I think David Boreanaz, Anthony Hall, Nicholas Brendon and James Marsters should have been doing all their scenes nude with periodic oil massages given between the four of them.
I think Riley and Oz should have had the mad love affair with the aforementioned nudity and oil massages.
Oh… and in the double Xander episode, Nicholas Brendon should have been giving his twin brother the oil massage.
You know, Mockingbird, I really like the way you think.
Thankyew.
I also would not have made Anya so ignorant of human customs. She’s been around for a 1000 years. Having killed so many people, I would think she’d know what goes on at funerals.
Re-Riley
I don’t think it would have worked out either. However, I didn’t see him as saying ‘Forgive me right now or I’m leaving.’
To me, he was saying ‘I need to know if you can eventually forgive me. If you can’t, I’m leaving. If you can, I’ll stay and you can yell at me and punish me before you forgive me-for months if you want- so long as you finally do.’
(sub)I apologize for any improper spacing. My spacebar is dying, and I refuse to use a keyboard that lacks a numeric keypad or has those damn Windows keys. This makes finding a new keyboard difficult(/sub)
I think you’re misreading this. I saw this scene as proof that she was bisexual. If she wasn’t still attracted in some measure to guys, the jacket wouldn’t have worked on her. It didn’t work on Xander or Spike. Because they’re guys? Or because they’re 100% heterosexual? I think Willow was bisexual with a preference for women, which is why she was going to cast the gender switching spell: it both made him more desirable to Willow, and made him less desireable to her competitors. I fully believe that if Tara had still been around, the jacket would have had no effect on her, because she was “completely” gay.
Reaching a bit now, but I think most of the scenes DocCathode tagged as Willow being annoying in stating her sexual preference also reinforces her being bisexual. She goes out of her way to mention how gay she is. Why? Because she still feels the occasional attraction to guys, and feels the need to prove herself. We know she was sensitive about this, because of the fight she and Tara had before Glory put the brainsuck on Tara.
After the first two seasons or so, Willow becomes very self concious about not reverting to her previous nerdy ways. This was one of the cornerstones of her magic addiction: her magic is what made her cool. She viewed her sexuality the same way: she was the cool lesbian Wicca, as opposed to mousy little Rosenberg with her unrequited crush on Xander. She eventually realized that her identity didn’t need to rely on her being a witch, but she never got to a place where she needed to realize that her identity also didn’t rely on her being a lesbian.
Finally, there were also a few scenes where Willow let it slip that she was still into guys, at least a little. When Buffy and Riley are locked in their sex-o-rama in the haunted frat house (one of my favorite episodes, btw. Never understood why so many people hated it.), the Scoobs find Giles singing and playing his guitar in a cafe. Willow is visibly turned on, and says so: “Now I remember why I used to have such a crush on him.” Tara is less moved: “He plays pretty well, I guess.” And then there’s the Dracula episode, where Willow falls for the Counts sexy Eurotrash charms, and Tara gets a little jealous.
The show should have stayed at the WB, first and foremost. I think that once it left its home network, it had a bad effect on the series, for whatever reason. I never felt like UPN knew what to do with the series.
After the Initiative storyline was over, I’d like to have seen Xander start taking some, well, initiative. There are all sorts of ways to learn tactics and strategy out there; the Scoobies ignored all of them. Personally, I think that if I spent a good chunk of my life in combat, in between melees I’d be studying my ass off, just to be sure I’d live through the next one. And I think Xander was smart enough to figure that out, especially after his stint as Military Guy proved to be so useful. So, break out the battle plans, the weaponry, the drilling, the preparation, and if possible, the artillery. You fight all the time, might as well learn to fight. At least learn a martial art or two. Oh, and guns do work, sometimes. Rocket launcers do, at least. Bring a shotgun, and use it if it seems like the thing to do.
Meanwhile, the only reference to tactical planning in the last two seasons was in the D&D game Andrew had going. I was so happy to see them concentrating on their positions on a map, too. And then I realized they were fighting Trogdor the Burninator. Why not use that level of planning on actual opponents?
