Seven Seasons of Buffy--SPOILERS
I figure I'm the last one to see it who wants to, but one never knows. Cut just in case.
It took me eighteen months to watch what took the makers seven years to produce. In part because I watched the first four seasons in company with Rachelmanija, which was great fun, and we may still continue from where we left off. I love talking them over with her during and after. But our schedules are irregular at best, so I went on past; on nights when my hands hurt, TV is better than trying to hold a heavy book.
Anyway, I finished last night, as I had a bad hand day after much feverish workage during late and early hours around guest daytripping. I did a marathon with the last half of season seven (often speeding through long sessions when characters walk slowly into a spooky space with flashlights and the music plays DOOM cues. I also sped through a few monster fights if there was no dialogue to listen to).
Though I found the last episode kind of static, except for the last ten minutes, most of seven was terrific, which was a relief after the sharp disappointment of season six.
Overall? Proof that American television could be such a wonderful art form--and will be when the twits currently insisting that long story arcs are impossible have retired at last. Syndication has changed so since the days when TV Wisdom insisted that the end of an ep had to deposit viewers pretty much at square one because summer syndication couldn't guarantee sequence. Even in those days, when there were no rentals, and you could only see reruns when the stations chose to show them, people remembered tiny details of change and discussed them endlessly. I recall that about Trek, for example. But not exclusively--it happened about all shows. I remember my parents discussing Rowdy Yates' growing up as a character in Rawhide. And oh the shock when the Nelsons let the boys marry on screen (long married in RL).
Well, anyway, Buffy was fun in the early eps, though I got tired of Monster of the Week plot. It was the wit that made it fun, but the character arcs that made it interesting: when the first arc happened, my investment just soared. From then on, I was hooked, and even though I knew there were seven seasons, the end of Season Three had me so tense beforehand--and it was such a terrific payoff--that I couldn't wait for more.
The world building is ridiculous, and toward the end some of the characters (and sometimes the wit) ended up in a bit of a predictable rut, but the steadily building emotional investment carried me right past the occasional clanking ep, even when Six came along. Six started strongly: when Willow went out without telling her friends what she was going to do and sacrificed an innocent life in order to get blood for the spell to bring Buffy back to life, I thought, Willow is going to have to pay the price for that. Well, she did . . . but she didn't. Other than Tara asking her just once about that bit of action, the entire thread was dropped, and instead we had Willow addicted to magic. That just did not work for me. The actor made me believe it at times, but at other times the dialogue was so excruciatingly diffuse I was as frustrated as during the moment during the otherwise great season five (with some reservations, like the incredibly boring Adam, and everything concerning him) when Giles says blithely (this is after Joyce is proved to have a brain tumor) something like "Medical things and magic don't mix."
Say what?
History, my dears, is full of people trying to mix medicine and magic. Oh, attempts at destruction are also a part of the curious history of magic in Western Europe (as late as the 1500s Philip Melancthon, among others, was trying hard to form a unified field theory which united all knowledge--science, religion, philosophy, magic, alchemy included) but I think only comfortable modern writers in their warm houses give us mages who concern themselves exclusively with destructive magic. But unexamined cliches in the Buffyverse building were there from the gitgo.
A perfect example of the problem is at the end of the "Angel" episode in season one, when he and Buffy share their first kiss. He refers to pain, she does, we think they mean the pain of having to part, but then she goes, and we see that her cross has burned his skin. Worldbuilding-wise it makes no sense: if the cross is a symbol of power, then Christianity has power. But Whedon slips us tromping clues that no, Christianity has no meaning . . . except that we've got lots of evil monks, and magic is chanted in Church Latin. Yet crosses burn. R-i-i-i-i-ght. Yet that same image is a terrific character moment.
Anyway, so there we have the issue of Willow's moral path--and her fight for redemption derailed into addiction. That undercut Xander's final scene with her to a serious degree for me. It could have been so interesting: Willow using her powers to take judgment against a human being. What culd have been a fascinating, and difficult, moral dilemma turns into the overblown "Willow tries to destroy the world" climax, which at least for me, didn't have the tenth of the power it could have had if she'd stayed there with Warren's horrible corpse and had to face what she had done.
Another problem with Season Six is Buffy's problem Spike. It seemed to me that she kept dancing around the fact that he had no soul, thus no moral center, but she never says it . . . she just keeps saying mealy-mouthed things that cause them both to storm around angrily. Then he gets mad enough to try to rape her, which I guess I could see, but she should have kicked his ass. Instead of yet another girl gets raped cliche, even if she was crying hard enough to barf, she should have kicked his butt right outside the house. We've seen Buffy in extremis, but she always had power. If we'd been given the reasons that later get niftily explored in season seven, Spike's last scene in that season would have had more powerful impact.
