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

[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. :)