Buffy - Season 6 impressions (episode 15)

[thalia_seawood]

I haven't posted any Jossverse reviews in ages due to a very busy RL which resulted in a lack of fannish motivation.
Then I spend an evening showing Buffy to my oldest friend hopefully winning another fan. (She liked the show and took season 1 with her for further watching

Comments

[selenak]

Here I have to jump at the chance to defend my favourite hated underdog among the writers - no, not Tracy M. of "Something Blue" and "Beer Bad" fame, but Marti Noxon, because she, like Joss, did a lot of uncredited rewrites of crucial scenes. For example, Jane Espendson and Ultimate Drew are credited as writers for Conversations with Dead People in s7, but we know via interviews the episode had actually four writers - Joss wrote all the Buffy scenes, Marti wrote all the Willow scenes, Jane wrote the Dawn scenes (to everyone's surprise when she revealed this, because we all had thought she wrote the geeks!), and Drew Goddard wrote Andrew & Jonathan.

Marti also did uncredited rewrites of the occasional Angel episode, like, famously, Dear Boy in s2. David Greenwalt's original scene between Darla and Angel at the climax wasn't nearly as good and very unsubtle (it was online for a while, when all the shooting scripts were), whereas the Marti-penned broadcast scene is one of my favourites on either show, containing one of my all time favourite lines.

All of which is my way of saying: yes, Joss did a lot of editing and rewriting on many an ep, but he wasn't the only one, and as Marti gets regularly vilified for what people don't like about the later seasons, I'd like to position - given she was ex. producer from s5 (not just s6) onward - that she is a good alternate condidate for the good stuff as well.

Re: Fool for Love specifically, though: someone forwarded the writers special on the complete BTVS set (I bought the individual seasons thus don't have the complete set) to me, you know, where several of the crucial scriptwriters sit together and talk about the show, and they start by introducing each other via naming their favourite episodes of the respective other. Jane E. introduces Doug Petrie via "Fool for Love" and the rest of the bunch fangirls/boys him over that one, which I doubt they'd do if he hadn't written most if not all of the episode - Joss is sitting right there in the conference as well, after all.

(David Fury's introduction - forget which other writer does it - amuses me most, though, because he's presented via his Emmy for "Walkabout" (the - truly fabulous - Lost (i.e. neither BTVS or AtS) episode he wrote!