Every time I watch it I'm just like "would someone please open their damn mouth!!" It seems like such a simple common sense thing to do....but then I started thinking about it, and it seems to really fit in with Mal's character. I still don't like that part of it, because it still seems like when he realized it could turn violent that he should have said something, but throughout the series when someone tried to make him do something he usually just dug in harder and refused to change course.

I guess the rest of the episode just made up for that shortcoming for me. I loved River's trouble eating the ice planet, Jane's hat, and so much else about the episode that it just outweighed that one annoyance. I can totally see why some people would put that in their list of least favorite episodes though.