Buffy: Seasons 6 and 7 [WARNING SPOILERS]

Well jesus fuck everything happened in season 7. The spike redemption plot has been going on since 5 at least, but maaaan I just watched the episode where buffy discovers spike's feeding again and the whole crossing with a jealous-lover theme is just chilling.

And all the stuff with everyone just fraying at the edges? I just love the acting and the style itself, everyone hard and scared and angry and alone. And bringing in the slayers in training is like a masterstroke coz it it reminds us how far buffy has come.

(That said, there hasn't been much actual action, true.)

But another thing: why doesn't anyone talk about Angel? That show kicks major ass. It's seriously underappreciated but has done nothing but get better from year to year, the cast is great, the characters are engaging, the production values are much, much higher - if you disagree, ask yourself how sick you are of the entire Buffy season taking place in her goddamn house, it's funny, it's moving, it's thematically much stronger ("redemption" will last you longer than "high school sucks" - especially after you graduate high school), the actors actually seem to give a shit about being on it, the arc has actual plot twists - plot twists, for you Buffy viewers, means that something unexpected happens regularly and not just in sweeps (UK viewers, that's the November/February/May period when American stations pull out stunt episodes to attract advertiser dollars, then they slough off dull-ass stories and repeats in between), and best of all, every time I think Angel's about to let me down with a story that I don't buy into or a situation that seems weird, lame, or outright sick ("Connor ... I want you to have one thing that's real ... "), they do something later to show that it was a good idea all along.

Angel's a great show. If you've seen one or two dud episodes and don't buy it, give it another chance. It's great.

Okay. Thanks.

Gotta dig the LoTR rip, though.

But this has been a bad thing, no? Andrew and Principal Wood are cool with me, but all of the slayers in training have been awful and a terrible distraction. Does anyone actually give a fig about any of them? I've actually been rooting for their deaths.

The writing has been mostly shit this season, and even the good bits have, yes, been sort of slopped out with more than a bit of boredom. At this point it's just the plot that's tugging it along: I just want to get through the season to a rich resolution and have done with the whole thing. The sloppy presentation has made the show pretty damned meta at this point.

Sterling, I'm not sure where the rejection-of-Slayerdom thing is supposed to head, but as it stands it was the culmination of an entire history of Buffy gradually pulling away from being "the Slayer" and moving toward individualizing her role. (Obv: her initial reluctance to be a Slayer, tensions with the Watchers Council during the first seasons, full break from the Council later on ...)

* The "holy crap Giles is The First OH NO HE ISN'T" thing pissed me off because it meant they'd gone to the trouble of having Giles -not- touch anything on camera for several episodes as a complete red herring, which is cheap, especially for a show with experienced writers and directors.

* Spike's mama didn't wuv him enuff when she got vamped. Oh boohoo. It worked okay for this episode, and I have come to accept the Spike-redemption uberplot, but it just smacked of "redemption through revision." Redemption plots are great when done well, but the whole "this evil character, see, he actually had a good heart way back when, oh, and also, he was treated poorly, so don't you kind of feel a little bad for him -- even though he was evil more often than not?" thing is sloppy.

* Buffy goes all Paper Street Soap Company with the Slayerettes, but no one over the course of the season has said, "You know, there's this whole other Slayer who's like already trained and everything, and since she lives in the world, she'd probably be cool with saving it, why don't we spring her from prison?" I'm not saying I'd expect the Scoobs to agree with it, but the fact that it wasn't even brought up just screams "the writers didn't want to deal with the Faith issue until they were ready to bring her into the show."

* The drawn-out "here's us training, there's The First cackling" bits, prolonging everything so that it takes up a full season. If we hadn't already had a season devoted to "oh crap, Gloria's a god, there's no way to defeat her, and by the way, there's no way to defeat her, and holy shit, guess what, there's no way to defeat her," it might not be so bad. I think I would rather the show simply end by ... not having any more episodes. I used to watch Hercules once in awhile, and have to give em credit for doing that: the last episode ends with Herc wandering off, with presumably a bunch of adventures in his future that we just don't happen to see.

All in all, this is one of those seasons that I'm enjoying as it unfolds, but that I doubt I will rewatch when it's in reruns.

Oh and question, we can talk about spoilers for what has aired in the US or like spoilers in general meaning if we happen to know what is coming up?

Angel's been good, but I find that the climax usually happens a bit after mid-season and then sputters towards the end, e.g. the Darla storyline followed by the (ugh) Pylea. We've had the high point with Angelus/Faith and I don't know if I'm terribly excited by the Cordelia storyline. It doesn't help that she's been exposed as a *horrible* actress when forced to increase her range. On the other hand, Wesley has gone from the cringe-worthy Watcher on Buffy to hands-down the most compelling character on Angel. I'm starting to dig Gunn and Lorne's a great minor character, though he hasn't been given a lot to work with thus reduced to basically a caricature.

