late to the party, pt. 45

[chronovore]

I finished the boxed set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 2 that epiphaniesrus and super_nyanko so kindly loaned me a half decade ago. My opinion has gone from "meh" in season one, to "ohh. now I get it" over the course of the 22 episodes of season 2. That is a nasty, bad, mean way to end the season; if there hadn't been a season 3, that would have been the most downbeat series finale ever. It makes Joss Whedon look like the kind of guy who would end a series with the slaughter of beloved characters... [cough]Serenity[/cough].

Now I'm torn whether to look at Wikipedia or equivalent to find out what happens, ask for season 3 from my current, long-suffering sources who'll be visiting next month, or just bite the damned bullet and buy the DVDs from Amazon.co.jp - 'cos it looks like they'll sell Region 1 discs there even though they'll not sell import games. Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot to that logic.

Stuff what I didn't like so much:

• Allison Hannigan's (Willow)  "dork act" is frequently unbelievably overacted
• Charisma Carpenter can't act. At all.
• Wotserface Landau's (Drusilla) stunningly bad cockney accent
• The show traipses back-and-forth over the line between "what if this really happened for real"-land and "oh, it's just a TV show, lighten up" though I'm beginning to accept that this is just the inconsistent logic of the world that the show takes place in. Like in cartoons, where gravity only works if the character notices he's not standing on anything.
• Every other week is an End of the World threat, prophecied for ages, though it never actually works out. Though sometimes the prophecy is very true - so are prophecies capital-D "Destiny," or more like "guidelines"? See previous point.

Stuff I liked:

• Spike as a bad guy
• Angel as a bad guy - Jeez, what an asshole
• chemistry between Bad Angel and Spike; lots of "oooh hooo hoooo!" moments there
  
• lots of references to earlier episodes - YAY in-jokes
• Xander going from comedy dorkboy to a deeper, albeit meaner character
• SMG (Buffy) dealing with her loneliness, and desperate and unrealizable hope for a normal life, including all the moments where her Mom claims to know what Buffy's going through - a wonderful statement of truth that grown-ups can never appreciate the complexity of the world that young people are dealing with
• SMG wearing inappropriately tight pants
• Any scene with Giles; no wonder they thought about making a spin-off with him; though it wouldn't have worked
• dialog, dialog, dialog
  

Gah! I like it lots. I think Firefly would have ended up being the superior show, but I've still got several more seasons to enjoy of this...!