The Buffy Chronicles, Season Deux

Well, Matt is thoroughly addicted to Buffy, so we're just whizzing right along through the world of Buffy. We just finished up Season 2 (to be fair though, I was missing a disc, so we skipped 4 episodes. They were probably the best 4 to miss though: "What's My Line" 2-Parter, "Ted" and "Bad Eggs"). Let me say again that you should skip this if you haven't ever seen the show and ever intend to. That's especially true for this season, since there's some big time spoilers here. Also, this post is going to be massive. You have been warned. So, after a rewatch, what do I think of Season 2?


Well, here's the thing. For a little while, I called Seasons 5 and 6 my favorite seasons, but, even though I love them, I suspect it was because I tended to watch a couple episodes from them a lot, and also I have some contrarian tendencies. Just before watching Season 2 this time around, I told my buddy Kirk that Season 2 was my favorite, by a hair. After watching it again, I'm willing to go even further. I think Season 2 is objectively the best season of Buffy. You may have a different opinion if you like, but you would be wrong. It's a great, great season of television. Lets talk about why.

First of all, it has easily the best cast of characters of any season. Besides the 3 principle cast members, it has Giles, Cordelia, Oz, Angel/Angelus, Spike, Drusilla and Principal Snyder. The only great characters from later seasons that it's missing are Anya and The Mayor, but that's more than made up for by our sensational villains. Lets talk for a second about how great Spike and Drusilla are, because they are so, so great. From the first moment they arrive in "School Hard", they're completely different than any vampire we've seen so far. I love how it looks like The Anointed One is set up to be this big villain, but Spike just dispenses him without any ceremony. James Marsters just exudes cool as the punk rock baddie, both deliciously evil and hilariously witty. I knew Spike was cool, but I'd forgotten how great Drusilla is. She's the best example of Joss Whedon's propensity for writing crazy people actually working. He's done it in all of his series' (Fred in Angel, River in Serenity, A variety of people in Dollhouse), but it never worked as well again. The craziness is played for laughs, for example, this exchange:

Dru: I'm naming all the stars.
Spike: You can't see the stars, love, that's the ceiling. Also, it's day.
Dru: I can see them. But I've named them all the same name, and there's terrible confusion

But the craziness also makes her extremely scary. Juliet Landau plays the part in a delightfully unhinged way, I don't think Buffy ever had a scarier recurring villain. We don't actually see her kill often, but there's a sense that she could do anything, that even she doesn't know what she will do next. She just feels dangerous.

The next thing that makes this season so great is the consistently great quality of the episodes. That's not to say there aren't some duds (we'll get to that in a bit), but overall the season is really consistent, and contains some of the best episodes the show ever did. "When She Was Bad" is one of the show's strongest season-openers. The aforementioned "School Hard" is a great introduction to Spike and Drusilla. Halloween and The Dark Age introduce us to "badass Giles", fleshing out a darker past for our straight-laced librarian. Then, starting at episode 13, "Surprise", and running all the way through the finale the show has one of its absolute strongest runs, with just one sub-par episode, and a ton of classics. Because there are so many great episodes, I want to take some time to talk about a few individual episodes:

Lie To Me: It's a great episode about jealousy, how our pasts come back to haunt us, and how often the thing you want most is the thing that is worst for you. Mostly though, I wanted to include this great exchange from the end of the episode.

Giles: What do you want me to say?
Buffy: Lie to me.
Giles: Yes, it's terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true. The bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats and we always defeat them and save the day. Nobody ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after.
Buffy: Liar

Surprise/Innocence: This marks the spot where this season gets amazing. That Buffy and Angel sleeping together would trigger his transformation back to Angelus is absolutely genius. It's that classic high school trope of "he was different after" writ large. The scene where Angel, now without a soul (unbeknownst to Buffy), comes back to talk to Buffy is absolutely brutal. It's painful to watch as he hurts her more than any punch ever could. Even more brutal is that it comes up again and again during the episode, as first Willow and then Giles and Jenny realize, without it being said, what triggered Angel's change, each time reminding us of Buffy's pain with the look on her face. What I had forgotten about these episodes is that this is also the time where Willow finds out about Xander and Cordelia's relationship, which is another heart-breaking moment even in the midst of Buffy's pain ("Remember? The 'We Hate Cordelia' club, of which you are the treasure!"). It's just an amazing 2-parter. Honestly, the weakest thing about it is The Judge, who is kind of perfunctory and easily-dispatched. Doesn't matter though, it's such a powerful and emotional story.

