buffy review, in short

OK, so someone in the UPN promo department should be shot. Here I was thinking it'd be a stupid stand alone "big worm eats things" episode and instead we have several huge developments, a killer last scene, and one of the best Xander one liners in recent memory. ("Yea, I don't think she'll be calling.") Specifically, the development of Spike this episode was outstanding. The scene in the graveyard will be tough to top, actingwise, for the rest of the year. The use of light and shadow was breathtaking. Both actors brought their A game. And the final image and Spike sizzling himself on the cross....jesum. It was anything but violent, just this slow walk to the cross and you're going "Oh boy, he's not....oh Christ he is." Juxtapose his desire for "rest" here with wanting to "rest in peace" in "Once More With Feeling" and you see an enormous progression for the character. And the show wisely put any discussion of "Did Spike really mean to get his soul back?" to rest. What's also interesting is the balancing act he has with sanity. It's clear something went very wrong when his soul was restored. How much Spike is used as a pawn by the Big Bad will be interesting. Rewatching the first episode of the season, Spike clearly tells Buffy that even the zombie/ghosts won't come in the room he has inhabited. There is something specific about Spike that the Big Bad needs or can exploit. (I am personally waiting to see tif the Big Bad's arrival has its roots in Spike's transformation or Willow's attempts to end the world---my gut is one of the two started the chain reaction of this season.) Knowing this, taking into account all the proto-Slayers being killed, and the fact that Faith is coming back for the last five episodes, and you've got a basic season-long arc of "Big Bad kills all the Slayers until there's just Buffy and Faith, Buffy needs Faith to fight the BB, Spike gets pulled back and forth on both sides, and finally dies saving Buffy, who is finally in love with him." Something this shattering will give Buffy a good reason to leave the show yet still have it continue, leaving Faith or (cringe) Dawn as the Slayer, with Willow being set up as a new Watcher. (What is England if not Jedi training, really, for Willow?) And while I cringe at the notion of "Dawn the Vampire Slayer", I give props to the show for finally making her watchable again. The only thing I was diappointed in was the lack of continuity with the school material. Principal Wood is an interesting character, if for no other reason that Buffy-philes are honing in to try and get a reading on where his allegiances lies. It was a nice continuity touch to have Anya be the source of the worm in order to show her actively trying to counter Halfreck's claims from last week. I am glad we got rid of Xander's almost new romantic interest since she was way too Jamie Gertz without being Jamie Gertz for my liking. I'll give it an 8 overall for Spike's stuff alone, everything else was gravy. And after rewatching the first episode again, I bump it up to an 8.5. Really great start to the season.

buffy review

OK, this may bore most of you, oh well, I do that anyways unintentionally most of the time: An excellent first episode, not so much for the "plot" per say (zombies in a high school attack Scooby Gang Version 2.0) but for all the separate strands it has set up in just an hour. The creepy assasination in Instabul. Willow's coven training. Sunndydal High's return. Xander making coin over a building built on a Hellmouth. Buffy's new job. A new principal. Everyone and their sister going, "We're in for some majorly bad juju soon." And finally, the morphing end sequence. All set up in about 40 minutes of TV that lays the groundwork for the entire season. About the morphing in particular: I love that Joss and Company seem to finally be ready to explore the very nature of the Slayer herself and the locus of what has been implied to be a struggle throughout millenia. The news reports have always leaked a desire by the writers to go "back to the beginning" so people took that to mean the show would return to Season 1, the Master, etc. But Joss went even beyond that, and shockingly morphed the Master into Buffy. The notion of the primal power of the Slayer has been teased on and off for the past 3 seasons (starting with the First Slayer in Buffy's Dream, the Dracula episode, and all of Season 6 with Spike consistently reminding Buffy of the incredibly thin line between them) will hopefully finally be explained within the mythology of the show. The only problem may be that, after going into the very root of Evil itself, there may be nowhere for the show to go (and given that SMG may leave, it's not a bad idea to really go for the gold here). The season being about "power", as it seems to be, normally would sound annoyingly like a Literary Criticism class I took in college, but fits in nicely in contrast to last season, which was largely about impotence---inability to love, inability to connect, inability to change the terrible things coming down the pipe for each of the characters. Willow went completely the opposite of this at the end of the last season, overindulged in her attempt at potency, and damn near ended the world. This season may end up being a 22 episode search for the primal source of the good and evil in the Buffyverse---as Willow says, it's all connected. Buffy is connected to the Master is connected to Glory is connected to flowers from Paraguay. The Big Bad will most likely turn out to be someone trying to disrupt the balance of the these forces, a Lucifer-type figure who wants to finally tip the balance once and for all. The killing of the Slayer-in-training is just the start. The talisman is part two. Who knows what the next step will be? (I know, this sounds eerily like "Star Wars". God help me if someone takes Buffy's midichlorian count.) Point of the matter is, we have already seen the Big Bad. It is haunting Spike, for reasons yet unknown, and has been for as long as he's been back in Sunnydale. My gut instinct tells me that even though we haven't seen it's corporeal form, in a sense, this Big Bad has ALWAYS been in the show, if Joss is going after what I think he is. The spectre of evil which has always been present in the Buffyverse, had guided everyone from the Master through Warren, is about to reveal itself. The interesting thing is, it most likely will be the very driving force behind the Slayer as well. update: So Liz is mad because Dawn and her friends scream parallelism to the Scoobies way too obviously. Well, yea. But I don't have a problem with that. Whedon's a huge X-Men fan; he ripped off the Jean Grey/Dark Phoenix saga last year, and now he's positioning Dawn, Goth Girl, and Slater's Cousin as the New Mutants to the Scobby Gang's X-Men. Odds are about 3-1 at least one episode these year has the younger three acting EXACTLY like their older counterparts. And it's clearly obvious that Buffy and Dawn don't have Sprint PCS for their provider of cell phone goodness; their reception is indeed way too good for that.