Well, I think, anyway. I loved Season Five except for Adam, and the ridiculous plan based around Adam, and his goal. The Initiative would have been much cooler, and more sinister, if the scientists hadn't had to become monster puppeteers. Older women, as well as persons of color, sure did not do well in that show. (Except for the awesome Principal Woods in the last season. His conversation with Faith--"I'm prettier than you"--cracked me up so hard that I had to backtrack to play it again. And thank goodness, the black guy did not have to die, even if the good demons did.)
The very last episode had the same odd static quality that I found in Angel Season Four, which I got so I could watch the Faith sequence. In Angel, I was not invested with the characters (though I knew who they were, as Rachel had showed me some stand-alone eps that were really good) but the long conversations with no one moving, not even their faces, as Evil!Cordy reveals she's pregnant (did everyone take a clueless pill? They didn't see it?) to Connor, and then claims it's his (and he doesn't even blink, much less say, Prove it. Or any number of more believable things a teen might say, even a teen one year old or whatever is going on) made me impatient. Well, the last episode of Season Seven was like that. Caleb was dead, the First wasn't corporeal or really even defined, everyone's relationship had resolved . . . so the last episode, I thought, would highlight the Slayer Girls. So, you know, when they gain their power, we really feel it for them. But no, we get super long static love or sex scenes reiterating what we already knew about the main characters. Though I adored the one with Faith and the principal. I guess those were emotional good-byes on the part of the writers and actors, but I think story would have been more effective. I felt the same disappointed as at the end of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movie, where instead of the "Scouring of the Shire" you get three or four endings of characters standing around being emotional and uttering inanities.
Yadda yadda yadda. I'm complaining too much about what disappointed me when there was so much that was good. That was brilliant. Like Willow, even when she was being dumb evil!Willow. Oz. Anya's entire arc (save the season seven waffling) was great. Xander being insightful was intensely good. Spike was my favorite character, a fine foil for Buffy, who was just plain awesome. So was Faith. I guess the upshot is, even with its flaws, and some epis that really fell flat, that I loved the show overall, and I will watch it again. Some episodes more than once, where the emotional arcs are just incandescent.
But I don't give Whedon an unqualified thumbs up enough to even try Dollhouse, which sounds totally repellent.
Of course, if everyone reports that no, it changes, it's great, it actually has a story, and insight, then maybe I'll trot way behind, baaa baaaa baaaaa.
It took me eighteen months to watch what took the makers seven years to produce. In part because I watched the first four seasons in company with Rachelmanija, which was great fun, and we may still continue from where we left off. I love talking them over with her during and after. But our schedules are irregular at best, so I went on past; on nights when my hands hurt, TV is better than trying to hold a heavy book.
Anyway, I finished last night, as I had a bad hand day after much feverish workage during late and early hours around guest daytripping. I did a marathon with the last half of season seven (often speeding through long sessions when characters walk slowly into a spooky space with flashlights and the music plays DOOM cues. I also sped through a few monster fights if there was no dialogue to listen to).
Though I found the last episode kind of static, except for the last ten minutes, most of seven was terrific, which was a relief after the sharp disappointment of season six.
Overall? Proof that American television could be such a wonderful art form--and will be when the twits currently insisting that long story arcs are impossible have retired at last. Syndication has changed so since the days when TV Wisdom insisted that the end of an ep had to deposit viewers pretty much at square one because summer syndication couldn't guarantee sequence. Even in those days, when there were no rentals, and you could only see reruns when the stations chose to show them, people remembered tiny details of change and discussed them endlessly. I recall that about Trek, for example. But not exclusively--it happened about all shows. I remember my parents discussing Rowdy Yates' growing up as a character in Rawhide. And oh the shock when the Nelsons let the boys marry on screen (long married in RL).
Well, anyway, Buffy was fun in the early eps, though I got tired of Monster of the Week plot. It was the wit that made it fun, but the character arcs that made it interesting: when the first arc happened, my investment just soared. From then on, I was hooked, and even though I knew there were seven seasons, the end of Season Three had me so tense beforehand--and it was such a terrific payoff--that I couldn't wait for more.
The world building is ridiculous, and toward the end some of the characters (and sometimes the wit) ended up in a bit of a predictable rut, but the steadily building emotional investment carried me right past the occasional clanking ep, even when Six came along. Six started strongly: when Willow went out without telling her friends what she was going to do and sacrificed an innocent life in order to get blood for the spell to bring Buffy back to life, I thought, Willow is going to have to pay the price for that. Well, she did . . . but she didn't. Other than Tara asking her just once about that bit of action, the entire thread was dropped, and instead we had Willow addicted to magic. That just did not work for me. The actor made me believe it at times, but at other times the dialogue was so excruciatingly diffuse I was as frustrated as during the moment during the otherwise great season five (with some reservations, like the incredibly boring Adam, and everything concerning him) when Giles says blithely (this is after Joyce is proved to have a brain tumor) something like "Medical things and magic don't mix."
