Kevin's Watch

Cagliostro wrote:I have and it is done by Joss. I enjoyed it in bits, but out of all of the Joss series that I have seen, is probably my least favorite. It does seem to become Valley Of The Lost Buffy Characters here and there though. I watched it on Netflix while I was watching Buffy, trying to watch them both in the order they were broadcast, for the most part. Which was fun at the times when they had the crossovers between Buffy and Angel. But it is a lot less fun in general than Buffy, with exception of when they meet up with Fred and the season following. But it suffered from too much darkness, and the usual thing from Joss of killing off all the likable characters. I'd say it is worth a watch, but don't expect much from it.

Ya gotta love Lorne, though. And the amazing character growth of Cordelia and Wesley.

It's true. Of the characters that were not on Buffy, Lorne and Fred were my favorites. I absolutely love Lorne, and am sad that his character had so very little to do in the last season or so. Cordelia's character certainly is given the shaft, but is much more likable than on Buffy, and I grew to active dislike Wesley by the end. And Spike was constant entertainment when he was on Angel.

I appear to have been misinformed. I was told that Joss just handed off the series Angel to another person to write and manage. Hmmm... guess I should have checked on that before believing everything I am told. Ok, I'll give it a try...

I recently got the Buffy box set and I'm watching through the whole series, because while I've seen most episodes before I saw a lot of them with gaps or out of sequence.

Into season 3 now. The first season is very badly dated, but the second holds up okay. I noticed that Buffy had three different birthdates in season 1, two of them even in consecutive shots: In "I Robot, You Jane", her birthdate is 1980 in the school records, 1979 in the copy of the same records shown to another student immediately after, and in "Nightmares" her tombstone shows 1981.

One thing that's different since last time I watched the show is that the ages of the actors are a little more noticable. Charisma Carpenter in particular looks way older than most other students at the school (she was 26 in season 1, playing a 16 year old) and it becomes very difficult to ignore her age by season 3.

(Shallow, but I also hadn't really noticed before just how much better looking she is than the rest of the cast.)

Getting to the actual meat of the show, what makes this work is the creators' willingness to be absolutely brutal to their characters. Season 2 in particular, with "Innocence", "Passion" and the finale in "Becoming, pt 2". They put these people through hell.

Then there's the little touches, like the way they subvert the usual alternate universe tropes in "The Wish" by killing off the character who knows the original reality - the protagonist of the episode - halfway through.

Almost done with season 4, and there's definately something different from the previous three seasons. Along with the setting change there's kind of a change in tone, too - even though things still happen that are painful for the characters, the series just doesn't seem as dark as it was.

The main villain isn't handled so well, either. Adam just seems to pop up randomly now and then, kill someone, beat someone up, then leave; he appears dealing with some demon or other without revealing his overall plans; or the demons are seen to be behaving oddly because of his influence. But it's all not very compelling. I think given his origins and personality, he would have been much better served if her was not covert, if he actually was quite visible and open about his activities and plans, but was just unstoppable because of his power. Rather than cryptic schemes, his apparent naivete as a "young" being, combined with his awareness and invulnerability, should have led him to just be totally honest and open, stating exactly what he planned. It would have meant very different schemes over the season but the same solution in the finale, and it would have been more interesting.

Let's see... Season 4 was, as said, disappointing. There are good episodes in there, but it doesn't quite hold together across the full season arc.

Season 5, on the other hand, is one of the best. Very strong season, good final enemy, good episodes in among there. The whole long arc about Joyce helps.

Season 6 is back to the sloppy and not-quite-holding-together. I think it's possibly the worst season. I get the themes, I get the character development - the whole purpose of the season is spelled out when Buffy lists the things she's been through to Giles in the finale. It's about coping with life. But I just don't think it's particularly well made. There are some fun episodes in the season, but only one great one. I didn't really enjoy the whole "magics as drugs" storyline in the first part of the season.

Though I do appreciate that the final confrontation was nothing to do with Buffy at all, and was all about Willow and Xander. That was well done.

I'm now on season seven, not quite half way through, and, well, wow: seven is a very strong season. The episodes individually are good, there's a strong connection to the main evil of the season, and the show's horror elements are stronger than ever in episodes like "Same Time, Same Place" and "Conversations with Dead People" (one of the creepiest moments on TV is when Dawn is bandaging her feet and trying to contact Buffy after the first attack of the poltergeist... and suddenly you realise her mother's body is on the couch in the background).

Strongest seasons: Two, Three, Five, Seven. Not sure what order to put them in. Three has a bit of nostalgia going for it - it's the classic format before Four changed everything up, and it's the season I first got into Buffy. It also has a strong, and different, villain. Two's Angel storyline was brilliant, but perhaps not done as well as it could have been.

I think if I had to rank the seasons, best to worst:
Three
Seven
Five
Two
One
Four/Six I can't decide

Best episodes: "Hush", "The Body", "Once More, With Feeling". Interestingly they're the three most unique episodes, which defy usual television conventions. They're also all Joss Whedon episodes.

I'm not sure why, but I suddenly got it into my head to watch "The Body" again today. Wow, what a tearjerker.

I completely agree. "The Body" definitely captured the complete inability to cope when something really awful and inexplicable happens in life.

Well, all these years as a detractor of the show, I finally broke down and watched it on Netflix.

First season. Really not very good. Monster of the week + bad writing + shaky acting/directing. If you like episodic shows (I do), then that's fine, but there's no real story and character development seems to occur by accident.

Second season. Getting better. Somewhere in Highlander: The Series territory. Still largely episodic, but we start to have reasons to care about the characters.

Third season. It's now a show worth watching. Sure, you have to have invested the time to get to know these characters, but it's not completely embarrassing for a grown man to say he's watched the show.

Fourth season. Dawson's Creek the College Years with vampires. And that's probably unfair to Dawson's Creek, which I also never watched. What the hell is this? OK, the characters are old enough to have sex (a lot), but damn. I think Riley quite literally put me to sleep once.

Fifth. OK, that's better. Why didn't I just skip that last season?

Sixth. Same as the the fifth, really, but with pretty poor choices for the villains. Too lazy to invent new characters, are we? The warlock guy would've been a much better choice, even if the whole poorly veiled parallel with drug addiction was incredibly cliched (takeaway: drugs are bad, mmkay, but it's OK for some people to do heroin occasionally if it's for a good reason).

Seventh. Pretty good, but kind of weird. Were they planning another season or just trying to end the show as awkwardly as possible? But hey, at least we finally have a black person on the show who isn't evil. Kind of dumb, stereotypical, and boring, but not evil. Good for sexing up. Anya who? Eh, well if losing an eye just makes you kind of gloomy for a single episode, what's one dead ex-fiancee? Girl power!

Yep, 3, 5, and 7 are the strongest seasons, and there's a lot of crap scattered among the good stuff. I keep saying, it's a good show with some great bits, but not a great show overall.