The whole Season 6 ‘Buffy’s broke’ storyline stank to high heaven. I understand that she had to deal with the realities of life, but she’s not a real person. If I want to deal with the realities of life, I’ll get a job at Burger World. She’s in a world populated by demons, most of which are the kill-on-sight variety. Are none of them wealthy? No sellable body parts? Where does the magic shop get its stuff from, if not partly the hordes and corpses of the same kind of fiends our gang fights every week? Go hunt down a rich evildoer demon, knock him off and take his stuff. Agonize about it for an episode or two if you want to, but having the girl who saves the world behind the counter of a burger joint seems to be a major waste that even the Watcher’s Council wouldn’t condone.
Speaking of the Council, well, I would have blown them up long ago. Useless gits. Their whole job was watching the Slayer. Yay, team.
This would have changed the tone of the last two seasons considerably, but would have made more sense out of the ‘Buffy agonizes about being the leader for several episodes’ storyline. If she was a leader, I’m Bruce Campbell.
The Willow magic thing was great, when she sucked at it. I would never have let her get good with the spells; she needed to suck at it throughout the series. Magic is the ultimate plot copout, and it got abused almost as much as Star Trek’s deflector dish. She shouldn’t have got past the pencil-floating stage, at least not by much.
The plotlines I would have followed:
All demons are bad, and should be killed without remorse. Well, except Angel. And then Spike. And Clem. We love Clem. And Lorne. And… hey, wait. What makes it okay to kill demons? Have the gang killed any completely innocent demons? Are there repercussions?
Buffy, if you recall, ‘came back wrong.’ What wrong? What the heck? I think she came back on the wrong network, but other than that, what was, specifically, wrong?
More and more people acknowledged demon weirdness in Sunnydale as the show went on. I think this could have been interesting, if the show actually addressed this. What would Buffy have done with a few squads of volunteer demon-hunters? What would Buffy have done if the town called in mercenaries to deal with the threat? What would Buffy have done if the town started treating her like a superheroine?
As it stands, the Big Bad in Season 6 was Incompetence, and the BB for 7 was Confusion. I liked the last episode, but I wish the rest of the writing team hadn’t left such a nasty mess for Joss to clean up later.
I can’t wait to see what he does next, though.
For my money, this was the single biggest oversight in the series. Once you have the mayor of the town try to eat the high school, you can’t just go back to everyone pretending monsters don’t exsist. One of the first new characters introduced in season four should have been whoever replaces Mayor Wilkins. Not necessarily as a villain, but definetly as someone who is aware of Buffy Summers’ exsistence and has some vague knowledge of what she really is.
I would also move Spike’s first appearance sans shirt back to sometime in S2, instead of waiting until “The Harsh Light of Day”.
Yeah. Let the female viewers get a look at the Villian as Hottie (or Hottie as Villian). Hell, have him peel the shirt in “School Hard” in the scene where he lies down on the bed with Dru when she’s telling him that he should play nice with the Annoying One.
Actually, I would have had Spike shirtless at least once in every episode he appeared in. Also, he should have been shown naked much, much earlier than in “Wrecked”. Like, oh, say, in “The Harsh Light of Day”…
I also think Wesley should have taken his shirt off before everybody spun off to L.A. Then we could have all thought, “Yeah, he’s a prat, but he’s a prat who looks good without a shirt. No wonder Cordy thinks he’s hot.”
I would have given Shirtless Angel a miss, though. DB is so beefy, he looks freakish. Seeing him shirtless really just doesn’t do anything for me.
To those who think it’s terrible that willow is ‘rigidly’ defining herself as gay: is it also terrible that all the other characters rigidly define themselves as straight? It cuts both ways. For all the occasions where willow being gay crops up, it happens ten times as much with the straight characters. Only you don’t notice it, because being straight is more common and less noticeable (in TV-land). Especially if some of the examples of her being too ‘obviously’ gay are just her being attracted to females. Buffy’s attracted to males, Xander’s attracted to females all the time, Spike’s straight too, why not complain about* them* being ‘stuck in a rigidly defined label?’
Some of you have some great plot ideas. I agree with all of Miller’s post! Though I quite like the idea of Sunnydale being blissfully unaware of the demons ion their midst, with the numbers of people being killed it would have been impossible to ignore. I’m sure the parents of all the kids killed while buffy was at High School wouldn’t simply have shrugged and said, ‘oh well, it was a demon, nothing we can do about it.’ They would have wanted revenge like most bereaved parents do.
