IMO the series peaked in season 2 and began a long, slow, steady slide downwards, each following season a little weaker than the last, culminating in a pretty poor season seven. Still better than your average pre-packaged TV junk, but nonetheless not great. I think part of that was specific too me, insomuch as they tightened up the mythology of the show it went in many directions that I just was not crazy about. I suppose in effect things were more thrilling for me early on when the backstory was more mysterious and speculative. But that aside, I do think there was a real qualitative slide in at least the last couple of seasons. Buffy for me would probably have best died in season 5. And when I mean died, I mean dead :p. I always favored an ending set some years down the road that shows her finally wearing out and falling nobly, the longest-lived slayer ever in history, but fades out on a new slayer being born, showing the eternal, unwinnable nature of the struggle between good and evil, in both its negative and positive aspects.
However if I couldn’t get that episode, Normal Again, with an even more ambiguous ending, should have been the series finale :). Further it should have been unannounced, not completeing a full season, with a couple dummy episodes shot to throw people off the trail. Never would happened, but I sure would have been pleased ;).
Meaning having a soul has little to do with being evil or not.
Which is why I thought a much better villain for season 7 would be a resouled Spike… who actually, since he has his soul back, would not really be Spike anymore but William the bitter dejected poet.
That’s a really interesting way to look at it, AsbestosMango, Buffy as the abusive boyfriend. There was always something about Spike supposedly being such a bad guy when she kept beating the living shit out of him that didn’t set very well with me.
I hated the AR, too.
That being said, I thought that Season 6 had some of the hottest sex I’ve ever seen on t.v. when it didn’t consist of someone getting raped. Maybe I’m just twisted, though .
Loved the musical and I thought “Normal Again” was really creative. From a professional standpoint, I’d have to say that a grandiose paranoid psychosis is far more likely than, well, Buffy. But as my girlfriend would say whenever my suspended disbelief was dangling by a thread, “It’s a television show. About vampires.”
I have to confess I get a little tired of people slagging S6 because of the Trio. I can’t be the only one who gets that the point of them was to explore the banality of evil and to further the theme of the consequences of bad choices? I mean, come on, look at their motivations. Jonathan was originally about making the grand gesture. Warren was always about control. Andrew we don’t know why he trained the demon flying monkeys to attack the school play but if we assume it was for reasons as cosmic as Tucker’s for attacking the prom (he was turned down for a date) it’s probably because he tried out and didn’t get a part. And their super-secret origin as an evil team? “You guys wanna team up and take over Sunnydale?” “Yeah, sure, OK.” Yet look what their banal evil set into motion. Not one but two apocalypses. But realistically, what would most people do in their circumstances, given the access to their resources and having made the decision to act for personal gain? Most people aren’t going to try to destroy the world. Most people are going to be about getting money, power or sex or some combination of the three. So much of S6 was about Buffy’s reacclimation to the mundanity of the world and the Trio were representative of the worst aspects of that mundanity.
I have to… agree with Otto. Brilliant analysis of Season 6. I think the climax of the season is what the mundaneness is all about.
When Warren, comic relief and mundane college student type guy, shoots and kills another student - no magic, no universe-bending, just another senseless day. Also, the mundane theme appears in the striking and inappropriate reality of Katrina’s almost-rape in what’s supposed to be a purely comedic scene about hard-up nerds.
But I’m really here to plug Entropy as another fantastic episode. It’s no Tabula Rasa, but it’s a good romp.
Okay–I watched all of the episodes. I was trying to tell my sister about it and I’m sort of at a loss for words. I’d heard so much hype about Once More With Feeling that it actually was a little disappointing the first time through, although it grew on me the second time around. Amber Benson has a great voice and I always like it when Giles gets to sing! Normal Again was great though. It’s definitely easier to buy Buffy as a tripped out mental patient than as a mythical superhero. Also liked Tabula Rasa…
But the season as a whole? I don’t know. There were definitely great episodes but overall there was just something–I don’t know how else to word it–lacking. I absolutely agree with Asbestos Mango’s assessment of Buffy as the ultimate abusive boyfriend. I guess I just hated the gross soap-operatic feel to it. The characters were still compelling and the show still outshines many, many other television shows out there, but there were moments where the show could have aptly been titled Days of Our Sunnydale Lives as the World Turns . It got a little annoying. Still a big honking Buffy fan though.
I don’t think this is specific enough to be a spoiler. There’s a couple of places in the seasons where someone’s addicted to somethingwillow-magic
riley-vampand it’s left vague if the addiction is physical or ‘metaphoric’ eg. about power or attention… This is something I noticed very much in Tolkein (eg. Saruman’s control of Theoden - how much was honeyed words from wormtongue, how much was magic?) who pulled if off wonderfully, but it falls a bit flat in buffy. I think they’re drawing from a wider mythis - in [these] mythoses, xxxx is addictive, so we’ll borrow that - when it doesn’t really fit, since it hasn’t occurred before so it always feels a bit like a one off, not fitting the ‘physics’ of the earlier eps.
I was always of the opinion they should have evolved into the big bad rather than giving the season over to the Supernatural - although Dark Will was a good BB, too.
I wonder if the writers got the idea for this episode from the Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight story “Masks.” It’s the same sort of story: Batman goes unconscious, wakes up in a psychiatric hospital, and seemingly finds out that it’s all a gaslight by the vengeful psychologist son of an embezzler he put away… or is it? (This last revealed in almost exactly the same way as in the Buffy episode.)
After getting the shot that makes her remember it cuts back to Buffy in the asuylum with the doctors screaming “We’re losing her!” The camera pulls back to show a catatonic Buffy that makes you wonder “Is the show really all her dream?”
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