Passion: My favorite episode of the season, and my 2nd favorite episode of the whole series. I'm not going to say too much about it because I could go on and on, I just want to hit on a couple points. It's hard to overstate just how shocking Jenny's death is. Even though the show had killed off some characters before, Jenny had become a pretty major character, and things were just mending between her and Giles. Not only that, but it came right in the middle of the episode. Even as she's running away, even when Angel catches up to her, you're just waiting for Buffy to show up and save her. Then Angel just snaps her neck, and in an instant it's over. It's this episode that gives Buffy the resolve to kill Angel. The way Angel not only kills Jenny, but then sets up her body for Giles to find...It's just brutal. Up until this point, we've heard about how evil Angelus was, how he terrorized people everywhere he went, but in this episode we see that. The show delivers on how evil its been telling us Angel's dark side is.

Becoming: Joss Whedon, you're a cruel, cruel man. Poor Buffy. There's a lot to love in this episode (Angel torturing Giles, Drusilla killing Kendra, Spike and Joyce), but it's all about that ending. That devastating ending. Even knowing that it was coming, that look on Buffy's face when she rams that sword through Angel...so painful. Also, the song playing over the end is perfectly pitched. It's the first of many great season finales, and it might be the best.

This season is defined by how high the emotional stakes are. No other villain is nearly as compelling as Angelus (except for perhaps a few episodes of Season 6, but we'll get to that in time) because there's a vested emotional interest in him. We aren't only concerned for our heroes, but we're concerned for the villain. We want to see his soul restored, but it also hurts every time we see this character that we had grown to love destroying his former friends.

Now, the season isn't perfect. Near the beginning of the season, it's got a few monster-of-the-week episodes that aren't great. "Some Assembly Required" is ok, but "Inca Mummy Girl", "Reptile Boy" and "Bad Eggs" are pretty sub-par. Also, they unfortunately put the below-average "Go Fish" right before the season finale, which puts a speed bump in an otherwise fantastic run of episodes (to be fair, "Killed By Death" is a pretty great stand-alone). Also a weakness, Kendra the vampire slayer, who mercifully appears in only 3 episodes. Introducing another slayer is not a bad idea (as Faith will prove next season), but she's kind of a flat, uninteresting character, and the less said about her terrible accent, the better.

Still, even in the worst episodes of this season, there's plenty to like, and despite its weak spots, Season 2 is packed with incredible highs. Even though I love later Buffy seasons, I don't think the show ever again had the same emotional stakes over the course of a whole season, which is why it's my favorite.

So, I Got My Roommate Addicted To Buffy

I haven't written about it much on this blog, but if you know me well, you probably know that my favorite TV show is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I've watched through all 7 seasons twice, and individual episodes a lot more times than that. It's a great, great show. Many of you are probably judging me a little bit right now for loving a show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I feel no need to defend myself. It's an amazing piece of TV, and if you want to miss out on it, that's your prerogative.

Anyway, last weekend I threw on an episode of Buffy one night, and my new roommate Matt came in and asked "what's that?" I told him, and when the episode finished, he was interested enough that he wanted to watch the first episode. Now, as I stated in the title of this post, he's hooked, and we've been watching at least a couple episodes every night. Tonight, we finished up Season 1 (12 episodes) and started on Season 2. It's been a while since I last sat down and watched through the series, so I'm enjoying it too. Since I can never get enough of writing about the entertainment I love, I thought this would be kind of a cool chance to write about the series as I watch through it again. Most of you will not care about this, but frankly, this blog is a lot more about me processing my thoughts and exercising my compulsion to write, so I don't really care if anyone wants to read this :).

So, I'm gonna be writing about the show as we make our way through it. That's probably going to slow down a lot once the semester really starts going, but we'll see how it goes. I also note that I'm writing these with knowledge of where the show is going, so if you haven't seen it but want to (and you really should. As previously mentioned, it is great), beware that there may be spoilers here. So, with that out of the way, now that I've assured that essentially no one will read this, here we go:


It's been a while since I revisited any of the Season 1 episodes except for "Prophecy Girl", the season finale. As such, I had a dim picture in my mind that these episodes were pretty bad, the stuff you had to mire through to get to the good stuff in Season 2 and beyond. Of course, I'd forgotten that once upon a time, it had been these episodes that had captured my attention enough to get me completely hooked on the show, despite my skepticism going into it. While it's true the first season doesn't quite measure up to the show that Buffy will eventually become, it surprised me how good these episodes are.

Immediately evident when watching Season 1 is how much more fragmented the episodes are. Clearly, Joss Whedon and his writers hadn't quite figured out exactly what the show was going to be yet. Instead of the more serialized show Buffy is from Season 2 onward, we get a lot of stand-alone, monster-of-the-week episodes. We also get several end-of-episode tags that never do get returned to (Amy's mom in the cheerleader statue, the bug monster's eggs, the invisible girl taken away by the FBI). It's interesting think what the show could have been if they hadn't taken it in another direction, although I'm glad they did, since season-long arcs are something the show does incredibly well in later seasons.

