ENFP: Malcolm Reynolds, “Firefly”

The Champion, The Energizer, The Discoverer

Oh, boy.

I’m gonna catch a lot of gou shi for this one.

Captain Malcolm Reynolds is a mercurial character, much like the writer who created him. Pinning down his exact personality type is extraordinarily tough. I usually find him typed as an NT, because people see him as a problem-solving scoundrel out for his own profit who occasionally struggles with his conscience.

Mostly, Mal pops up as an ENTP all over the place. Like here, here, and here. I think a lot of my fellow geeks love that one of our favorite heroes could be an ENTP spaceship captain.

I’m going to disagree with them.

Mal presents himself—and his creator Joss Whedon presents him—as an antihero. A Han Solo type. A bizarro Captain Kirk. He’s the one who rebels against the Federation and their utopian ideals and sets off on his own to be a space pirate. With a heart of gold, of course.

He’s really a good guy. Well, maybe he’s just all right.

But just because you rebel against the ideals of utopia doesn’t mean you don’t have ideals yourself. Mal lives like a rogue, but that’s not how he started. As Mal once says in jest, “You can’t open the book of my life and jump in the middle. Like woman, I am a mystery.”

Dominant Function, (Ne) Extraverted Intuition: “Conceptualize from the Experience”

Mal hungers for open skies and boundless possibilities. In our earliest glimpses of him (in flashbacks from “The Message”) he’s carefree and careless, despite fighting a war. He takes up the cause of the Independents because it jives with his Ne need for freedom (and also his Fi ideals). He’s adaptable and resourceful, at times playful, and thrives on the possibilities found outside the borders of the Alliance.

His loss at the Battle of Serenity hardens him, pushing Mal down into his more practical Te, but he’s still out there looking for the next shiny adventure.

The moment he lays eyes on the Serenity, Mal starts dreaming. His second-in-command is skeptical, but Mal encourages Zoë to see what the ship could be, not what she is. At the end of the original pilot episode, after all the trouble they’ve been through, Mal’s just happy to be, “Still flying.”

Mal tries to be gruff and grim, but there are times when he comes off as downright poetic. He’s clearly an inspiring leader to the soldiers under his command, and he’s virtually a fountain of creative metaphors and witticisms. And yes, he’s read a poem, don’t faint.

Firefly MBTI

Firefly seems to have been born fully-formed.

So many TV shows—especially sci-fi—take such a long time to find their feet, but the world of the Serenity and her crew just works from the word go. By the first episode or two, it already feels like we’re visiting family.

Truth is, we only have just over half a first season. Fourteen episodes. And in the meantime, there are characters harboring secrets and dark pasts that they won’t talk about, relationships on the verge of blossoming that we never quite get to see happen, and one character who’s brain-damaged and crazy.

Makes typing quite a trick.

Joss Whedon created nine distinct characters who would each provide a unique perspective on the ‘verse that they travelled through. Yet, each character was also a part of himself, and his distinct voice spoke through all of them. So I had a lot of unraveling to do to find everyone’s cognitive functions underneath all that delightful patter.

I’ve been wanting to do this series since the day I started this blog, and it’s taken this long to get to a point where I feel confident in my typings. Also, I really dug having an excuse to watch Firefly over and over, and it was always hard to hit that last episode and not want to go back again for more. Like, if you wished hard enough, there would magically be another dozen episodes waiting for you that somehow went missing before.

Alas, the show, and the typings, are done for now. Hop aboard, and we’ll spend some time with these Big Damn Heroes.

(Screencaps for this series come from Cap-That.com/Firefly.)