Sorry, “are you for real” struck me as the first detour down the personal path. If you meant it differently–if the “you” was not meant to refer to me, and if the “for real” was not meant to refer to my mental state or motivations, then I take back my line about your being rude. Only, if I responded to someone in a discussion about a friggin TV show with “Are you for real?” I’d expect that to be taken personally. YMMV. (But as long as I’ve given you something personal to focus on, instead of responding to the actual content of the post, I guess I’ve served your purpose. Dang, I’m so easily baited these days.)
Justin - But you see, it’s still just a personal opinion (even though I totally agree with you!).
Season 6 is very polarizing, let’s just leave it at that. If I hadn’t been watching it with my wife, I would have stopped watching halfway through the season. Marti Noxon is on my permanent shit-list.
Look, point is, we BOTH know that opinions differ about the last couple seasons. Mock astonishment with “are you for real?” doesn’t really move the discussion forward. Let’s both try to keep this a little drier, emotional-outburst-wise.
You could do this. However, if you do, you will miss the single greatest season of any show in television history.
And that’s a fact. I can prove it with math.
As bad as I think it was, Season 6 is at least partially redeemed by “Once More, With Feeling,” “Tabula Rasa,” and “Normal Again.” The last one there being one of the more subversive hours of television I can remember.
Miller, I forgot you are one of “those people.” I also don’t remember if you are a 'shipper as well, but if you are, I’ll bet you were a Bangeler rather than a Spuffy-ite, like all decent folks.
One, two, three, four
Let’s have us a Holy war!
Are you for real???
[spoiler]Xander leaving Anya with no prior warning is a huge plot hole as is his personal involvement in summoning Sweet. He’s not above having someone else perform a spell for him, but doing it himself is not something Xander can do.
Opinion or not, there are some concrete things about season 6 that are just wrong in the context of the rest of the show and Angel.[/spoiler]
Jeez. It was a play on words. Get over it. You said it was realler. I made a joke asking “Are you for real?” Did you really miss that?
JB, you’ve never wasted any undue politeness on me. I apologize if I assumed your tone was the same as the one you often address me with. Let’s both call this a starting-over moment, shall we?
Oh and, totally disagree. Everything about Xander’s character leading up to that moment made it seem perfectly plausible to me. Even inevitable. You and I have obviously had different experiences with people, JB. I’d’ve thought the outcome you expected would’ve been fairy-tale false. Again, that item is another sign of the show’s maturity and willingness to deal with difficult, complex issues. And the second item is perfectly plausible too. “The child is the father of the man,” or something. So Xander was still the Xander he always was, but he’d grown and changed too. In good ways and bad ways. Kinda like . . . all of us! I have zero problem with him still being unable to overcome the kind of fear and doubt that led him to make that tragic decision, and I have zero problem with him also having enough grown up confidence–with unimportant things, at least–to attempt to do alone what he’d previously not attempted.
Some people have complained these characters did not change enough; you seem to complain they changed too much. Ain’t humanity messy?
[spoiler]The systematic dismantling of every meaningful relationship is the one thing I hate the most about Buffy’s later seasons. There is nothing organic about it and there are few clues the relationships are in trouble until the exact moment they break.
The only breakup that was set up in any kind of real way was Riley’s sendoff, which is ignored because everyone seems to hate Riley because he’s not Angel.[/spoiler]
I have only seen Once More With Feeling the one time, but my impression was that Xander was lying about having summoned Sweet, to cover for Dawn. Is that a crazy interpretation?
No. I am, in fact, a highly sophisticated hologram.
But I still think that season 4 of Angel made the entire run of Buffy into an also-ran in it’s own created universe.
It’s not a crazy interpretation, but it’s the only evidence used to show Xander is unhappy with Anya. Without Xander summoning Sweet, him leaving her comes completely out of left field as the whole point of his character previously was that he was fiercely loyal to his friends.
The best thing about FIREFLY ending when it did is that Whedon didn’t have enough time to do this to that set of characters.
I don’t know that I’ve ever seen an episode of a TV show that I hated as much as I hate “Normal Again,” to the extent that I have to actively remind myself that it’s just a TV show, and that it’s dumb to get that worked up about it.
I’m not a 'shipper one way or the other. I do think that:
Buffy and Angel was a better relationship than Buffy and Spike but I don’t have a deep emotional investment in one over the other. I like the former largely because of the context in which it occurred - Buffy was simply a better television show during that relationship. By the time the second pairing came up, the show had decayed over all.
Of course, my perspective is a bit altered because I didn’t start watching the show regularly until season 5, so for me, Riley was Buffy’s “first” love.
Not that I’m putting him forward as the better than the other two.
Of everyone she was ever with in the series, he was the least worst. It was still for the best that it didn’t last, but the other two relationships were in no way healthy, and I don’t get the hate for him.
But brilliant in the way it totally freshened the show for me: made me have to go back in my mind and reprocess everything that had happened over 5+ years in a totally new light. It imparted a new sense of doubt where complacency–and hence boredom–was creeping around the cracks trying to worm its way in. Only X-Files has succeeded so well in completely negating everything that came before, but with utter believability. And its final result was to put Buffy back in control of her own destiny. Another major growing up moment: she took responsibility for her own choices.
[spoiler]I think a lot of people didn’t really like his characterization. First, he was too boring. Then, in an effort to make him darker, he started whoring himself out to vampires. It seemed kind of…inorganic, I guess. Like the writers were saying “let’s make Riley darker!” without taking his character into consideration.
Personally, I liked Riley okay, and found his story arc to verge on the tragic. It’d be hard for ANYONE to date Buffy at that time period, when she’s just getting over the drama and trauma of her relationship with Angel. No one could measure up, really.[/spoiler]
I don’t hate Reilly, but he was filler. His only purpose was to show that Buffy could, tragically, never have a normal life. The other relationships were not healthy in the short run, but they helped Buffy mature. She learned a lot more from those relationships than she did from Reilly.
There’s a fascinating article this book, where a bunch of psychologists and psychoanalysts–of varying stripes and schools–examine Buffy as a psychological subject. Search the author name “Carol Poole” for a fascinating treatise on what Buffy was going through with the second relationship, and how what seems like such a horrible choice was part of a necessary process. I’m sure it won’t be convincing to everyone who reads it, but it made perfect sense to me.
Cordy? The character Cordelia Chase does not appear in Season 4 of Angel.