BUFFY THE VAMPIRE POLLSTER

not including the comics bc i haven't read them

anyway the answer is 2

Ultimately Season 8 (the comic) was a load of shit and I assume S9 will be too.

Either 2 or 3, voted 3 because of Faith

3, come on. It doesn't have a dud all season and has about as many classic episodes as most 'great' tv shows ever do.

2 and 5 have the highest highs tho, in Surprise, Passions, Becoming, The Body and The Surprise.

Surprise? Gah I meant Innocence obv. I watched the end again, in the car w/ Giles and on the couch w/ Joyce and omg dunno if any telly has ever been that good. Ever.

a hoy hoy, how long did it take your series re-watch you mentioned some months back?

SEASON TRES

season 1 wasn't half bad tho - i surely hope it gets more votes than 6 &7. it was responsible large part for hooking me onto the show in the first place, bizarre enough (given context of subj. matter of the rest of the series)

I didn't start watching the show until season 5, and I still have a great deal of affection for that season. I think it is underrated.

Went for 2, but 2,3, and 5 are all completely classic.

season 3 really struck a chord w/ me, tho. a lot of it was just due to the coincidence that it was set during the last yr of high-school.. a pretty pivotal time for most everybody... but b/c it really had the last great cast as well.

anya was great but her novelty wore off her first season

obligatory rankings:

3,5,2,1,7,6

5 but not "because" of dawn

it's best season but i didn't notice until rewatch. 1 holds up the worst even though it's soooo snappy when you first see it

4's the hardest season to sit through and the payoff is the lamest (7 takes the most offensive quality dive but there's still plenty to see - <3 andrew)

s1 - ehhhh. it has its moments though, such as the first two episodes, Witch, Angel and Prophecy Girl. 6. Best Ep- Witch.
s2 - wooey. Starts slow, like you could take School Hard and skip the first 5 episodes and then BAM! Lie To Me, WML, Surprise, Innocence, I Only Have Eyes For You, Passions, Becoming - and we have the best romantic arc in TV history. 9.8. Best Ep- Shhhhhheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit, how to pick... Passions?
s3 - wooah. I guess I'd give Dead Man's Party a 7. Maybe Gingerbread too. Almost every episode is perfect or close to perfect television. Faith and the Mayor are sublime. 10. Best Ep- Graduation Day Pt. 1
s4 - sighh. Kinda rushed. Kinda confused. So obv they didn't know how to do two shows at once. Still one of the best shows in history w/ Fear Itself, Wild At Heart, Pangs, HUSH, the Faith arc, Superstar as the most meta thing not done by Community, the last two plus Restless. 8. Best Ep- This Year's Girl?
s5 - ;_;!!. Holy shit I <3 this show. I mean look at it. Family, Fool For Love, Shadow, The Body, I Was Made To Love You, Intervention, the Tara arc at the end and The Gift. Never will I wash dishes listening to the rumba the same again. 9.9
s6 - baddd. They sing, they raise the dead, they get depressed and drugged up, Giles leaves and it should have ended as a figment of crazy buffy's imagination. 7.
s7 - talky, speech after speech after speech after speech also the first good black guy in the show (in which we take kendra's accent into account). Oh but Selfless, Storyteller and Conversations With Dead People are amongst the greatest tv i've ever seen. 5.

rankings on the whole with replayability factored in: 5 >> 3 > 2 >>> 6 >> 4 > 7 > 1

noooooo i haven't finished this yet & want to cast an informed vote

andrew revived a lot of the nerdery i missed from xander. he dropped a lot of that after getting high construction job

2, 3, or 5 tho

Season 1 - lol
Season 2 - ANGEL
Season 3 - FAITH
Season 4 - um riley
Season 5 - DAWN

^lol these are p otm season synopses

xpost

I can do it in like a week but I no longer have s6 on dvd so its been years since i watched it all b2b.

Anya's best moments are in The Body and Selfless so meh to "wearing off" after her first season. She hadn't even warmed up!

Also Season 5 shouldn't be DAWN it should be SPIKE imo. What a fucking character arc.

Season 3 is nearly all duds and doesn't have a single great episode.

how far are you kev btw?

you...take that back xp

how far are you kev btw?

― Ravaging Rick Rude (a hoy hoy), Monday, September 26, 2011 3:43 PM (24 seconds ago)

u_u school started again - halfway through 6

Season 3 is nearly all duds and doesn't have a single great episode.

― Melissa W, Monday, 26 September 2011 20:43 (47 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

srs trolling going on here.

cool kev you can stop there. maybe watch normal again, selfless and cwdp.

