I want to howl. I want to scream. I want to write a bad fan fiction with an uberpowerful self-insert character and torture Glory for weeks, and then spit on her sizzling corpse until I run out of bodily fluids.
I want not to have watched tonight’s episode, so I wouldn’t have to have seen what happened to Tara. It hurts, dammit, it hurts. And I didn’t even really know her all that well. And even worse… Whedon and co. are good enough writers that I know we’re not going to see a typical TV main-character magical wimp-out fix (q.v. any given second-season episode from the original Star Trek). I don’t think there’s anything foreshadowing a possible cure at all, unless they pull something out Dawn’s mysterious Keyness at the last minute. She’s gone.
I think I’ve gotten too into this damned show, because I want to go mourn.
Oh, and just to work off a little of my frustration, two bits of advice for Willow:
Physical shields, girl. Physical shields.
You’re a Wiccan, girl. That means you’re a priestess. Quit dicking around with the dark path Hermetic stuff and go a clerical route – fight divinities with divinities.
My prediction is that when Glory is defeated, the minds she’s absorbed will fly out of her head in an incandescent myriad of lightbolts and make their way back to their original owners, restoring Tara and all the others.
But then again, I’m an optimist.
It was a good ep, and yes, death to Glory and all, but I’m always a little disappointed when I can call the ending during the second break.
“Oh, well if Glory scrambles Tara’s brains, then she’ll be crazy and that means she’ll be able to see all that Keyness as opposed to just knowing about it. And she hangs out with Buffy and Dawn. This will not end well.”
I don’t like Tara. Never have, never will. I was hoping Glory would do more than scramble her brains a bit. And Willow had that whole huge book of Darkest Magick and all she can come up with is a little snake thingy and a bubble? I agree with BobSchroeck, Willow knows that Glory is a god, why fight her with little stuff? She is always calling on her own divinities to aid her in such and such, use one of them for Christ’s sake.
Maybe if you told us why you don’t like Tara, Lyllyan, it would help us to see where you’re coming from.
And hey, Willow did more than the snake thing and the bubble. She also turned her eyes black. In fact…ah yes, the book had some vampire dust on it; let me just blow it off. Yes, the title is really “Darkest Eyes Magick.”
Dark Lord Davidson: I’d like to hope Tara and the others could get their marbles back at the end of the season, but that just wouldn’t be good storytelling. The counterpoint to upping the stakes (no pun intended) from season to season (from the Master to Angelus to the Mayor to Adam to Glory) is that higher and higher prices must be paid. And no great price has been paid yet. If Glory had killed Joyce, that would have been big enough. But Joyce died of natural causes. So it has to be Tara.
I’m with Dark Lord Davidson: I hope that when Glory is destroyed that all the people she’s mind-sucked will be restored, but, as ** Fiver** says, Joss doesn’t usually go for pat endings, one of the reasons why he is such a great storyteller. For a minute there, I thought Glory was going to kill Willow during their fight.
It’s amazing that BtVS stays so fresh and dramatically powerful even after four years.
In addition, what’s the deal with Ben? Are he and Glory a Hell god form of Siamese twins? We know being exiled in our dimension has affected Glory’s mental stability: is Glory schizo and Ben one of her alternate personalities? Is Ben a hapless human whose body Glory is borrowing to manifest in our dimension? I want to see Glory die, die, die, but Ben is too nice (not to mention gorgeous) to perish.
After Tara and Willow’s argument and when Glory approached Tara…I knew it was going to happen. Willow would prove her love for Tara by standing by her.
And correct me if I’m wrong but doesn’t Willow have gods on her side already? Can’t remember the exact names but when Willow got mad and cast the spell that made everything she said come true…they told her she could alwys come to them for help.
Wow. I didn’t know that… My wife and I came late to BTVS – because of Cruel Intentions, actually – so we’ve only seen about a season and a half, plus the six first-season eps that were on videotape in our local Blockbuster. If Will’s had direct divine contact, and they’ve authorized her to call on them, then whyinhell is she shooting Glory with a popgun when she can unlimber a howitzer? I really hope Willow hasn’t come down with a case of the television stupids – that’s the disorder that afflicts so many main characters when they face a difficult situation that they could handle easily if they just remembered their own lives.
Well, there’s your answer. What the hell is a demon, even the head demon, gonna do against a god?
I thought it was a very good episode. A few thoughts:
I think this completes the transition of Willow from side-kick to real character. Equally important, it removes Willow’s lesbianism/relationship with Tara from writing ploy to an integral part of Willow’s personality. (IMHO, Joss was playfully alluding to that with the “lesbo street cred” line from Willow.)
The brain sucking:
a. One flaw in the episode was that no one even mentioned the idea of magically curing Tara. I mean, magic did the damage, so, according to the rules of the Buffy/Angel world, magic might be able to reverse it. You’d figure there’d be at least a bit of frantic research or a few wise words from Giles that there is no cure.
b. What was up with Glory when she was threatening Tara? She was talking about the brain-sucking as if it had happened to her. Has it?
c. I think there will be a cure for Tara. If there isn’t, then Joss & Co. lose the opportunity to play with Willow’s romances, which have always been a strong part of the show. If Tara isn’t cured, she will pseudo-disappear from the show, and Willow wouldn’t be about to start dating others so long as Tara is alive.
The Buffy/Willow relationship - I thought the whole bit was well done. It was good to see Buffy’s unconscious arrogance (“I ordered her not to, so she won’t”) come undone.
BTW, re: Tara. I can see why Lyllyan doesn’t like Tara. More accurately, there isn’t much about Tara to like. Joss & Co. are slow to develop characters, and they haven’t really focused on Tara yet.
Sua
P.S. No, I’m not obsessed. OK, yes I am. I haven’t enjoyed a character-driven show this much since Northern Exposure
Well, we’ve seen that Glory needs to suck out peoples’ sanity in order to remain functional in our reality.
So my take is that the longer she goes without “feeding” in this way, her mind degrades into a condition similar to the one she leaves her victims in. That’s why she’d be familiar with it.
Thanks for sticking up for me Sua. I don’t like Tara because she is just not a real person for me, ya know? Or maybe, it’s the actress I don’t like. No mater how engrossed I am in the story, when Tara comes along, she instantly reminds me that these people are acting, and I lose the feeling of the moment. For instance, we see Tara sitting on the bench, in a completely relaxed position, knees apart, just chilling. Glory comes along, starts crushing her hand, and her seated position is exactly the same. IMHO, if someone was crushing my hand, and I was scared enough to wet my pants, I sure would have my knees together! And why, oh, why does Tara choose to say something about Dawn being the Key when Glory appears? I just can not work up any sympathy for her.
But the black eye flying Willow was pretty cool.
And the Spike/Dawn scene was interesting. Hmm, he reached out to touch her, hmmm.
I’m relatively new to the whole Buffy world. And maybe it’s supposed to be a mystery, yet to be revealed…
But remember when Glory’s little troll servant was refusing to talk in the shop, so Giles told the other two “Scoobies” to fetch some rope. They turned away, there was a noise, and then all of a sudden the troll was eager to talk.
It’s cool how he has this whole big brothery thing with Dawn. But then, Spike is the epitome of cool. Last week’s episode put him in the highest echelons of cool-dom. If someone had told me when he first came on the show that he would turn into a character that was noble (at least acted nobly)… and bordering on sweet, but still able to be all bad-assy and pissy like we like him, I should have promptly laughed my ass off.
Have I mentioned I love Spike?
What? This thread was supposed to be about Tara and Willow?
oooops…
