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Well, my second part of S5 arrived a few days ago, so I have gone Buffy crazy and I'm nearly at S7.
Hmm... I can definitely see why people don't like S6 much. It's really not done anything for me. Giles is gone, Spike is annoying, Willow is boring. If it weren't for the bad Buffy/Spike (yes, I just said bad Buffy/Spike... I can totally see why you hated Spike in S6, Danni >_<) I would probably really like Buffy this season, though. You were also right about Tara, I do like her a bit more this season. She's sort of gone up from 'boring, don't really like her' to 'decent character', although it would be nice to see some more development *SOB* I know what's coming soon ;___;
So, yeah. I hear S7 is better though, so I can't wait for that. I'm really disappointed by the Buffy/Spike, what the hell have they done to Spike? I'm not one to miss S2 when he was kick-ass; I adored him last season, he was just another part to make up the awesomeness that was S5. But gahhh, I hope they turn him back around soon. I think this is the only point I'll ever prefer seeing Willow/Tara interaction to Spike/Buffy...
On the other hand... OM,WF was of course, awesome. 8D I've been listening to the songs nonstop. The characterisation was awesome -- it's only after Tabula Rasa that the series started going downhill for me, I think (Randy Giles! *cackle*) because Spike was awesome in OM,WF and, well, everybody was. It really lit up S6, it was well placed in this season just for that reason. >_<
Uhhh yeah. Spontaneous ramblings about the series so far! (Also, Doublemeat Palace was so, so lame, makes Beer Bad look brilliant) *scurries off to watch MORE Buffy instead of doing homework*
ETA: Oops, forgot about my thoughts on the rest of S5!
Really amazing. I knew The Body was going to be musicless and heartbreaking, but it still made me pretty much consistently cry throughout it. The Gift was great, too -- although I really wish I hadn't been spoilt for Buffy's death. In fact, yesterday I realised how disappointing it is that I've been spoilt for so many upcoming things (three major deaths; I don't think it's possibly to be as spoilt for stuff as I am >_>). I really wish there hadn't been such a massive gap in when I watched the first half and the second half, it's hard to see the two as connected and it kind of disorientated me when starting to watch the second half.
Aaand we're finishing Earshot. Helpless was weird; it makes me cringe when Giles does something evil. D: But then he got to be cool and badass later to make up for it, so. It was really heart-melting when Buffy was trying to get him to take her to the ice show instead of her dad.
Wesley is an annoying guy, but I love what he does for the show; he's hilarious and brings out irritable snarky cool Giles. :D And Cordelia constantly hitting on him, while weird, is amusing.
The Zeppo amused me; the "the apocalypse is going on but we see it all from the point of view of Xander, who is completely out of the loop!" gimmick was fun, though it might also have been fun to actually see what was going on. In any case, Xander episode, so yay Xander. And there was amusing dialogue and so on.
I'm really coming to enjoy the Mayor as a villain; he's so creepy in this disturbing nice-guy way. Faith I am also starting to really like, since her development around killing a man has been pretty well handled and her turn to the dark side works. The finale is building up to be epic.
I really have a thing for awkward adorable virgin guys being used by dominant women. I should not have enjoyed the Faith/Xander scenes that much.
Butterfree, I love how unrelated our posts are. XDD Will be jarring for Danni to reply to...
I also started to like the Mayor as a villain, he was really disturbing in the way I've only seen Buffy really do. It's like they didn't mean to (except that, obviously, they did), like he was creepy by accident. They do something similar later with Glory; these two villains really made S3 and S5 very special, in my opinion.
Anyway, what I thought would happen happened -- S6 got better. This EXACT SAME THING happened with S2. I watched the first half, and then had to wait ages for the second one due to a slow delivery, and it seemed bad and un-Buffy when I watched it, either because I was out of the loop or was expecting something else. It feels like the second half of S6 is completely superior (barring OM,WF and Tabula Rasa), now it's like it's settling back into normal Buffy (hehe, quite interesting/ironic, considering that I just finished watching Normal Again). :D Which is great!
And thank God, Spike is better. I don't think this is just because of the reasons I mentioned before, I seriously think Spike just sucked in the first half of S6. I was really hoping this would happen, because I hated that horny, lame Spike that seemed to have completely lost the depth that made me like him so much in S5. It might just be temporary, but I really, really hope that they stay with this Spike, even if he's still different from the S5 one.
Uh, yeah, that probably made no sense. The ramblings of a girl taking a break from her Buffython!
Yay, lots to reply to! :D (oh holy hell this will be long)
Hehe, that scene in Lover's Walk (with the little marshmallows and then Spike pretending to bite Joyce while calling Angel "a very bad man!" is Ruth's absolute favourite Buffy scene, ever. And now I giggle every time I see it in your sig.
Like I said, my favourite scene is Gile's slideshow in Hush, with the memory-loss scene (Randy/Joan XDD) in TR coming second. So, so good.
My other Buffy-friend's favourite scene was Jonathan's "Class Protector" speech in The Prom, which isn't funny, but is so, so sweet <3
YES. I totally agree with both PK and Cirrus about
the Spike/Buffy-ness in S6, especially the sex scenes being absolutely horrifying. They make me really uncomfortable just watching them. ><
And, if you can believe it, another friend of mine who loves Buffy and finds James Marsters unbearably attractive, which, as previously stated, I absolutely do not get (although she put Amber Benson #5 on "list of 5 celebrities I'd sleep with" list, so I can't fault her taste too much), bought the DVD boxset of S6 specifically for the S/B sex scenes. She's crazy.
I hate S6 more than anything for what they did to Willow, though. Just... no. I don't care if it was carefully developed and foreshadowed for absolutely ages, I utterly hate it :/
I don't know if S6 or 7 is my least favourite season. S6 was terrible to a lot of my characters, and hurt them in ways that I absolutely cannot get over, especially making them act in ways that, I feel, are totally OOC, but S7... is boring. It has its moments, but a lot of it feels like dead space. Sorry for being so pessimistic about this :/
Haha, Doublemeat Palace. It's like the writers thought the season was getting more depressing, so they decided to revert to the upbeat days of S1, so they came up with something they'd hope would match the absurdity of things like I Robot, or Ted (speaking of, I STILL DON'T KNOW WHY TED IS A ROBOT!!! D:). And, in that respect, they kinda succeeded! :D
Did you shout at Willow for being a stupid, foolish girl at the begining of TR? Me and PK had fun yelling at/being disappointed in her.
Tara will continue get more developed throughout the season. Her best episodes (I think) are Dead Things and Older and Far Away, which I dunno if you've seen yet.
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa ;~;
Helpless is awesome, if for no other reason than it sets the story up for one of my absolute favourite S5 episodes, Checkpoint, which has one of the most fantastic, happy, scenes in the latter half of the series. Plus, we get to see The Many Sides Of Giles, which is always fantastic.
My friend Sarah thinks Wesley is the greatest thing in the world, I don't get why. I think he's pretty funny, but the fact he's married to and has a child with Alyson in real life scares me beyond all measure because I'm incapable of separating actors from their roles.
I think the Mayor may be my favourite villian. He just steals every scene he's in <3 The finale is VERY, VERY epic.
I found Glory very creepy and thought she was pretty cool, too, but loads of people think she was an absolutely terrible, boring villian. I'll be interested to see what Butterfree thinks when she watches it. PK/Harle/anyone; what did you think?
And now you know why I giggled so much when you listed your reasoning for liking Teacher's Pet - epic foreshadowing! :D
The Body. So, so good. There is absolutely nothing about that episode that isn't perfectly done. I couldn't possibly love it (in terms of how well-done it was; it makes me just too sad and hits too many sore spots for me to say I like or enjoy it) more.
I'm glad you're enjoying the second half of S6; I wasn't really that keen on it. I just never really liked Spike much after about mid-S5, and I remember a bunch of S6 being The Spike Show and not really enjoying it much.
Oh, but Normal Again was so, so fantastic <3333 I meant to show it to Butterfree, actually (when you watch it, you'll love it, I swear).