Say what?
History, my dears, is full of people trying to mix medicine and magic. Oh, attempts at destruction are also a part of the curious history of magic in Western Europe (as late as the 1500s Philip Melancthon, among others, was trying hard to form a unified field theory which united all knowledge--science, religion, philosophy, magic, alchemy included) but I think only comfortable modern writers in their warm houses give us mages who concern themselves exclusively with destructive magic. But unexamined cliches in the Buffyverse building were there from the gitgo.
A perfect example of the problem is at the end of the "Angel" episode in season one, when he and Buffy share their first kiss. He refers to pain, she does, we think they mean the pain of having to part, but then she goes, and we see that her cross has burned his skin. Worldbuilding-wise it makes no sense: if the cross is a symbol of power, then Christianity has power. But Whedon slips us tromping clues that no, Christianity has no meaning . . . except that we've got lots of evil monks, and magic is chanted in Church Latin. Yet crosses burn. R-i-i-i-i-ght. Yet that same image is a terrific character moment.
Anyway, so there we have the issue of Willow's moral path--and her fight for redemption derailed into addiction. That undercut Xander's final scene with her to a serious degree for me. It could have been so interesting: Willow using her powers to take judgment against a human being. What culd have been a fascinating, and difficult, moral dilemma turns into the overblown "Willow tries to destroy the world" climax, which at least for me, didn't have the tenth of the power it could have had if she'd stayed there with Warren's horrible corpse and had to face what she had done.
Another problem with Season Six is Buffy's problem Spike. It seemed to me that she kept dancing around the fact that he had no soul, thus no moral center, but she never says it . . . she just keeps saying mealy-mouthed things that cause them both to storm around angrily. Then he gets mad enough to try to rape her, which I guess I could see, but she should have kicked his ass. Instead of yet another girl gets raped cliche, even if she was crying hard enough to barf, she should have kicked his butt right outside the house. We've seen Buffy in extremis, but she always had power. If we'd been given the reasons that later get niftily explored in season seven, Spike's last scene in that season would have had more powerful impact.
Well, I think, anyway. I loved Season Five except for Adam, and the ridiculous plan based around Adam, and his goal. The Initiative would have been much cooler, and more sinister, if the scientists hadn't had to become monster puppeteers. Older women, as well as persons of color, sure did not do well in that show. (Except for the awesome Principal Woods in the last season. His conversation with Faith--"I'm prettier than you"--cracked me up so hard that I had to backtrack to play it again. And thank goodness, the black guy did not have to die, even if the good demons did.)
The very last episode had the same odd static quality that I found in Angel Season Four, which I got so I could watch the Faith sequence. In Angel, I was not invested with the characters (though I knew who they were, as Rachel had showed me some stand-alone eps that were really good) but the long conversations with no one moving, not even their faces, as Evil!Cordy reveals she's pregnant (did everyone take a clueless pill? They didn't see it?) to Connor, and then claims it's his (and he doesn't even blink, much less say, Prove it. Or any number of more believable things a teen might say, even a teen one year old or whatever is going on) made me impatient. Well, the last episode of Season Seven was like that. Caleb was dead, the First wasn't corporeal or really even defined, everyone's relationship had resolved . . . so the last episode, I thought, would highlight the Slayer Girls. So, you know, when they gain their power, we really feel it for them. But no, we get super long static love or sex scenes reiterating what we already knew about the main characters. Though I adored the one with Faith and the principal. I guess those were emotional good-byes on the part of the writers and actors, but I think story would have been more effective. I felt the same disappointed as at the end of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movie, where instead of the "Scouring of the Shire" you get three or four endings of characters standing around being emotional and uttering inanities.
Yadda yadda yadda. I'm complaining too much about what disappointed me when there was so much that was good. That was brilliant. Like Willow, even when she was being dumb evil!Willow. Oz. Anya's entire arc (save the season seven waffling) was great. Xander being insightful was intensely good. Spike was my favorite character, a fine foil for Buffy, who was just plain awesome. So was Faith. I guess the upshot is, even with its flaws, and some epis that really fell flat, that I loved the show overall, and I will watch it again. Some episodes more than once, where the emotional arcs are just incandescent.
But I don't give Whedon an unqualified thumbs up enough to even try Dollhouse, which sounds totally repellent.
Of course, if everyone reports that no, it changes, it's great, it actually has a story, and insight, then maybe I'll trot way behind, baaa baaaa baaaaa.