It's weird watching Seasons 2 and 3 of Buffy on DVD and see how *nice* she was compared to now. When Wood asks her out on a date and discusses it with Willow, I believe that's the first time in a year I've seen her smile and light up like that.

To add to what Carey just said -- both of those things were boring. Yeah, the consequences weren't, but they were relatively major events which occurred uncontested. Someone nuking Los Angeles is boring. Jack Bauer trying to stop them from doing so isn't (presumably). There has been very little actual conflict this season: it's mostly been reduced to the bad guys doing stuff over here, and the good guys doing stuff over there.

I think that this was one of the best episodes of the show evah which is why I was disappointed in how the season has been going for the past few episodes.

I only watch Angel if I know there is a crossover of storyline that I need to be aware of. Otherwise, how old Cordelia looks is too distracting now. I just decided recently to sell my 2 Cordelia action figures.

& I thought "Bring On The Night" was great too coz it was all atmosphere and dread.

Also the stuff with Andrew has been particularly poigniant.

Season three, anyway ... (nabisco may be the first Buffy fan I've even heard of who liked season four).

Season four was terrific, I think. See: Xander and Anya, Harmony, Hush, etc.....

For the record, I "like" seasons 4-7, and "love" seasons 1-3.

Good things about season 4: Xander and Anya. Harmony's needed comic relief. I'll grant Hush, but it wasn't a stand-out episode for me. Superstar, on the other hand, was -- and the ending of the Halloween episode ("don't taunt the fear demon") was classic.

Bad things: The guy Buffy sleeps with early in the season; the amazingly bland Tara -- I still wonder if they had Amber Benson play her as mousily and timidly and dishwaterfully as possible just to ward off "you're playing up lesbians as titillating" complaints; the mystique of "who are those commando guys" utterly failing to pay off when the Initiative turns out to be a caricatured red-tape-and-timesheets government agency; subsequently, the contrived science vs. mysticism conflict with Riley/the Initiative and Buffy, which looks even sillier in retrospect when the combined portrayal of the Buffyverse in both shows makes All Things Mystical seem commonplace enough that we should expect the gov't to be aware of them; the increasingly vague portrayal of All Things Slayer with the introduction of the First Slayer; the general lack of direction of the show once the cast was removed from high school.

Yeah, but I don't think that was the intent. It wasn't so much "the characters lack direction," because the characters lacked it just as much in season 5 -- and they still do, in their normal lives, they're just busy doing jumping-jacks in the Paper Street Slayer Factory's backyard right now, so it doesn't come up. The show itself lacked direction, and I can't believe that even Whedon is meta enough to say, "You know, freshman year tends to mostly involve snacking on Ramen until three a.m. and then doing a shit job on an assignment to turn in at the last minute, so I think that's what our writers should do this year."

This actually required a lot more direction to the plotting, I think, just on a logistical level. During the first seasons the characters were usually together and usually knew where to find one another when they weren't. Suddenly in season four their locations and their levels of communication became the basis of a ton of plotting: suddenly they don't know and often don't care what the others are up to, and a great deal of the movement of the episodes had to do with their skipping out on one another, ignoring one another, not being able to get in touch with one another. Awkward Buffy / Willow encounters in their dorm room became a sort of sad staple; suddenly our omniscience as viewers gave us loads more action. It was also a great shift from the direction the show had been moving through high school: it opened with a lot more attention to the characters' attempts at normal social lives, then sort of necessarily narrowed to their group slaying activities. Season four blew them open into social creatures again.

All of this basically leads up to the resolution moment where they're going to fight Adam, assuming I have my sense of the seasons' starts and finishes right: on their way down into the Initiative they have their amusing huggy "why have we drifted apart we must always be friends" moment. Which is both great to see, as a viewer, for the same reasons those moments are great to have -- but also rings completely hollow, as such moments always do, because soon enough they're back to moving in their different directions again.

Feelings of impotence and/or pointlessness seem to be the biggest theme of Buffy between high school and Dawn, which is maybe one of the bits I relate to well: pointless Giles, abandoned Willow, impotent Spike, useless Riley, inferior Xander, hopeless Tara, confused Harmony -- even Faith and Adam have no idea what they're trying to accomplish. Seasons four and five seem to be the ones during which the plots and characters as a whole turn to The Big World Out There and just shiver in fear and impotence.

It was also a great shift from the direction the show had been moving through high school: it opened with a lot more attention to the characters' attempts at normal social lives, then sort of necessarily narrowed to their group slaying activities. Season four blew them open into social creatures again.