And Tara saves the day! :D Also, how good was she in Older and Far Away (the birthday ep with Dawn being annoying)?
Also, what were your thoughts on Hells Bells?
Entropy is... a series-changing episode, followed by one that is even moreso. I look forward very much to hearing your thoughts on the next few episodes, actually.
It does that, and then it abruptly settles into Buffy on every life-sucking depressant you can think of D:
Also, which deaths have you been spoiled for? I can only think of two major ones o.o
I was actually mildly let down by Graduation Day Part 2, mostly because demon!Mayor was kind of lame - the CGI was poor, to start with, but even then he didn't really do much after ascending save be there and eat a couple of people, and I was hoping there would be more to his rage over Faith (I really liked the build-up of their messed-up father/daughter thing) than just being fooled into chasing after Buffy to the library. I was also kind of expecting the grand plan to be a bit more ingenious than "Everybody has weapons and uses them before they blow everything up!", but all the same, it was very nice to see everyone band together to help Buffy (same with that heartwarming bit in The Prom where it turned out people had been noticing Buffy's tendency to save lives - I really loved that). That said, the rest of the finale worked very well - the Buffy/Faith fight, stabbing her and Buffy's moral conflict over that, Angel finally leaving for good, Oz and Willow being generally adorable, Xander being ridiculously excited over being "Key Man", etc.
And then we can move on to season four and a whole bunch of fun episodes!
the fact he's married to and has a child with Alyson in real life
Buh? @_@ That's just... odd. Now I'm picturing Willow hooking up with Wesley and it makes no sense.
I had a couple of other Buffy dreams. I forgot what one of them was about, but the other involved pepperoni pizza, Buffy and the gang needing to steal a car to save the world (after which Buffy promptly crashed into another car on the weird parking lot they were at), and good spiders. It was quite epic.
So, while the site was down, we watched the entirety of season four and the first five episodes of season five!
Giles with a chainsaw in Fear, Itself was awesome. Also the tiny fear demon, and Anya in her giant bunny suit.
While Riley isn't exactly the epitome of interesting, I don't dislike him at all; I feel more or less the same about him as I felt about Angel-with-a-soul, really.
Whee Spike. :D He's been really fun in season four. I will mourn the day that Spike stops being constantly hilarious. As I mentioned on Twitter, I nearly died laughing at the scene in The Initiative where he and Willow discuss his inability to bite her. So did Shadey; he's been showing it to everybody. I think it's more amusing if you actually know who these characters are, so they tend to just stare blankly at it, but hey. Spike in Pangs was also hilarious, especially with walking around in bright sunlight covering his head and looking in on the happy vampires who are having a feast. And getting impaled with dozens of arrows while tied to a chair. And everybody was pretty hilarious in Pangs, really; all the dialogue in that episode was made goofy in one way or another. And Dannichu knows I love Something Blue, and Hush is great, and Tara is adorable and sweet and needs a hug and Miss Kitty Fantastico makes me go all "KITTY :D" whenever she appears.
Oh! Oz. His departure was pretty sudden and his infidelity felt kind of out of character but then again it was supposed to (but really, Oz is the sweetest guy in the world and the perfect boyfriend and I'd totally marry him if he didn't have the silly wolf thing). New Moon Rising was pretty cool and Tara was adorable, though I can't shake the base feeling it ought to have ended with a big happy threesome. Did I mention Tara was adorable? I'm glad Oz left for good after this episode, though; things had gotten really uncomfortable and Willow and Tara are cute.
Oh, God, Who Are You? makes so much more sense now that I actually know who Faith is. The tiny, tiny babies line is still awesome, especially with Giles's flailing.
Okay, so did I go mad or was Where the Wild Things Are not that bad? @_@ I mean, yeah, it's completely irrelevant to the plot arc, and yeah, it doesn't have much of a lasting effect on the characters, and yeah, Buffy and Riley do spend most of it locked in a room having sex, but I actually liked how the house's history of sexual repression twisted the libidos of everyone in it. And it has Giles singing. And I liked when he exploded at the old lady. And as far as episodes with a moral go, "sexual repression is bad" has a lot more need to be said than "beer is bad" or "internet dating is bad" or "maybe your stepfather really is evil". For that matter, while I usually don't think you really can say anything meaningful when trying to prove your point through a link that doesn't exist in the real world (Beer Bad cannot possibly tell you anything about actual beer as opposed to magic caveman beer), the moral part actually managed to somewhat work thanks to tying in with another supernatural phenomenon (so it doesn't tell you anything about what actually happens to sexually repressed teenagers, but it does have it leaving supernatural impression that looks eerily as if they'd all died there).
I loved Giles in The Yoko Factor. He's amusing when he's all drunk and bitter, and that "Bloody hell!" made him sound like teenage!Giles.
The Initiative and Adam were never very interesting, but eh, season four just had a lot of memorable, and hilarious, episodes to make up for it. The uniting spell in Primeval was sort of cheap; why haven't they done that before when it would have been convenient? Plus, it just feels overpowered, what with stopping bullets and whatnot.
Shadey hated Restless because he's lame and hates dreams. I still thought it was extremely amusing, but he didn't laugh once. :( And he thought it was by far the worst episode of the series, worse than I Robot, You Jane, and balked when I told him the Critically Touched guy ranked it as one of the best episodes of the series. Silly Shadey.
So! Season five. I've been wondering where the hell they would pull Dawn out from. My theories have at various points included:
- Joyce adopted her
- She would just be handwaved as having been staying with Buffy's dad the whole time
- Dawn was an orphan who used a spell to insert herself into a family in the hope of finding love
- Joyce, fearing loneliness, used a spell to make herself a second daughter, but the spell also caused her illness
I'm glad that's cleared up. Not that "cleared up" is the right way to put it, since I still have no idea what it means that she's "the key". She's kind of annoying at the moment, but I hope she comes to feel like a more natural part of the show.
The Replacement was very fun, especially Anya. And I realize now that I haven't really talked about Anya at all, but she is amazing and hilarious and I love her.
Glory seems potentially cool, not that I know much beyond "she be craaaazy". Looking forward to watching more.
Dawn grows into herself. She's ... At first I was horrified that the writers did what they did - "Buffy? A sister? But that invalidates canon entirely! Everything we've seen didn't happen! Aaaaaa!" etc.
But she gets better. She gets worse before she gets better, but she does get better. Good times.
Oh boy. I finished season 7 just before the site went down, so I was planning on rambling everything as soon as it came back up. And then I had a geekout with Danni the other day and now feel all worn out. XD Still, I'll try... so much to talk about... going to put most of it in spoilers. Hah! Your spoiler tags are secret no more! >D
By the way, Butterfree, I totally totally did the exact same thing when Dawn arrived. Who. The bloody hell. Is this girl. I knew Buffy's sister would arrive later, so (I think) the two times Buffy was specifically described as an only child, I was like @_@ Continuity error much? And then she arrived and I was like WTF for ages. I was so weirded out that I even stopped watching for a bit. I actually think they took a bit too long to explain it all; while I do think it was a really clever idea, it just seemed like they'd just randomly inserted her for no reason other than to have a convenient character.
Anyway.
I definitely didn't think seasons 6 and 7 were as bad as people say. I enjoyed them as much as I did for at least 3 and 4 (most likely because I was more obsessed watching 6 and 7 and the characters were more established). The Trio sucked but I did actually enjoy having a darker season, I really did. I've seen Buffy's behaviour during 6 being described as 'annoyingly emo', so I was expecting something really bad, but I still enjoyed it.
Buffy/Spike... going to go back to that. It's my favourite ship, the only one I feel strongly about at all. (By the way, your story about the video clip of Willow/Tara was so beautiful, Danni. ;_; I felt so bad not liking Willow/Tara because I felt like I should, having heard so much about it and how influential it was for lesbian relationships on TV. I think if I hadn't been expecting it at all, and definitely if I had been younger, I would be a massive fan of it, rather than just not seeing the chemistry. Sigh.) I made a sort of essay-type ramble about my thoughts on Buffy/Spike in S6 and in comparison with Buffy/Riley, but it's pretty long and like I said, rambly, so I won't bother posting it here unless people are actually interested in adding their thoughts on it. X3 Before I wrote that and made some sort of theories of my own, I really disliked all the sexytiemz Buffy and Spike had. I just really hope it was meant to be uncomfortable, because goddamnit, it really was. I'm a bit of a prude and find all sex scenes to be uncomfortable to watch, but Buffy/Spike was just another level, and if I didn't like the pairing I probably would just try and remove them from my memory entirely. Hopefully though the destructive nature of their relationship was meant to be represented by tasteless sex scenes.
