Gone – Older and Far Away
611 | Gone
Andy: Willow looks to be on the mend but Buffy’s done for. Dawn’s acting a little bit bitchy but at least she’s normal. Buffy went a bit wacky while invisible. It affected her more than I would have expected. I was hoping she’d become pudding. Xander is particularly thick this episode. On two occasions he walked in on the Buffster and Spike but he didn’t suspect anything.
Exactly why did the nerds need Willow as a hostage? Couldn’t they have just told Buffy that she was going to turn into pudding unless she let them zap her back into visibleness? Couldn’t they assume that she would have wanted to be visible, not to mention not pudding, and therefore they would not have needed to kidnap Willow? I guess the kidnapping was an opportunistic idea after Willow stumbled into their den. Now that Willow knows where they live, aren’t they a little afraid? This whole thing is making less sense the more I think about it. Almost a good episode but lacking things.
Why do they call a witches hat a pylon?
Tom: …Probably because given the circumstances, “witch’s hat” would be rather inappropriate.
An alright episode. The nemesis/nemeses joke has been done before though, and better. And when your humour was done better in ‘Mystery Men’, you’ve got to start worrying. The invisibility was fun. Amy is being played as extremely irritating — earning her the moniker ‘Ratgirl’ in the local TV Guide. I still feel sorry for her after spending over two years as a mouse though. At least Buffy spent her small intervening time in heaven. She should be grateful.
And the Half-Time Score…
Andy: Buffy started out slowly with some ordinary episodes. Once Buffy became adjusted to living again and Willow’s magic dependancy became apparent we’ve had some exciting episodes. It was about the episode before the musical that things began to pick up. I can’t really relate to being dead or engaged so I found those first episodes boring. After that we had all the characters emotionally involved for some good episodes. Unfortunately we now have lost a couple of characters and are only following Buffy and Willow. I would like to see a greater range of characters involved before much longer. Also with the show in it’s sixth season, the writers need to take extra care to avoid stereotypical behaviour from the characters.
Tom: Half way already? I’m surprised, because unlike Angel, almost nothing seems to have been happening on Buffy. The universe once again seems to be revolving almost continuously around Buffy herself — with the exception of the Willow plotline. While I applaud any attempt to actually examine the (very talented) supporting cast, I do wish some aspects could have been handed in a more careful and less heavy-handed manner. Willow’s magic-dependence was being built up quite nicely — and then suddenly one episode she becomes a junkie. I’m almost certain that the show wasn’t always this unsubtle. The nerds have been interesting, with Warren perhaps showing the most promise as a character… but ultimately they like everything else in the show contribute to a sense of constructedness that isn’t exactly awful, but is annoying. I find it hard to imagine the Jonathan of ‘Earshot’ and ‘Superstar’ suddenly being interested in evil-doing. I find it hard to believe that Willow and Tara would have just continued to live in Buffy’s house without considering paying for rent. Basically I find it hard to believe that any of these people have a life except when I tune in on Monday nights.
Dancing demons, however, I have no problem with. So something’s wrong here! In some ways, most of these are minor quibbles — but they’ve been there for the last two and a half years … what Buffy needs is a bit of momentum. And some focus on its supporting characters — when was the last time Xander or Anya got their own plotline, let alone episode? Perhaps some building up of semi-regular characters would be worthwhile too. Still, in some ways this season looks more promising than the last two — things hopefully will get interesting.
612 | Doublemeat Palace
Andy: Fancy that. The creepy fast food company turned out to be vegetarian. Who would have guessed that it was really the little old lady? I thought it might be the butler. I would like to see more story lines/arcs going on. I think they got the idea from the 1973 flick “Soylent Green”. Not a particularly imaginative episode but nothing really wrong with it. I hope Willow doesn’t permantly give up magic. It’s not all bad.
Tom: I’m not sure I should even give this episode the credit of a review. Tell you what, I’ll give it fifteen words:
Slow, obvious, poorly written filler. Willow — job? Xander funny but useless again. Oh, another bonk.
613 | Dead Things
Tom: Kind of disturbing this week. The nerds will never be quite as funny again. Despite the unsettling nature of the show for them, it did demonstrate Warren’s darker side very nicely. Not that we didn’t know that he was the bastard of the group — but I feel he now has more gravitas as a villain than Glory did! In any case, the episode was a pick up from the last month or so of highly average Buffy. Our second favourite slayer has a nerve talking about the stuff she lets Spike do to her though. Just look at what she does to him! I think I’d rather have her side of the deal than Spike’s. Ah, in the general case where we’re not being gender specific that is.
I was going to write “favourite slayer” up there to avoid saying ‘Buffy’ twice in a row, but then I realised Faith is probably my favourite. Buffy was better than Kendra though. And the two that Spike killed.
614 | Older and Far Away
Tom: Another fairly good episode of Buffy — I’m feeling spoiled! Amber Benson gets to demonstrate how much fun we could have been having with Tara all this time if they’d actually given her something to do. Introducing her rather sly sense of humour, while overdue, is much appreciated now at least. We also see some interesting sides to Anya — her hysterical reaction to being trapped in the house and insistence that Willow should do something are both fascinating to watch. And finally the ‘Dawn-stealing-stuff’ plotline moves on. With all these developments it’s hard to dislike the episode. Hopefully we can keep this momentum going and do something with Xander and Willow soon?
Mattt: Yawn. But an award goes to Tara for being in the show for two years before having her first decent line. That has to be a TV record, to go for so long with only lame lines and wimpy looks.
But Buffy‘s over as a show. there’s nothng left, all the characters are
dull or unbelivable. Even Willow is a nobody now, what a crap “going evil”.
so many characters with nothing to do. I say finish the show before it
becomes a joke.