So... I've been listening to
GAKS go through
BtVS and it's been frustrating, entertaining, unnerving... and every time I write in: a little demeaning. And the pages... oh lordy the facebook pages dedicated to the fans of this podcast. I leave, I come back, I bait, I fight, I ignore, I roll my eyes. It is nothing like what I have in the Spuffy-corner of livejournal. It's all fangirly. And not even the good kind with giggling and swooning. The nasty, abrasive, "if you have a different opinion than me I will personally attack you until you stop talking" ... which is so icky and yucky and just makes me yell pirate-y growls at the computer screen. What happens more often than not is the "I don't like this... let's talk about the fact that we hate this" and I know, I know, that this is not an
unusual conversation to happen in a fandom forum. But really guys? That's all that's really happening.
So ... the conversation came up: Why we Hate Season Four. And I was about to contribute... but then I was thinking about why I like the seasons that I like and why I dislike the seasons that I dislike. And then I remembered... I am an English Major. I love things for entirely different reasons than pure, emotional response. So here it is: My run-down of every season (with an emphasis on Buffy's arc)
Season One
This was my first completely owned and completely watched from beginning to end straight through season. And it was the only one I had for a good four years. So I watched it... way more than the average viewer watched the first season. So I love it. I totally love it. I love that each episode is a remake of a classic horror story brought to high school. I love that you can see, even early on, that Whedon has a weird fear of mothers and, actually... possibly, the very act of parenting all together.
I also adore Season One Buffy. Basically I blame SMG. Once the writers found out Buffy can be a kick-ass bitch, she lost her initial softness. I love how fragile and feminine Season One Buffy is. And I mean that in a positive way. She's resourceful - every demon/badness she defeats is through cunning and knowledge. Season One Buffy is a smartie. She relies on school-knowledge to kill baddies. And it rocks. I love bizarre knowledge about bizarre things, and seeing a kick-ass female pull out
knowledge to be even more kick-ass... it thrills me. Post Season One Buffy is not a smartie. She's resourceful, but more often than not she seems completely lost in class and in conversations about anything other than demonology. Hate it. This alteration, as a smart female, bothers me to no end. That's why
Season One Buffy is my favorite Buffy. She's not too thin, she wears knee-high boots, she has bizarre taste in boys, she uses school knowledge, she befriends the friendless, she questions the validity of the baddie - she has intuition about people. She freakin' rocks.
The writing isn't always perfect, so what? The camp gets overboard, and Xander gets off too easily (as per usual), but overall it's a solid season. I don't even mind the "monster of the week" episodes, because I know where it's going and think every episode is clever.
Season Two
After just watching this season through, I find that it's more effective than I usually give it credit for. I have a hard time with the die-hard BAngle-iness, but the great thing about Season Two, is that their relationship is truly questioned and played with. Yes, Whedon is an ass for punishing female sexuality the way he did... does...
repeatedly. But it works within the universe he has created. For all that we have half a season of mooning, swooning, brooding Angel... we also have a full season of Spike and Drusilla, half a season of Angelus (and therefore actual acting from David Boreanaz).
A couple of my favorite episodes are in this season:
"Lie To Me": which is the most awesomely ironic episode of the entire series. The only thing that comes remotely close is the Cheese Man in terms of overt post-modern self-commentary. Ford is my favorite one-off baddie. One day I'll write a full essay on the topic of Ford alone, and it will be the awesomest awesome.
"I Only Have Eyes For You": is possibly in my top ten episodes. I love how much it questions and plays with the BAngel relationship. And playing with the idea of doomed love is interesting - investing in it, taking it seriously - not the awesome - questioning it is the coolest.
Season Three
Everything that I loved about Season Two they throw under the bus in Season Three. BAngel is taken too seriously, Buffy is way too self-absorbed in all that drama, and Faith... Faith's my girl, okay? I don't like the treatment of Faith, by either the writers, the Watcher's Council, or Buffy. There's far too many "monster of the week" episodes and there's some real problems with consistency in this season. Some stand alone episodes make no sense, character-wise...
It's frustrating that Buffy's entire look is changed. There are moments where she's full-on 50's housewife and it's... okay. So I was angry with Season Two Buffy because she wasn't quite up to the par of excellence that Season One Buffy gave us. I'm even more disappointed with Season Three Buffy. She's not the Buffy I fell in love with. She's harsh in a bizarre, fake-California-tan kinda way. She reminds me of the girls I didn't like in High School. She should be the champion for the outcast... instead she creates outcasts. She and the Scoobies become the elite. It's never more evident than in this season that Willow and Xander have been pulled out of anonymity... but they are the lucky few. And that bugs. Really grates on my nerves.