buffy's back

and the return of "Ryan needs to be home at 8 pm every Tuesday or suffer dire consequences" begins. I have a fun habit of coming into every trend late in the game. It took me 19+ years to get into the Grateful Dead, and when I finally get tickets, Jerry Garcia up and died. I get into Phish about a month after they swore off touring (thought mercifully they are going back on the road starting on New Year's). And in the first episode of "Buffy" I ever watched, she died. Since then, phrases like "Big Bad" and "Scooby Gang" and all of the other phrases that I had heard betwixt my friends during college suddenly started to make sense. My hardcore devotion to the show started at the same time I got into "Alias" and "24"---I took my well-deserved and much-needed break from unpaid theatrical freelancing and needed something to fill the suddenly large amount of free time I had. Concurrent with discovering "Buffy" I also discovered reruns on FX 2 hours a night and sites like "Ain't It Cool News" which religiously details every bit of the show. I wanted to BE Xander. I wanted to date Willow. (Sorry y'all, gimmee Alyson over Sarah any day). I wanted to be able to write one-liners as effortlessly as these writers did. Everything about it just seemed way too good to be true. I won't go too deep into what other people are much more capable of doing, namely delineating the web of metaphor the show employs (high school as a literal Hell, vampirism as rape, boyfriends who turn evil once you sleep with them, disguising fear and neuroses through various demon/mystical incarnations) but sufficed to say, as long as growing up was painful for you, "Buffy" will ring true. And since I know of none who enjoyed high school completely, you should watch the show. Period. Most "Buffy" fans seemed to LOATHE last season. Me myself and I had nothing to compare it to, so for the most part I was much more lenient. Plus, for most of the year I was dizzy with how frickin' amazing "Once More With Feeling" was; just mind-blowingly good. It was plot-heavy, musically-savvy, and itself a dissertation and deconstruction of the musical theatre genre all at once plus with about 20 laugh out loud lines to boot. I may have to add Joss Whedon to my list of "dream roommates"; he's a god on earth. (Someday I might fully geek out and explain how I see “Once More…” both reacting to and exulting in the musical theatre paradigm, but for now I wanna keep the 8 or 9 readers who still come Be that as it may, even _I_ couldn't take the "black magic as drugs" metaphor thrown about last year, even if it drove the season's plot to it's conclusion (Willow goes bad, which is turns gives you varicose veins apparently). (As Liz's boyfriend pointed out over the weekend to me, that whole story line was a simile, not a metaphor, and a crappy simile at that.) However, having watched all of seasons 1 and 2 (thank you DVD box sets!), plus most of the other seasons via reruns, I feel the last 5 episodes of the season were on par with anything the show's done. The stakes were enormous, the pain was real, and, given the mutli-year buildup for some of the storylines, the payoff was HUGE. They also left the season, at least in Sunnnydale, with the unspoken line which is uttered near the end of "Once More...": "where do we go from here?" you have most of the cast literally picking up the pieces from the mess their lives had become. (Spike being the exception, of course.) I am looking forward to watching my first full season starting tonight. Let others make predictions, it's more fun to let it unfold (even as I have just read spoilers on AICN, stoopid curiosity). All I can hope for is the return of Red-Head Willow. Sigh. (update: I'd give tonite's episode 7.5/10. Great, great set-up for the season: a bizarre intro, a killing ending, a dubious principal, and more good one-liners than the entire run of "Becker". Dawn's speech about liking "Britney Spears' earlier work, you know, before she sold out...her watercolors, for instance..." was priceless. And did I mention the ending rocked? My feeling is they are finally going to get down and descroibe what vampires and Slayers primally have in common, and perhaps locate either their common source or the source of the split; a sort of Lucifer figure that pre-dates the Master. Or Xander will kill everyone in an ice cream truck. Either one is feasible. More tommorow. "Its about power.")