2-4 was the peak for me, voted 3 because it had the best villains (faith and the david lynch-esque mayor)

anya is the best character in the history of television just fyi

could've used more rabbit scenes

oh god yeah

also kitten poker

honestly not a huge faith fan

even though it's always hilarious how she always thinks she's good at manipulating people or turning angel evil again and it never works

her daddything w the mayor's fun though and she's great in buffy's body

2 and 5 have the highest highs tho, in Surprise, Passions, Becoming, The Body and The Surprise.

― Ravaging Rick Rude (a hoy hoy), Monday, September 26, 2011 3:17 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

ya this is correct. the body is probably the best single episode of a show i've ever seen, at least for network. and the angelus arc is incredible.

gotta rep for S6 though, i'm a part of its small cult (and i'm not even a OMWF stan)

3 or 5 now i will read the thread

2
3
6
5
4/7
1

7 also has a bunch of really great episodes. opposite case with 6 -- OMWF is good and so is tabula rasa and nothing else, but the season arcs are great (ok i just really enjoy the dark willow story, which is probably challops but whatev). 7 has an awful full season arc but it also has selfless, conversations with dead people, storyteller, maybe a couple others i'm forgetting

6 has both better arcs and episodes than 7 u crazy. 7 is hard to defend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O06DGow63c

yeah i don't know. that episode feels like it's trying too hard with too slight a payoff to me. that whole season is so going through the motions.

oh and + wheelchair fight

um i think people are generally against moving the poll craze into ILE but would anyone be interested in a proper episodes poll (volunteering myself to organize if so)

that song >>>> all of omwf

gtfo

do you mean like with proper email voting or just a poll thread for each season?

only great song on omwf is the tara one, the rest gets by w/ joeks and context.

i mean proper email voting

i will help iyw. its not like my buff knowledge is limited (really should have spent this time on something more productive)

It would be a race for 2nd place with "The Body" taking the big prize, but it could be fun.

i dunno, i genuinely couldnt pick an obv winner from innocence, becoming, hush, body, gift and omwf.

i always say willow is the season 6 villain, i like this better.

the run from about halfway through season 2 when it finds its feet to the end of season five is amazing. six is p much all out of ideas and seven is a good idea and the first episode is great but they blow their wad with it so quickly whereas the reveal should have been slower and later and they end up just having to pad out the entire season with inspirational speeches and stirring pronouncements before the climax which is weirdly similar to the season three finale (season three has the best finale tho so)

it eats you from your bottom

God, I hated all those inspirational speeches.

i liked beauty and the beasts xpost! oz eats a dude [posts out of context]! the girl kills it w/ her scene in the bathroom. willow does her adorable groupie thing. ok the plot kinda sucks and is a bit too on the nose but they make it work.

xpost

It always seemed like mates & family unfamiliar with Buffy would walk in right on them, thereby officializing their opinion of Buffy based on the one scene. It's a problem that they're so long and so seemingly often.

3

Based on no of fave episodes, 7 wins for me.

1: nada
2: Lie To Me, Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered, Killed By Death
3: The Wish, Amends
4: Hush, Who Are You?, Restless
5: Family, The Body, The Gift
6: Once More, With Feeling, Normal Again
7: Beneath You, Potential, Storyteller, Chosen

But I think the writing / acting / production improved with every season.

... apart from season 8, which was a travesty. Issue 5 was amazing however. Called "The Chain". Some of Whedon's best writing in that.

Killed By Death but no Innocence or Becoming?

Potential? Really? Was it the Xander speech? Chosen also kinda sucked imo although I can't really get into it without kev spoilers.

idk i liked chosen

I just did the whole run for the first time - 7 starts out great but the whole Big Bad thing is so, so crap. And the ending...hoo boy.

3 > 5 > 6 > 4 > 7 > 1 > 2

explain your dislike of 2 plz

yeah how the hell do you have 2 last?

5 > 4 > 6 > 2 > 7 > 3 > 1. 6 and 2 are a toss-up, though.

Was it the Xander speech?

Absolutely. Made me weep many man tears.

Killed By Death but no Innocence or Becoming?

Have never found either that satisfying. Killed By Death wins because it's one of the few times I remember being genuinely scared by the show.

Re: 2, the whole Angel/Buffy thing generally did nothing for me, ergo the ending had no impact, especially since it was pretty clear there were no real stakes (ha!) since he'd be back shortly. (Plus there are a bunch of crap MOTW eps like in S1.)

7 is vastly underrated but couldn't in good conscience vote for it over 3. 6 is the worst, the "dark willow" arc verged on self-parody.

