AuthenticM
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Last night, I finished watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the first time. The girlfriend started watching it as background noise (as she'd already seen it when it aired), I watched one episode with her (the one in which Xander falls for his teacher who happens to be a demon praying mantis) and got hooked.
It's a pretty great show. I was surprised by how well it aged; there's some great writing in it. The special effects sure haven't aged well, but that's superficial. The dialogue and characters are what carries this show. I very much understand why the show made such an impact on popular culture. Part of me wishes I had watched it back in the day, but I think I would have been a tad too young to appreciate it fully (I was 9 when it started airing). But watching it all these years later, yeah, it's fantastic, and I very much recommend everyone to do the same.
I have some stuff to say about the show, but there won't be any structure to it, so here goes.
The first three seasons of the show are the best. Only one season is bad across the board (the last one), but the first three are the most consistently great. The show is at its best when it deals in self-contained monster-of-the-week episodes, as opposed to those dedicated to the season-long plot. There's some really good stuff in there, often times offering subtextual (and sometimes very textual) social commentary.
The most recurring commentary has to do with violence against women. Not just physical violence, but all kind. Men are assholes in this universe, and the show portrays women dealing with it in every which way. The show offers more and more of that as it goes on, and it culminates in a big-bad in the last season who's a priest who thinks all women are sluts and sinners. Whatever you might think of Joss Whedon now, the show he created speaks for itself: it is unabashedly feminist. And it's great.
Aside from male characters, adults are also portrayed as assholes in this show, John Hughes-style. In fact, I don't believe I can think of any adult that was portrayed positively in the whole show outside of Giles, Joyce and Miss Carpenter (hundred-years old vampires notwithstanding).
So about the quality of the show. As I said, the first three seasons are the most consistently great ones. But season 4, 5 and (to a lesser extent) 6 all offer fantastic episodes. In fact, the two best episodes are in season 5 and 6. The best of the two is the season 5 one, and it is certainly one of the best episodes of television ever aired. It is unbelieaveable how better in every department the episode is compared to the rest. Those who saw the show know which episode I'm talking about. There is a level of directing and writing presented in it that makes you wonder if you are watching the same show you were watching an episode prior. It's real fantastic.
The second-best episode is in season 6 and it is decidedly the most technically impressive episode of the series. It doesn't have the finesse of the best episode, but from a pure production perspective, it is the biggest and most complex episode of the show. And it's fantastic. I could talk about it in more details, but honestly, I'm hoping that some of you reading this will start watching the show yourselves for the first time, and I don't want to spoil anything. Before I started watching the show, I read about it on wikipedia, and read the articles dedicated to the series finale and the famous season 5 episode (and btw, doing so is what made me want to watch the show, despite being spoiled on a bunch of shit). But that season 6 episode was unspoiled to me. And man. It's so fucking good.
Anyways. Season 4 is when things started changing a bit. First of all, Cordelia disappears from the show. And I mean disappear. She had been a main character up to that point... and then poof. She's gone, no one mentions anything. Not even one line "oh she moved to L.A.". It was super weird. Having read on the show prior to watching it, I knew that eventually, she would step out of the show to go on Angel, but it was still weird that not one word was spoken of her considering how important she had been up until then.
You can actually pinpoint three things that explain the drop in quality of season 4:
- First, the dynamic of the scooby gang changes. As mentioned, Cordelia goes poof. Oz eventually also goes poof. I liked Oz. Giles stays on the show and is still billed as a regular, but I noticed that he seemed to have less screen time, which isn't a positive. Then the show reintroduces Spike... and they have no fucking idea what to do with him. It is crystal clear that they brought him back because of his extreme popularity instead of some carefully-constructed plot design. Because man is he lame for a while. He would eventually get much better, but for season 4 and (most of) 5, he's just there and looking handsome. Last for this point, Finn is introduced as a love interest for Buffy. Finn is boring. Bad character, bad actor. Christ, even the guy's face looks generic as shit. He looks like the default white male character you'd get in Oblivion and I'm not fucking with you. At some point, Spike derogatively calls him "white bread", and I wonder if that's not a wink to the audience coming from the writers, because it's too on-the-nose.
The gang. The writers should not have messed with them as much as they did.
Though I will say that season 4 introduces Anya; an ex-demon, feminist and irreverent capitalist (also Xander's girlfriend) who is quite possibly the best character of the show. I'll have more to say on her and Xander later.
