Claire Wolfe enjoys Firefly, film at eleven. She’s not so keen on Kaylee:
The only element that didn’t ring true to me was this little gamin girly they made the ship’s mechanic. She sort of “intuits” the machinery of the ship – not with alien powers, but just with a loveable girliness. I didn’t believe it for one second, and pictured real mechanics groaning at the idiocy.
I wonder what she’ll think of River later on.
I’m no technician, but let me say I didn’t get that vibe off Kaylee at all. It is established in later episodes (Shindig and Out of Gas come to mind) that she is simply a mechanical wiz who makes it look easy.
In the dinner scene in the pilot, Kaylee says in so many words that machines “talk to me,” and in Heart of Gold she says, “I’ll talk to [the ship], see what she’s got we might use.” This sort of language supports the above-quoted complaint.
But she also shows, e.g. in chatting with the bucks at the ball in Shindig (the lamest episode imho), that she doesn’t need magical “girliness” to understand machinery.
Also: in Out of Gas, River announces the disaster shortly before it happens. Her superpower sometimes seems to be clairvoyance, but eventually it’s specified as mind-reading. (According to the Big Damn Movie, that’s why They are after her.) So whose mind did she read? The ship’s.