Other than that, I did actually like how Buffy/Spike progressed. Okay, so Spike kind of sucked a little in late S6 because he'd lost all the badassness and hilarity that made 5 so damn brilliant. But I adored him in Season 7, and really, really empathised with him. I wasn't a big fan of Anya in 7, so all that season had going for it was really the Spike and the few times they made the First really interesting.
Like I said to Danni over MSN, Dark Willow was just total meh. Vamp Willow? Awesome. Dark Willow? Bad scripting and just weird. I didn't dislike the way her memory charms in TR and before that were done (of course, I was angry at her for it, but I didn't think it was completely OOC or anything), but getting addicted to magic? What? First of all, what's so bad about becoming 'reliant' on magic anyway? Suddenly there was a huge fuss about doing stuff like closing the curtains with magic to save her getting out of bed. What's actually so bad about that? I understand that becoming reliant = becoming like Dark Willow eventually, but that was never explained and seemed really bizarre.
Plus, I find it slightly offensive. I'm a pagan, bit Wiccan, and for the most part I just found all the (obviously) inaccurate Wiccan stuff and portrayal mildly amusing. I already knew the show had gone 'ooh, Wicca is something unusual, let's include it' and didn't have a huge problem with it when I came across it in the show. And I looooved how Jenny was a technopagan, because technopagans are awesome. I got annoyed at the 'Wiccan meeting' or whatever it was when Willow met Tara, because although they were portrayed as not being 'real' and kind of stupid, that was only because traditional magic is actually real on Buffy. But when Willow got 'addicted' to magic, I was a little bit put out. Especially with all the drug addiction and sex addiction parallels, and how it was pretty much done with the Wiccan name... and also how they used the term 'Wicca' but never actually focused or even described it as a religion (it wasn't even properly explained). The only time the word 'goddess' was mentioned was that ridiculously cringeworthy 'Oh my goddess' line by Willow in Chosen, which really spoilt an otherwise beautiful and redeeming moment.
Now... Anya. Like I said, got spoilt for the three deaths (Tara, Anya and the third one was Spike, *SOB* ;A;) and knew she died after reading an Amazon review. Bloody reviewer, just tell me whether or not the product was in good condition, not the entirety of the plot! Anyway, reading that she died was a shock in itself, so I can't even begin to imagine how it would have been in the show, not knowing she was going to die. But I thought it was a really nice ending.
Hey, Danni, I know you don't like Spike, but Anya wasn't the only one whose death was brushed over! But yeah, I didn't mind that nobody was overly sad about their deaths right there. I liked the last moment, everyone just taking in everything that had happened and the scope of the great big massive cratery explosion (which was a little OTT; everyone got out of town previously?), and I thought Xander's sad smile was lovely.
Tara's, though, was a little strange. Like you guys said, everyone pretty much got over it very quickly. I understand that they had more pressing matters to deal with, i.e. Willow about to destroy the world, but even so. Then again, I've never felt that dealing with death was one of the show's strengths -- not including Joyce though, of course. The Body was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen, though unfortunately too painful for me to consider watching again any time soon. I even thought that Giles got over Jenny a bit too quickly. I understand that he wouldn't necessarily show his grieving all that obviously, but it was like she was forgotten very quickly, and since we can't hear Giles' thoughts, I was a bit sad about that.
All rambled out, now. Is anyone else who's seen all of Buffy interested in making a 'Top 25 Episodes' list like the one on Critically Touched? :D I'd be interested in seeing what you guys' ones would be like.
Also, Danni, not only does the fandom call Riley Captain Cardboard, but so does Spike in "No Place Like Home". XD In his "...and you have stupid hair" speech. Only noticed that today. Ahh, season 5, how I love you.
Is it wrong that the days the forums were down were absolutely killing me because I miss ranting at you guys about Buffy so much? :3
(advance warning: this will be LONG)
I still can't belive you watched so much in such a short space of time, though, Cirrus. I watched series 1-4 quite slowly, about two or three episodes a night, because last year we'd go over to my friend's and watch it, and one of us was bound to have homework of some kind that needed doing, so we couldn't stay up till 4am watching all the Buffy we could. I pretty much marathoned S5 over a couple of days (and as a result, I see S5 as one big plot-thingy rather than a bunch of individual episodes), and seasons 6 and 7 were a little bit more broken up over periods of time.
While Fear Itself is blatantly a rehash of Nightmares, it does have an absolutely huge amount of things that would make anything better; Giles with chainsaw, Anya with bunny suit, Oz as God, Giles with somrero and the freaking hilarious teeny-tiny fear demon at the end. I <3 Gachnar.
Yup, the idea of Willow and Wesley is marginally creepy when you can't seperate the characters from the actors. But you know what's even creepier? Amber Benson is dating Warren's actor IRL. I know.
(Butterfree, you'll meet him later and all will become clear)
I don't really get the Riley-hate. I think he's boring - pretty much everyone I've ever spoken to thinks he's boring (everyone except my best friend who inexplicably adores him, second only to Giles), but there's no reason to hate him. ):
I think S4 Spike is my favourite. He's fun when he's all evil in S2, but he's just so, so funny in S4 X3 Any scene with him and Giles cracks me up, and his interactions with the other characters (him and Buffy in Something Blue, him annoying Xander by imitating Anya in Hush... the scene Butterfree mentioned with Willow in The Initative). I just plain love season 4. It's one of the most-hated seasons in the whole series, but it's just so funny you can't help but love it <3
My absolute favourite scene in Pangs (it's one of the funniest scenes in all of Buffy, and probably the single most absurd) is that shot of them all on the bikes, pedalling across the cemetery for about five seconds while music that sounds like a newsflash jingle plays in the background. It makes me die laughing every time.
Though Spike's "You made a bear! Undo it!" is fantastic, Xander mentioning Angel at the end is perfect, everyone thinking Angel's evil is hilarious (as is Anya's "What's he like when he is evil?") and so much more I can't be bothered to list. So good.
Hehe, Giles' "Bloody hell!" in The Yoko Factor is so good. I also love the little scene with Tara and Anya hiding out in Giles' bathroom ("...Nice bathroom." "Like the tile.") way more than I should.
Well, the "sexual repression is bad" moral loses some of its....moral-ness when you consider that Buffy and Riley having sex in the first place is the trigger for all the badness happening in the episode. It does come across as a bit "sex is bad"-ish, though I prefer to think of it as "Buffy having sex is bad"; PK and I have talked at length about how Buffy should never, ever have sex because it just never ends well for anyone.
Yeah, it's pretty much universaly agreed that Primeval isn't a very good ep (I can't dislike it, though, simply because of Giles' "...it's a magic gourd" line), and I'm so glad Restless exists to make the S4 finale a good one. Gaaaah, that episode is so good <333 (tell Shadey he's wrong wrong wrong) :3
Glory is craaaaazy. I always thought it was weird that the Big Bad was introduced so early on in the season. I think it works, though. Mostly. God, I hate that scene with the appallingly CGI'd snake, though. That was worse than the one in Band Candy DX
I think Glory's minions are the cutest things in the whole world~
And also, I take back what I said above about the bikes being the most absurd moment in Buffy and raise you that scene in Spiral that, not to spoil anything, is the closest Buffy ever comes to an actual car chase With knights and horses. And Winnebagos.
I was really confused when Dawn was brought in; I thought she'd been living with Buffy's dad or something, too. I wish I liked Dawn more; I can only stand her in scenes with other characters I like (you have to love her scenes with Tara, and the few she has with Xander are pretty sweet, too).
I wish Miss Kitty Fantastico was in more episodes; she was epic.
