I think I’m on the same UPN feed as The Tim. Was there a “previously on Buffy” or teaser this week? UPN seems a few minutes off (I got about 5 minutes of Abby before Smallville started on WB), so I may have just tuned in late.
And Andrew’s fantasy after “I was a supervillian” was wonderful if only for the goofy goggles Jonathan and Warren were wearing. Plus the “In my plan we aren’t wearing belts”.
Homophobic? I don’t think so.
A loser, sure. A coward, a bit.
His orientation’s about as hidden as a flashing neon sign, but being unsubtle about a closeted homosexual != homophobic. He’s not stereotypic, unless crushing on guys can be considered stereotypic gay male behavior.
Hell, I’m straight, and besides the murder and demon-raising I’ve shown the rest of Andrew’s negative traits (unrestrained geekery and general unusefullness).
Just want to say: I loved this episode! A nifty moment no one has yet mentioned was Andrew and Johnathan in bed in Mexico, with Andrew assuring Johnathan that he was really evil.
I don’t think it’s importnat that we have not seen much of Giles. (Not that I wouldn’t love to see more of him.) I think everyone knows who he is; we shouldn’t need reminding.
“It doesn’t take a few drops, it takes nigh on a pint. It also presumably has to be dripped directly from a living host, or from cuts made with a specific mystical knife.”
Perhaps I’m wrong, but didn’t the First send Andrew out to the butcher shop for a bunch of blood to open the seal? (where, of course, he met Willow).
Where do you live?
[spoiler]
The reason I ask this is because the pre-credits stuff had Andrew in a Masterpiece Theater mode, in a well-furnished study, sitting in a big chair in front of a fireplace wearing a smoking jacket and (I think, damn my memory sucks if I’m forgetting stuff already.) holding a pipe, talking about Buffy in this ridiculous accent. The way he said “vampires” had me rolling on the floor.
Then the fantasy is shattered when Anya walks in on him and we learn he’s giving his little speech to the camera while sitting on the toilet. She asks him why he’s been in the bathroom for 30 minutes and then says, "Why can’t you just masturbate like the rest of us?
Perhaps your UPN affiliate considered this joke inappropriate for the 8 o’clock hour.[/spoiler]
Andrew’s just as nerdy in his sexual orientation as he is in everything else. That’s not stereotypical, indeed, it’s unlike any other depiction of a gay character I can ever remember seeing on television.
Now Jack on Will & Grace, that’s a sterotypical and insulting depiction of a gay male.
Why so sensitive, gobear?
Because I get really, really, really, really, really, tired of gay men depicted as wifty, effeminate, helpless losers. And that goes for both Andrew and Jack.
Why can’t we have a badass gay crusader for truth, justice, and the American way?
gobear: You do remember the Look in beneath you?
Fibber thanks, that sounds hilarious. I’m in Boulder and Buffy is shown at 7, which may be the reason.
gobear I was going to give a flippant answer but then decided there was no way it wasn’t going to come off anti-gay. The reason, lots of people in real life would freak if they were saved by a gay person and would by extension be wigged out if a gay person saved the day. This is a subset of “Well I suppose they are entertaining.” mentality that has spawned Jack. I think Andrew in this episode was however more dweeby because he was a dweeb than because he was gay, and I think also was partly parodying Jack. I hope that character consistency is maintained and he is more serious in episodes to come.
You read comics?
Ever read The Authority?
If not, look into it.
Apollo and The Midnighter are pretty much the most badass gay-couple ever.
It’s also pretty obvious that they’re based on Superman and Batman, but the similarities are superficial and thankfully, once you get past the Batman and Superman as sex-partners joke, they’re excellent, fully fleshed-out characters in their own right.
And Midnighter has some of the best bad-ass lines ever uttered anywhere.
On the same note as my last post: with the possible exception of the Rawhide Kid in his new series, I can’t think of a single example of gay superhero in comics who was depicted as a effeminate swish.
Apollo is definately the more effeminate one in his relationship, but he’s more than enough of a bad-ass to get away with it, and it isn’t as overt as with a character like Jack.
Damn the inability to edit posts. Rawhide Kid isn’t a superhero, he’s a western gunslinger who wears an outfit that had people wondering about him long before he ever came out.
Andrew’s gayness is nothing like Jack’s, since he doesn’t mention it every three godamn seconds.