I find the Angel/Buffy stuff much more tiresome in 3 (though I do love the parody of it in The Zeppo).

Oh man, The Zeppo - that might be my overall favorite ep.

The only redeeming factor about Dark Willow was that I genuinely found her sort of scary. Not "boo!" scary, but scary in ways that this was a character you had known for so long and was now an entirely, entirely different person. The concept is easy to imagine and pretty unimpressive in theory, but I just found that it - sorry, gonna be vague here - *worked*. There were bits that exposed Whedon at his worst - "I don't want to hurt you, Willow!" >> "ha ha ha i dont even consider these base deliberations" - but otherwise that she was defeated via a speech by Xander than any karate chops or super-weapons I really thought a neat departure, and appropriate.

And maybe cliche. I don't know. I don't watch an awful lot of other TV but I have to admittedly imagine this having been done elsewhere.

it's the speech meg gives charles wallace in a wrinkle in time.

well, it's not a speech in wrinkle in time, but it's the same idea

i dislike some of the execution of the dark willow arc and question alyson hannigan's ability to act it fully, but it is a good arc and is definitely exactly where willow's character was headed. so full of rensentment + insecurity + grandiosity.

i guess it was less willow's character itself that i liked, but the overall conflict that surrounded her. i adore every episode, every season of buffy just about until those last 3 episodes when the big bad's ready to execute their big plans... not so b/c i think it's overly "done", but that buffy always defeats them in such seemingly convenient ways. immortal mayor? explosives! evil incarnate? look, i found a super axe!

i mean i think on these things and am full well conscious i couldn't come up w/ anything better, and that this ultimately is television - it needs a bad guy, it needs a hero(in), it needs a resolution. but i don't hesitate to say that i find buffy unlike most shows in way that its filler episodes were always more memorable that the ones that concerned the arc.

that said, season 3 and 5 are exempt. 2 was great as well, but i always felt spike & drusilla could've just been reduced to a team-rocket sort of duo (i'm young) and fans wouldn't mind otherwise.

dark willow was never even my favorite, just the general atmosphere of all characters in despair made it one of the best imo--put your people in crisis and you'll see shades and colors more compelling than you ever would ime

yes you are very smart on season 6 in general, hoos

ahh team rocket

aw thx hs

I sorta feel like S6 is one of those moments in a life--you hear Nevermind when you're 15 or you read On the Road on a college off-year or whatever--where I encountered the point in the narrative at a near identical junction in my real life, and like any of those sorts of things, you don't give up on your favoritism easily, if ever. Maybe even defend it a little harder.

I, of course, watched S6 right after being resurrected from the dead.

"Beer Bad" is a bit of a fave of mine not just for the lols, but becauser it was written by my namesake!

yeah silent hedgehogs was one of the show's more underrated writers

lol

Hahah :)

i think i first really started watching buffy while the sixth season was still airing, because i heard about the musical episode and watched it and was charmed that anyone would even try such a thing (and i had basically zero experience with or affection for musicals).

OH nvm what I said earlier, the Spike and Dru stuff is what made S2 tiresome IMO.

the spike and dru stuff was p tiresome in s2 but in later seasons with the other character tensions i was kinda interested in how that dynamic might play out tbh

spike: a lot of people never really got dru

xander: she was insane

Love Dru. Still occasionally say "Yore face is loike a poem" to the missus.

Plumped for S3, mostly because of the mayor.

Worst episode is clearly Dracula. Feels like they wrote a deliberately shitty season opener to spite the channel or something?

Love Dru. Still occasionally say "Yore face is loike a poem" to the missus.

:D :D :D

Still occasionally say "Yore face is loike a poem" to the missus.

lol this is awesome

xp!

Worst episode is clearly Dracula. Feels like they wrote a deliberately shitty season opener to spite the channel or something?

That episode was sort of meta-funny to me because I used to watch All My Children when SMG's character was married to the dude who played Dracula.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wmjMH8BitE

oh wau

s6 - baddd. They sing, they raise the dead, they get depressed and drugged up,

As a proud owner of the Once More With Feeling soundtrack CD, gotta disagree. What's always confusing about these threads is I mix up the story arcs with Angel and never stopped loving the show: The rumored dip in quality seems to coincide with it taking me exactly where I wanted to go at the time, which was down into cathartic sadness.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I made the bold declaration a few years back that season 5 of Buffy was the best season of any TV show ever. That might've since been trumped by Breaking Bad or The Wire, but it's still up there.

Season 6 is the best hardest to watch season of any TV show ever. Hugely underrated, hugely depressing.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Season 4 - um riley 0

lololol