I do have to say that I thought they were going to illustrate the old saying, “If it seems to good to be true, it probably is” when Riley returned with his wife. I thought, “OK, she isn’t what she seems.” She was connecting with everybody too well. Imagine my disappointment when they just used her to show Buffy (again) how sucky her life is (and of course, it’s ALL her fault") :rolleyes:
Let’s say you’re a Scooby. You fight alongside a supernaturally powerful Slayer, and face horriffic demons and monsters that you have to kill on a weekly basis. You know, for sure, that you’re going to be fighting something, sometime soon.
I, for one, would be getting me some serious martial arts training.
Apparently, even though Xander found his brief bout of being military-guy amazingly useful, none of the gang has thought about getting that kind of training for real.
And, everything everybody else has said, too.
My peeve is with the really bad edit in the last ep. Anya was screaming “hang on everyone, there’s gonna be a wedding” and then we jump cut to a medium shot of her and Xander.
That was bad.
My peeve is the discarding of characters is done pretty casually and frequently over the past 6 years. Characters come in and out of the series like water.
There are only 3 of the original cast left, Buf, Xander and Willow. I miss the group feeling the cast had around season three. Angel, Wes and Cordy spun off, Giles too. Oz left, Faith left, popping up in LA for a couple of episodes.
Even later, characters just were discarded. Buffy’s mom, Riley, even badguys like Dru just lost to the wind.
The replacements just aren’t as strong. Anya and Dawn get on my nerves if they’re on screen too long, Tara can’t hold my interest.
I think that letting a good ensemble cast go is a waste.
Not a complaint … just a gray area. What determines vampire strength/dangerousness? Here’s what I can surmise:
-
Angel seems to be the baddest living (dead) vampire
-
Spike ranks a close second
-
everyone else is … what? Spike seems to kick the ass of much beefier vampires without too much trouble. And he’s killed a slayer (or two? can’t remember) before.
Is it age? Older vampires are tougher than fresh ones? Is it the number of kills? Do they gain in strength for every victim? Is it just experience/training? (Angel works out a lot … whereas most vamps are pretty lazy and self-indulgent.)
Any clarification?
I must dissent.
Ballybay, they have often noted that magic was physically dangerous, not addictive. The warnings in earlier seasons was that it can kill you, spells may misfire and cause harm, etc.
I mean, when Giles, back when Willow first started dabbling, warned her about the dangers, he never mentioned, “oh, and by the way, it’s more addictive than smoking crack while receiving oral pleasure from [insert your favorite supermodel here].”
'Course, had he said that, he would have been remarkably prescient about Willow’s future coming out. 
Sua
Both Spike and Angel are master vampires. Joss, it seems, is a bit fuzzy on the concept, but here’s what seems to be what…
-
A vampire can make either childer or minions; it depends on the amount of blood given to the soon-to-be-vamp AND on the strength of the giving-vamp. Harmony, for instance, made minions because she was weak as far as vamps go. Spike and Angel were made (by Dru and Darla, respectively) as childer, not minions, so they automatically had a bit of a leg up.
-
Spike and Angel have been around a long time. That gives them additional strength, far more than your average, fresh-out-of-the-grave minion. It seems that age plays a good role in this, but also in their favor is the fact that they have both learned to harness their demons to work with them. Note that you rarely see a young vamp who isn’t in “game face.” The idea is that they haven’t learned to use their demon, so they’re running around with a whole lot of power but no experience to use it to their benefit.
-
Now, to the other meaning of ‘master vamp’… both Spike and Angel have controlled territory at some point, with the power that’s associated with it. Not everyone can be a master in this respect. So one can surmise that a good bit of their strength also is in their reputation.
-
One may question if being grand-childe and great-great grandchilde to The Master, who was the oldest vampire around, also has some effect. The fact that they keep up on their training certainly helps.
Finally, Spike got lucky with the Slayers… he was still pretty young when he killed the one during the Boxer Rebellion. Right place, right time. Even a minion can have one good day.
Hope this helps. Oh, and Sua… BWAH HA HA HA HA HA!!!
-BK
Most of my problems with this show have just popped up this season. I really don’t like the dark turn the show hoas taken. It’s way to depressing. Also, I wonder if it is possible to have less of a plot then they have right now. Absolutely nothing is happening. This season may as well not exist.
Dawns quick recovery from her arm fracture was amazing. That thing healed in like two weaks! She must be taking Calcium suppliments or something.
