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10 My Name Is Early
Spun off from: Firefly
Who’s in it? Jubal Early, a Boba Fett-style mercenary who made each hunt a game… but that’s about to change.
What’s it about? Early lived a life of wickedness, skullduggery and villainy, travelling the ’verse to hunt down targets not only because he was paid to do it, but because he enjoyed it. But after an encounter with the crew of an aptly-named ship named Serenity, Early found serenity of his own.
Left floating in space with no hope of rescue, he had an epiphany: do good unto others, and you will be saved. He resolved to change his ways and, as a karmic reward, he was rescued by a passing ship piloted by a young woman named Saffron. Perhaps she wasn’t the best person to set him on his new path – having a rather troubled past herself, to say the least – but with her occasional support as he makes his way across the ’verse, Early sets out to do some fixin’. One day he might even run across the Serenity again, and he’ll have some grovelling to do…
Why do we want it? He may have been left as an “Object In Space” in the final episode of Firefly , but all is not lost for Early. “Oh, I know he survived,” Joss Whedon told MoviesOnline (opens in new tab) a few years back, and all we can say is: “Yay!” Because Richard Brooks made Early magnetic to watch, philosophising like a crazy priest one minute and ruthlessly violent the next; a true renaissance man.
He couldn’t be a hero unless he had an epiphany, of course (just ask Angel and Spike), and we can’t think of anything better than him reassessing himself while lost in space. Think of him as a reverse Gully Foyle from The Stars My Destination .
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11 In Cold Blood
Spun off from: Doctor Who
Who’s in it? Madame Vastra, Jenny, Sergeant Sceptical Of The Yard, Monitoriarty
What’s it about? A Silurian with a thing for samurai swords and a lesbian lover-cum-valet prowls Victorian London dishing out her own form of cold, hard justice to serial killers, malcontents and undesirables. She’s managing to put aside her natural disgust at humanity, the race that usurped her own as the rulers of Earth, and has trained herself to act like as a Lady Of Means, but if her own hibernating brothers and sisters were to awake again, whose side would she be on?
Why do we want it? It’s not just us – everybody wants it! “A Good Man Goes To War” has barely finished airing before the internet was awash with petitions for Vastra and Jenny to get their own series. And you ever know – it could happen (opens in new tab) .
Interestingly, another potential spin-off from Who (one that actually given serious consideration) was, hey, another Victorian London-based show (watching films and TV you sometimes come away with the idea that the Victorian era was something that only ever affected London, parts of Africa and a couple of ships). A pair of characters from the 1977 Tom Baker story “The Talons Of Weng-Chiang” called Jago and Litefoot – a larger-than-life theatre impresario and a straight-laced pathologist – proved so popular with the production team that there were serious discussions about them being granted their own series. It never happened on screen but years later the actors did reprise their roles in a Big Finish series of audio adventures, kicking off in 2009.
You can’t help wondering if Jago, Litefoot, Madame Vastra, Jenny and the Victorian Torchwood team kept bumping into each other?
A non-Victorian spin-off that many Who fans would love to see would be a UNIT series, and Russell T Davies was planning a Rose Tyler: Defender Of The Earth series before realising that he had too much on his plate and that four concurrent Who niverse series was probably a bit too much.
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