medical talents make Simon a commodity on such worlds, so it's not long before he and River are kidnapped by a band of mountain settlers in desperate need of a doctor. The ignorance of the isolated settlers leads them to brand River a witch for her psychic abilities. Just when they're about to burn Simon and River at the stake, Mal and the crew rescue them.

Best Moment: The dance/gunfight sequence. It was beautifully edited and kept both halves from weighing down the episode.

Notes: "Safe" gives us the first and one of the only hints into Shepherd Book's past. Worry not, Browncoats. The graphic novel The Shepherd's Tale is due out in November.

Episode Rating: 5/5- Solidly Western and full of essential backstory, "Safe" is one of the strongest episodes of the series. It finally filled out Simon and River, who very well could have gone the entire series without a proper episode of their own.