This has already been said, sort of, but I am going to say it again, and change it a little. The Buffy and Spike thing got old real fast. I dont think it should have happened at all. I just doesn’t work for me. Why is Spike still alive anyway? I am as big a fan of James Marsters as the next person, but logic would say that they killed Spike as soon as they could. He is EVIL. He has killed many people including 2 slayers, and has proven that, should his chip get removed, He would gladly do so again. I think he should have been killed a long time ago.
What I’m pissed about:
Less Tara/Willow interaction.
Spike, after making that great opening monologue about Angel in the Angel part of the Ring of Amarra crossover, ends up later being just like what he said in the monologue. You know, a “fluffy puppy”.
Spike not having his moral chip shorten out, so he can make real decisions about his undead life.
The B/S sexual relationship wasn’t directed by Steven Speilburg; only he can get away with filming hardcore sex on TV.
The three geeks having a compelling storyline developing, only to have the matter completely dropped over the next four episodes.
Buffy not remaining dead for a little while longer, and winding up joining Xena’s ghost in some epic otherworld quest. Now that would be real closure for us Xena and ex-Xena fans.
No major demon is dead yet this year. Could mean major demon blood spillage in the next few episodes.
Willow not playing the flute for me in the musical as she promised–ok just kidding.
That’s it for now.
I have a lot of grievances with the show, such that one might wonder how I can even stand to watch it. But every show, every novel, every movie is loaded with problems. What allows us to overlook these is willing suspension of disbelief. The important thing to remember is that Willing Suspension of Disbelief isn’t something you give like charity, it’s something that must be earned. It speaks very highly of the show that it is well enjoyed even by the people who are nitpicking it to pieces here – with so many problems, it has a hell of a job on its hands to earn the required indulgence, and somehow it manages.
With that preamble, here are some of my complaints about the show:
[ul] [li]The conflation of magic' with Wicca’ and `witchcraft.’[/li]
This is not to open up the debate over the historical origins of Wicca, but to point out that the show not only throws around the term Wicca when referring to a notion of witchcraft that Wiccans try to disassociate themselves from. Wicca has a strong eco-feminist bent, and so the kind of witchcraft that involves eyes of newt and chicken feet is incompatible.
It may be that the show does this on purpose, as a sort of sly parody of Wicca – blurring the perceived boundaries that modern witches try to sharpen between demon summoning and Diana/Hecate worship. But more likely they’re just throwing out mystical technobabble.
[li]The sources of the vast pool of information available in these books.[/li]
The Watcher’s Council apparently has a huge cannon of detailed information on an amazing number of mystical entities, though it’s not clear how the many authors involved were in a position to know so much about the entities they write about especially since they obviously didn’t do much to stop these things. In some cases, as with The Gentlemen, it’s clear that the moster has appeared before and been defeated, so then the only mystery is where they go between defeats. But in many cases we’re talking about abominable horrors that we are expected to believe are well documented and yet nobody has done anything about them.
Clearly we can see that it’s not possible for Buffy and the Scooby gang to do first-hand research to find out what makes a monster tick, so how did the guy who wrote the book manage it? What possible means could there have been for finding this stuff out that would not also have been handy to actually defeat the beast?
[li]“Willow, see if you can find something about this on the Internet.”[/li]
Yes, Willow, why don’t you spend an hour or so browsing the succinct and accurate, unbiased and neatly indexed occult database known as the Internet and find out exactly what we need to know. Oh, brother. How about this one: “I’m sorry, Giles, my thread on Acathala got hijacked by flirters and then sank like a stone.”
[li]Buffy and Willow gain XP and hit points, learn new spells. Everybody else – still level 0.[/li]
This is the gamer’s corrolary to the complaint already given by others – nobody but Buffy and Willow seems to be getting any better at this stuff, even though we can’t imagine doing this for years and not feeling motivated to learn some new skills that would make it easier to live through battles with evil. I think the gag that Xander is dead weight has played itself out, and its becoming increasingly a wonder that he can’t be bothered to learn to shoot a crossbow at least. Xander is a handy guy, so you’d think that at least he could be pretty good at making weapons, setting up traps and so on with his building skills. Sure, Willow is a hacker, but Xander could make a pretty good gadgeteer.
Obviously Buffy has Hit Points, which is why she can stand toe-to-toe exchanging blows with a vampire and not even feel sore later, near as we in the audience can tell. Sometimes she’s bruised, if the plot demands it, but generally she just rests for a week and she’s fine. Fine by me. I’m down with D&D. But only Buffy and Willow are PCs. The rest of the Scooby gang are 0-level NPCs, and have been for the last six years. Get these guys some players so they can start soaking up some of that XP Buffy’s been hogging. Furthermore, shouldn’t Buffy be entitled to a garrison and band of 5th level followers by now?