- Second, the main season plot of seasons 4 through 7 range from mediocre to bad. They're just not interesting. Season 4 introduces some fucking military drek that's so out of place it feels like recycled shit from some other C-grade show. On top of that, it messes with the audience's suspension of disbelief because now that the government is involved, you would think that they would be on top of the fucking demon situation that's all over Sunnydale. You know, the HELLMOUTH. But no. The military there is composed of only a small number of personnel, and the shows explains that they are some sort of experiment from the government to see if they can manage the situation, which is why you haven't seen them up to that point. They can't manage shit, as evident from their getting slaughtered by the end. And then the government just abandons Sunnydale. Like, what? The gates of Hell are in your country and you just fucking ghost on that shit? Fuck off.
The military side of things also mess with the show's vibe. It was supposed to be this pastiche of gothic horror, mythical monsters and teenage drama. Adding military bros, scientists and guns to the mix just fucks with the recipe. It's like adding black pepper to a strawberry shortcake. You just don't do that. Thankfully, that stuff is secluded to the fourth season. It's still bad.
- Third, starting from the fourth season, there seems to be a slight (and not-so-slight for latter seasons) drop in monster-of-the-week episodes. As I said previously, the show is at its best when it's not building some bigger story. There are still many great such episodes all throughout season 4, 5 and (to a lesser extent) 6. But there are fewer. And season 7, dear lord, has almost none of it. I can only recall one (which is not only bad, but a recycled idea from one of the earlier seasons), but I think there are maybe two or three. Maybe not even.
Season 7, though. That's a fuckin' dumpster fire. Ho-ly shit. I don't know what happened backstage, but man. It feels like a completely different production team making the show. It's bad. Both the macrostructure and microstructure of the show are just bad. Moment-to-moment writing in each episode is uninteresting and leads to nowhere. The overall plot of the season progresses at and uneven pace, which is made all the more excruciating as most of the season is composed of episodes building on the season plot.
The idea of bringing back this single-episode antagonist as the show's big-bad is great on paper, but they executed on it so poorly. Nothing about the season was interesting. My girlfriend and I were talking about it and we agreed that the show should have stuck with
Dark Willow
Last thing I want to talk about. Xander x Anya. The cutest thing in the show. They were so good together. They were made for each other. But the fucking writers, man. They had to ruin it. I have no fucking idea why. It's as if they were hellbent on making every character on the show miserable. No one can be happy. Buffy can't be with Angel 'cause as soon as he puts his dick in her, he loses his soul. Willow can't be with Oz because he's a werewolf and he's scared of hurting her. Giles can't be with Carpenter because fridged women. I don't know what's up with that, but it's shitty. There should have been at least one happy couple in the show, and it was supposed to be Xander and Anya.
It's also frustrating because every character on the show went through changes. They've all grown and matured. You take them at the beginning of the show, when they are sappy teenagers, and at the end they are all wise adults. Even Xander. But to write him in the way they did in that moment during season 6... it's just shit because it's like they went back to the well of insecure high schooler Xander from back in season 1 and 2. It's so frustrating. There was really no reason to write that shit. And to add insult to injury, they write off Anya so badly in the last episode. Like, fuck all of you.
About Dawn. Apparently people didn't like her much. "She whines all the time". I usually dislike child actors as they are often annoying, but I really didn't feel that with Dawn. There's maybe once or twice when I rolled my eyes and thought "oh, Dawn", but besides that, I thought she was fairly well-written. Most importantly, Michelle Trachtenberg was a pretty good actress for her age. I swear at times I thought she out-acted SMG.
Honestly they really sold her relationship with Buffy and it was really great to watch.
As for her introduction, I would have kept the charade going for waaay longer than one episode. Had I been the showrunner, I would have waited until the mid-season finale before even acknowledging anything.
Something I forgot to say last night, regarding the one episode from season 5:
after Joyce died, the writers should have never brought her back. For anything. She appeared in two or three flashbacks, and even appeared in spirit form to warn Dawn about an impeding danger. Fuck that shit, man. It totally taints the beauty of her death. Writers ain't shit.
Anyways. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is great. It's fantastic, even. You should watch it.
As for me, I'll be watching Angel in the near future. I haven't read shit about it, unlike for Buffy. I've read on here that most think Angel is a better, more consistent show; a sentiment with which my girlfriend agrees. So we'll see about that.
cheers
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