I'm glad you enjoyed seasons 6 and 7, Cirrus; again, I wish I liked everything; if I loved every series as much as I loved 4 and every character as much as I love Tara, I'd probably explode from joy.
But, uh, I have some handy motivational posters that sum up my feelings for me: Series 6 (though, that said...), and Series 7. X3
Aww, it's a shame you don't care so much about Xander and Anya; I was devastated at the end of Hell's Bells and, if I were a vengence demon, would have been all too keen on evicerating Xander for leaving poor Anya for such a stupid reason )< Why are Willow and Xander so awful to their girlfriends? ):
I find sex scenes on TV uncomfortable to watch most of the time. I can read pretty much anything (okay, that's a complete lie), but I get very squicked out by watching anything, and there were times in series 6 where the episode would suddenly cut to a gratuitious Spuffy sex scene and I'd just cover my eyes in reflex. I spent pretty much all of Where the Wild Things are feeling distincttly uncomfortable, too.
I love how tastefully done Willow and Tara's "intimate moments" are.
Please, by all means, post your essay-ramble. I'm not particularly emotionally invested in Buffy's conquests, but I'm still more than happy to read about/discuss them :)
(and if it means a post here that's longer than mine, I'm all for it)
"Spike kind of sucked a little in late S6 because he'd lost all the badassness and hilarity that made 5 so damn brilliant." Well, he also sucked because of the whole attempted rape thing. Gyuuuh, that scared me so, so much. x.x
Again, it's so sad you didn't care for Anya in S7, because it was easily my favourite season for her, and Anya was one of the few things I really liked about it. Well, pretty much the only thing. Andrew was fun, but I resent him terribly from S6, and while there were a few really funny moments (the Chinese Potential X3), it wasn't enough to combat the whole seriousness of everything else.
Well, I also loved Principal Wood - not as a character, but because he was played by DB Woodside, who played the President of the United States in series 6 of 24, and seeing him do stuff like go on dates with Buffy and sleep with Faith was absolutely freaking hilarious.
The magic addiction thing was stupid. Very much so. It's been said time and time again that it'd've worked so much better to have Willow get addicted to power, and have magic be the vessel through which that power manifested - it's been established time and time again that Willow likes having power and control, and it'd make so much more sense than her, um, getting high and smashing up cars (oh, how I wish I were joking).
I didn’t like Dark Willow too much, but honestly at that point, I was too traumatised over losing Tara to really care about much else. It could’ve been the best series finale ever and I wouldn’t’ve really cared because I was pretty much entirely emotionally numb and, I’ll say it again, I get disturbingly attached to fictional characters. O.o
…I want to know, when Willow got rid of all her magical stuff, what happened to the Doll’s Eye Crystal. Joss loves referencing earlier stuff, and bringing objects you’ve forgotten about back (see: The Gift), but we never know what happened to it, and it breaks my heart to think that it just got thrown away; it was Tara’s family heirloom, after all ):
While I agree that the Wicca meeting was probably offensive to *actual* Wiccans, I always thought of it more as showing the hypocrisy that exists within groups like that – the parallels between practicing magic and homosexuality are clearly established (through Willow and Tara and Giles and Ethan XD), and I think it was more of a comment on how inclusive groups like that like to think they are, but if you don’t meet a certain set of criteria, you quickly become ostracised.
(or it might be that I’ve been studying Foucault too much)
It was a shame that the religion aspect of W&T’s Wicca-ness wasn’t explored more, I agree. That said, Willow’s Jewish and, except for a few comments and her putting stones on Tara’s grave, we never really see her do anything remotely related to Judaism.
It’s not just that I don’t like Spike so much that I didn’t comment on his death, it’s also that he – I hope this isn’t too spoilery, but I can’t put spoiler tags within spoiler tags – he comes back. In Angel, yes, but he still returns. And his death wasn’t (I thought) as sad as Anya’s; he got to say goodbye and realized that dying was something he needed and wanted to do, unlike Tara and Anya who, like I said earlier, were suddenly, unexpectedly ripped away from their loved ones in a moment of violence.
In the leadup to Chosen, it was established that everyone in Sunnydale left – I forget the reasoning (something like “the townspeople felt a massively dark power growing and decided to get the hell out”), but there’s a scene where Clem’s stuck in all the mass-exodus traffic, and the Scoobies and Potentials do a bit of looting when everyone’s gone (including stealing Jaffa Cakes XD).
It’s really sad that, with Sunnydale gone, Tara and Joyce’s (and presumably Jenny’s, though I don’t think we ever see a grave) graves have been destroyed, too ):
After reading a whole ton of comforting Tara!fic, I’m a little bit more at peace with the character’s responses to it. There’s a wonderful (eternally unfinished; last updated in ‘03) fic called Working Out The Kinks, where Buffy explains that rushing off to stop Willow murdering a human being is exactly what Tara would’ve wanted, rather than let Willow become a murderer because everyone was too busy mourning her, and I can’t help but agree.
Yeah, Joyce’s death and the beautifully, heartbreakingly portrayed reactions to it nearly make up for the unrealistic coping-with-death that happens with every other character. I understand that we can’t have an entire episode dealing the with aftermath of every character who dies, but the stark contrast about how life-altering Joyce’s death was for everyone, compared to Tara’s death pretty much only affecting Willow (again; what about Dawn?) was deeply annoying.
Haha, I forgot about that. We watched Intervention yesterday and all had a good giggle about the Buffybot saying how “Angel’s hair sticks up and it’s bloody stupid!” or similar. Jealous Spike is funny. As is the Buffybot. “You’re recently gay.” X3
(Sorry, Butterfree/PK)
Top 25 List? I’ll do a top 10 and then maybe expand it when I’m not falling asleep.
1. Hush
2. Doppelgangland
3. Once More, With Feeling
4. The Gift
5. Restless
6. New Moon Rising
7. Family
8. Who Are You?
9. The Body
10. Chosen
God, I favour the mid-seasons. That’s 1 from S3, 4 from S4, 3 from S5, 1 from S6 and one from S7. Except for Doppelgangland (which got 95), NMR (90), Family (75) and Chosen (92) they all got “Perfect” scores on CT.
Well, the "sexual repression is bad" moral loses some of its....moral-ness when you consider that Buffy and Riley having sex in the first place is the trigger for all the badness happening in the episode. It does come across as a bit "sex is bad"-ish, though I prefer to think of it as "Buffy having sex is bad"; PK and I have talked at length about how Buffy should never, ever have sex because it just never ends well for anyone.
Well, conversely, the only reason any badness whatsoever happens is because of sexual repression; Buffy and Riley having sex only has negative consequences because very special circumstances are involved, and those very special circumstances include a history of sexual repression which on the other hand has direct negative consequences in and of itself that only happened to manifest themselves visibly when Buffy and Riley had sex. I mean, imagine that the episode was ever so slightly different. Instead of the sexually repressed, the house is haunted by the spirits of children who were simply unloved, and as a result they feed on love and friendship. The Scooby gang enters with all their love and friendship, and this gives the poltergeists food enough to start to wreak havoc. Would you interpret the moral of that as "love and friendship are bad"? Hardly.
Plus, Giles makes that whole rant about how the repression was bad and abusive and those children have probably grown into very disturbed adults. And who would you rather believe: Giles, who's just been singing, or the creepy old lady he's shouting at?
Of course, it is very true that Buffy should have learned by now that she and sex are very un-mixy things, and I can't believe I'm lengthily defending that episode, but it felt very notably pro-sex to me, especially for a show about teens.
Anyway, we watched six more episodes. I really wanted to like Family more than I did, since I'd been looking forward to learning more about Tara, but I really agree with the Critically Touched guy that her family was just so awfully one-dimensional that it didn't really work. Primarily, it just really feels like it could have been so much better with a bit more insight into their motives and beliefs, exactly what really happened to Tara's mother, and I was really, really hoping to see Cousin Beth waver at least a little in her resolve when the demon thing was proven wrong. Though really, that didn't quite make sense either. While Spike punching her to resolve it was amusing (although Tara is too adorable to be punched D:), it really doesn't work from a story perspective; how in the world does Spike's chip know whether what he's harming is human? I always assumed that it responded to the particular pattern of brainwaves that happens when he specifically decides to harm a human being, but it working as an omniscient demon-detector just doesn't make sense. I mean, technically it could be that he just thinks of Tara as human and therefore it hurts, but then why does everyone still just immediately go, "Oh, okay, so since Spike hurts when he hits her, obviously she is fully human" and never spare it another thought?