But there's Faith. Poor, damaged, abused, neglected Faith. And there's Willow - who really begins to grow into herself. The series finale - the dream sequence is amazing. Faith's emotional weakness is amazing. She's amazing.
Basically, I hate the BAngel-iness of this season. It ruins it for me. The melodrama feels like sloppy writing to me. I honestly feel like the whole series would have been better off had Angel left the series at the beginning of S3 instead of the end.
My knitting-friend said something to me recently that made me realize that 1-3 are really about nostalgia. And they are. Even as they paint High School as the hellmouth - it's still glamorized. To the point of being sickening at times. Season Four still has this... but not to the same extent. Who really has three best friends who stand up with you no matter what in High School? Who has perfect moments? Who really even enjoyed High School? (I have a real problem with the Hollywoodization of High School... guess what, puberty isn't glamorous or monstrous - it's just any other time. A highly overrated time.)
Season Four
Even though there are some great episodes, and Tara is a total kindred spirit... This is my least favorite season. Like in every other season, the more we get away from Season One Buffy - the less I like her. In this season, she's teeny-tiny. No seriously. Riley is no bigger than Angel, and yet Buffy looks like a toddler in comparison to him. He dwarfs her and monopolizes the screen every time they are in a scene together. It's claustrophobic. And demeaning to my hero. It's my main reason for disliking 4. Adam = lame. Initiative = lame. But do we really need the actual imagery of the heroine to be demeaning? To show her as small and ineffectual? It's badness I say!
But then today I had an epiphany about it::
Selfishness is a really interesting aspect of Season Four and it intrigues me a lot. I think the Initiative is possibly the least effective big bad... but I think by placing Restless last, Whedon suggests to the audience that Adam really wasn't the point - their relationships were the point. The big bad of the season is actually their maturation progression. Which is actually pretty interesting. It links the season to 6 - in which the Trio are only a distraction to the self-destruction that is happening to all the Scoobies.
Aha! You could almost say that 4 and 6 are mirror images of each other. In 4 the Scoobies are growing and therefore growing apart, finding and investing in outside interests. Not out of a willful selfishness, but just as a consequence of becoming adults. Likewise, in 6 the Scoobies all turn inward, ignoring each other because they are all battling inner wounds (I've read a series of essays about 6 being basically a how-to guide to depression which was very evocative). In the end, it's only by reaching back to each other that they "win".
For all that Adam is the lamest of the lame... without 4 and esp "The Yoko Factor" the power of S6 would be completely lost.
Season Five
Family is my favorite episode. 5 is my favorite season. Because this is a Buffy I can get behind. A big-sister Buffy. I get that. I never really was able to identify with her, now I can. And Dawn reminds me immensely of my own kid-sister. Who is taller than me, also. I enjoy the whole arc because I feel like every episode we are working our way toward the ending.
Season 4 was about breaking up, 5 is about forging a family unit and all that a family means. Family that you are saddled with, Family that you choose, Family that you give up, Family that is taken away. Which means that there is loss. Buffy is completely broken down one notch at a time. Everything in her world is turned upside down - more than once. And she breaks. She falls. She. Is. Awesome. I never find Buffy particularly whiny, more ... introspective and self-involved (and rightly so, I might add), but in 5 I feel that Buffy starts to find her way back to pre-Master Buffy. Season One Buffy makes a comeback. She takes it all back on, school - Slayer duties/training - and she rocks at it. She takes it all on and then some. And she never backs down. Possibly what I love about this season is that Buffy is growing so independent... but not in a self-destructive way, more in a "I'm a big sister now" kind of way.
There are some amazing one-offs in this season. Spike's arc grows and grows in a delightful way. But I really love this season for Buffy. The Scoobies get me through the earlier seasons, but it's Buffy that I love in 5.
And Dawn. God how I love Dawnie. I think it's magnanimously important that Dawn's first act post-monks is to ditch Xander as major crush and turn to Spike. IMPORTANT. A plot line that the writers dropped. Dawn suffers from the writers not knowing what to do with her, not lack of interesting possibilities.
Dawnie is my heart-song. For Realsies.
