Chosen: a rant.

[rivka]

curiousangel and I just watched the final three episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I feel curiously unmoved.

When Buffy was good, it was so damned good. Some of the best television I've ever seen. It probably helped that we watched the whole series on DVD, so that we could swallow whole seasons in big gulps and didn't get interrupted every ten minutes by commercials - but it's also true that Joss Whedon is a genius, and that, at the height of the show, the writing and the acting were superb.

I didn't hate Season 6 as much as a lot of people did - I kind of got behind the whole "real life is the Big Bad" theme, although I hated the way that everything we'd ever known about how magic works in the Buffyverse abruptly changed when they decided to turn Willow evil. But Season 5 was weak - except for Joyce's death; "The Body" was one of the best single episodes of TV I've ever seen - and Season 7 etched away everything I liked about Buffy. It was speechy, irrational, overly drawn out, repetitive, and self-contradictory. (In every episode Buffy had to harp on how none of the potential Slayers would become the real thing until she died, and yet no one ever bothered to explain why no other Slayer was called when Buffy died at the end of Season 5. Were we not just supposed to notice? And how come every last human conveniently panicked and cleared out of Sunnydale before it was destroyed, when nothing had even happened yet? Weren't we supposed to wonder what led to the breakdown of civil order and the end of Sunnydale's centuries-long obliviousness to the danger in their midst? And why, exactly, were we supposed to be so frightened of a noncorporeal enemy that barely did anything until the last couple episodes, when we'd seen Buffy & Co. take out a God in Season 5?)

I liked the Spike in, I think it was, late Season 5, who thought he was "good" because the chip in his head prevented him from killing people, and didn't understand why Buffy was disgusted by that. I liked it when Buffy characters had that kind of complexity. Spike-with-a-soul drove me absolutely fucking bonkers. I didn't buy his redemption, probably because I was never given a reason to buy it other than, apparently, "Marti Noxon thinks he's really hot." The drawn-out emotional speeches between him and Buffy in the last few episodes left me baring my wrist to curiousangel, begging him to use his steak knife to put me out of my misery. (The bastard, he just kept cutting up his chicken apple sausages with it.)

There's a moment in Season 7 where Buffy explains to Principal Wood that, because they're living over the Hellmouth, normal hellish teenage experiences become concrete and literalized into actual hell. (That's not how she puts it, but you know.) And that's... something I thought worked much, much better as an underlying theme or metaphor that was never spelled out in such a simplistic and mechanistic fashion. High school is hell, yeah, and being ignored can make you feel like you're invisible, and high school girls who talk their way into a college frat party are in serious danger, and finding out that your boyfriend is cheating on you is like taking a rusty metal rod through the gut. That's what made Buffy so emotionally powerful, when it worked. Having that simplified into "here's how the Hellmouth works its wicked magic" ...cheapened it, I guess, for me. It takes away the viewer's ability to identify; we don't live over Hellmouths, so these things shouldn't feel like hell to us.

Or maybe that's because, by that point, I was already feeling like an outsider.

I still have two more seasons of Angel to watch. Yeah, yeah, don't tell me. I've already heard that it went downhill in Season 4, and I'm not in the mood to anticipate that right now.

Comments

[zerbie.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm with you. I hatedhatedHATED season seven. Ugh. It just... I know Joss said, "oh, we've been planning for seven seasons all along, really," but what it felt like was, "oh, shit, SMG isn't coming back and we need to end the series!" And they couldn't kill Buffy AGAIN, so they just bitch-rigged some stuff and slapped on some duct tape and called it good. Continuity went right out the window, and the Slayer lineage? SKIPS BUFFY. Buffy is outside the line; Faith is the one who has to die before any of the Slayerettes (who I also HATEDHATEDHATED) would get called. And... and... ugh. I watched it when it was happening, and I don't think I ever want to watch it again.

[annaoj.livejournal.com]

re: Angel, I recently bought the season 4 DVDs and was surprised to find that I really enjoyed most of the episodes, and overall liked the season more than when I originally watched it...

[ke-jia.livejournal.com]

Oooh, if people have been telling you that fourth-fifth season Angel wasn't good, let me be a contradictory voice; I loved those seasons. I'm a sucker for very dark, twisted stories, and season four in particular is wonderfully twisted. Which only works as well as it does because we (well, I) still care about the characters, and want them to make the right choices. But ... then, sometimes, they don't. Certainly plot points aren't executed perfectly, but the larger story is very nifty and entertaining.

And Spike is an interesting character (again) in season five. He doesn't reach the heights of season five BtVS (I agree that was his best season), but that's a hard standard to meet.

