Get it done buffy evil2/25/2024 ![]() Credit for thinking big, but most of season six is a big miss.ĭIG IT UP: “Once More With Feeling,” “Two to Go,” “Life Serial” “We don’t kill humans” is too pat an answer to yet another question the writers avoided addressing by putting Buffy in a chicken hat, and having Xander dump Anya at the altar for … reasons. And Buffy never really explains why stopping a baddie like Warren by any means necessary is such a blot on Willow’s cosmic ledger. ![]() Until Tara is killed to set the climactic events of season six in motion, the Trio are less credible as Big Bads than they are tiresome - an undifferentiated grab bag of clichés about geek culture. Why not give Willow responsibility for her behavior? We’d seen her use her powers for petty vengeance as often as in season-finale showdowns. Buffy had laid years of groundwork for the idea that Willow, an underestimated “nerd” with a gift for schoolwork and coding, would find her calling in magic, then get carried away by new feelings of importance and power. Throw in a different writing team from week to week, writing Buffy all over the place emotionally, and it’s a depressing bunch of episodes, and not in the way the show intended.Īnd then there’s the bungling of Willow’s “magi-crack” addiction. What? Here again, the Buffy writers start with a complex dramatic conflict (a hero brought back from the dead, with unforeseen consequences) but don’t unpack it all the way. She’s degrading herself because she’s Doing It with a guy she doesn’t love? In … the 21st century. ![]() Plus it makes sense that, in her circumstances, Spike is the only one Buffy can really talk to about having died or being the strongest one in the room.īut m’God does that shit drag on, and the reason it’s apparently so important to the show and Buffy is retrograde horseshit. Great performances by James Marsters and Sarah Michelle Gellar and the game-recognize-game chemistry they had from the moment the characters met. I adore “Once More With Feeling” like it’s a person, but your opinion on season six comes down to your opinion on “Spuffy.” Mine is this: On paper, I like it. STAKE IT: The other 19 (and “Touched” isn’t that great either, to be honest) The finale came as a relief I didn’t like that Buffy’s unique “one girl in all the world” power, the foundation of the show, got transmuted into some kind of “Kumbaya” collective consciousness … but at least it was over.ĭIG IT UP: “Conversations With Dead People,” “Touched,” “Chosen” Season seven did both, and when it wasn’t providing a different - but always inadequate - explanation for the Potentials every week, it was overestimating our investment in Spike’s soul-reacquisition project, or belaboring the concept of the First Evil without seeming to understand that a literal fight against a figurative concept is not narratively workable. You can violate the laws of the universe you created, using a raft of new characters in whom we have no investment (except perhaps in hoping they get killed off, Kennedy), or you can drag nine episodes’ worth of doing so over 22 hours of TV. I rewatched the entire series a couple years ago, and if I had to pick one season of Buffy in all the world? Here’s how I’d rank all seven, from worst to best: As a show qua show, it’s a very good, almost great monster serial whose ambitions never faltered even when its latter-season execution did big time. Joss Whedon’s tiny, mighty hero and her Scooby gang fought evil, and at the same time became our friends, feminist icons, and family members.Īs a cultural force, Buffy’s place in the pantheon is assured. Buffy The Vampire Slayer turns 20 today, which is hard for me to believe mostly because I can’t remember a world or language without it - without Big Bads, “bitca,” Spuffy, kitten poker, and Giles’s grouchy muttering (“…Pillock!”).
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