Plus, all of the Scoobies standing up for Tara as one of them, while sweet, felt kind of random since it wasn't really set up at all; earlier in the episode Buffy and Xander were just talking about how they don't really know Tara, and I'm not sure they even exchanged a single word with her until the end when she'd just caused them trouble by using that spell, which of course they shouldn't be condemning her for, but it shouldn't exactly be bringing them closer together either. While of course the Scoobies will always protect the innocent and it's definitely in character for them to defend Tara when her family suddenly shows up to take her away and tell her she's a demon, everyone suddenly being all "SHE'S IN OUR FAMILY NOW!", as opposed to just arguing that what the family are doing is simply wrong in general, seems to come kind of out of nowhere. :/ I mean, it's nice for Tara to get accepted into the group, but it could have been done a lot better.
I was also looking a lot forward to Fool for Love, what with supposedly being the definitive Spike episode and all, but while it had some good bits, I didn't really love it either. I'm kind of torn on how much I like Spike's backstory generally. On the one hand, it's difficult to take him seriously knowing he spent his human days writing bad poetry and got his "William the Bloody" name from that (nicknaming somebody "the Bloody" just because their poetry is "bloody awful" is a seeeerious stretch), and the woman who rejected him saying he's beneath her is just kind of over-the-top mean, considering apparently it's just because he's a bad poet. On the other hand, it does explain why he's so unvampirically romantic (for lack of a better word) in thinking, I suppose I can see how his human personality translated into his vampire personality when allowing for the same drastic change as between Angel with and without his soul, it's just fun to think of him hunting down everyone who ever mocked his poetry and driving railroad spikes through their heads in revenge, and regardless of the sensibility of the first "You're beneath me", it does work when Buffy says it, and ow, does it sting. Nothing is more adorable than Spike sobbing.
Really, though, the main thing that bothers me about that episode is why Spike was telling her all that stuff in the first place. Exactly how did it help him make his point about how he killed those two slayers? It seems very odd for him to just needlessly decide to tell somebody he's just realized he has a sexual obsession with that he used to be this loser who wrote terrible poetry, and it seems kind of out of character for Buffy to just listen to it instead of telling him to get to the point already.
That said, Spike coming over with the rifle, seeing Buffy being distraught and just changing his mind to try to make her feel better was just adorable. So much so that even Shadey declared that Spike was the most adorable character on the show, surpassing even Miss Kitty Fantastico.
Um. Riley got himself bitten by vampires and left. I'm pretty much indifferent, really, but I liked Spike's part in it. He's so cute and pathetic these days. :3 And still funny, if not quite as much so as in season four.
Aww, I loved Family, and with the exception of a couple of people (both of whom love Tara as much as I do), nobody really seems to like it much. I agree it's not up to Joss' usual standards in terms of quality, but I just love it (my list of the top 10 best Buffy episodes would be rather different to my top 10 favourites listed above).
I agree that Tara's family are a little one-dimensional, but her father and brother were probably physically ("I'm gonna beat you down") and definetly emotionally abusive towards her, and not giving them positive, redeeming qualities (in the real world, let's face, it, child abusers aren't the most sympathetic people) didn't, I felt, detract from the episode in any serious way. Plus, they were more of a means to an end (showing Tara's home life, how she came to be like she is, etc.) rather than an end in themselves, so complaining they didn't have much of a personality is a little like complaining that the Gentlemen didn't have personalities. They were there. They were scary. They existed to push the story forward.
With the lone exception of Joyce, not a single Scooby parent really has any personality past "drunken", "neglectful" or "abusive" anyways. I agree the episode could have been better if they'd explained their motives or whatnot a little better, but I don't think the ep suffered too much because they didn't.
I'm not sure how I feel about not knowing exactly what happened to Tara's mother; it's not made 100% clear, but you can get most the important stuff from reading between the lines; I (and most fanfiction writers) assume she had cancer or similar (from the "Was it sudden?" "No. And yes. It's always sudden." in The Body - I absolute freaking adore that scene, by the way), and from Tara's smile as she talked about her mother in Hush ("She had a lot of power. Like you.") they were clearly close and Tara took the death very hard - "I did some pretty dumb stuff like lying to my family and staying out all night" (from Intervention).
Plus, given how much the rest of her family feared/hated magic, it was something almost certianly shared just between the two of them, and once her mother died, having nobody to practice magic with only exacerbated her loneliness (see: the first verse of Under Your Spell), especially when she didn't have any actual friends (Donnie mentions to Tara that the Scooby Gang is "more people than you met in High School.").
Again, I think the impact it had on Tara and her personality is more important than the actual death itself; how Tara's mother died doesn't really matter within the context of Buffy; the fact that it hurt Tara and left her feeling scared and alone is what's important and relevant.
And that scene with everyone all together facing off against Mr Maclay is one of my favourite Buffy scenes ever <3 If I may (once again) refer to the top-100-moments list I love so much:
Family is one of the chief themes in season 5, and it's epitomized in this moment. A large portion of the episode has been spent establishing how the Scoobies really just don't get Tara. Buffy and Xander have no idea what to get her for her birthday, absolutely no one on earth (except Willow) gets her jokes, and as for Tara herself, she doesn't quite feel like she fits in. But when Tara needs them the most, the gang backs her up. They may not get her, but they're there for her all the same, just as they would be for anybody else. The line is drawn in this episode, clearly making the distinction between people who share your DNA and your true family, stating that in no uncertain terms they are not necessarily one and the same. That's a nice sentiment, and I love how this scene plays out, but that's not full reason why it's here.
What really makes this moment for me is the fact that right then, the group of characters that will always and forever be the heart of the show for me come together.
The Core of Buffy, Willow, Xander and Giles. The addition of Dawn. The Scoobie-in-laws, Tara and Anya. And even Spike, who is noticeable in his hovering on the fringes and declarations that he doesn't care. This is the group of characters that I love, that worked better and felt more right to me than any other, and it was a special thing to have it encapsulated in a definable moment.
Riley's getting bitten by vampires and such always struck me as a little odd. His leaving was quite well-done, though, and I'm fond of Xander's speech to her before she runs off to the helicopter. Xander doesn't get enough attention in the later seasons ):
Buffy's "You're beneath me" always reminds me so much of Faith's "Because it's wrong" in the church in Who Are You?. It's like it's said a few times in the episode and is even kinda humourous at the time, and then it's said later and it actually means something and oooh. Or maybe that's just me.
Pathetic Spike annoyed me. I miss Kickass Spike from S2 and Wacky Neighbour Spike from S4. ):
About Tara's mom, I was actually thinking in terms of the turning-into-a-demon thing. Didn't they say that it happened to her mom and that was supposed to be why Tara believed it? Which I was really confused by, because in The Body we see that Tara knew her mother, presumably after the age of twenty, and if the turning into a demon thing (explicitly stated to be physically visible, too) was a lie, Tara would therefore have known. Or maybe I'm just being really stupid and completely misunderstood something, which would explain a lot. @_@
I'm not precisely asking for redeeming qualities or personalities, more just... a bit of insight into why they became that way. I'm not even sure precisely why it bugs me we don't get any such thing, because you have a good point about bad guys usually not having much in the way of dimensions; I just know it does. Maybe I was just too excited to see it, because I read on TV Tropes (just before seeing the episode, too; I hate how spoilers hunt me down) that her family had this whole abusive repression of women going on and was maybe imagining something a bit... more. I don't know.
I really like how Xander's grown to often be quite insightful now, such as there when Riley was leaving; I love how he's developed from the goofy comic relief while still being very much himself.