Another thing I'd forgotten is how quickly the show established that essentially anything was fair game, nobody was safe. The pilot kills of Xander's friend Jesse, who was no more obvious a target than Xander and Willow at that point. Then episode 6 opens the gate wide open, by having a pack of possessed students literally eat the principal of the school (I think it was at this point that Matt was really won over, since he said something like "This show will kill anyone"). The next episode, "Angel", has Buffy's mother being attacked and Darla, one of the few recurring vampires so far, bites the dust. We very quickly learn that this show is willing to off just about anyone, and it's a tone that will persist throughout its run.

The most surprising thing is perhaps how fully realized the characters are right off the bat. Buffy herself might be the one who feels most erratic early on as the show was finding its footing, but Xander, Willow, Cordelia and especially Giles feel fully formed right from the get-go. It's no stretch at all to believe that Willow and Xander are life-long friends, and Xander's inability to see that Willow has feelings for him yields some genuinely heart-breaking moments in both "The Pack" and "Prophecy Girl" (I was also surprised to see that seeds of the future Xander/Cordy pairing are very much there in these early episodes). Giles really is the standout of Season 1 though. Right from the start, Anthony Stewart Head perfectly embodies this awkward, old-fashioned and very, very British watcher/librarian. It's these characters that make the show worth watching even at its lowest moments.

That isn't to say that it's all good though. The show is VERY 90s. It feels extremely dated a lot of the time, and it certainly has its fair share of corny moments. There's also "I Robot...You Jane", which is, without question, the worst episode in the series. Basically, a demon gets scanned into the computer and now...controls the internet? It's pretty painful, especially watching it now with all its talk of this newfangled "web". Also, the more fragmented nature of the season takes some of the punch out of the finale. The Master is a pretty cool villain, aided by some really great makeup work, but he just isn't featured enough and we don't know enough about him to make his final confrontation with Buffy as dramatic as it could have been. "Prophecy Girl" is definitely the highlight of Season 1, but it pales in comparison to later season finales because it didn't have the build-up of a whole season-long arc behind it.

Despite its flaws, the show really began to find its footing near the end of the season, and the last 3 episodes are all pretty solid. They begin to bring in Cordelia and Angel more, and Mrs. Calender gradually gains a more prominent role. "Prophecy Girl" is a legitimately great episode, between Buffy's breakdown, her realization that she has to fulfill her duty, and then a legitimately scary showdown with The Master, it's got a lot of really powerful moments. All in all, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Season 1, which I had really written off. It isn't great, but it does a good job setting the table for what is to come, and it's a lot better than I had remembered.

The Amazing, Surprising, Perfect Plan of God

So, I lied. All you have to do is scroll down to the date of my last blog post to see that I did not follow through on my intention to post more over the summer. Not only did I not post more, but I managed to not post at all. So, I'm not going to make any more resolutions about posting more, since I clearly cannot keep them. So, I'll update this thing when I can, and hopefully when I do I'll have something to say.

So, it has been quite the whirlwind week for me. Last Saturday, I was a groomsman in my best friend's wedding, and got to stand beside him as he married an awesome girl, which was great. The wedding was awesome [and the reception was excellent :)], and I'm so excited for both of them. On Sunday, my family and I loaded up all my crap (in the rain), drove to Charlotte (in the rain) and moved me into my apartment (thankfully, not really in the rain this time). So, having moved in, I settled in for a relaxing intensive Greek course, which started on Monday and will go for 3 weeks. So far, I've found the Greek to be a bit easier than Hebrew was, but its still plenty of work. Memorizing vocab and declension patterns every day can be pretty exhausting mentally. All in all though, Greek is going well.

The real craziness didn't come until Thursday. In the afternoon, my roommate got the news that the loan he was counting on to help him pay for seminary would have much higher payments than the bank had originally estimated. That means he isn't going to be able to stay here and go to RTS without racking up a ton of debt, even if he were working full time. So, his only real option is to move back home. It's a situation that really sucks, and I'm sad for him that things didn't work out for him to stay at RTS and be in seminary. So, its Thursday night, I'm 4 days into living in this apartment, and my roommate is going to be moving out after Greek finishes. He's very apologetic, and is willing to help me out in whatever way he can, but I'm still in the position of having to find a new roommate or a new place to live, and do it rather quickly. Also, our first test for Greek was on Friday, just to compound matters. Yikes. Cut to Friday afternoon. After acing my Greek test (at least, I think so. You can never really be sure about these things until the grade comes back), we talked to the admissions director at RTS, and he said there were still a couple guys who were trying to find roommates. I called Matt, a guy who I know from having several classes with him last year, who, it turns out, has been looking for a roommate/place to stay and just praying that God would provide something.

In the course of 24 hours, my life swung from normal to wildly uncertain, then suddenly everything was solved. Crazy. Sometimes, God's provision is simply amazing. Even when life throws crazy curveballs your way, and your only possible response seems to be panic, God is still
in control. God is good, and every now and then its nice to be reminded of just how good he is.

"Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat, nor about your body, what you will put on. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing." - Luke 12:22-23