Serenity (Firefly vessel)
 Animation showing the difference between the engine pod digital models used in the television series and movie
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Serenity is a fictional spaceship that appears in Joss Whedon's Firefly television series and related works. Set in the 26th century, the series follows the nine-person crew of the Firefly-class vessel, a small transport ship, as they earn a living through various legal and illegal means. The ship is the main setting; it appears in all fourteen episodes, the film, and several comics.
The ship was designed by director Joss Whedon, production designer Carey Meyer, and visual effects supervisor Loni Peristere. The collaboration led to more consistency between the live-action and digital effects representations of Serenity than is usual in science-fiction works. Two contiguous sets were built, between them containing the entirety of the ship's interior, which provided several advantages to the cast and crew during filming. The digital model of the ship was created by Zoic Studios, who also developed methods to digitally replicate live-action filming techniques, a first for television. These allowed digital renderings of the ship to blend in with the documentary/found-footage filming style of the live-action scenes.
Serenity is described by Whedon as the "tenth character" of the series. Some reviews compare the ship to the Millennium Falcon in the Star Wars franchise. She has made cameo appearances in the Battlestar Galactica miniseries and the Star Wars: Evasive Action webcomic.
Serenity first appeared in the pilot episode of Joss Whedon's Firefly, which is set in the year 2517, in a star system humanity migrated to after using all of Earth's resources. She is the property of Malcolm "Mal" Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), a former sergeant who served on the losing side of a civil war that ended six years before the series began. Mal acquires Serenity from a used spaceship yard after the war (as depicted in flashbacks during "Out of Gas"), intending to hire a small crew and take various jobs to support himself and wartime comrade Corporal Zoe Alleyne, while keeping out of the way of the Alliance, the multi-planetary government they were fighting against. Other flashbacks in "Out of Gas" show how the rest of the main crew came to join the ship; pilot Hoban "Wash" Washburne (Alan Tudyk), engineer Kaylee Frye (Jewel Staite), and mercenary Jayne Cobb (Adam Baldwin), as well as Inara Serra (Morena Baccarin), a courtesan who hires out one of Serenity’s two shuttlecraft. At the start of the series, the episode "Serenity" depicts the arrival of the other three members of the ensemble cast as passengers aboard the ship: the preacher (or shepherd) Derrial Book (Ron Glass), the fugitive doctor Simon Tam (Sean Maher), and his psychic and psychotic sister River (Summer Glau).
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