The farthest-reaching—and, frankly, the saddest in its triteness—effect that Joss Whedon's 'Firefly' has had on scifi after it is the inclination of lazy writers to set their universes in Western-style or frontier-style environments.
It was something that Whedon pulled off spectacularly well because he wrote it well and because his characters were real and fully-fleshed out, in a universe which was also made real and felt real.
From the first episode, this show has had dull, predictable, two-dimensional characters that are more caricature than human.
Another trite, yet overused scifi trope is the inheritance of the large-forehead/ridged-forehead trait in alien species from the many iterations of 'Star Trek.'
One thing we know about evolution and natural selection is that, in species which develop intelligence and verbal communication, no physical trait is "wasted" on decorative, superfluous ****. A larger forehead would only develop over millions of years to accommodate a larger brain; a ridged forehead is something which is retained only in non-intelligent species such as reptiles, as a decorative feature to attract mates in the absence of intellectual communication.
This show is full of the worst of the many scifi tropes and blunders in universe-building which plague bad writers.
You can't make great stories out of that.
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