You have an interesting point. I hadn’t thought about that, but you may be right. Of course, we would have lost a lot of interesting episodes with Anya (most especially Selfless, which was excellent. D’Hoffryn really showed his cruelty by offing Halfrek). They could have brought Oz back as Xander’s boyfriend. I think Oz was a far better character than Anya for the most part.
Eh. Not buying it. Remember “like hearts behind plates of steel”? The Scoobies weren’t even sure if Turok-Han could be killed, and a few episodes later, the civilian fighters were dropping übervamps like they were freshly-risen vampire high-school girls.
That would be sir, sir:D. Andrew’s episode (I presume you mean Storyteller) and Jonathan’s (Superstar) were good–I’ll grant you that. I have no problem with their geekiness–I’m a geek myself. But Andrew was a whiny, immature, pathetic twit. I got thoroughly sick of him.
I watched it three years after my mother died, and it absolutely ripped me apart.
I first watched season seven as a boxing-day marathon. 22 episodes in 22 hours, after a full Christmas day. I rather liked the pacing . By the later episodes, my exhaustion paired nicely with the desperation of the characters. I highly recommend you do such a Buffy marathon some time.
Same here; a friend showed me that episode on DVD, and I ended up watching the whole series. Hard not to like Joss Whedon; we have similar strengths (character, dialogue and overall story arc) and weaknesses (plot mechanics) as writers (with the obvious additional strength, in his case, of being a workaholic).
Overall, I liked the series so much that it’s more efficient to talk about the few things that really bugged me. One was the overuse of misdirection. Sometimes misdirection is a good storytelling technique and ultimately enhances the viewer’s perspective; sometimes it’s just contrived, dishonest bullshit. Two examples:
In the episode in which Buffy briefly became involuntarily telepathic (I think it’s called “Earshot”), she “hears” a thought that makes her believe one of the students is going to massacre people at the school. (By coincidence, this episode was originally going to air right after the Columbine shootings; understandably, it was delayed.) Sure enough, we’re shown Jonathan, up in the school’s belltower, opening a case that contains a sniper rifle in pieces, which he starts assembling. Buffy confronts him, and we think the danger is past – but no; he was only going to shoot himself, so the real would-be killer is still at large.
What makes the misdirection dishonest is the ridiculous contrivance of having a character decide to commit suicide up in a tower, using * a freaking sniper rifle with a scope*. I don’t know if Jonathan’s arms were even long enough to have shot himself with that rifle. It was a stupid plot device.
Throughout Season 7, people are hassled by the First, which can appear as various dead people. It’s an illusion; there’s no physical form.
After Giles returns from England, the gang come to suspect that he may actually be a projection of the First, and that the real Giles may have been killed. This is some weeks after his return, and it means that for all that time, even though they’ve been friends for years, not one of the other characters has had any physical contact with Giles, or else they’d know he was the real thing. Not a hug, a handshake, a friendly reacharound, nothing.
But these are just flaws in what overall was a remarkable achievement.
I agree. When I first saw that ep and Jonathan confessed he was going to kill himself I said out loud to my girlfriend who was watching with me,
“What!? Why the fuck would he go into a bell tower with a sniper rifle just to kill himself!?”
It may have been the only gun he had access to. Sunnydale was never really shown as being awash in a sea of guns and Johnathan was never really shown as being the smartest cookie… And if you intend to commit suicide a gun is a gun, regardless of whether or not you need to use your big toe to pull the trigger.
Yeah, I thought that was pretty ridiculous too. The writers were clearly working hard for that payoff (which turned out to be worth nothing more than a throwaway joke in my opinion.) I’ve seen shooting scripts from that part of season 7, in the period from Giles’ arrival till the ‘time of suspicion’, and there are several directions to reinforce the idea that nobody could touch Anthony and he could not touch any objects. “Buffy does not hug Giles hello or even shake his hand.” “Buffy opens the door, Giles follows her through, and then Buffy goes back and closes the door while someone else is talking.” “Giles asks Xander to carry somebody’s book out to the car, even though he’ll be going to the car himself in just a minute.” That sort of thing. And none of it makes sense because Giles was the real Giles.
The Scoobies didn’t. And yet Xander, Anya, Giles, Wood, Dawn, and even freakin’ *Andrew * each managed to off a few ubervamps.
