Two to Go (Douglas Petrie)/Grave (David Fury)
I’m about to commit heresy. Alyson Hannigan isn’t very good as Dark Willow. The terrible dialogue that she was saddled with didn’t help her. “Get off, superbitch” (a throwback to “This Year’s Girl”) and “Cause I’ve turned pro” are just two of the clunkers littering the script.
I have no idea whether it was AH’s choice or the directors’ or the showrunners’ to have her so one-note as if she is controlling a great rage but unfortunately she appears as if she is suppressing nothing. It’s as if there is zilch going on under the surface: it’s all shallow water (a puddle even) and highly disappointing. We get a glimpse of the Hannigan magic, and what she can do, when she collapses into tears and into Xander’s arms.
“Villains” now seems a fantastic episode compared with these two. The opportunity for an exploration of Willow’s character was generally passed up for laughable sequences such as Willow tearing down the police station (and screaming) and riding on top of the cab of a truck. The scene between Buffy and Willow at Rack’s is the notable exception except that Willow is more perceptive about Buffy than she is about herself.
Willow murders Rack (though interestingly what she does to him which kills him doesn’t kill Giles when she does it to him) and nobody cares. Unless I missed the note informing us that Rack isn’t human, she kills a man and nobody cares.
Talking of not caring, I really really don’t care about Spike and his challenges to get - - - a soul - - - and not what Buffy has coming to her. A gigantic yawn of a mislead which kept getting in the way of the main story.
[Discussion question: did Spike ruin Buffy?]
The special effects in Buffy are generally cheesy but that’s no problem for someone raised on Blake’s 7. However, the spire (aka temple) at the random bluff we have never heard of before was tacky and off-putting. Well, not completely off-putting so that the scene between Willow and Xander isn’t beautiful and moving.
It was good of Willow to take time off from ending the misery of all of us to give Buffy something to do in the finale.
One of my other disappointments with Buffy is the complete failure to do something interesting with Dawn. No wonder folk don’t like her when she is written so implausibly and immaturely. The promise we see as she fights the demons alongside Buffy was sadly not capitalised on.
I liked Anya and Xander’s conversation:
I care if you live or die, Xander. I'm just not sure which one I want.
Again with the comfort. Look, we both know things might get ugly at, uh, Wiccapalooza. And if it gets really bad...
Let me guess. You'll propose?
The fight between Willow and Buffy was no Faith/Buffy face-off, which was unsatisfactory.
Giles’ appearance at the end of “Two to Go” was the bestest thing eva. However, as Andy put it, the laughter from Giles when he hears the summation of S6 from Buffy is a bit rich because we had to sit through it and it wasn’t actually funny.
Andy reckons S6 isn’t so bad and thinks my sad fannishness (not that he called it that) is the reason why I don’t like it. I’m not so sure that he is right because there is so much fabulous Tara stuff in S6 and I still don’t like it as a whole. I have no desire to watch episodes like “Smashed”, “Wrecked”, “Gone”, “Doublemeat Palace” and “As You Were” ever again and I think that is the worst thing I can say about Buffy.
I’m going to try very hard while watching S7 (alongside Angel S4) to be positive. I will be banning the words “I don’t care” because ultimately this a TV show created by Joss Whedon and, honestly, despite what I also say about Dollhouse, I do care.
I too feel like I'm a bad person saying it, but I also hate Alyson Hannigan's acting choices as Dark Willow. I can only figure that AH didn't want to retread Vamp Willow's gleeful evilness and since Willow finally breaks down with an outpouring of emotion that Dark Willow was meant to be suppressing all emotion. But, yes, she seems to be suppressing nothing. The only scene in which I find her to be really creepy is when she is threatening to turn Dawn back to energy.
You know, I'd never thought about Willow killing Rack as her killing a human. I think I figured he was a demon, though we were never told as much. And as for the discrepancy between her killing Rack and not killing Giles with the same procedure, I think I've fanwanked that because Giles' magic was a bit of an overload for her, Willow didn't manage to drain all of his power. I mean, he seems to be able to tell what's going on with Willow as he lies dying in the Magic Box, so I assume that he retained a little of his borrowed magic.
I have trouble finding the yellow crayon scene "beautiful and moving." I think that AH and Nick Brendon are wonderful in it, and I do find Willow's collapse into sobs heartbreaking, but the dialogue is such trite, well, shit. I can't help but roll my eyes a couple of times.
Though you're right that it's no smackdown between Buffy and Faith, I like the fight between Willow and Buffy mainly because I enjoy seeing Willow beat up Buffy. Buffy really annoys me at this point in the series and, apparently, I'm petty.
