Tuesday, July 05, 2011

Buffy Rewatch Week 27: Spoiler Forum

And here is the place where you can discuss this week's episodes -- both Buffy and Angel -- without fear of spoiling it for anyone else. Enjoy!
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5 comments:

Colleen/redeem147 said...

Willow assumes familiar rather than pet. Magic addiction kicking in? Then she says to Miss Kitty, "You have a catnip problem."

Buffy told Angel in LA that she loved Riley - but she never told Riley.

Buffy is being the commander - a la season 7, where there will be a lot more troops.

I love the slo-mo Spike fighting - foreshadowing of the hero he will become.

5 July 2011 at 21:05
Tom D. said...

I just rewatched Blind Date, which I think is an excellent and seemingly little-discussed episode that does a great job of developing some of the main ideas and plots that are going to be important to Angel (the show) going forward.

Holland Manners was, to me, the most compelling of the Wolfram & Hart lawyers, until Lilah eventually came into her own as Wesley's foil in season 3-4. I love his urbane reasonableness. Like many well-written villains, he has beliefs and a worldview that actually make sense -- from a certain perspective, which is the perspective Lindsey ends up adopting by the end of the episode.

And I just love the plot with Lindsey very nearly becoming either a good guy or a martyr, but in the end, coming back to the dark side. The cliche ending would have been for Lindsey to be morally redeemed and then die. The opposite result is far more compelling, both in this episode and in the future possibilities that it creates. Lindsey will keep being an interesting character right up to the end of the show.

And the ending with Lindsey sitting in the big office at Wolfram & Hart, contemplating how the world looks from there, wonderfully foreshadows season 5, in which all the protagonists will be operating from a similar (though not the same) perspective.

I also really like the exchange between Lindsey and Angel, wherein Lindsey is ranting about how he was shaped by his terrible childhood and Angel pretends to fall asleep, then says, "did you get to the part where you're evil?" This is one of a series of great moments where this show explores the question of what evil actually is.

Possibly part of the reason why I like the law-firm stuff in Angel so much is because I'm a lawyer. A few years ago I had to make a career choice vaguely resembling the one that Lindsey faces in Blind Date. Making a law firm the key villain was, to me, one of the most inspired choices that Joss et al. made.

7 July 2011 at 02:15
Tom D. said...

New Moon Rising. I don't think I can say anything rational or analytical about the Willow/Oz/Tara stuff. The "extra flamey" ending is, I think, the most perfect romantic scene I've ever seen.

The episode also contains Riley's best moment: "No, sir -- I'm an anarchist!" with the concluding punctuation provided by a punch to the jaw of his commanding officer. Too bad the rest of his arc will be a betrayal of that promise. He says to Buffy that he's glad he finally knows where he stands. Turns out he is still much more confused than he realizes.

Also interesting that the event that triggers this outburst from Riley is the military torturing a prisoner. It's almost prescient, considering that season 4 happened before 9/11 (as Colleen/redeem already observed in the non-spoiler thread). It makes me wonder if there's something to be said about how the military gets portrayed in the TV show (which was mostly pre-9/11 and entirely pre-Abu Ghraib) and in season 8 (which started a few years later). But I think that ultimately, whatever season 8 might have wanted to say about the military or the so-called war on terror didn't really come through -- the military ended up just serving as a generic goon squad for Twilight rather than doing anything interesting.

7 July 2011 at 03:35
Page48 said...

Robin 'Ethan Rayne' Sachs surfaced (ever so briefly) in the first episode of "Torchwood: Miracle Day". Hopefully he'll be back for more as the season unfolds.

Of course, 'Ethan' also had a memorable one-off on "Alias" back in the day. Auf Wiedersehen.

9 July 2011 at 20:57
Unknown said...

This is one rewatch batch back, but, in Superstar I couldn't help but think that in that scene where Spike is insulting/taunting "Betty", as he calls her, there is more chemistry between them than in all her scenes with Riley put together! I'm not a Spuffy, but I can totally understand why the writers kept drawing him into a larger role, and I can understand why fans felt they should hook up. I also love how the writers keep having to remind the viewers Spike is EVIL!!!

12 July 2011 at 13:25

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