[li]Weapons are often talked about, sometimes brandished dramatically, but rarely actually used in combat.[/li]
Buffy jams her bag full of swords, crossbows, holy water, daggers, baseball bats with nails in them, and then when she gets to the scene she drops the bag and improvises a stake from broken furniture that the vampire has conveniently busted up for her. In fact, most of the fighting in the show is fisticuffs, which is usually pointless because the only blow that counts in a battle with a vampire requires a wooden stake to the heart, which Buffy seems to think she needs to warm up to.
And for some reason, Buffy seems to behave as though she needs a different stake for every vampire she kills, though that’s clearly not the case. She kills a vampire, abandons the stake she’s got in her hand, and goes and gets another one.
[li]Dead and obscure languages mentioned just for the hell of it.[/li]
A lot of scholarship is done about Gaelic, but not a whole lot was ever done in Gaelic. English, Latin, Greek, French and German have all had turns as the lingua franca of research, and probably an extensive demonology library would include a lot of translations from other languages, but whatever scholar managed to dig up a woodcut of an image of an actual demon somehow so that it could be conveniently included in that demon’s Monstrous Manual description then inscrutibly wrote the inscription in Gaelic?
[li]After being around for a century or so, Spike gets stuck in the seventies?[/li]
I mean, I understand that they wanted a punk rocker-type vampire, but they didn’t want to make him a young vampire. I like the Anne Rice notion that a vampire is stuck with the spirit of the age in which he is sired, but that he can be `requickened’ with a modern zeitgeist (all this I gather from the movie – I never read the books). But there’s no explanation on this show of where Spike got his Billy Idol complex.
[li]Rusty-haired Oz turns into a grey-haired werewolf?[/li]
Why not just make him purple? I mean, it seems like there’s a kind of logic that they missed out on following through, and I’m disappointed.
[li]They’re hardly even pretending anything’s a secret anymore.[/li]
It was preposterous from the very beginning that all this demonic activity would escape public attention. But even the half-hearted attempts to explain it away – people have selective memory, it was isolated to the hell mouth, the mayor was covering it up, ect. – are hardly bothered with. There’s a demon roadhouse way out of town operating in full daylight? I have stopped assuming that somehow the world doesn’t know about it. I have started to believe that the world does in fact know about it, and what I’m wondering is what exactly they do know. I get the impression that the darkness is closing in all over the world and people must be starting to realize it. I’d like to know more about that.
[li]The show presses heavily on the edge of religious issues, but almost never brings religion into it.[/li]
I would actually expect that the Roman Catholic Church, which has recently admitted that the sitting pope has performed three excorcisms, would have a big stake, as it were, in Buffy’s activities. Where are they? And even though there’s clearly a God, and even a Jesus, given that crucifixes work, nobody is very interested in the subject. If I lived in a world I knew was full of vampires, I’d be Jesus-talkingest motherfucker you ever saw. I’d have a big wooden crucifix around my neck. I’d have a whole chain of them made into a collar. I’d have an extra in my boot in case of trouble.
They broached the subject in one episode in which vampires raid a church are the flock is saved by Faith (hyuck, hyuck, I get it). But that was about it. [/ul]
Wow! Great post, Johnny Angel. Brace yourselves: Fourth Stage Geek-Out in prgress
**
I moved these two together so I can answer them both at once. The nature of the paranormal universe in Buffy and Angel has a number of features that have been hinted at in various episodes. The most obvious is that there are other dimensions: a wide variety of hells, at least one heaven, and a few “Prime Material” worlds: the world Cordy was trapped on in the last season’s finale of Angel, for example. Travel between these dimensions is clearly not difficult: every episode of both shows deals with creatures that have come from one of these alternate worlds to this on. Further, there are “alternate Earth” realities that co-exsist with this one, and can be accessed with relative ease (Willow, a low-level witch, and Anya, a former demon with no native powers, were able to reach into an alterante reality and bring back vampire Willow. Not to mention Anya’s “world without shrimp” description of multiversal physics.) I postulate that many, if not most, of these books are not of this Earth. So when Giles reads about how to destroy a super-demon from a book in ancient Sumerian, it may very well be from an Earth in which Sumeria became the dominant world culture before being destroyed by this same super-demon.
Additionally, often as not, Giles is reading from prophecy, which seems more common than Harlequin romance novels and Left Behind books combined. Prophecies would be best studied in the original language, as the true meaning is often hidden in some untranslatable nuance of the original tongue. And, as a prophecy, it can talk about things that haven’t happened yet, like how to kill a particular super-demon.
**
**
Well, she does have all those Wicca sites bookmarked by Jenny Calender, which she used in season two to re-curse Angel. Of course, weren’t those bookmarks on the computer Angel smashed and set fire to right before he killed her?
