Afternoon of Alterity - Nazareth College

to watch the murder and mutilation of his fellow crew members. Inshock, the man mumbles a string of incoherent sentences about theattack on his crew, whispering that they were, “Cattle. Cattle for theslaughter” (“Bushwhacked”). Witnessing such inhuman brutalitycauses the crew to question the nature of the creatures that werecapable of committing such atrocities. The crew’s preacher, ShepherdBook, suggests that Reavers are human beings gone astray, insistingthat they are redeemable men, “too long removed from civilization,perhaps – but men” (“Bushwhacked”). However, just as the varioustranslators of Beowulf refer to Grendel as a “walker in darkness”(Donaldson 13) and a “dark death-shadow” (Heaney 13), the captainof the ship, Mal, emphasizes the Reavers’ otherness and monstrosity,describing them as a “darkness” that “you can’t even imagine…blacker than the space it moves through” (“Bushwhacked”).It is not until viewers reach the feature film, Serenity (createdas a follow-up to the prematurely cancelled Firefly series), that itbecomes clear that both Shepherd Book and Mal were correct intheir assessment of the Reavers, as the crew learns of the Reavers’human lineage and hybridized nature as Grendel-esque, humanoidmonsters. In the film, Reavers finally appear on screen and viewersare able to see their recognizably human, yet deformed features.Comparable in appearance to J.R.R. Tolkien’s orcs, Reavers’ featuresare mutilated and harsh, with accentuated, fearsome teeth, pointedears, and bleeding and broken, charred-looking skin. Their physicalappearance as hybridized demonic humans is clearly reminiscent ofthe legends of Cain’s cursed and deformed kin. Additionally, likeGrendel whose lineage can be traced back to the human line ofCain, the crew of Serenity discovers the unsettling truth behind theorigin of Reavers that renders the dividing line between humanityand monstrosity too porous for comfort.Upon their arrival on the isolated, presently uninhabited,borderland planet, Miranda, the crew discovers a recording leftmaura whitman 13