[dafna]

Yeah, I don't think anyone thought Season 7 was particularly smart. A lot of us would have liked to have seen it end with Season 6 -- which, like you, I thought was amazing. Season 6 was also the year of 9/11 and its aftermath, so it was particularly cathartic for a lot of us watching it then. I thought Chosen didn't totally suck as a single episode, however. I actually wrote a review of it under my real name -- if you're interested, I'll e-mail you a link.

I can never keep my Angel seasons straight and it was so all over the place that for me it kept seeming like a bunch of different shows. So, I'm less about seasons and more about, "I liked Angel-Doyle, I liked pre-Fred-Angel, I liked Liliah-Angel" and so on.

[writingortyping.livejournal.com]

I think I can ease your pain on the "Why no 2nd slayer called when Buffy died the second time" thingy.

Apparently, when she died the first time and Kendra was called, that was it. The "trigger" effect only functions once. So Kendra -> Faith, and until Faith goes, no more slayers (well, until everybody got to be one in the final episode).

Otherwise, yes. What you said.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Apparently, when she died the first time and Kendra was called, that was it. The "trigger" effect only functions once. So Kendra -> Faith, and until Faith goes, no more slayers (well, until everybody got to be one in the final episode).

So how come everyone spent the entire season saying that when Buffy died, one of the Potentials would become the Slayer? That's my problem. This explanation makes perfect logical sense, but every single character on the show apparently believed something different, for no reason that I can figure out.

[writingortyping.livejournal.com]

Dunno!

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

It's... uh... added realism. Yeah. 'Cause fiction has to make sense, but reality doesn't. So, if it doesn't make sense, it's more realistic.

Yeah.

Really.

[geekymary.livejournal.com]

Oh Season 7 was so BAD! Instead of making the badguy an interesting character, we'll just make it...something. You know, just..evil. And instead of fighting something icky every week, we'll just build up really slowly to the season finale by having Buffy talk about it a lot. So many episodes where NOTHING HAPPENED. And then something would happen, but it would be of no consequence.

And the Ubervamps, which took 3 episodes to kill one at the beginning of the season, were being dispatched like nothing in the finale.

And whatever happened to "from beneath you it devours"? Was that just a prophecy to tell them that evil comes from the Hellmouth? Well, duh.

And although I liked Andrew, he shouldn't replace Xander as the butt-monkey. Especially when Xander's right there.

One good thing is that it didn't make me sad when the show ended. It was like a mercy killing.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Actually, Joss pointed out in an interview (or the commentary?) that the Ubervamps were either weakened, or the slayers strengthened (I'm not sure which he said) by Willow's magical working.

I didn't have any problems with the season as a whole, but I think I saw it *as* a wrap-up all along, so I realized some of the stuff going on was only happening because they were trying to close things up.

[caille.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. I loved every single season. Not unconditionally. But I loved love loved it. Everything each of you says is valid. But...well, it's not like I don't care what you think, not at all. It's more like the way everybody but Spike kept saying, "Wait. Ben is Glory? Huh?"

I cain't hep it.

[eeyorerin]

I'm also watching S7 Buffy, and moving up on the end. There were some aspects of this season that I really liked (like some of the 'back to the beginning" nods to continuity), but I just hated the overall arc, I hated the Big Bad, and I hated that while everyone and their dog involved with the show CLAIMED that they knew what they were doing ("It's about power") and that it was all planned, it really felt like they were pulling the show out of their ass as they went along. If "it's all about power," then how come so much of it was about Bad Group Interventions wherein everyone was telling Buffy to Stop Shutting Them Out? I'd be shutting out that group of whiny crybabies too, if I were her.

Er. Rant off. :)

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

Sorry for the huge quote, but I couldn't find a better place to cut:

High school is hell, yeah, and being ignored can make you feel like you're invisible, and high school girls who talk their way into a college frat party are in serious danger, and finding out that your boyfriend is cheating on you is like taking a rusty metal rod through the gut. That's what made Buffy so emotionally powerful, when it worked. Having that simplified into "here's how the Hellmouth works its wicked magic" ...cheapened it, I guess, for me. It takes away the viewer's ability to identify; we don't live over Hellmouths, so these things shouldn't feel like hell to us.

Of all the little ways we disagree about this show, I think this is the only one where we're 180-degree opposites. I liked season seven better than you did, but I agree that almost all the things you mention were flaws, ranging from the minor to the huge and glaring. Except this one. As I said back here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/therealjae/378823.html), I usually like allegory, but the sort of thing you're talking about here always felt like the writers sending the message that all you have to do is get rid of the demon-of-the-week and all those externally imposed problems go away. It felt incredibly trivializing of characters' very real problems. And this, above all else, is why I have a predisposition toward the later seasons and why I really don't care for season one at all: eventually they stopped doing this. And thank God.

-J