Edward Copeland's Tangents

i'm with you all the way on season three; i doubt i'll ever love a tv show as fervently as i did 'buffy' back in its faith days. it features so many of my favourite episodes ('doppelgangland', 'lover's walk', 'the wish') and it introduced me to hotness that is eliza dushku

it was all downhill from there for me, save for occasional highlights - season four's 'hush', season five's 'the body' (the best hour of television ever) and season six's 'once more with feeling'

and i try not to think about season seven
 

i love buffy so much on that i'm on my third run through of the entire series.

you're so so wrong about season 4. It's pretty darn brilliant ---especially in the ways it handles the total identity chaos that greets the first year of college.

and HUSH is so impossible to beat. Well, except for by the other three or four best episodes
 

I've never heard that about her and found nothing in a cursory Google search to back that up. Even still, I'm a big Dubya/Iraq war opponent but unless a piece of entertainment itself contains an explicit political slant, I've never understood people disliking movies, music, TV or whatnot based on what the actors might think in private life. I would have thoroughly disagreed with John Wayne on most things but that doesn't prevent me from enjoying some of his movies. Besides, Buffy ended its run before Iraq even started.
 

Actually, if this were true, why would she have appeared in this movie I found described?

"Sunday saw one of the most egregious attacks in the form of ’Southland Tales’ by Richard Kelly, the director behind 2001’s cult movie ’Donnie Darko’.
In his new film, a satire set in a dystopian future Los Angeles, broad parallels are drawn between fascist pre-WWII Germany and the United States under a Bush government that holds onto power well into 2008.
A star-heavy cast moves the story along as it takes scattershot aim at a range of targets, particularly the war in Iraq, Big Brother-style spying on US citizens, the US dependence on energy and the fusion between celebrity and politics.
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson plays a big-name actor tied to a political family who tries to unravel a plot involving him travelling into the future and back and trying to stop Armageddon. And any resemblance to a certain California governor who starred in ’The Terminator’ is coincidental.
Also spotted is ’Buffy’ star Sarah Michelle Gellar, putting in a delightful turn as a marketing-savvy porn star, and pop singer Justin Timberlake who treats the sometimes befuddled audience to a music clip underlining the damage the US military has taken in Iraq."
 

I too bought Dixie Chicks albums after their problems and liked them a lot. Of course regardless of Stallone's politics, not watching any of his movies after Rambo would have been a wise idea anyway.
 

raenelle,

i share your political feelings but won't you be cutting off WAY too many entertainers if you take this stance. I mean for, what, 2 years or so there was uninformed jingoism everywhere.

i still shudder sometimes that the media is acting all high and mighty about the mistakes now when they were helping to cause them by shutting their mouths and doing the rah rah bit too.
 

Buffy is great. I don't think it's the GREATEST TV show ever, but it's probably one of my favorites. When it was on, I anxiously anticipated it every week.

I disagree that season four is completely worthless -- like season six, it plays better on DVD, where you can minimize the Riley stuff. To me, seasons seven and one were the show's clumsiest. The former because of the uncertainty about plotlines and whether the show was ending and the latter because they were still figuring out the tone (a common thing to do on shows).

Good write-up! It makes my plans to do the same seem needless.
 

I'm curious. I caught up with Angel late as well (mainly because I knew I had to follow James Marsters when I read that he was going over there). I thought the show was fine, but it never grabbed me the way Buffy did. If I had to pick, I guess I'd say I liked Season 4 the best, but I don't think I've seen many Angel episodes more than once (unlike Buffy where I have seen just about all of them at least twice, even in Season 4). What's your collective takes on Angel?
 

Angel's all right. It's probably the least of Whedon's TV efforts, but the final season is extremely good. The show got better as it went along, I think, and they figured out that they didn't have it in them to do a supernatural detective show.
 