…Unless there was some mechanism by which they were prevented from knowing, like the Watchers’ Council casts a forgetting spell on the survivors or something. That could have lead to an interesting storyline where, after the Council are killed, people no longer forget and start to question the high murder rate in their town.
Other than that:
No Slayers-in-Training.
No Faith and the Principal getting it on.
No Giles leaving.
Xander and Anya don’t decide to get married. They’re still only about 22, in the real world few people of that age consider marriage. It’s not like their parents are scandalized at them living together.
The Watcher’s Council actually pay Buffy. In fact, perhaps she’s owed back pay and when she gets it, goes on a spending spree like the girly Buffy of old.
Bite your tongue, woman! He’s the reason I started watching Buffy. Well, that and the great writing.
One think I’d have liked to see more of is Buffy against other human beings. She’s fine when it’s just a question of lopping heads off demons, but would find it harder in a situation where her vampire slaying powers wouldn’t be enough.
I thought one of the big mistakes in Season 4 was when they had Adam come to life and immediately kill Professor Walsh, thus effectively ending the Initiative as a serious force. Buffy battling against a human power such as Maggie Walsh could have been more dramatic than some guy in a rubber mask; and in later series she could have been up against other government or vigilante forces also fighting vampires in a misguided way, as already mentioned by other people.
With the final season, one of the many things they glossed over quickly was the split in the Scooby Gang: one minute everyone was deciding to throw Buffy out, but by the end of the next show everyone had made up again. They had dealt with Buffy’s isolation (and that of Willow) in Season 6, but they could have progressed with this.
I would like to have seen Buffy forced to make a genuine decision between Spike the killer against her other friends, and to see some complex dynamics between the characters as they tried to work out their allegiances. For added chaos, add potential slayers walking into that mess, not to mention the First and other nasties.
I think the only real way to split the group would be to have a rift between Buffy and Willow, which there were hints at but never really developed. If Willow had been forced to go out on her own (fighting with Buffy over magic, or Willow’s relationship with the lowly but insubordinate trainee Kennedy), Xander might have chosen Willow. Willow would have been free to develop as a white witch (I thought blonde Willow in the finale was very cool). Imagine Buffy isolated with no allies except a still-insane Spike as the final conflict nears…
And strange alien radiation should have made Anya 50 foot tall after Xander dumped her.
I think instead of Xander leaving Anya at the alter, Anya should have called off the marriage. Therefore, Anya does not become a vengence demon again and we don’t wonder why someone does not say to her “I wish Tara was never killed.”
There’s a great essay someone wrote on one of the other boards, about the opportunities that BtVS missed or did wrong. If I can get permission I’ll link to it or c&p here. It explains where the show went wrong, perhaps even better than I could.
But, a few quick (paraphrased) highlights:
Give Xander a story arc. He spent all of Season 4 doing basically nothing, then gets to be Dracula’s butt-monkey, and then suddenly he’s Carpenter God. What??? How 'bout some progression here?
Keep them in school. Everybody always says that Seasons 1-3 were the best, because they had to deal with school. Season 4, while it had problems, showed Buffy and Willow dealing with everyday college stuff that was just as juicy. They should have continued with that. Unfortunately, the Dawn storyline and Joyce dying put the kibosh on that as far as Buffy was concerned. But UC Sunnydale virtually disappeared in S6&7.
Dark Magic Willow. Talk about how not to do a story arc. They started off great in the beginning of S6, culminating in Tara breaking up with Willow for violating her mind (twice!). And then it all went downhill, with Willow going through “withdrawals” like a junkie. So, magic is now a drug? Before, it was a metaphor for sex (in S4, with Willow and Tara), now it’s crack? And then, in S7, the magic is “a part of [her]” – what does that mean? We could have had S6 be the season where Willow, deciding that Buffy is in no shape to lead the Scoobs and fight evil, takes on the job herself; as her hunger for power grows, she alienates the others, captures the “Lame Gunmen” and then uses them as her henchmen, and generally causes havoc with her well-meaning monomania. Buffy is forced to pick up the reins again. Tara grows close to Buffy as her advisor and confidante, which alienates Willow even more. The season finale, where Buffy and Tara battle Willow to try to save her, would have been much better than that ghastly thing masquerading as the S6 finale.