Kickass Spike and Wacky Neighbour Spike were extremely entertaining, but what can I say? I like my fictional men on the pathetic side. As shown by how this development has been coinciding with my starting to find him kind of hot, even despite the still-rather-terrifying cheekbones, and that belt of his is weirdly sexy, and I'll stop now. <_<
So! I watched the rest of season five, and it was amaaaazing. First, I absolutely loved Crush and Buffy's general "wtf" reaction to finding out Spike's in love with her, Spike having Harmony dress up as Buffy and pretend to want to stake him and the whole "It's not a date! Do you want it to be?" shtick, although then he went creepy with the chaining Buffy up and threatening to kill her if she doesn't admit there's something "between them". I don't think Spike is quite grasping this whole one-sided thing. And I Was Made to Love You was just extremely amusing, and I cannot believe Amber Benson is dating Warren, and Spike getting him to make a Buffybot is just adorably desperate. And The Body is heartbreaking (what else is new?). And I adored Intervention because the Buffybot and everyone's reactions to her are hilarious ("the who whatting how with huh?") and Spike is all really, really pathetic and desperate and gets beaten up and tortured by Glory, which is always nice ignore me, and then he refused to tell her about Dawn, which was adorable. And then Tara got mindsucked and it was all noooooo. ;_; It was really, really hard to watch her being insane when she's usually a pillar of maturity and reason.
The whole finale was just epic and perfect and probably my very favorite episode so far for a zillion different reasons. First, God, I wish I hadn't known that (and I'm spoilering this, because I do not want to be responsible for some new potential viewer flipping through this thread and finding out here) Buffy dies. It was still amazing, but it would have completely blown my mind if I hadn't known.
But still! Oh God I loved that episode and you will have to stop me because I am being way excited and incoherent even though it's been days since we watched it. First, freaking GILES whom I love indescribably! <3 He was being all morally ambiguous and wanting to kill Dawn to save the world! And Buffy wouldn't let him because she's cool like that! And they used Tara to lead them to Glory, which I had been thinking they should do, and Willow was cool and brought Tara back and it was amazing and fluffy and adorable. And Xander got to have an important part too, and they used the Dagon Sphere and the Buffybot! <3 And it really felt like it took all that stuff to take Glory down, and Spike went to help Dawn, which was sweet even though he didn't achieve much. And holy crap, GILES MURDERED BEN ffffff. I know that is not something normal people squee about, but that is one of my favorite things in the world, and his chilling little speech before it about how Buffy is a hero, not like us, and the fact he chose to suffocate him instead of stabbing him or something felt really right, and foarwigaophrgpoahuregopaihreg GILES. <3
Yeah, I'll stop not making any sense now. It was amazing, and again, I really, really wish I hadn't been spoiled because it would have been so much more powerful if I hadn't known, not that it wasn't pretty darn powerful anyway, and then Spike was all heartbroken and it was sad.
And then we started watching season six and we've just finished episode 18. First, Spike has been getting really creepy and it bugs me. D: He still really doesn't get the whole one-sided thing, and I cringe every time he goes all RAR YOU LOVE ME BUT YOU JUST WON'T ADMIT IT. But I really like Buffy (the character) in season six; I love that the show actually bothered to treat resurrection not just as a cheap plot device to keep the series going but as something that has serious repercussions. Seeing Buffy deal with having been dead and being so completely lost and depressed is really interesting, and yes, that includes the Spike/Buffy, dysfunctionalness and all. I feel really sorry for both of them; it's so messed up, Buffy doesn't want it at all and is just using it to feel alive while for Spike it's pretty much the Buffybot all over again except with less love. (Which is especially painful when you consider that at the beginning of the season, Spike couldn't even look at the Buffybot precisely because it was just a hollow shell of Buffy pretending to like him, and, well...) It's all pretty twisted, but very interesting for the show in my opinion.
Once More, With Feeling is so much better in context! I never had any idea what half of it was on about, and just seeing the general state of all the character relationships makes it so much more satisfying to watch. I even think Shadey enjoyed it, despite his hatred of musicals; I don't think he could take Going Through the Motions very seriously (I can't really either, what with the dancing demons and Disney prince), but after that he made no deprecating comments, and in fact he seemed genuinely interested in the potential of the plot (he kept wondering if the singing would lead to Buffy revealing that she'd been in Heaven). So yay for that.
Tabula Rasa was brilliant; I was laughing pretty much throughout the entire memory-loss scene. Spike was Randy Giles and kept making all these "I'm sure you never showed me affection like that!" remarks, and they were all "Oh, God! I'm British!" and Buffy thought she seemed like a Joan. And hee, Willow and Tara were immediately attracted to each other. x3 I also really liked how they settled on calling Xander Alex, even though they knew his full name. And Giles and Anya thought they were a couple and he was leaving her. XD And the whole thing was just great. Except for Giles leaving. D:
Now, that episode brings us to Willow. I knew she'd be getting all dark-magic-addicted-y, but the drug metaphor got kind of "huh?" with that Rack guy. He's using magic to... make people high? I mean, being addicted to the feeling of power works, but it's kind of lame when it works exactly like a drug. And it's kind of weird how her actual use of magic has completely stopped being relevant at this point, because it's all just Rack using magic on her, not her using her own magic. And it doesn't seem like it should be so addictive that she would go right after she promises Tara to go without magic for a week and do it again, especially after Tara had pointed out to her that forcing people to forget things is truly a violation of their mind. I thought the scene at the Bronze where she and Amy (I love that they brought her back finally) went nuts with magicking everything worked pretty well, because there it really was about the power thing, and I like how she's constantly tempted to do things with magic out of pure laziness because she's gotten so used to having the power to do things without manual work, but the high thing and the apparent actual physical addiction is kind of... odd.
That said, after she went cold turkey, I really like her again; she's showed a lot of strength of character maintaining her resolve for all this time, especially after Amy came and gave her all that power and I was sure she was about to go on a rampage or something. And she and Tara got back together and it's all yay. :D And Entropy was hilarious when Anya was trying to get everybody to wish evil on Xander and was trying to convince them to be man-hating because they're lesbians and they were all "We're more about the... girl-on-girl action." The Spike/Anya thing worked surprisingly well; I like how the show keeps showing you all these amusing parallels between how different characters are feeling.
And now I realize I skipped over Hell's Bells and Normal Again. I really didn't like Hell's Bells at first, or rather, it was very funny but I really disliked the "future-Xander" and the visions he showed the real Xander because it seemed lame and clichéd. That said, I always held on to the hope that, true to Buffy tradition, it would end up subverting it, and it did, so yay. :D But argh, Xander should just have called off the wedding, not the relationship! D: I'm sure he could have made her understand that he just wasn't ready for the eternal commitment thing even though he still loved her. It made me really sad, and then none of Entropy would have happened, which would have deprived us of a lot of hilarity, but they wouldn't have been hurting so much. D:
Normal Again was creepy. I loved how at the end when "Joyce" told Buffy to be strong and believe in herself, it made her realize "herself" was the Sunnydale Buffy, not the one in the institution, because that's basically what I'd been thinking. It was cool to see her manage to snap out of it like that, but also how willing she was to consider it thanks to all her depression and confusion and did I mention I really like Buffy this season?
I have a great urge to start psychoanalyzing Spike now. Darn you, club, for making me start talking about him. <_<
Man, I'm totally behind on all the S5/S6 stuff... BUT I have one very meaningless thing to contribute here!
BOTH XANDERS WERE REAL OMG
also this line: "Xander seems to be a bad influence on himself..."
now I just want to know what the heck is up with freaking Dawn (I have this theory that she exists somehow as a result of Joyce's loneliness with Buffy off at college), but that episode was good enough that I don't really mind not learning anything about Dawn in it.
oh oh oh also! Dawn writing in her diary~ "Willow and Tara are both witches. They do spells together. One time I said maybe they could show me the kinds of things they do together... then Mom got really quiet and told me to go to my room. I guess her generation just doesn't get witchcraft."
god I love Dawn already, even if I have no idea what's going on with her.
Also Anya has been amazing for the entirety of S4 and she's still keeping it up. Squee.