A great shift in direction I'll agree with, if you want to say that season four was a turning point for the show as a whole -- the time when it shifted from the focus of the high school years to the setup of the show now, the quasi-collegiate twentysomethings (I guess they're only barely twentysomethings, but they're not really portrayed as "barely"). I think that in the long view, the show has done a much better job of transitioning from high school to post-high school than other shows in that position have done -- I just don't think that was evident until season five.

(It's also why I warmed up to Dawn, somewhat. I don't like the character very much, but her presence has kept the group together more than if she hadn't been introduced, I think, and has made it easy to pretend that the Scoobys are older than they are.)

This might also sum up much of what I disliked about it. The season seemed overly bleak -- which is probably why Superstar is my favorite episode from it -- and lacked much of the humor of the first three seasons. That's always been a large part of the appeal of the show for me: the humor, both in the premise and the execution. I'm much more willing to accept an all-powerful seemingly-undefeatable villain when they're funny, like the Mayor or Glory -- a mold Adam definitely didn't fit into.

By the way, I love that this thread announced "English people stay out, SPOILERS," and then we sit around talking about season four!

The Willow of Oz

First off, obviously the main difference is that Buffy has characters that can be funny (Anya and particularly Andrew: his underlining of "Break-up Sex" during the briefing in Empty Places is classic), whereas in Angel anyone can be funny (Angel/Connor's duet on "Jasmine" & the rest of the testifying sequence). Angel didn't always have this: the first half of the second series was miserable.

The previously clips for Buffy is "here's the threads of the rich tapestry (oooh-ahh) that we'll be dealing with this week". The previously clips for Angel are all the same, because there's been one fecking plot all year apart from lightning girl.

The way that Sky has staggered the episodes leads to some neat comparisons: last week's was Touched and The Magic Bullet, both of which end in cliffhangers. The week before ended with Buffy/Fred walking off into the dark all alone in the world, and two or three weeks before that was Buffy Vs. Faith's "How far will you go to win?". None of these comparisons does Buffy any favours.

Also they've both had nice horror set-pieces recently: Caleb's introduction is "trapped in car with nutter", and Fred's time as an outcast is "invasion of the body snatchers/some better match that I can't think of".

Buffy's new predicament is interesting because she's nearly always had her gang behind her, while the last season and a half of Angel has had his gang in pieces. This season's had both "the gang is back together oh no it's a dream" and "the gang's back together - oh no it's a fools paradise do you see?".

The love and sex episode of Buffy underlines the lack of either in Angel. CF Spike's monologue from Angel season 1.

Was S2 really that miserable in the beginning? All I can remember at the moment was the Wesley-is-mistaken-for-Angel episode, which was hilarious. I'm anxious for it to be released on DVD; in impressionistic memoryland, that's my favorite season.

There's some really crappy dialogue on it at the moment though - last week we saw the episode where buffy confronted the slayer-makers in the parallel dimension and the dialogue in the scene where Buffy dresses down the Scooby gang, the Slayerettes and Spike was just so weak and unrealistic. Douglas Petrie is pretty unreliable on this score.

1) It would've provided a strong character/dramatic arc contrast with Faith and her journey of redemption and reacclimation into society.

2) It would've put into question the the real conquering power of the Scoobies' friendship, as seen in "Primeval". By removing Buffy from this power and imbuing her with an alien power, there would've been dramatic interest in seeing Xander, Willow and Giles fight to keep Buffy rather than hey let's give another lecture to a houseful of faceless random girls. To have their love and friendship conquer even uberslayer killing machine would've been reiterating the earlier theme but at a higher pitch, which was supposedly what this season was about anyway (reintroducing a villian from S3, for example).

3) It could've provided a reason to give INTERESTING, CAREFULLY DRAWN SYMPATHETIC PERSONALITIES to the potentials, since they could've served to remind the Scoobies and us what a slayer REALLY is (a sympathetic and resourceful 16 year old girl) while we see Buffy herself move further and further away from this (though rescued miraculously at the end!)

I watched it on DVD, straight through. You can tell that the show got the axe halfway, because Whedon's usual slow build suddenly jumps--Slayerettes! Kennedy! Caleb!--close.

But there are eps here as good as anything in the canon. Conversations with Dead People is just brilliant. Storyteller is hilarious. The one where Anya gives up her demon ways is a real heartbreaker, and *really* slickly penned.

And in the finale, that triple dissolve jump zoom on Willow as she says, "oh. My. Goddess."

C'mon. Pure Buffy bait at its loopy cornball best.

S7 faith talks like pootie tang

lol

omg

sa da tay

can't stop laughing now