Giles laughing at the synopsis of season six feels really disrespectful to me. It's like the writers saying, "HA! Can you believe we actually got people to watch this shit?" I dislike Andrew making fun of Buffy's tendency to speechify in "Storyteller" for the same reason.
I disagree with Andy. Fan or not, season six is not very good. I only ever feel compelled to rewatch "Tabula Rasa" and "Once More With Feeling." Two out of 22 episodes having rewatchability is not good odds.
Spike was inextricably involved in Buffy's downslide, I do believe. He is the first character chronologically speaking that stayed around long past his expiration date, a problem that plagued the show in its later seasons.
Oh heck - I'd better defend my position. I still maintain that as an overall story arc, Willow going bad was not that poorly handled, and the bits that tied in with that Willow/Tara and even, to a lesser extent, Anya/Xander for the most part worked. Maybe it was because the bits that I remembered (and was annoyed by) most vividly from last time around seemed less consequential (Buffy/Spike/sex and Willow and her magic-habit and visits to the magic-den for her magic-fix).
Hmm...maybe I'm the "fanwanker"
However Hazel omitted to mention that in the discussion that followed, S6 did come in in 6th place.
Poor Andy.
My arguments with season six are articulated most simply: 1) the writers didn't make Willow's slide into darkness the least bit relatable or interesting and 2) watching characters you like kick themselves in the stomach for weeks on end is not entertaining.
I'm not saying that characters should stay minty fresh and wholesome as apple pie all the time. But when they do go darker, I think it's good writing to make the audience sympathize with the character and even understand the character's actions on some level. A good example of such writing is Buffy trying to kill Faith in "Graduation Day, Part 1." Should Buffy be trying to kill a human? No, but the audience understands why she is and it's interesting to watch. With Buffy sleeping with Spike, I think the writers did manage to make the audience understand her self-destructive behavior and feel a little sorry for Buffy. However, with Willow the writers do not encourage the audience to sympathize with her past a certain point, so short of creating empathy for her, the writers should have made her descent into darkness interesting. And they FAIL. I like the creepy spell in “Bargaining” and I can see why Willow is trying so hard to bring Buffy back, even though her stabbing the fawn disturbs me. And even though I don't like her attitude, her confrontation with Giles in “Flooded” is interesting and even promising. I'm probably more forgiving than Hazel, but I even feel a little sorry for Willow at the end of “Tabula Rasa” when she's crying in the bathroom while Tara packs her things to move out because I've been in that place where I've lost something I loved because I screwed up so completely. But then her abuse of magic becomes a cumbersome analogy for addiction and I really stop caring. In my opinion, Willow's overabundant use and increasing misuse of magic had more to do with her struggling with how to handle power than magic being anything like a drug. There were many ways that the writers could have made her struggle with magic come out of her established character traits (i.e. she's always been a fixer, she felt powerless in high school) rather than resorting to a very literal (read: BORING) and frankly shallow depiction of addiction. Granted, I'll never know for sure, but I think that if her struggle with magic had been more personal and I could see pieces of the Willow that I had known for five years in there somewhere then I would have been more involved in her struggle with magic.
And all of that, the self-destructive magic- and man-using goes on for WAY TOO LONG. Pain does make you like people, but no one enjoys seeing people they like in pain, especially when they are causing it for themselves.
(And just to clarify, I mean "fanwank" as in "To fill in plot holes or explain away lapses in continuity in fictional works by coming up with (often convoluted) explanations." I know that "wank" has a, uh, certain connotation in Britain that I am not intending here, though I suppose the two meanings are not mutually exclusive.)
Huh, I always thought the problem I had with AH's delivery was that the dialogue was so awful, even she couldn't sell it.
I strongly agree with your comments on this episode. The Buffy/Willow fight wasn't interesting, I didn't give a damn about Spike (and yeah, I think the way the show used him had a lot to do with its declining quality in later seasons), and Dawn really was wasted.
I haven't watched these episodes in a very long time. The last time I made my way through the series, I stopped after Seeing Red. Yes, I was one of those people who fell hard for Tara and didn't want the show without here, but I also knew that there were almost no decent episodes left. A few of the early S7 episodes were watchable, a couple were even good ... but just not enough to inspire me to keep watching.
Anyway, I hope you find S7 something better than a chore, and that you're able to avoid "I don't care," particularly in the second half of the season.
Well, I just finished Season 6 today. It almost seemed like a BtVS spinoff to me, that's how different it felt.
I loved S5, so I was primed for more Buffy goodness in S6, and it started off well enough. The surviving Scoobies, along with Spike, were fighting the good fight in Buffy's absence, and plans were well under way to resurrect the champ.