P.S. Danni, I blame you entirely for spreading your Amber Benson crush to me. Fffft.
Aaaaaaah. I get you. Yeah, the Tara's-mother-physically-turning-into-a-demon-thing is never explained, but I always just assumed she was taken away once a month (or whatever), but it still doesn't really make much sense in terms of Tara's mother not telling Tara about it. Point taken.
Given how far the Maclays come, the fact they're probably from a very rural area (Tara's horseriding, her isolation), and the massive distain for witchcraft doubling as a distain for lesbianism, I think the male Maclays and their hatred of magic/women/homosexuality were supposed to be like the deep south religious fundamentalists, in which case the explanation would simply be "they were raised to think like that". I'm grateful Joss didn't make the Maclays Bible-bashers, though; there's a character like that in S7 and it's more than a little heavy-handed.
I do with they'd made Beth more interesting, though; the only reason I can see that she was there in the first place was that she was supposed to be an example of what a woman who believes the lies the men of her family tell her is like, and by extension, what Tara could have turned into, were it not for Willow et al, but it's a bit of a stretch.
Xander really does turn into some kind of relationship guru in the later seasons; he has a few deep conversations with Buffy and I really love them. I think it's sweet that he's getting more understanding while still remaining the Xander we know and love, but it irritates me that he doesn't seem to get Anya as much as he should.
I don't mind Spike being pathetic (well, I miss his other incarnations, but it's not like I'm heartbroken now he's suddenly a weeping wreck of a man), it's just annoying (to me) that we see so much of him being all pathetic and stuff. I'm not a big Spike fan (wish I was, but I'm just not) and all the episodes and arc about Spike just, well, bored me ):
I Was Made to Love You was a weird episode; the idea of making love-robots is deeply disturbing to me and I loathe Warren with a fiery, fiery passion, but, as I said earlier, I love the scene with Tara being sad about people's bad spelling online and Anya wanting to buy a gazelle so, so much. Willow and Xander girl-watching ("A girl like that isn't going to be alone for long." "Definitely not.") is hilarious, as is Willow trying to backpeddle out of it when Tara hears.
Intervention is another of those episodes I love way more than everyone else. I absolutely adore the Buffybot and everyone's reactions to her too, and there were just so many brilliant scenes/lines in the ep; "I'm not sleeping with Spike. But I'm starting to think you might be."/"You're recently gay!"/"How's your money?" "Fine, thanks for asking!"/"Willow wants to watch a historical documentary about Salem witch trials, which will only make her upset"/ ... and probably more I'm forgetting.
Spike and Tara both having massive suffering and still refusing to tell Glory about Dawn was incredibly sweet. Spike's torture was pretty horrible, and him not giving in was very awesome of him, and you can probably imagine how much I hate seeing Tara's hand get crushed and then being all whimpery when Glory describes, in detail, what it's like when your brain's sucked out, but the idea of telling Glory about Dawn obviously never even crosses her mind. And seeing her be all babbly and nonsensical just hurts to watch; the scene in The Gift where she slaps Willow across the face and then looks completely devastated afterwards breaks my heart ):
I know Spiral is completely wacky, but I love that scene with the knights all chasing after them in their Winnebago so, so much. Every time I watch it I laugh my face off.
And The Gift is one of my absolute favourites, ever. There's not a single thing about it that's not perfectly done, and the CT guy is totally right in saying that the entire series as a whole was leading up to this one point. I grin like a nutter every time I see the "previously on" for the episode, with clips from just about every episode in the entire series (I squee at the Willow and Tara in Hush clip and giggle stupidly over the fraction-of-a-second appearance of The Cheese Man), and then Buffy's encounter with an ordinary vampire and the guy she saves telling her "You're just a girl" - which, arguably, is a sentiment the entire series was made to subvert.
I'm so, so sorry for spoiling Buffy's death for you; I had it ruined by OMWF, too, and I think it would've been so much better had I not known, too...
I just love the musical ep so much I have to show it to everyone, and then I don't realize how spoilery it is until it's too late D:
Firstly, I love anything, regardless how cheesy (and this wasn't cheesy in the slightest), when all the characters come together and all play a role in taking down the Bad Guy. And the way everyone came together and used their strengths and situations to take down Glory, bit by bit; Tara leading them to the base, Willow reversing the mind-suck, the Buffybot being a diversion, Xander and his wrecking ball, Anya and her baseball bat, Spike going up to save Dawn, Giles taking out the threat of Glory ever returning and, of course, Buffy sacrificing herself for the world/Dawn. So, so beautifully done.
And all the references! I'd completely forgotten about Olaf's Hammer and the Dagon Sphere until they were brought back and proved pretty much instrumental in taking Glory down. Anya refusing to run from apocalypses anymore because she's human now and is beginning to understand just what it means. Willow and Tara joining hands a la Hush to clear the path for Buffy. I'd even completely forgotten about Doc, and was completely surprised when he came back (the fact he's the Wizard of Oz in Wicked still means I can't take him seriously, but it was still cool). And all the talk of blood all season finally making sense.
I can't think of a single thing that could have made it better. Every time I see it or, hell, talk about it, I just love it more <3333
Yeah, I agree that while you can appreciate OMWF from a musical POV while knowing little/nothing about Buffy, it's so much better when you actually see how it fits into the series; one of the best things (I think) about the ep is how it's not just a musical extravaganza gimmick; it moves the plot forward in leaps and bounds, and choosing the episode where characters' deepest emotions are laid bare through the medium of song was just perfect for the episode in which Buffy told everyone the truth.
(pretend this is in a quotebox) "And the whole thing was just great. Except for Giles leaving. D:"
What about Tara leaving? ;~; That scene at the end always breaks my heart; they've spent the entire episode showing how "meant to be" they are, even if Willow's supposed to have a boyfriend, they're just drawn together and neither can resist, but then the spell is broken and Tara realizes that being in love and being completed by Willow just isn't enough and she has to leave.
Giles' leaving hurts terribly; he's one of my absolute favourite characters, but his leaving always seemed, to me, to be a little out of character; I feel like Buffy, confused and hurt that he chose now to leave Buffy all on her own.
But Tara's leaving was needed, and while it meant the breaking up of my absolute favourite couple, I totally understand that it was what she had to do, and respect her massively for it; there's a deep irony in Tara having the emotional strength and courage to leave Willow and to not put up with being abused any longer as a direct result of relationship with Willow in the first place.
In Family, Tara didn't have the strength to leave her abusive family; it took Willow's encouragement and the Scoobies standing up for her to be able to tell her family she wasn't going back to them. Willow was the one who taught her that she deserves to be loved and isn't worthless or whatever else her family had her believe, and it was only through that that Tara would have been able to leave at the end of Tabula Rasa.
Lots of people think Tara was underdeveloped as a character, and while I agree she didn't get enough screentime, she develops and grows as a character just as much, if not more, than all the other characters.
And Dawn just running away upstairs when Tara tried to hug her goodbye. It physically hurts. D:
Yup, I (and pretty much the entire Buffy fandom) totally agree with you on the WTF?-ness of the magic-as-drugs metaphor. It's way overdone and doesn't make a lot of sense. There were so many ways they could have done it, but the way they actually chose just feels like a "drugs are bad" message every bit as subtle as "beer bad" and the seriousness of what's happening to Willow gets undermined.
I think Xander leaving Anya was completely silly and I actually hate him for hurting her so much. One of the things I hate about season 6 is how much it had Xander hurting Anya and Willow hurting Tara, and it just makes me resent Willow and Xander, and not liking the series' main characters is never good.
Normal Again was absolutely excellent. When the Geek Trio sent another monster after Buffy, I was thinking "Oh god, not another Gone", but it was so, so good. I love how the ending implied that the whole of Buffy could be the paranoid delusions of a girl in a mental hospital, but Buffy believed in her friends (or something less cheesy) in the end.
I do really like Entropy. In season 6, Anya makes out with all the main male characters XD And Anya trying to get all the other characters to wish ill on Xander is so, so funny, and I love that scene with Anya, Willow and Tara too; "If you love men so much, go love men!". And the ending is just awwwww.
