What, no aliens?

It’s taken me up until episode ten to notice that there aren’t any aliens in Firefly.

I kinda like that, in a werid, not-very-sci-fi sort of way. It makes the characters easily identifiable, and it’s also the first type of sci-fi I’ve seen in ages that doesn’t assume there’s some other, probably more technologically advanced version of rat-people on nine million planets out there. I also think that the premise is that most of these planets were terraformed (I don’t know why I think that), but it makes sense, since we haven’t really spotted much evidence of other planets yet, let alone livable ones.