Tara. Her death was absolutely useless, except to incite Willow to turn to the dark side (see above). Beyond that, it was a waste of a great character, a surrogate mother for Dawn, a confidante for Buffy, a foil for Spike, a friend for Anya and Xander, and a conscience for Willow. And a waste of a great actress like Amber Benson, who took what could have been such a dull role and made her lovable, and who, unlike the other actresses on this show, looks like she eats more than one meal a week. (Sorry, but I like a woman with a few curves). Not to mention a woman who can sing her hind end off – remember the musical?
Spike. He’s the Fonzie of BtVS – in that he’s the formerly threatening figure who came to eclipse most of the rest of the cast at the expense of the show. One of the most sickening aspects of S6 is the degrading liaisons between him and Buffy; after his nobility in S5 (“I know I’m a monster, but you treat me like a man”) this was an insult to both James Marsters and to the fans.
Nothing worse than when a show you initially love lets you down.
Willow’s Magic I think they made Willow much much too powerful. If they wanted a witch to use her powers to help the gang fight evil that’s fine however with Willow’s displayed strength you don’t need a slayer.
Sigh… seems you missed the entire POINT of that discussion. The problem is not anyone having any particular sexuality at all. The problem is that in Willow’s case, later seasons made it plain that it was a retcon, not a character progression. First she was madly in love with men, exclusively men, not noticing women or giving a hint of it. VampWillow was the first hint of it we got. Then it was simply about Tara and her having something special, which was cool. But then, especially after Tara died, but even before, Willow became rigidly defined as gay. Which again is fine: I just said that if this is where she was going to end up, and we had the show to do over again, I would have liked to see more foreshadowing earlier on about this possibility in her character, and more explanation for what happened to her previously strong attraction to men (even male strangers). Her feelings about her sexuality wasn’t explored so much as made a cheap occasional point of hipness. With Tara, it felt real, and the writing was believable. But coming out on the other side of things, it felt like more like a clunky reference than a well written or well explored aspect of her character.
Miller
you seem to be proving the point: you are imagining all these things yourself to explain things. That’s great: but I would have liked some hint of these much more complicated issues from the writers.
Quoting stuff from the Tara-era doesn’t help, because I agree it was written more belieably then. It’s not that I find the later references annoying in and of themselves, it’s that I find them so in the light of the lack of character progression and introspection into the past annoying. It all culminated in the Kennedy/Willow sex scene which, while great as a concept and a barrier breaker, was, as with all the sex on that ep, straining to be hip and edgy rather than believable.
The end of Tara’s “I’m under your Spell” song was WAY cooler as a sex scene, and still one of the best bits of Buffy: implying more by saying less.
[Tara, singing lies back comfortably on the bed, the camera focusing on her face only: Willow is nowhere to be seen] You make me complete! [Tara (we can still only see her head and shoulders) mysteriously starts rising straight up off the bed, as if levitating: still no sign of what happened to Willow] You make me complete! You make me com…[cuts off right to another scene].
Priceless.
I think any show that deals with magic and superpowers runs into this problem: sometimes things that they show as possible for a character to do turn out to prove that they are just TOO powerful for later events to be believable.
One great example is the season finale of Angel. W&H can, apparently, completely rewrite history to their liking, affecting even people’s memories. But if they can do that, why futz around with the FG and get their butts kicked so often? Why not simply acheive whatever they are after much more easily?
Apos - How about the line: "I can feel you inside"?
But Willow’s fear of turning evil again served as a limiting factor.
I have to say, I liked Riley, because he acted exactly how screwed-up young men act. Here he is, a guy who’s worked hard to get to where he is, and this flimsy-looking girl shows him up every time-- and he’s already fallen in love with her.
Riley needed to get away to get his head screwed on straight, and it sucks that Xander didn’t see that, but Xander proved later on that his head wasn’t on straight either.
My only real beefs with Buffy were in Season 7. Unlike many, I liked season 6-- musical, magic as alcohol (not crack you dorks! It’s booze-- which some people can handle, and some can’t. Get it straight 
), et al. But 7 was disjointed from the get-go. It did have some nice elements, but there was too much chaff in that season’s wheat.
S7 should have had much more with Dawn and her three friends mentioned in the first ep, instead of the SITs en masse. It would have been fine to have one SIT, like that girl from Sunnydale High, but not 3 dozen.