Meh. This episode just rubbed me the wrong way. Too self-consciously clever instead of genuinely funny, which is a shame because there was some good material in there. I wish I could describe it better, but almost every gag in the episode seemed like a textbook on how not to deliver a joke.
Except for the bit about where the knife is kept; that part was pretty good. And although all the fantasy bits were way too over-the-top, there were a couple of nice touches: Andrew’s looking to the heavens and screaming each time he killed Jonathan, and one moment where they’re talking about the Hellmouth and it cuts to him pointing at it on the whiteboard.
And I liked Anya and Xander’s last scene. It would’ve been better if they’d actually done something with that storyline, instead of letting it dangle for so long and then just cutting it short. But we’re already used to that with all that “Is Giles the First?” nonsense.
On the whole, it just seemed to be status quo for this season. Lots of wandering around, talking about what a big deal it’s going to be when they get to the finale, but clearly making things up as they go along. And filling the dead time with lots of self-referential jokes that have just gotten stale.
My intelligent contribution to this conversation is going to be this: I liked it.
Scene.
I liked it. I think that the idea for the ending, and how he was speaking to the camera at the end was an indication that he now knew what it meant to be part of the team.
Sort of a sobering “growing up” situation. Maybe a sobering realization that he killed someone, and contributed to more than that.
I like Andrew. He’s funny, in that geeky way that several of my friends are. Serious discussions about the properties of energon, for example.
I think Andrew has serious chances of pulling a Wesley wimp-to-badass transformation, if he makes it to a spin-off show or an unlikely eighth season. Which would be great, because the show’s still really godamned good. I loved tonight’s episode.
Hope Andrew comes out soon, though. The “repressed homo” jokes are wearing a little thin.
Energon my ass, give me nucleon, the power of the new generation of trnasformers!
Seriously though, I loved this ep. I liek Andrew as a character, and my friends and I have determined that Andrew is, in fact, simply a copy of one of our friends. This guy loves all things geeky (Star Wars, Star Trek, James Bond, Comics, and he even makes documentaries!)
Oh, and, by the way, guys, it’s “In my plan, we are beltless!” A line which, to me, is inherently funnier than “…we aren’t wearing belts.” Of course, it could just be me…
Some other bits I liked:
The introductions to everyone. Especially that Spike came into the screen not wearing a shirt.
The flashbacks from Two to Go. It cracked me up that they didn’t re-shoot Willow’s bits, just Andrew’s, so Willow kept looking in the wrong place and stuff.
The way Andrew said “vampire” all through the show.
The goofy-ass goggles Jonathan and Warren were wearing.
Wood coming this close (but, unfortunately for me, not close enough) to killing Spike.
The creeptastic way that the students turned into Bringers. I didn’t see that coming.
“Scratch his back from his front?”
And, finally, this is what I really liked about this episode, It Was an Episode with a Theme. Wow. Almost like the ones we had in the first four seasons of Buffy. The characters’ issues had metaphoric implications in their external world.
Things I didn’t (like, that is):
The “funny” kid exploding in the hallway. Er, didn’t we establish, in Help, that kids dying in any way was not cool?
The whole “we’ve got a bunch of plotlines that have been laying around for more than a year now, damn, I guess we had better do something about them” vibe I got from the episode. Now, now, a year later, we get Xander and Anya having a conversation?
The meta-reference to First Date. I’m talking about the bit where Andrew is talking to First!Warren and it sounds like Andrew’s conversation with First!Jonathan about Buffy’s underwear. I just found it tiresome.
The stupid gangland in the highschool. Why was this necessary, again?! So that Wood and Spike would be out of the way? Well, er, then, why was it necessary that they were at the school at all? Maybe it was so Andrew could make the joke about the sexual tension?
Did anyone else notice how bad Wood’s stunt “double” was? It’s almost as if ME thought that all bald black men with a white band-aid look the same.
Oh, two other things I didn’t like:
I, for one, didn’t like that they fucked with the Mutant Enemy “Grr, Argh” guy. The only other time I remember them doing it was after Becoming, Part II, when he walked off saying “I need a hug.” To me, that was part of what was, I don’t know, special about that episode. To cheapen it just 'cause the “We are as gods” thing was funny just bothered me.
And Kennedy. No explanation necessary.