**
Y’know, Xander does okay in a fight. I just saw him take a battle-ax to bunch of those leperous hobbits that worked for Glory. He’s definetly improved over the years. He’s not a total bad-ass, but he usually does okay fending for himself while Buffy takes on the big bad. Still, compared to how Wesley has matured into a veteran demon hunter on Angel, Xander does appear to be lagging badly.
**
**
You need an explanation? Billy Idol kicks ass, that’s your explanation.
**
I don’t think Oz’s natural hair color was ever established. I’m pretty sure he did have purple hair at one point. Regardless, you miss the larger issue that he turned into a three or four different werewolves, each resembling the other only to the extent that they all looked really, really dorky.
**
I absolutely agree with this, and this is a big part of why I’m starting to like Angel better than Buffy (and I don’t just mean this season’s Buffy) I’m sick of the cliche that “people don’t want to see the supernatural, so they don’t” It’s been done to death in everything from Vampire: The Masquerade to Stephen King to Terry Pratchett. Let’s see what happens to a society that knows and recognizes the exsistence of the supernatural. Angel is like this. One show opened with a hideously disfigured sewer-demon sucking noisily on a 7-11 Big Gulp, so there’s at least one convenience store in LA that caters to non-humans. Plus nightclubs like Caritas, vampire hunting street gangs, and Angel Detective Agency itself: a paranormal detective agency that advertises in the yellow pages. It’s not exactly common knowledge, but people do know about the paranormal on this show, at least in LA. I like the “darkness closing in” idea, too, and it’s even been hinted at in one show: On her vision quest, Buffy tells the primeval slayer, (paraphrasing badly here) “I’m not doing this forever. One day the tide will roll back. I’m going to be a fireman.”
**
Yeah, I always wanted to see a campus proselytizer see Buffy’s cross and ask if she’s interested in going to a prayer meeting. “What? Oh, no, I just wear it for the vampires.” However, don’t assume that because the cross hurts vampires, it means that Christianity is proof of God and/or Jesus. It could be a mystical symbol with an entirely seperate pedagree that was appropriated by the Christians because of it’s effectiveness against demons. There are (in the real world, not the Buffy world) pre-Christian carvings of crucifixes in parts of Ireland and Scotland.
fast and thick in here indeed.
Kinda makes me proud.
And I have a problem with the “Pay the watcher, leave the slayer to struggle however she can” thing too.
Watcher’s council sucks.
stoid
Miller wrote:
The analogy to D&D keeps coming up when I think about it, just because that’s the most codified multiple-universe fantasy setting ever. But they don’t use any D&D directly. Never do they slip into tell-tale D&D geekspeak like Prime Material Plane' or 666th level of the Abyss’ or `material components.’
Can it possibly be that the writers don’t play D&D?
Woah, woah. Ockham’s razor, Ockham’s razor! Let’s not posit an unfathomably manifold multiverse that somehow unfathomably converges at Giles’ bookshelf. I mean, at that point why even bother with logic in the show? “How come gravity works sideways today?” “Well, you know, the teeming multiverse.” “Ah, yes. I almost forgot about that from last week, when it started raining monkey asses.”
I haven’t done the statistics, and I don’t have a pie chart to prove it, but actually I’m pretty sure that Giles is usually reading from what amounts to a Monster Manual description of the beast. Here’s what it does, here are its weaknesses. Nothing vague, like prophecy tends to be, that has to be figured out in the course of the hour. He digs up specific information on the order of: “level draining” or “+1 or better weapons to hit” and often produces a picture of the beast. Same thing with artifacts. If anybody’s ever enchanted a shoehorn to play Greensleeves, Giles has got a fucking woodcut of it.
I mean, we all have to rationalize the show in our own way, so if this explanation saves you some whiplash, that’s great. But it’s still a bit much of a coincidence for me.
Have you ever seen a Wicca site? Here, let me throw out a name from Hebrew demonology and see if you can find useful information from the Wiccans about how to defeat it: Lillith.
He’s `clocked a lot of field time’ as they say, and that ought to have taught him something. But not nearly as much as you’d expect. Meanwhile he’s been losing ground just in terms of his haircut.
He ain’t no Brian Setzer.
I think that he’s actually some sort of weregorilla. And the hellhounds' were actually hellgorillas,’ too.
Given the wide variety of things that have been counted as crucifixes even under a strict Christian meaning of the symbol, it could be that the symbol goes beyond that. There are plus-shaped crosses, X-shaped crosses, T-shaped crosses, historically all considered Christian symbols. And in the tradition of vampire movies, any crossed sticks constitute a cross. So why can’t we suppose that the symbol transcends that particular myth associated with it?
