Though the Firefly series has a few different villains, the Reavers were the scariest during the 14-episode television series. The series is a sci-fi-western set in outer space long after Earth can no longer support human life. The inner planets of the solar system are home to the affluent members of humanity, while the outer planets are more like the wild west. That's where Mal Reynolds and his crew run their smuggling business, and the people living there struggling to survive in hostile territories. Part of what makes those territories hostile are the creatures known as Reavers.
Reavers make their first appearance in the pilot episode of Firefly. Though they don’t appear in every episode of the series, they do act as harbingers of chaos and violence in several of them. They also appear in other media that have spun out of Firefly, like comic books, novels, and the big-screen movie sequel Serenity. The latter offered perhaps the most insight into what these creatures are and where they come from.
Firefly Treats Reavers Like Their Own Urban Legend
As early as the pilot episode of Firefly, Reavers are treated like the kind of monster used to scare kids into behaving, or that adults talk about like campfire tales. They’re like an urban legend, but one that permeates space. Those who operate outside the law, like the crew of the Firefly-class ship Serenity, have seen Reavers and fought them. However, the official stance of the Alliance, the governing body of the allied planets, is that Reavers do not exist.
Reavers are referred to as men who have traveled to the edge of the known universe (or occupied space) and have been driven mad by the emptiness of it. All the known Reavers in Firefly are men, and they can easily be identified. Their clothing is scrapped together, and they have pieces of flesh that have been cut into, stitched, or removed. They don’t speak, but instead growl, yell, or grunt. Reavers are animalistic beings who are only concerned with their own rage, hunger, and violence.
Reavers live on their own ships and send raiding parties out to other spaceships or down to planets to capture people. Some of these people might be turned into Reavers themselves, but most of them will be killed by the Reavers instead. As Zoe Washburne (Gina Torres) points out when the crew of the Serenity crosses paths with a Reaver ship:
"If they take the ship, they'll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into their clothing. And if we're very, very lucky, they'll do it in that order."
“Bushwacked” Reveals How Reavers Grow Their Numbers
Though Reavers are seen as savage beings who only care about their base instincts, they do maintain some sort of social structure and higher thinking. This is demonstrated through the fact that they paint symbols on the ships they use, and strap dead bodies to the front of them to intimidate others. They also leave traps behind after raiding ships, which is seen in the episode “Bushwacked.”
In the episode, the Serenity crew comes across a ship after it has already been raided by Reavers. While most of the ship’s crew has been killed and many of the supplies are bare, there is one injured survivor left on board. That survivor saw everything the Reavers did to the rest of his crew, and isn't exactly stable in the head. The others who rescue him theorize that he was driven mad by being forced to watch the torture of everyone else, slowly turning into something resembling a Reaver himself.
That man eventually starts cutting into his own skin and attacks members of the Serenity crew, which Malcolm Reynolds (The Rookie’s Nathan Fillion) reveals he’s seen before. It’s never made clear if the Reavers did anything to the survivor of their raid to intentionally make him one of them, or if his actions are a result of some sort of psychological break caused by the trauma of what he witnessed. It’s left up to the audience to decide.
Serenity Provides Reaver Backstory
Following the cancelation of the television series, Firefly lived on in games and comics. It also got a sequel in a big-screen movie. The film Serenity picked up after the events of the series, and helped close out the story to an extent. One of the storylines Serenity fleshed out more for the audience is the origin of the Reavers.
Government officials spent Firefly and Serenity in pursuit of River Tam (The Sarah Connor Chronicles’ Summer Glau). Seventeen years old, River is a genius young woman who attended a boarding school sponsored by the Alliance, and while there, was experimented on. Her incredible gifts gave her some psychic reach, which meant she knew government secrets that the Alliance didn’t want to become public knowledge. One of those secrets was the location of the planet Miranda and what happened there.
At one point in Serenity, River commandeers the ship to plot a course for Miranda, and the crew decides to see just where her mind was leading them. What they found there was a shipyard of Reavers just above the planet — because Miranda was where the Reavers were born. River accessed digital logs created on Miranda to reveal the secret the Alliance had been keeping from the universe.
The Alliance allowed for scientists to experiment with medication that would make workers less aggressive. The chemical G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate, also called Pax, was added to the air on Miranda. It worked so well that it calmed the human beings there to the point where they essentially died where they sat. They had no desire to do anything at all, including eat or drink. 0.01% of Miranda’s population of 30 million people, however, experienced the opposite.
Those roughly 30,000 human beings became so aggressive that they turned on the rest of the population and the scientists there who were recording the incident. These people are the original Reavers. The Alliance then sealed all records of what happened and pretended the Reavers didn’t exist, even hiding knowledge of the planet Miranda from others the Firefly universe. Despite the continued denial by the Alliance, however, the legend of Reavers as monsters on the edge of space grew with every attack.
While this explanation for Reavers is provided in Serenity, it’s unclear if the mythology surrounding Reavers would have been the same if Firefly had been able to continue beyond its first season. As with so many aspects of the show's sci-fi world, audiences are left to wonder what might have been.