I think Bletsoe made the points very well about Mal's failings as a hero. His was my favourite essay of the piece, I think, since he talked quite starkly about how unsympathetic Mal is, essentially, on the page and the way in which Nathan Fillion turned him into a sympathetic character.

I think Goldsmith definitely saw the Government in Firefly as a fairly direct allegory for the American Government both present and at the time of the North's victory. I think his reading of Firefly is, as you say, wrong, or it at least misses many subtleties and complexities. I could probably have teased out my unease better but there was a conflation of libertarianism = Mal Reynolds = the South = good and current US administrations = the Alliance = the north = bad that made me deeply uncomfortable and uncomfortable that that reading was there in Firefly to be had.