Is Entropy the last episode you've seen? ...I can't make any kind of comment at all without ruining stuff DX
I will simply say am very anxious to hear what you have to say about the next episode/the rest of the season.
Aaaah, Salamander, I completely missed your post, which means I spent an hour typing out that massive response above. When I fail all my tests this year, I'm blaming this club XD
Aaaah, I loved The Replacement. Series 4 was so Xander-less, it was lovely to see him get his own episode, and, like all Xander episodes, it was funny as hell. It's lovely to see him getting back on his feet and actually finding a path in his life.
Hehe, I love everyone's theories about Dawn. They always make my inital assumption (she was off living with Buffy's dad and conveniently nobody ever mentioned her) seem really stupid XD
Dawn's inner thoughts are fun. Haha, the bit you quoted, with her wanting W&T to teach her stuff, is so, so funny, I love it. There's a really cute irony in that nobody tells Dawn that Willow and Tara are together romantically (the idea of lesbians are too much for a 13-year-old to handle??), but later she becomes the biggest T/W fan in the world. It's adorable.
I'm so glad you like Dawn; season 5 is so much better if you do.
I didn't.... not dislike, but didn't really care too much about Anya in S4, but from mid-S5 onwards, I adored her to bits. Really loving the characters makes the series so much more fun :D
What did you think of the dream episode?
Aww, she's so easy to crush on, though! I got my Twitter account primarily just so I could stalk her (in a non-creepy way, of course) and she's just so cool <3 For example, at the moment, she's selling limited edition Tara figurines to raise money for a charity that feeds abandoned children/battered women/homeless people/etc. So awesome.
Intervention is another of those episodes I love way more than everyone else. I absolutely adore the Buffybot and everyone's reactions to her too, and there were just so many brilliant scenes/lines in the ep; "I'm not sleeping with Spike. But I'm starting to think you might be."/"You're recently gay!"/"How's your money?" "Fine, thanks for asking!"/"Willow wants to watch a historical documentary about Salem witch trials, which will only make her upset"/ ... and probably more I'm forgetting.
Oh, yes, that episode had so many fun lines and was just generally hilarious. I cannot believe not everyone loves it; it's definitely one of my favorites.
Spike and Tara both having massive suffering and still refusing to tell Glory about Dawn was incredibly sweet. Spike's torture was pretty horrible, and him not giving in was very awesome of him, and you can probably imagine how much I hate seeing Tara's hand get crushed and then being all whimpery when Glory describes, in detail, what it's like when your brain's sucked out, but the idea of telling Glory about Dawn obviously never even crosses her mind. And seeing her be all babbly and nonsensical just hurts to watch; the scene in The Gift where she slaps Willow across the face and then looks completely devastated afterwards breaks my heart ):
Oh, yes. Tara is the kind of character who is so utterly sweet and nice and adorable that it's impossible to watch her being hurt or... damaged, for lack of a better word. D: I want to hug her. Constantly. Whyyy must Joss keep having her be hurt? ;_; He can hurt Spike more instead!
I'm not sure, but I think I knew about Buffy dying at the end of season five before you showed me OMWF. And even if you hadn't shown me OMWF, I've been reading all those Critically Touched reviews that use every opportunity in every season to talk about how everything is setting up for Buffy's eventual death in The Gift, so I think it would have been thoroughly hammered into my head by that point anyway.
Yeah, I love how OMWF is a ridiculously important episode, plot-wise; the singing-curse is actually used to bring out really important things in a way that couldn't have been done the same way if it hadn't been a musical episode. It's awesome.
Well, I didn't actually feel like Tara was leaving in the same way since I knew she would continue to be around in several more episodes (you'd mentioned some good Tara episodes that had yet to come at this point, as had Critically Touched), while Giles was actually flying out of the country and I had no idea if we'd ever see him again. Plus, Giles is still my favorite character and I like it when he's around. D: I don't get his sudden leaving thing.
Tara taking her stuff and Dawn running upstairs and Willow crying was still heartbreaking, though. And I really agree with you on the wonderful confidence growth Tara has had this season.
And now I'm randomly musing on the fact that even though Tara and Oz aren't particularly alike in personality, I feel almost exactly the same way about them, namely that they are such completely sweet and adorable people and I want them to be real so I can hug them and hang out with them and marry Oz and I'd totally marry Tara too if I swung that way. Except Oz is a werewolf and that comes with some serious issues, but hey. They're not the most interesting characters on the show to me, but they're just so lovable. <3
So anyway, we watched the final four episodes of season six.
I actually came to really like the Trio as villains; they seemed kind of lame and silly at first, but then they went from "pathetic, annoying and creepy but mostly harmless" to "kinda disturbing" to full-on evil (well, in Warren's case, anyway). I had deduced from some vague comment you made that the episode where Tara died had Amber Benson in the opening credits, so I knew what was coming as soon as I saw her there in the opening of Seeing Red, and I figured the Trio would probably be the ones to kill her somehow since they were being set up as the main villains for the time being, but I was still just utterly shocked when Warren suddenly arrived there with a gun and just started shooting and aaaaa. ;_; The fact the show never uses guns gives it a lot of additional impact now when it suddenly does. And Tara just died immediately and couldn't say goodbye or anything! ;_; And aaaaaaaaaaa it was so heartbreaking when Willow just completely broke down. If anything was going to make her turn back to black magic, it was that. And what the hell, Amber Benson is honestly dating Warren? That'll make nice dinner conversation. "Oh, he killed me in Buffy and was subsequently murdered gruesomely by my girlfriend. Pass the sauce?"
And GILES. <3 Oh, wow, seeing him burst through that door was just ridiculously awesome. "I'd like to test that theory." We both cheered.
Giles bursting out laughing when Buffy told him she was having sex with Spike was gold. A bit earlier in that scene, we realized that we seemed to have accidentally pressed something that slightly slowed down the video and made the voices deeper, which sounded mildly odd on Giles but really utterly ridiculous on Buffy when she finally spoke, so we both giggled uncontrollably at that, closed the video and started it up again, and then we happened to skip exactly to where Giles burst out laughing. I swear I thought for a second that the deepened voices had actually been intentional and Giles was really laughing at that.
And their whole laughing fit was quite amusing, although during that whole time I was wondering why the hell they were leaving Willow there in bonds that they knew wouldn't last forever without even keeping an eye on her. I loved how it was part of the plan to make Willow steal Giles' pure magic and have that appeal to her remaining humanity, and Xander there at the end was just sweet. And throughout the latter half of the last episode I was really panicky because I thought they were about to kill Giles too and was like "NO! YOU ALREADY KILLED TARA! YOU CAN'T KILL GILES TOO!" but thankfully he lived, so that's all good. Except for the "already killed Tara" part. D: You can't kill her now, when she's just gotten back together with Willow and they're all ridiculously happy and adorable and Dawn is being all squeey about it! Oh, you cruel, cruel Joss.
Spike's attempted rape of Buffy was really uncomfortable to watch. The guy needs help. Or a soul, I guess; I don't know how much of his issues is soullessness and how much is just his messed-up self, but hopefully the getting-a-soul part will help him at least somewhat with that. I liked how disturbed he was by it himself, though, and the fact it apparently scared him enough to make him want to get his soul back of all things. Hopefully interesting things will be done with this in season 7.
Yeah, the main characters have all been hurting one another a lot, haven't they? Buffy uses Spike, lies to her friends about both that and where she was until they resurrected her, and later beats up and tries to kill everyone when she thinks they're figments of her imagination; Willow violates Tara's mind and then everybody's before going on a murderous rampage; Xander leaves Anya at the altar; Giles leaves everyone behind to go to England; Anya has sex with Spike; Spike tries to rape Buffy; Tara leaves Willow. Good God, there's a lot of hurt this season. It is so, so depressing.
EDIT: I was just randomly looking through the script of Once More, With Feeling, and this made me giggle:
Giles and Anya are going over her ledgers, Tara and Willow off in the corner stocking jars. They're very touchy and giggly, basking in each other this morning. (Tara and Willow, not the other two.)
