Have you ever had a male dental hygienist?

[dherblay]

I had my teeth cleaned yesterday. I had my new hygienist, Debbie, who is either some sort of genius in her ability to clean my teeth without ever reminding me that there are sharp metal objects in my mouth, or totally incompetent. I've looked in the mirror, so I guess I'll go with the first. However, during the cleaning, I kept asking her to go back and scrape some more. Somehow, I don't feel like it's a complete dental check-up until someone's jabbed into one of my nerves. I feel dissatisfied unless I've been through some amount of pain before we get to the floss; I feel somehow guilty. I mean, I know the shape my teeth are in -- I know I deserve some sort of punishment. I don't think I'm particularly masochistic, but get me in a dentist's chair and I start feeling a need for contrition.

Anyway, tonight being Tuesday, it is my sacred duty as a LiveJournalist to offer my thoughts on Buffy:

Has anyone ever clicked a cut tag that just led you to the comment, "Does anyone really give a damn about my thoughts on Buffy? Does anyone still really give a damn about Buffy?"

Actually, this may be a Buffy worth giving a damn about. I won't say it's the greatest episode ever, but considering the season, it's a slight improvement. There was some actual nice stuff in there: the Buffy/Faith talk, the Anya/Andrew scenes. The direction (by someone of whom I had never heard, but then I've only heard of David Solomon) looked like someone looked through the camera for once. I even managed to not fall asleep during the Buffy/Spike schmoop. (The final scene of "Beneath You" is actually soporific for me!) Still, as I think over it, what comes to my mind are the problems.

• Buffy loves Dawn so much that she wants her to be safely out of the way of the apocalypse. Sure. But she sends Xander to chloroform her? This raises the deep philosophical question, what the fuck? That's showing love and respect -- exposing your sister to a carcinogen. I guess this is the last lingering effect of Generalissimo Buffy, but I'm going to have a tough time excusing what this does to the character of Dawn, or of Xander, or of Buffy. It's a shame she didn't have chloroform when she wanted Joyce out of town in "Graduation Day"; or maybe in the monk-created memories she did, and that's how Joyce got the tumor.
  
  
• Does anyone in the prop department read the scripts? Does anyone in the script department look at the props? Every time one of the characters said, "It looks like a scythe," or "It's obviously more ancient than that," it took me right out of the episode. I don't have my handy-dandy guide to polearms around, but "scythe" is about the last thing I'd pick. I'd go
  1. axe
  2. poleaxe
  3. bardiche
  4. voulge
  5. thingamajig
  6. butter knife
  7. scythe
  8. kitten
  And old? The thing looks like machine-tooled, tempered steel; things that are described as "old" in Sunnydale ought to be chipped flint, not something that looks like Darth Maul's backscratcher. On the other hand, while everyone else is looking for the Fray connection, I like to think of it as the third appearance in Sunnydale of the Glaive of Rhadyxmantril.
  
  
• I consider myself pretty feminist for someone who started watching the show because of Charisma Carpenter's hemlines, but I was bothered by the conscious reference by the "guardian" to being the last of a line of, specifically, women who worked to watch and correct the shadowmen. I mean, sure, patriarchy bad, but can't women and men work together to oppose it? Wouldn't that be more interesting than this simplistic oppositional dichotomy? Or . . . love the earth and women power and I'll be over here. Of course, patriarchy isn't the only domination on the planet, and I was disappointed that a group which takes its architecture from ancient Egypt and apparently operated under the aegis of Spanish Catholic missionaries should have as its last representative a woman whiter than plain yogurt and almost as white as Blythe Danner.
  
  
• Giles: still suspicious. Whatever. Hot on the heels of killing the bringer before the scoobies learned too much, he now tries to get Willow to go all black-magic. Whatever. He's so contrivedly bad I'm starting to think he's good. Evil, good, Judas or red herring, whatever: he just doesn't feel like Giles to me.

So, I have a lot of quibbles, but at least they're quibbles I'm eager to talk about, which is more than I can say about most of the recent episodes. Plus, there was the great line about Miss Kitty Fantastico. All in all, I would probably recommend that Rah head over to her "Peace Out" party a little early. I might even be rewatching the ep right now, except that Rah wants a tape of the Jasmine arc, and Connor just asked, "Where are those people?" ("I ate them." "Cool." Now that's a real show!)

I won't be updating my journal for the next few days, but don't worry about me: I'll be happy. Very happy, if you know what I mean and I (considering that this LJ has a readership of at most eight and possibly as few as one) think you do.