Nathan Fillion stood up at Awesome Con on Saturday and told a room full of nerds who never got over a show cancelled twenty-four years ago that it's coming back. Animated. Almost the whole OG cast. Just needs a streaming platform to say yes.

I get it. I am one of those nerds. I torrented the only season based on some forum recommendation and next thing I knew I was in love with a ship and wondering how Joss Whedon was able, again, to reach through the screen and grab me by the feels. Firefly didn't just have good dialogue; it had dialogue that knew what words were for. Every line was load-bearing.

Then the other shoe. Joss Whedon "gave his blessing". But he's not writing it. He's not in the room where it happens.

I have to hold two things in my head at once, and neither is comfortable.

Whedon, by the accounts of people who worked with him and were hurt by him, was not a good man to those closest to him. Charisma Carpenter's letter. The Justice League set. Kai Cole's essay. The pattern formed a picture of brilliance coexisting with cruelty, feminism performed in public and contradicted in private.

But Whedon could also write like almost nobody else in scriptwriting. Once More With Feeling. Alpha and Whiskey. "That's my secret Captain… I'm always angry". Mal kicking Crow into the engine. That's a writer who knows the funniest version of a scene and the most frightening version are the same scene.

My problem with the animated Firefly isn't about whether Whedon deserves another platform. It's about what made the show the show. Call it "cowboys in space" and you'd be right and completely wrong, the way you could call Hamlet "a prince who can't decide." What made those fourteen episodes so shiny was the voice. Every line sounded like it had been turned over three times before being placed where it belonged.

Showrunners Tara Butters and Marc Guggenheim aren't bad writers. And they know the material. But Butters's Gen-V S01 is the sort of "school is awful" cliche that Joss skewered; and with a few exceptions Guggenheim's Arrowverse is the characterless, content-mill television of which Firefly was the absolute antithesis.

Hollywood keeps assuming what audiences love are The Things. The ship. The cast. The catchphrases. Put the stuff back together, the magic follows. But what people actually grieve aren't the players. It's the mind that told them what to play. Sometimes you shouldn't get the band back together.

I'll watch it, of course I'll watch it. I just hope I don't spend the whole time thinking about what it could have been. And isn't.