Serenity (movie)
The Operative is all that the Alliance stands for. He is, as Whedon described, the "perfect product of what's wrong with the Alliance". He is someone who is a force for good, who wants to help make his (and the Alliance's) image of a "world without sin." The Operative believes so much in this idea that he do anything to make create that world . Mal is the opposite. At the movie's beginning, he is a man who has lost all faith. By the end of the movie, however, Mal finally believes in something—freedom of choice—so strongly that he is willing to die to preserve it. Whedon has said that the most important line in the movie is Mal's to the Operative at its end: "I'm going to show you a world without sin." Whedon's point is that a world without sin is a world without choice, and that choice is what defines humanity. The Operative, who does only what he is told to do, and the inhuman Reavers, created by the Alliance's need to control people, are only two examples of this theme.