Season Six
The selfishness exuded by the Scoobies in 6 just... it's perturbing. But I love 6. I really, honestly do. It's dark and it's real. 5 was all about losing nostalgia and transitioning into a very dark place. 6 is - well, you're in it, hunny. That dark place? You're sleeping with it, you're using it as a drug, you're running away from it, you're engaged to it, you're abusing it... You are the dark place. And really, to do that over an entire season, as slowly and painstakingly as they did. Bravo to the writers. 5 does a good job of finally getting to a season-long arc place. But 6 perfects it. There is not an episode that can be taken out or replaced. All the characters are moving along at breakneck speed and guess what - there's no slowing down and there's no stopping this progression. (Joss pretends to in 7, but everything picks back up again in 8.) Every arc is fully explored and every character is always moving forward. And like I said above - 6 is very much an internal journey. Each character has issues that can only be solved by them withdrawing from each other. The Scoobies? They don't help each other as much as they could... and they shouldn't. It wouldn't be real if they did.
Six is not just about Buffy and Spike doin' the nasty every which way (which is more frustrating than rewarding because between the two actors they lost about 50 lbs neither could really spare in the first place), but it is an interesting reward to seasons of oversized, broody men in Buffy's sheets. Sex is still not a good... in fact, it's still the baddest and darkest of all the dark, bad places... but Buffy's sexuality is her own. She
owns it, for the first time in her life.
Plus, "Tabula Rasa" and "Once More with Feeling" are amazing.
Season Seven
I don't dislike 7 the way I get the feeling a lot of fandom do. Like 6, it's solid from top to bottom. Even if some episodes seem to get in the way, there's always a season-long development happening. Unlike 4-6, this season is not big on Scooby character development. In fact, the Scoobies are pretty set. They know how the apocalypse works and how they fit into stopping it. Rather, characters like Spike, Dawn, Anya, and Faith (even Wood) get a lot more development time, because they can. The season only works if the Scoobies are solid and unshakable. Yes, there's conflict, but not character-shaking/changing conflict. The story is more important in this season than the main Scoobies. Which is okay by me. I like seeing established characters thrown into something they
think they can handle. And I like all the new characters seeing this for the first time, questioning the way things always have been done. If Buffy was having life-changing, character-altering things happening in this season, the Slayerettes would be way too much. They wouldn't serve their purpose: to question what we know about how the Scoobies operate. Which they do. It annoys the audience. But it's self-reflective, and you have to give the writing team props for that... not just doing one episode (Ford/The Cheese Man, etc) but writing an entire season of :: "See - that's why the world works this way"
Also, this season brings out chauvinism and says "Gotcha!". There's a more eloquent way to describe the history of the Slayer and the scythe and the sharing of power and all that, but that's basically what happens. All the underlying issues with the Watcher's Council --- really, with the Slayer powers themselves, get questioned, explained, lather, rinse, repeat. It's awesome.
Season Eight
I don't care what anyone says, 8 is a Faith and Willow season. Buffy? She screws up. Royally. Angel? Is a pain in the ass. Royally. Spike? Is a tease set upon us by the writers to keep Spuffy fans interested. Royally. Dawnie? Is totally destroyed and I'm pretending that the whole Xander thing is a sick, twisted joke.... or maybe that Dawnie isn't the real Dawn. Anyway, let's not talk about that.
Let's talk about Faith and Giles. And how they are the true heroes of this season. Because they do what others can't. They pick up Buffy's mess. They confront the bad that was supposed to be all good. They bond and are dark do-gooders. And then... they are the martyrs. Giles for Buffy's sake and Faith for Angel's. And... there needed to be more. There needed to be so much more of them. The two of them. Together, battling and fighting and doing the right thing that no one else has the balls to do.
And Willow, poor Willow, is once again set upon a path of destruction she can never really recover from.
I don't have much else to say about 8 because, really ... it wasn't Whedon's best work. He went too big and too vast and really messed everything up out of a sick, perverted desire to mess everything up. And Buffy was the victim in this. Really really.
But now he can pick up the pieces. And I'm excited to see that.
Because if this exercise has taught me anything, it's that I like to see him fix things. That's what 5-7 are about, fixing what is broken. The team fell apart? Put it back together! And it's sloppy, and there are cracks, and water leaks through onto the floor and you constantly have to re-glue, re-fashion. Because once something is broken, it will always have scars and it will break again and again... sometimes along the same lines as before, and sometimes along new ones. But it will never be completely healed. These are the Scoobies. And this is why I prefer the later seasons of the tv series. Because 1-4 is all about remembering being whole, becoming whole, finding ways to be whole and be loved... but it doesn't last. And
that, the act of remembering and being nostalgic for a time and place that didn't exist, and then pushing off and realizing everything was broken to begin with? <-- THAT is what 5-7 is about. Letting go of the nostalgia for something that didn't actually exist in the first place.
