Right, I was just talking about pre-Awakening. Now it’s irrelevent about Faith.
Incidentally, can you imagine a Slayer baby breastfeeding? Ouch.
I thought they all got called in the finale, so it is pretty much a moot point on who the line runs through, right?
S6-7 sucked badly for many reasons. The Trio, killing Tara, Magic as crack, Zombie Buffy stumbling around, Kennedy, rewriting Xander as the puffy one-dimensional jerk, re-writing Anya as a villan, then as a one-note character. Andrew tied to the chair. Spike chained in the basement. The Spike-Buffy soap opera. The loss of Giles for very long stretches. The first evil storyline crapping out. Caleb being slapped in at the end. Endless bad rah-rah speeches to whiney girls.
3-4 good episodes in 2 seasons, offset by twice as many dreadful eye-rolling stinkers. In the end, they fundamentally changed all the characters from the S1-5 Buffy, and almost always it was for the worst. The spark, verve, style, wit, fun, humor, dignity and spirit were gone- replaced all to often with drudgery.
While Once More With Feeling was great, even that one had headscratcher or two- Xander caused it?!? Huh?
In any event, Season 1-5 were great, but in retrospect the series should have ended with The Gift.
[/hijack] I just re-watched “Normal Again” on DVD & in retrospect, the way they should have resolved that episode was to hand Buffy a mirror so she could have said, “This well-coiffed, made-up and groomed in a padded cell? Clearly this is far more unlikely than vampires and demons and therefore must be a hallucination. 'Bye, mom & dad.”
[/end hijack]
I thought the cell was the reality and the slayer stuff is the hallucination.
Season 6 was anticlimactic…it took too long to get going, and once it was there, I didn’t care anymore. Magic=drugs just didn’t work. But they started down that avenue, and kept going long past the time where someone should have stopped it. It wasn’t too dark, it was to blah… (still, there were some episodes I really liked.)
Season 7. Seemed like I was watching the same, exact episode every single week for weeks on end. (they’re discouraged, Buffy gives a pep-talk, they whine, Buffy kills something, they prep for the future…) But the big problem for me in S7 was the dropped threads. I suppose I got used to watching a show that would leave clues, small moments, indicators of items or ideas that would be important in the future. The characters (and we, ourselves,) might not be able to see how something was relevant, but later we could go back and add the hints together. When watching, you could also tell “_________” is going to matter. I remember there being a great many things that should have mattered in S7, but they were all loose, and never resolved, and it seems just forgotten about. It wasn’t woven as tightly as previous seasons.
And then there were the parts that were just plain dumb. (and the moments when characters did things that were not just plain dumb, but also out-of-character dumb, which was annoying.)
On the good side, Dawn was not annoying as anything during S7.
That was the purpose of the ending (which, BTW, was ripped off from the Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight story “Masks”): to sow those second thoughts.
Personally, watching the series (and all its spinoffs) become less fun if you believe that everything in it (including the stuff in L.A. where Buffy is not present) is a delusion on her part, but that’s just me. (Though someone pointed out that a shrink’s misuse of the term “schizophrenia” in that ep is a hint that the asylum is the delusion.)
Or that the writer doesn’t have much knowledge of psychology. 
Or maybe the shrink wasn’t on top of his game. After all, to err is human.
What I liked about Buffy was that the plot lines would constantly have me guessing about what would happen next, and then what would actually happen was always way cooler than what I had expected.
Until the last two seasons. In the last two seasons, especially season seven, what ended up happening was never as cool as I expected. Almost every plot twist left me thinking, “It would have been better if they’d done this instead.” Now, I have the same reaction to a lot of other shows, and I still watch 'em, but Buffy had had five years of being cooler than I could possibly imagine, so the bar for those last two years was a heckuva lot higher than it would be for almost any other property on TV.
I also want to add how much I hate hate hate the interpretation of the show that has Buffy as a mental patient, and everything in the show (both shows, actually) as nothing more than her hallucinations. It makes all the emotional interest I’ve developed in these characters totally meaningless. Which I recognize is wierd. I mean, being made-up characters in a fictional setting, they haven’t exsisted since the very first episode. Why should it bug me if it turns out they were made-up not by Joss Whedon, but by Buffy Summers? And yet, it does bug me. A lot.
This is also my main complaint w/ S7. The entire second half of the season really only needed to be five or six episodes, but was 11. Ugh. And The First really annoyed me. It’s suppossed to be the “ultimate evil,” but what can it do? NOTHING! I can look like dead people and talk to you! Can I touch you? NO! Can I look like someone alive so as to maybe trick you into doing something? NO! (unless they are one of two people in your group that have died at least once already.) It has to get an ubervamp and a crazy preacher to fight for it. That seems pretty weak. And then there was that whole issue with the oracle with the million eyes, “the first is here because Buffy is alive,” OK, great, set up what could be a cool storyline having to do with slayer energy, or something, but no…they didn’t even mention that after Anya and Giles met with it.
The only thing I like about season 7, really, was learning the slayer orgins. I, personally, think it’s kind of cool (and ironic) that a slayer’s power comes from demons.
Er, ah … hmm. Never thought about that before. Perhaps the First had some weather mojo ready to go?
The idea was to contain the ubervamps to the main school building. Robin and Faith blocked off the sewer access in that building. The three sets of two who stayed aboveground (Robin/Giles, Anya/Andrew, Dawn/Xander) were there to stop the horde from reaching another building with sewer access. What was dumb about the plan was opening the seal before Willow cast the Slayeration spell. That cost some lives.
Dumb, yes, but it didn’t cost any lives. I’m watching the final episode right now, and the potentials got their Slayer boost JUUUUST before the wave of demons hit.
Please insert the word “coulda” in between “that” and “cost.”