First, this is a great value. It was no real problem getting through the 85 hours, other than really getting sick of the negativity on too many occasions.
Basically we are dealing with a bunch of incompetent criminals. On many occasions they blithely eliminate people in the furtherance of their criminal schemes. Some of them have it coming, but in many cases it’s just murder. In one case it was just genocide, and unnecessary genocide at that, the enemy was already defeated and the genocide just tidied up the civilization that hosted it.
The alcoholism and drug abuse does nothing for me either. If someone is drinking until they suffer amnesia then they are way far gone. I have never met anyone who actually drank until they couldn’t remember what they did. I have been seriously drunk, but on the three occasions I was totally plastered I remember singing as I walked through the original Bedford the first time, running home and being violently sick along the way the second time, and walking to the stables to muck out the horses the third time. Mort gets a pass because it was a kind of self defense, they really were out to get him. So the alcoholism of two of the characters just does nothing for me. There’s nothing redeeming about them. Add on the casual murder and you aren’t going anywhere good. Conning innocent parties into becoming that sort of criminal? Nothing good there.
The author says that this is the spiritual follow on from Firefly. Nope. It isn’t. This is the sort of crew that Firefly would have put down as a service to humanity. In “Our Mrs. Reynolds” this crew would have been the wreckers who killed people to salvage their ship. Jane shot out their windows and blew them into space. Good choice.
The reader is pretty damned good… except English accents. Dude! That is a hackneyed Victorian or Dickensian era London accent that has long passed its sell-by date. Please don’t try that in a London pub, you are likely to be carried out on your back if you do.