The Giles-the-First thing was stupid, and above all else it was stupid because ultimately it was played for a (pretty weak) joke and dropped. Actually, my second biggest issue with S7 is the misuse of Giles. He was inexplicably assholish for much of the season, and I hated his strained relationship with Buffy.
My *biggest * issue with S7 is that I think the show fell into the plot-drives-the characters trap. Everyone behaved oddly, and mostly badly, and certainly not as though they were friends. The Scoobs appeared to have devolved into co-workers. The only character who still seemed (to me) to care about everyone on a *personal * level was Xander.
I think the show should have ended with season 5. Don’t get me wrong, season 6 had some really good episodes…“Once More With Feeling”, “Tabula Rasa”, “Normal Again”. Season 7, I didn’t like. But Season 5 was just a good way to end it. The slayer is a tragic figure. She’s picked, randomly, to fight vampires and other supernatural evils, and she fights them until she dies. Buffy’s death at the end of Season 5 was a triumph. She died saving the world (again), and it was a good place to end the series.
I also agree with Skipmagic. I hated what they did to Spike.
It looks like DianaG already got this one, but it needs to be reinforced. A healthy chunk of the season was based on that first übervamp being pretty-near indestructable. It kicked the snot out of Buffy, who has been a Slayer for close to 7 years and has been training with the best in the biz, multiple times. Even her slayer strength was inadequate for driving a stake through its breastplate into its heart (remember when she thought stakes couldn’t kill them?). Then, all of a sudden, Dawn (an ordinary 14-year-old girl who has had a few months of combat training) and Andrew (a wimp) are killing the things?
Overall, I’m a huge fan of the Buffy series. It was great. But there were a few little things that really bugged me. One was the vampire fighting style. Wouldn’t they tend to grapple and bite rather than punch and kick? And several of the demons and vampires made me think back to Walker, Texas Ranger, where every single bad guy in Dallas seems to be a martial-arts expert.
The obvious(?) answer is this: Since all vamps are descended from the original demon, each has a piece of said demon activating and powering them. This demon, being outside time and space, had a thing for Bruce Lee films. Thus, every vampire sired comes preprogrammed with all the right Chop-Socky moves. They just don’t have the muscle memoriy to use the moves perfectly yet, which gives The Slayer an edge.
(bolding mine)There’s a loose end I was hoping they’d clear up. Is it random? How are potential slayers chosen? When a slayer dies, how is it decided which potential becomes the next slayer? If there’s only one slayer, who’s dealing with the other hellmouth (the one in Cleveland that Giles tells us about in the series finale)?
One thing about season 7 and the übervamps is that they finally started bringing the series back around to Buffy being the vampire slayer. I mean, how many of the season villians were vampires? Only season 1 (the Master) and 2 (Spike). From then on, the “big bads” of Season 3 (the Mayor), 4 (Adam), 5 (Glory), 6 (the nerd gang), and 7 (the First) weren’t vampires at all.
I know you can’t change the name of a show in mid-run, but wasn’t it really more like Buffy the demon slayer? That would sound better than Buffy the god slayer (although Giles actually administered the coup de grace), Buffy the nerd slayer (well, she didn’t actually kill them), Buffy the cyborg slayer (Adam), Buffy the robot slayer (Ted), Buffy the hellhound slayer, or Buffy the bringer slayer. She almost became Buffy the slayer slayer at one point. Hmmm.
I’m still dejected about never having seen someone who lived up to the title: if our heroine had been bitten on the neck and changed, we could’ve seen a literal vampire slayer like we were promised in the credits. As it is, she’s just “Buffy, Slayer of the Vam-PIRES”.
But that was only under the influence of the boy, so it really doesn’t count, does it? It was only her nightmare come to life.
Willow: “Personal question?”
Xander: “Yeah, shoot.”
Willow: “When Buffy was a vampire, you weren’t still, like, attracted to her, were
you?”
Xander: “Willow, how can you–I mean, that’s really bent! She was…grotesque!”
Willow: “Still dug her, huh?”
Xander: “I’m sick. I need help.”
Willow: “Don’t I know it.”
With Spike, I never understood why, after he lost the chip but before he got his soul returned, why he was “in love” with Buffy. Vampires are demons riding around in the shell of the person that was bitten. And even with the chip, I can understand Spike being somewhat domesticated, but still not in love. With the chip, he was just a demon that couldn’t act normally. Is there any explanation for this?
. By the later episodes, my exhaustion paired nicely with the desperation of the characters. I highly recommend you do such a Buffy marathon some time.