I can understand Willow falling for someone else, but the whole Kennedy thing felt strange. Maybe it was too compressed. I think that, on the whole, the season would have been better without it.
More of Buffy coming to grips with herself and Dawn-- which was hinted at in the S6 finale, but abandoned for a whole 'nother year. This would have gone perfect with Dawn and her posse.
Giles? What in blue blazes was he doing in s7 except getting out of the way as much as possible? Could the writers have avoided his issues any more? Giles left because he thought he was standing in the way. And then we see him picking up the pieces with Willow. Well, let’s see more of that after ep 3 please…
Make TFE and the ubervamps a real threat that Buffy had to THINK her way out of – instead of picking up a pink deus Axe machina.
The only decent arcs in S7 were Spike, Wood, and Faith. And the main reason Wood worked was because he was tied into both of those characters. He’s the man realizing other people’s potential-- way to be a principal!
She didn’t come back wrong though. all she had was a molecular sunburn (or whatever Tara said). That means she didn’t have anything to point at and blame “see? All those things I’ve done? They’re not my fault!” I mean, it’s not like you or I have an out when life really starts to suck.
The problem with S6 was that Joss wasn’t around, and the writers weren’t communicating. My favorite episode was Dead Things. I think it pretty much touched on and highlighted all the good and bad of Spike and Buffy’s relationship. I think if the rest of the season followed the tone set by Dead Things, it would have been much better. Sure, Dead Things was dark, but to me it said a lot of things. Buffy was still trying her damnest to escape life, and Spike was trying in his own fumbling way to stop her. He said she belonged with him in the dark, but Buffy was trying to break away from everybody by turning herself in–like Spike said, there’s a word for that–death.
Anywho, Noxon said that they had literally no idea what to do with Spike and Buffy after Dead Things—so we get Older and Far Away, As You Were, and Hell’s Bells shudder. First Noxon wanted a “Life sucks when you have no money” angle (Flooded), then she wanted a “Confused girls have bad sex” angle, then she decided to shoot for “Spike is such a bad boyfriend” angle, only most people didn’t buy it because we actually have memories, and we were pretty pissed by the shoddy way Buffy treated Spike, not the other way around. And don’t even get me started on a “Magic is crack” storyline. Holy fuck, that sucked. I read a lot of fanfic that dealt with Willow’s magic problems in a much moreinteresting way. Namely–she wasn’t addicted to magic, but to power.
So, in conclusion, Marti can be a fine writer when she wants to be, but she’s not a good show-runner. Joss seems to think the fans didn’t like S6 becaus it was dark or a departure. I would have enjoined S6 if there was some, you know, continuity.
That was the plan, initially. Except they couldn’t work out a deal with the actress who played Maggie Walsh for more episodes, for whatever reason.
I never got the “Spike is Fonzie” crap. I don’t know if y’all noticed, but on BtVS, Spike is a complete outsider. You can’t get more outside than Spike, until S7. Which is why he’s popular to a lot of people…most of the fans I know identify with him because they’ve been in the same situation. We can’t identify with the core scoob anymore–once they left high school, they weren’t the outsiders that whole dynamic changes in college. But the first 3 seasons was all about the struggle of the outsider, so people who were attracted to that intially easily found a new character to love in Spike. A vampire, a chipped vampire no less, a geek, a poet. He couldn’t be with the other demons because the only way he get his bit o’violence before bedtime was to fight them, and besides, they wouldn’t feed him. He wnet from having a lover and minions to nothing. He couldn’t be with the scoobie gang, because they didn’t trust him or like him much. “Can’t be a vampire, can’t be a man”. He didn’t have a soul so he was good, but he wasn’t bad enough anymore either. NOt even worthy of being staked. The major characteristic about Spike is his ability to love, and that was highlighted in his very first appearance on the show. Yet, Dru cheated on him, and ran back to Angelus as soon as he returned. He went through over a century believing that his mother hated him. He fell in love with the one woman in all the world he really, really shouldn’t have been in love with. The problem with S6 is that he was just as isolated as Buffy.someone once said that it seemed they loved each other, but the internal and external forces were too powerful, and it kept them from connecting in any real way. For Spike the only connection was sex, which I think, is why the attempted rape happened. (Which, btw, was inspired by Marti Noxon’s personal life. She was the raper, not the rapee, and she did it because she thought if she did, her BF would love her again…)