'angel' always suffered from the "it's not as good as buffy" curse; plus it completely sucked the life out of the character of cordelia, expected us to care about dull characters like gunn and fred, and really it hit rock-bottom when it introduced angel's son.

that being said, it did have some kick-ass individual episodes and it's finale was everything buffy's lame final episode should have been.
 

I'm like Ed, I came to the Buffy party after the festivities had started and a friend of mine obsessed with the show brought me up to speed by loaning me some VHS recordings.

I have Seasons 1-3 in my DVD collection...and that's about as far as it goes with me. The beauty of Buffy was the whole "high school is a dangerous place...literally" concept and with graduation and college in season 4, it just seemed to have played itself out.
 

Sarah Michelle Gellar--I don't know her politics, and the impression I get is that it's more notable in its absence than any discernible presence. I'd guess she made that remark out of sheer thoughtlessness, or out of some hazy grasp of politics. More to the point I think would be the auteur's politics--in this case, writer/producer/director Whedon. He's as blue as they come, is my impression.

Yes, thought Season 4 was dull, liked 5 and especially the finale, where all the disparate elements throughout the season(the hammer, the robot, the mind-stealing trick) came together, liked 7 and 1 okay, loved 2 for Angelus, 3 for, yes, the Mayor and Faith, and 6 for the complexity. Sure--the Big Bad wasn't the unholy trio (three stooges is more like it; it was only by the end that their menace became really serious, almost by accident), but their own inner demons.

That song that plays in the finale of the finale of Season 6, incidentally, is a prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi. Often sung in hymn form in Christian or even Catholic schools. Interesting Whedon should pick that.
 

Your pick of Season 6 is particularly a good call, Ed. As much as I enjoy Seasons 2 and 3, the show's sixth season---which you defend beautifully---encapsulates a lot of what I love about it as a whole: in many ways, it shows these characters grappling with the trials of adulthood, and not always doing it in the most positive ways. There was one episode during that season, "Normal Again," that was marvelous but particularly difficult to watch: Buffy was given this curse that made her dream up this alternate reality that felt so real that it, for a short time, convinced her that she actually wasn't the Slayer, and that her friends were imaginary beings hindering her ability to become a regular girl again. Its climactic moments found our heroine tying up her friends and throwing them into the basement for a demon to eat up. Season 6 was dark, yes, but it was also powerful, funny, resonant, and moving, and the messy Season 7 wasn't a patch on it (although I did like its finale).

By the way, I don't know if you caught this, but there's one moment in Season 6 that also references, both directly and indirectly, an episode from another show's Season 6: in "Life Serial," when Buffy is trapped in repeating time until she successfully sells a mummy hand, the geek trio actually makes mention of "Monday," the sixth season X-Files episode in which Mulder is trapped in a Monday that won't end until he somehow prevents a bank robbery/explosion from happening. Coincidence?
 

I didn't catch that X-Files reference. That is interesting. Also anonymous, I didn't mean to imply that I was underestimating Buffy fans, I was just pointing out that I didn't catch that the the beginning and end of the Amy the rat story happened to fall in my two favorite seasons until I rewatched them.
 

Gosh, Willow's addiction to magic WAS just like drug addiction. Amazing! How subtle of them.
 

Blogger please!

Edward and Todd how can you be so far off the mark re: Season Four? Yes it's the least compelling in terms of season-long structure - something the writers have long acknowledged - but it contains such a high percentage of the show's all-time most enjoyable episodes that that alone should render it worthwhile. Have you watched 'Beer Bad' lately? It's not an insipid anti-booze after-school special like everyone thinks the first time around, it's a hilarious anti-booze after-school spoof. And it contains one of the show's most compelling monologues about adult sexuality - by Parker, the cad whom Buffy sleeps with early in her freshman year. Stronger than you remember: 'Something Blue', 'Superstar'(!!), Angel's return in 'The Yoko Factor', the two Oz episodes ('Wild At Heart'/'New Moon Rising'), the two-part Faith arc (especially Whedon's harrowing body-switching episode), the surprisingly heavy opener 'The Freshman', and especially the huge one-two ending, 'Primeval'/'Restless'. Yes, 'Primeval' is awesome: big emotional payoffs, big action, the dual duels with Adam and Forrest that redeem every lame moment those characters had. And everyone (but Todd!) forgets 'Restless', which is as impressive as the musical. Then there's Alyson Hannigan's complex work, Tony Head and Nick Brendon at (easily) their funniest, Seth Green playing lots of new notes, Amber Benson finding her way into the role of Tara...It's overshadowed by Season Five (which is better in every way than year six, like a direct sequel to Season Three in its balance of emotional payoffs and mythology), but Season Four is far stronger than people seem to want to believe.

