The show opens on a space station, inside of which there are people wandering about in a kind of carnival. A barker extols an exhibit featuring "proof of alien life".  Inside the exhibit, Simon and Kaylee stare at a tall, illuminated cylinder that holds a strange and apparently dead creature. The doctor declares that it is a mutated cow foetus, not an alien. Simon uses this moment alone with the engineer to attempt to get closer to her, but once again puts his foot in his mouth, and Kaylee leaves in a huff. Zoë and Wash enter. As the pilot mockingly tries to communicate with the "alien", Zoë manages to both console and insult Simon. Back in the concourse, Inara tries to convince Mal to let her help fence the Lassiter they stole in "Trash", but Mal insists on keeping her out of that side of the business. Mal checks in with the station postmaster, who passes along two packages along with Serenity's mail. Jayne arrives to find that his mother has sent him a home-knitted cap, and he proudly dons it. The others observe the hideous headgear with a mixture of amusement and sarcasm. The other shipped item is a huge crate addressed to Mal and Zoë. They open it to discover a dead body.

Flashback to seven years earlier at the Battle of Du-Khang. As a young Independence soldier, Private Tracey, calmly prepares a meal behind cover, an Alliance soldier sneaks up on him. Just as the latter is about to shoot, Zoë appears behind him and cuts his throat. While she lectures the boy about stealth, Sgt. Reynolds comes screaming (literally) over some obstacles and crashes into their position. Tracey is injured when the Alliance zeros in on them. Mal and Zoë grab Tracey and their shell-shocked lieutenant and bug out.

Back in the present, the two ex-soldiers puzzle over the "decently preserved" corpse of their former comrade. Hauling the box aboard Serenity, they find a recorded message from Tracey. He apparently anticipated trouble from some unsavoury associates, and has asked them to ship his body home to St. Albans.

Back on the station, an ominous Alliance soldier, Lieutenant Womack, threatens first to imprison, then to burn to death the postmaster, who quickly tells the man and his aide who left with the encoffined body.

On Serenity, Jayne waxes surprisingly philosophical about death to Shepherd Book, who contemplates a modest ceremony for the dead man. River arrives to make herself comfortable by lying on the casket. Meanwhile, Mal and Zoë entertain Inara with a hilarious tale about Tracey's antics during the war. Suddenly, the ship is shaken by a near miss from an Alliance craft. Lt. Womack hails them and demands to board Serenity. The crew mistakenly think that Womack is after the Lassiter. When Womack mentions "that crate", however, Mal realizes he's after Tracey's box, and stalls for time while they take apart the crate to discover what secrets it might contain. Finding nothing, they decide to have Simon autopsy the hapless soldier, but the doctors' first incision causes the "dead" man to leap up and struggle with the gathered crew.

After he calms down, Tracey confesses that he is smuggling illegal internal organs. He was supposed to deliver the implanted organs on Ariel, but he got a higher bid. Unfortunately for him, the original buyers killed the new customer and are now after their stolen "merchandise". Another shot from Womack reminds them of their immediate peril. Wash takes Serenity down to St. Albans, where they try unsuccessfully to elude their pursuer in a narrow snowbound valley. They finally come to rest inside a hidden cave, but the Alliance ship drops explosive charges into the valley to flush them out.

Kaylee gets to know and even flirt with the young soldier whose words mesmerized her earlier. Book does some checking on their Alliance pursuers and discovers some anomalous behaviour. He ultimately recommends to Mal that they allow the Feds to board the ship. Tracey overhears some of this conversation and pulls a gun on the crew. Mal expresses disgust at his former subordinate's attempt to force them to get him out of his own mess, and orders Wash to call the Feds. As Tracey fires at Wash, wounding him, Zoë shoots the ungrateful man in the chest. Wounded but not slowed down, Tracey grabs Kaylee for cover and heads for the cargo bay. When Mal confronts him about his treacherous behaviour, Tracey lays into his former superiors about being "saps". Jayne comes up behind him, and as Tracey turns to shoot him, Mal fires instead, knocking the young man to the ground.

Lt. Womack and his men enter the cargo bay. He tries to cow the smugglers with his Alliance authority, but an unarmed Book arrives to explain why he won't be using that authority, given the pains he's taken to keep his extracurricular organ-dealing activity from the local Feds. Faced with a surprisingly direct threat of death from the preacher, Womack decides to depart, dismissing the "damaged goods" in Tracey's gravely-wounded chest.

Tracey belatedly realizes that Book's confrontation was part of a plan, one that he screwed up by threatening the crew and getting himself shot for his efforts. He asks Mal and Zoë to really deliver him home this time, then dies. Accompanied by a mournful soundtrack tune and voiced-over excerpts from Tracey's message, the crew of Serenity solemnly returns the fallen soldier to his grieving family.

My Review:

Mal and co pick up the post and he’s a bit disturbed that a dead friend has mailed his body to him & Zoë.  All Jayne got was a hat.  Anyway cue the time tunnel back 7 years to the war and everyone looks exactly the same age as they do in the future and we see Mal, Zoë and dead body guy (who’s alive now) and they’re shooting and stabbing and eating beans before they’re attacked and they have to escape.  It’s all very Apocalypse Now, but without the PBR.  Jayne has the coolest line of the series too: What'd y'all order a dead guy for?  It turns out the dead guy (called Tracey) isn’t so corpsified after all, he’s in an induced coma state (like Riv & Si were on Ariel) the reason why has to do with the fact that he’s had his guts removed and replaces with artificial ones to help him smuggle them for some corporation.  However Tracey hasn’t figured out that the corporation would still send a retrieval team to make sure that he’s really dead.  Tracey comes too just as Simon is about to autopsify him, much to everyone’s surprise, especially Wash’s a little later on.  Tracey explains the situation but then the ship is attacked by the enforcer guys.  Mal and Book come up with a plan, which Tracey objects to very strongly, in fact he shoots Wash in the hand, but Zoë shoots him right back for hurting her man.  Then there’s the inevitable hostage stand off with Kaylee as the hostage of choice, but that goes south too and Mal is forced to mortally wound Tracey to save Kaylee’s life.  The enforcers turn up but Mal, Jayne and Zoë manage to convince them with their guns to listen to the Book man’s friendly warning to leave.  The bad guys leave, but not before they diss Jayne’s hat in some sort of honour revenge thing.  The burial scene at the end is quite nearly touching, especially as they play Tracey's message over the top to try and get some emotional impact. All in all an interesting episode but not nearly so good as what’s come before so I award it a lowly four out of ten.