It was after Buffy's welcome return that things fell apart. In no particular order, here are a few of my issues:
1) Where was the adult supervision? Why on earth was Giles only in a handful of episodes?
Giles was a lost soul in S4, after losing his job as watcher, not to mention librarian, and he spent too much time at home drinking wine and watching TV with Spike. He picked himself up by the bootstraps in S5, making a success of the Magic Box and re-establishing himself as a productive member of society. The Magic Box was the new Library, a safehouse for the Scoobies to gather and brainstorm. It was a home for the "family" as we saw early in S5 in the episode of that name.
Giles was a cornerstone of BtVS, and the only responsible adult in the lives of his beloved Scoobies. Dawn just buried her mother and sister, Tara's family was a freak show, Xander's parents were a drunken mess and Willow's folks were AWOL. So I'm racking my brain to figure out why Giles would leave his business and his loved ones behind at such a delicate time to return to a lonely life in England. Seems to me his life was in Sunnydale, and clearly things quickly unraveled after he left.
2) What happened to the "noble vampire" image that Spike was cultivating in S5? I loved Spike in S5. He worked so hard to prove himself worthy of Buffy's trust. He took a savage beating to protect Dawn, he shared his passion for "Passions" with Joyce, he fought tooth and nail alongside the Scoobies (the merry few, the Band of Buggered) to take Glory down in "The Gift". He even earned a cigarette light from Xander, which spoke volumes about his progress, IMO. He starts off nicely, in S6, babysitting the Niblet, but quickly went from being noble to being thuggish and not very likable once Buffy came back.
3) What happened to the wonderfully tender relationship between Dawn and Spike? It was evident in the opening episode of S6, when Spike was babysitting Dawn and speeding through the streets of Sunnydale with a football-helmet-wearing Dawnie on the back of his motorbike, but they barely spoke the rest of the season. I found that very disappointing, because if anything brought out the best in Spike, it was the Niblet.
4) there's no way on earth that Warren's pistol shot has the trajectory to take out Tara
5) I hated every second that The Trio were on screen and yet I would have welcomed a 23rd episode devoted solely to Willow torturing Warren and his worthless buddies before dispatching all 3 of them to the Hell dimension they so richly deserved. BTW, when Willow tore Warren's shirt open, I thought he was wearing a bullet proof vest under there. He had thicker chest hair than our buddy Oz under a full moon.
6) Dawn gets a whole category to herself here. I had no beef with Joyce, but I was so enamored with the monks' creation of Dawn as The Key, and the season-long storyline that went with her, that I was happy to give Joyce a touching sendoff and go forward with the Little Bit. So what happened in S6? They made Dawn a kleptomaniac? That's it? To what end? Shoplifting was her whole reason for being in S6? That was horrible. This brave little girl who was ready to jump off Glory's tower to safe Buffy and the world in "The Gift" was reduced to a mere shoplifter in S6. Total Yuk.
7) I didn't care anything about Xander and Anya's wedding plans. To quote Willow, "bored now". And who gets married at 21 anymore anyway? Nobody.
Overall, S6 was harder to watch than any previous season. I raced through previous seasons, not wanting to wait even a day for the next episode, but I found myself delaying the watching of several episodes in S6. I missed Giles all year and I hated The Trio. I was seriously geared up for the Dark Willow finale, but I found it pretty unsatisfying at the end of the day. Hearing Willow say such hurtful things to all the people who love her was hard to watch. These people have been through so much together and to see Willow treat them with such disrespect was painful, but in true Scooby form, her friends worked as a team to save her, and of course, the world.
All the deceptive scenes with Spike in Africa, talking about giving the bitch what she deserves was just so dishonest. BTW, how did Spike get to Africa in those post-9/11 days. Were his papers in order, his passport up to date? I want to love Spike, but I need him to work with me. He was a disappointment to me in S6, but I'll forgive him in a heartbeat if he just gives me a reason.
Next week I begin my final Buffy journey as I embark on S7. Every wonderful series enters a period of decline and it's always hard to accept, but I will savour my remaining moments with the Scoobies of Sunnydale and no doubt be depressed when it's over.
Hello, Page 48.
I am looking forward to your views on S7 since you are clearly on the same page regarding S6.
I find your feelings towards the Trio quite interesting because that is exactly how I felt about them the first time I saw S6. However, when I rewatched S6, I admit to quite enjoying them (except for the Katrina episode).
And I must highlight what you say about Dawn: I'm not surprised that she inspires ire in many Buffy fans since she was so underdeveloped. And there was so much to develop - she was a mystical ball of energy once - surely there is a plot there somewhere?
And one of my favourite images from Buffy is Dawn riding pillion with Spike and wearing an American football helmet on her head.