Here’s why: crossed lines happen all the time. Does a vampire get burned anytime he leans up against a brick wall by the criss-crossing lines of mortar? No. Because the crossing of lines is not a symbol unless it is invested with symbolism by the intention of a person. Somebody means for that to be a cross, and as a cross symbolic of something – specifically of the somebody in particular who got nailed to one. The myth of vampirism is steeped in Christianity, and in order to take the Christianity out, you have to ditch the cross, as some versions of the story do – like Anne Rice, apparently.
Note: A crucifix is exclusively a depiction of Christ on a cross… Do you mean crosses, or somethingmore specific? You can’t mean crucifixes.
Manda Jo: You’re absolutely correct, I meant crosses, not crucifixes. My bad.
Johnny Angel: Ockham’s Razor? That was in The Book of Wonderous Inventions, right? Vorpal +5 vs unshaven enemies?
Seriously, though. The books themselves might not be from other dimensions, but the information in them certainly might. The Watcher’s Council has had ample opportunity to interview, bribe, interrogate, or otherwise get information from a wide variety of other-worldly creatures. Not to mention the supernatural forces that favor and protect mankind (The Powers that Be and whatever force created the Slayers, to name two. Assuming they’re not the same thing.) which might have taken the time to send a little advice about the bad guys our way. Okay, yeah, it could also be a cheap plot device to deliver unwieldy chunks of exposition, but that’s hardly any fun at all. Otherworldly Books are much cooler.
On Crosses: The point I was originally making was that the cross might originally have been the symbol of some other power that was specifically anti-vampire, and was appropriated by the Christians because it was such an obviously powerful symbol of good. However, on reflection, the question is moot: both holy water and sanctified earth have been shown to hurt vampires in the Buffyverse, so obviously Christianity has something going for it.
On Wicca and the Internet: Well, obviously I’m not going to find demon killing info on the real internet. But on the fictional internet of a world where there are real demons, the information is eventually going to make its way on to the web. Jenny Calender grew up with magic and had a lot of contacts you don’t get with a Google search, and passed these on to Willow.
On Brian Setzer: Setzer oozes cool, alright (that’s not Brylcream in his hair) but he ain’t exactly menacing. “Punk vampire” is scary. “Swing dancing vampire” is goofy.
Um…yeah, I agree with most everything above.
And, why is it that Tara’s face always makes her look as if she is severely constipated?
That’s my big peeve.
And yet I still watch…
You do realise don’t you that it is exactly this kind of nitpicking that gives us geeks a bad name?
Do you get soap fans sitting on internet chat sites discussing how unlikely it would be for Mary-Sue to get that haircut when she said just last week how she hated everything about Debbie Harry? I don’t think so.
pan
Miller wrote:
What, in between jerking off and drinking tea? I don’t know how they find the time. Well, I suppose when the show comes out, we’ll find out what they do when they’re not harassing the slayer.
Oh, and here are a few more points that keep bugging me:
[ul]
[li]Buffy died again. Isn’t that supposed to spawn another slayer?[/li]
[li]Are there just a bunch of slayers in potentia sitting around waiting for Buffy to die?[/li]
I mean, what’s her name the African girl had apparently been trained as a slayer for years before she was officially called upon Buffy’s temporary death. Are there a lot of other girls with dormant slayer powers waiting for the call?
[li]Did the Master get twelve more regenerations, or is he just really stretching out his last one?[/li]
Er, never mind.
[li]Why do they keep calling Willow gay when she’s obviously bi?[/li]
Her attractions to Xander and Oz were real enough. She isn’t claiming to have been living a lie all that time. Plus, she lusted after Dracula like all the other women. So, why do they keep saying `gay’ when everyone clearly knows she’s bi? Is it because its now acceptable to have a gay character in a TV show, but somehow the squares are not ready for a bisexual one? Do the censors just not allow them to use the word?
[li]The Bronze has a liquor lisence all of the sudden?[/li]
[li]A complete set of The Books of Ascension costs less than a partial set of Chid’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads in paperback?[/li][/ul]
kabbes wrote:
Yeah, we’re so very well regarded otherwise.
Touché Mr Angel. Touché.
I think Faith has to die before another is called. She was called when Kendra was killed (who was called when Buffy “died” in Season One"). I think Buffy is kinda out of the loop.
Very good point.
Gotta change with the times, my man. Seriously, I think it had one all the time, it was just never really shown because the kids were so young at the start.
Well, if you shop around, you are bound to find a good bargain here and there.