579: The Race: Part 3

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The Race: Part 3

Title text: No, the best things about The Sarah Connor Chronicles were: (1) watching Sarah and Cameron try to pass for normal, and (2) Cameron throwing people and things through walls. Everything else was pretty secondary.

Explanation

Firefly was a television series aired by Fox in 2002 that got cancelled midway through, but it has a large fan base nowadays. The star of the show was Captain Malcolm (or Mal) Reynolds, played by Nathan Fillion. Other members of his crew were Kaylee (played by Jewel Staite), the ship's mechanic, Inara Serra (played by Morena Baccarin) was a Companion (or, as Mal would say: whore) that helped Serenity (the spaceship) gain a landing on many planets that otherwise would have nothing to do with Mal. River Tam (played by Summer Glau) was the seemingly crazy younger sister of Dr. Simon Tam (played by Sean Maher), and due to her latent psionic powers and the damage from the experiments she had undergone, she was known for making odd, out-of-context statements. Randall is a fan of Firefly, and makes reference to it (and Summer Glau in particular) in various other comics - see under 'Categories' below.

When Cueball is introduced to the first two women, he learns that they behave in real life as on the Firefly show (Summer is strange and Jewel is a mechanical wizard) - this is why he begins to ask about Morena Baccarin, and also why the other two say "No." before he can finish the question "Is she really a prostitute?". In the last panel, Kaylee apparently wired-up Mal's controller to broadcast on the frequency of Cueball's skateboard, so it took control of his board, where Mal's stood still. (Buy a few RC models (Radio-controlled model) to play with friends and inevitably this will happen. Where two controllers broadcast on the same frequency, so the two models are confused by the signals they receive.)

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was a television series aired by Fox from 2008-09. Summer Glau played the role of Cameron, a Terminator; Cameron was played in a distinctly "strange" manner as a humanoid robot who finds much about humanity puzzling. Combined with her role as River Tam, the joke is that it wasn't Summer's characters who were eccentric, but that Summer Glau herself is actually just as strange and eccentric as she is shown to be on screen. Electric skateboards have been the subject of several other comics like 139: I Have Owned Two Electric Skateboards, 409: Electric Skateboard (Double Comic) and a panel in 442: xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel.

This series was released on five consecutive days (Monday to Friday) and not over the usual schedule of three comics a week. These are all the comics in The Race series:

• 577: The Race: Part 1
• 578: The Race: Part 2
• 579: The Race: Part 3
• 580: The Race: Part 4
• 581: The Race: Part 5

Transcript

[Nathan, Cueball, and Summer Glau standing around with electric skateboards.]

Nathan: Meet a few of my friends. This is-

Cueball: Summer Glau! You were the best part of Chronicles.

Summer: I eat my bodyweight in food every 31 days. That's slightly faster than the human average.

[Summer stares off into space.]

Nathan: Yeah, there's a reason she only plays strange roles.

Cueball: Ah.

Summer (from below): I'm part of the floor now.

[They find Jewel Staite working on a skateboard's engine.]

Nathan: And this is Kaylee.

Jewel: My name is Jewel, Nathan.

Nathan: Kaylee—

Jewel: Jewel.

Nathan: —Jewel is fixin' up my new board.

Jewel: Almost done!

Cueball: So wait. Summer's actually weird, Jewel's actually a mechanical whiz...

Cueball: ...will Morena Baccarin be here? Is she really a—

Nathan and Jewel: No.

The racers set up

[Nathan and Jewel are to the far left of a full-width panel. Nathan is standing on his skateboard holding a controller. Cueball is on his skateboard which is careening out of control on the far right of the panel.]

Nathan: Kaylee, I've been gunnin' the radio hand throttle thingy for a while, but it ain't movin'.

Jewel: Oh, I must've set it to the wrong frequency!

Cueball (riding around on haywire board): AAAAAAAA

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Discussion

It should be noted, that Summer Glau (aka River) is known to play bizzare, confused characters. Her characters in Dollhouse, Sarah Connor Chronicles, The 4400 were all a little (or more) odd. This is referenced when on panel 2 she begins to act strange and on panel 4 mel explains, that there is a reason why she plays strange roles indicating, that Summer Glau herself has a odd personality.

Also, Summer Glau is my favorite actress if I may express my personal feelings in comment. :) 173.245.53.140 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

She seemed pretty normal when she played herself on an episode of Big Bang Theory. Then again, if you're reading explainxkcd you probably loathe Big Bang Theory and have never watched it. --108.162.241.127 14:20, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

Wait, what? By what metric do the majority of exkcd readers hate the Big Bang Theory? Why?

...did I miss something? Hppavilion1 (talk) 09:41, 12 March 2017 (UTC)

I do like the first few seasons, which actually had a lot of science and geek/nerd-culture related jokes. Later when it became more and more relationship drama, I lost interest. Don't hate it anyway.

Summer Glau played a role on TBBT, portraying herself as normal, which for a weird person is weird. So it makes perfectly sense. --Lupo (talk) 12:38, 9 October 2019 (UTC)