But your big mistake, sirs, is to discount Blucas as Riley Finn. A lot of people seem to get hung up on the fact that Captain America is vastly less interesting than Angel/Angelus (and his opposite number in Season Four, James Marsters's intermittently-useless but always entertaining Spike), but Blucas actually turned in a solid performance in a very subtly-written part. Riley really came into his own early in Season Five - see the lovely monologue he delivers Xander at the end of Jane Espenson's characteristically funny/earnest 'The Replacement', with its knockout ending - but by the middle of Season Four he was playing a lot of different sides of the Nice Guy With a Chip on His Shoulder, really strong stuff. That performance came to a head at the end of 'New Moon Rising' - 'I'm an anarchist,' one of the most telling lines of the whole season. I suspect that some people piss on his performance because it's comparatively un-showy, certainly next to Brendon's broad intuitive comedy and Gellar/Hannigan/Head's finely metered performances; nonetheless, his character's place on the show was vital, and Blucas really did make the most of it. The role wasn't underwritten, it was just what it was: temporary but substantive in a merely human way.

And let's add: Blucas was excellent in his Season Six encore, nicely capturing the tension of being both attracted to one's ex and self-righteous about her foibles yet authentically trying to move on. Partially because of the emotional disequilibrium of that 'Life is the Big Bad' year I think it was easier for people to enjoy his presence. Yet it was all an extension of his earlier performance - cf. 'Buffy vs. Dracula' where Riley faces down Spike in his crypt, his old 'anti-demon bigotry' tendencies flaring up a little. Angel was a perv and a half, and Spike was worse; Riley's presence really pointed up the progressivism of the show, and bringing him around to the Scoobies' point of view at a natural pace was one of the writers' least noticed triumphs.

Also: Anya in the bunny suit. QED.
 

If you skip Season 4, Willow will just suddenly... be gay.
 

Of course Riley did end up having a thing for vampires feeding off him.
 

Hey, I'm late to the party, but as someone who is just recovering from both "Buffy" and, even more so, "Firefly" obsession, I had to chime in....Season 4 was pretty good. Season Six, less so. So, I intone, "nyah."

And get busy with the Firefly. (I mean watch it.)

I do want to kind of chide some folks here slightly for making any kind of artistic judgement based on actor's -- or any other creative person's -- putative political views. The fact of the matter is that creative people in general and the actors and writers on Joss Whedon shows in particular are all over the map on politics. Really, all over the map, I gather, actually.

Regardless, if you try to view everything through that prism, you're going to miss a lot of good stuff. I'm a pretty outspoken liberal, but if I refused to enjoy stuff by rightwingers that would mean no Dostoyevsky, no Howard Hawks, no Merle Haggard or John Ford 50% of the time....
 

Raenelle,

While I probably agree more or less completely with your take on Iraq, I have to say that it's wrongheaded to dismiss the show based on something vaguely jingoistic you vaguely remember the lead actress or her embarrassing husband saying some time after the show's run had ended. Especially if you liked Firefly. It's your loss.

I agree with the thing about Anya in the bunny suit. I started watching the show toward the end of season 1, and never stopped. It had its weak moments, but even in the weakest episodes, even with season 7, there was always something there to remind me who these characters were and why I loved them.