Buffy newbie here - question about Slayers

[spoiler]Neg. All potentials are now full slayers. Non-potentials stay the same. Men get shafted, as appears to be the norm on Buffy.

What?[/spoiler]

Have you watched *Angel * at all?

The women of Angel fare much, *much * worse than the men of Buffy.

lissener, **Revenant Threshold ** is correct.

[spoiler]All the new Slayers were potentials. Not every woman is a Slayer.

Relative to the toddler slayer thing (Og help the person who has to manage *that * playgroup!), I actually wanked that Slayer powers would come on with puberty, but the little baseball-playing girl in Chosen looked younger than that to me. [/spoiler]

t wasn’t that the spell went awry, it was that Willow et. al. misinterpreted the results. Of course that was one of the most egregious misleads the show ever pulled, with Dawn getting lit up like a Christmas tree for so long.

If you’re just in season 3, you have a while till you see the second death. The only thing I will say about it is it was supposed to have been the series finale, because the WB did not wish to renew the show. Fortunately for Buffy fans everywhere, UPN picked the series up in hiatus (an eventuality for which JW had prepared during contract talks) and the show ran two more seasons.

[spoiler]Unless there were Slayer Potentials who were fetal. That would be pretty unpleasant.

Pregnant woman: “Look, honey, the baby is starting to kick!”
<Fetal foot shoots out of pregnant woman’s abdomen>[/spoiler]

Not to re-open old arguments, but not all Buffy fans feel that was entirely fortunate.

ok - “…fortunately for a lot of Buffy fans…”
I happen to like season 6 better than season 5 but could really have done without most of season 7

That is not how I understand it – the contract with WB was up, and WB didn’t want to pay anywhere near as much for the show as UPN offered. (UPN was desperately looking for a signature show, as the whole Star Trek: Voyager thing turned out to be a horrible mistake, and was ending its run anyway).

Sua

What I’d heard is that the Season 5 Finale was written so that, should negotiations fail, the series would end in a way JW could live with

I dont’ know how much of it was WB vs. UPN, but the show finally grew up after the switch. Season 6 is some of the best television on television in the history of television.

Wow. I smell a battle coming…

Nah. It would be restaging Antietam. Both sides bloody, neither conceding defeat.

The great thing about BtVS is that fans can find something for everyone somewhere. Don’t like Season 6? Watch Season 2. My wife adores Season 4, for example. I am more partial to 5 & 3. Buffy is large…it contains multitudes. :smiley:

I’m lucky, I found something to like in every season. Seasons 2 - 4 are my favorites, but I do think season 6 is underrated. Season 7 definitely wasn’t their best work, but I could watch CwDP, Selfless, and Storyteller on an infinite loop and be happy.

I’ve been rewatching the entire series of late, and I haven’t seen S5 in a long time. I don’t remember being particularly enamored of it, but I often do a lot of re-evaluating when I rewatch.

I’m also discovering Buffy and Angel for the first time (I’m at the end of Season 4 for Buffy, and the end of Season 1 for Angel). Thank the gods for DVD collections – I’m allergic to television so the only way I get to see the good shows is after they’re released on DVD.

I can understand why people love some seasons and hate others. One distinctive element of Buffy I’m noticing is that each season is more like a very long mini-series with several long plot arcs that aren’t resolved until the season finale (The the Master in season 1, the evil Angel in Season 2, the Mayor in season 3, and Adam in season 4). So the seasons can almost be grouped into single units, as opposed to a show like “the Simpsons” where there’s zero continuity between episodes.

Also, I’m getting the feeling that Joss and Company are a bit on the sadistic side. The characters are very well-developed and lovable, but they have the unfortunate tendency to leave, die, change, or be replaced when you least expect it. I guess it’s a good way to keep the show from becoming stale (as most do after 4 or 5 seasons), but it’s also a bit on the gut-wrenching side. I guess one of the attractions of a nice, conventional sitcom is that the characters and settings remain relatively static throughout the run of the show – a comfort I’m definitely not getting from Buffy.

Fourth season spoilers ahead:

I’m still mad that the high school (and the library!) were destroyed, Giles was expelled from the Watcher’s Council, Cordelia and Angel are gone (sort of), Oz (one of my favorite characters) is gone for good, and Willow’s no longer driving stick. (So much for my Willow fantasies :frowning: ) What’s next? No – Never mind. I don’t want to know…

All but one of them will be back, bet you can’t guess wich.

And there we have it, folks! The first nominee for the 2006 “Understatement of the Year” Award! :smiley:

Actually, I find Joss’s sadistic tendancies refreshing, what with all this test screening nonsense and general obsession with tayloring entertainment to be as instantly gratifying to as many audience members as possible.

Sure, the Buffy/Angel universe can be painful at times, but at least it’s not dull or predictable. I can forgive the writers for stabbing me in the heart a few times if it means I can experience genuine suspense and surprise.

(Angel Season 1 Spoiler ahead)

Except for the death of Doyle. That was simply unforgivable. I’m still in shock. I really, really liked that character.

Cool, thanks! Now I’ve got a few more things to look forward to in Seasons 5-7

A general observation: I’ve noticed that there’ve been a lot of new Buffy/Angel posts in Cafe Society lately, and I have a feeling that this is part of a recent growing trend. Unfortunately I think these shows fell under the radar for a lot of potential fans when they were actually on the air, and now that people like HazelNutCoffee and I are discovering them for the first time, we’re anxious to talk about them.

I’ll probably be starting my own Buffy/Angel thread as soon as I marshall my thoughts and observations into something coherent. I used to roll my eyes at all the Buffy/Angel posts in here (probably the second most-discussed show next to “the Simpsons”), but now I understand why these shows provoke so much discussion.

(Angel Season Five spoilers

I’m still aching over the death of Cordelia. Yeeowch! Almost as weep-inducing as “The Body”, especially with the unexpected switcheroo at the end… I sat stunned for several minutes

This is known in Buffyspeak as “the Big Bad” and “the Little Bad.” The Big Bad is the season-long arc; the Little Bad is the per-episode obstacle. I remember the debate among Buffyheads for most of Season 6 was about who was going to emerge as the Big Bad for the season. One of the reasons it’s my favorite.

I’ve always seen “Little Bad” used to refer to the minor “arc” villain that appears throughout each season: the Annoying One (S1), Spike and Drusilla (S2), Mister Trick (S3), etc. The Little Bad in Season 6 was therefore the Troika, while the Big Bad was, as Joss et al. stated, “life itself.”