It’s shocking, and I was really moved by the Kaylee line. You know, the character Kaylee says afterwards when they move on, “Wait a minute, where’s Wash?”, and it was so sad! And then Zoe says, “He ain’t coming,” it’s so, so sad.

After I read it I called Joss – he had told me before, “Just call me when you’re done reading it,” so I knew something bad was coming, or just potentially very embarrassing. As he explained it, it was to raise the stakes on the movie. At that point in the story, everybody starts to get injured and it looks like nobody’s gonna make it out alive and with Wash dead, there’s a moment where you actually think: “He’s just gonna kill everybody!” Especially when the doctor goes down and three other people have gone down, it’s like, there’s no way out! They’re running out of ammunition, there’s just no out. So I think it worked. If it didn’t work, I’d be mad, but Wash died in the service of something greater than himself: the story.