These comments are considering the entire "Return to Earth That Was" run, not just the first volume.

I'm very torn on this. Pak is a capable writer, and the story is probably his best one in his long run on Firefly. But I can't help but feel he still comes woefully short on his interest in the universe and its characters.

The voices are fine. Not great, but not so bad as to be a problem -- though I still am flummoxed as to how they never swear in Chinese anymore. Such a huge part of their dialogue on the show, and yet utterly ignored in Pak's entire near-30-issue run of the book. A very minor thing, that, but symptomatic of the larger issues.

Which are that the characters clearly are placed where Pak wishes them to be. Mal's mental state after "Serenity" is ignored, as are Kaylee and Simon's and several others. Pak justifies this partially by oblique hints to events in the interceding years, but mainly by citing his own work in the earlier books taking place between the TV series and the film. But that doesn't feel organic at all. If those events scarred Mal so badly, why does he not show so in the film that follows them? A lot, if not most, of this would have been fixed by Pak simply setting the entire 28 issue run after the film, rather than just this final arc. As Wash and Book do nearly nothing in these comics in any case, there'd be no problem doing so, and it would have set this book up a lot better.

There are also idiotic mistakes, like starting the book with the caption "A few years down the line" (which indeed this would have to be, to have Emma be walking and talking) and then in a later volume doing a flashback to "One year earlier" where Book is still alive (patently impossible, that'd have to be at _least_ 3 or 4 years prior to these events to make any sense at all). An editorial mistake? Sure. But also one that would never have happened had the writer himself cared enough to know where these events are taking place.

I trust that Pak has watched and liked the show and film -- possibly more than once, even. And he probably liked it. The characters are behaving enough as themselves for that. But there doesn't seem to be any deep love to it. The universe is on the surface the one it should be, but it is crammed full of high science fiction concepts like robots, artificial intelligence and space portals that feel horribly out of place in Firefly -- tonally more than anything. Considering the thousands of die-hard fans out there, it's saddening that BOOM couldn't hire someone who wouldn't make a mistake like having Mal bite into an apple instead of cutting it with a knife, someone who wouldn't put teleportation in the story and would know better than to add giant wars and robot armies to the arcs of characters whose main appeal was the small-time underdog vibe. Someone who would have them swear in Chinese.

But all that said, "Return to Earth That Was" is easily Pak's best Firefly book. It's emotional. It's well written, for the most part. And while I don't feel how he got the characters to this place was at all believable or organic, what he did with them once they got there felt good enough to retroactively soften my earlier frustration. I was genuinely touched at some of the moments here, and he ironically uses Wash better here, dead, than he did in the earlier books, alive. ( )