Season 2 recap will be much shorter, probably just one post, but it’ll probably be more philosophically meandering.

And then, to Vern’s delight, I will attempt to post episode-by-episode reflections for season 3 onward.

Buffy finds the bad guys, dies for a minute, is resurrected, kills the bad guys, and saves the world (spoilers).

Is this season-ender an epic blockbuster? No, it’s a late ‘90s tv production. Does it try to be epic, since it’s dealing with demons taking over the world and opening evil alternate universe portals or whatever? Sort of. I liked it.

There’s this one shot near the end where one of my favorite action filmatistical beats rears its beautiful head. A lot of people probably find it cheesy, probably don’t like it, and maybe it’s become associated with cheap ‘80s action and overwrought Michael Bay type of action drama nowadays, I’m not sure, but the thing I’m talking about is when the hero has made up her mind and starts decisively walking toward the camera, sort of Aaron Sorkin hallway dialogue-style, accompanied by a strong musical flourish, which in this case is a couple of measures from the BUFFY theme tune.

For a brief, forceful moment, the music almost overpowers the shot. It’s borderline distracting, but it’s fun & rousing, like the moment in a good kung fu joint when the good guy gets really pissed off and finally allows himself to bend his dead master’s rule about never using his skills for violence & vengeance. I’m like, “Fuck yeah, Buffy, that’s your song, been waiting 11 & ½ episodes for this, unleash the crane-kick!” So now I expect that same musical cue to let me know when it’s climactic action asskicking time in the final episode of each season. It’s like a whole separate character imposing itself on the action, not subtle at all. I bet Paul loves it.

Buffy’s assertiveness is refreshing. Too many pussy hero types out there in our fictional entertainments try to overstrategize, try to incorporate the assistance of their pussy friends, play politics, have to find inspiration & strength in some personal emotional tie to the conflict. Not Buffy. Though her simple directness means she sometimes falls for traps & demonic deceptions, she’s very good at efficiently developing & executing her #1 plan, which tends to be:

-Determine location of bad guy[s].
-Grab weapon[s].
-Transport self to objective location.
-Roundhouse, stab, one-liner, repeat.

It’s beautiful. I’m kind of jealous of her. I remember a bunch of times my team wanted to undergo this kind of direct planning & execution but the guidance from Top would tell us we had to tow along some dweeb Civil Affairs guy or we had to complete a secondary follow-on mission of assessing & photographing some plot of land or we’d have to hand out claims cards to locals when we accidentally broke their windows & doorframes.

I find the Buffy approach to combat vastly preferable to that of many other superheroes. Consider the X-Men movies. I don’t remember all the specifics, but I am confused why they decide to wait until the big finale (Actually, I’m not confused – I know the reason it happens this way is because the script & narrative arc demands it to be so.) to use the full force of their powers to win the fight. Why don’t they just be more proactive once they figure out who the troublemakers are? It doesn’t need to be a team fight. Storm can generate a badass hurricane and wipe out the bad guys, too easy. But then the movie would be, like, 30 minutes long.

Why deploy a sniper-supported infantry platoon on the ground when you can just tell an Apache to fire 2.75” rockets or a HELLFIRE from hundreds of meters away? Keep the grunts in reserve and send in the birds. Rest the walkers and send in the choppers. Keep it simple, stupid, etc.. Buffy is the heavily armed helicopter and Xander/Willow/Giles is the puny ground soldier team in this metaphor. Sometimes teamwork is unnecessary. Fuck teamwork. Pass the ball to Lebron and clear out, losers. (Buffy is Lebron James and Xander/Willow/Giles is most of the 2003-2010 Cleveland Cavaliers in this metaphor.)

Oh, that reminds me, I saw NAKED KILLER finally, per suggestions on the PRIEST 2D thread, and there was no nudity after the opening credits! Not in the version I saw, anyway. I mean, I can deal with that, I’m no Griff, whatever, but it all seemed misleading is all. There was plenty of groping & fondling and some amazing outfits, but bare nipples did not make an appearance, very strange. Still, it was an insanely fun movie.

I love the debut of the older lady assassin’s skills. The ridiculous things she does to all those guys in the parking garage could have been better filmed/edited, but it’s fast & furious fun that only the Chinese seem willing to do with the grace & straight face that such absurd action requires. She frisbees her crown like she’s Mortal Kombat 3’s Kung Lao or James Bond’s Oddjob, and proceeds to dominate in ways no high heeled human being should: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DARzZ-UsSRU&feature=player_detailpage#t=557s

Also, the cop who can’t touch a firearm without puking reminded me of a certain comedy classic’s hero’s “drinking problem” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl4plPGRG8o ), but it’s funnier to imagine that NAKED KILLER isn’t supposed to be a comedy.

Back to Buffy:
Ep. 10
Got some fucked up dreamworld shit going on here, some pre-INCEPTION, post-WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE business. The nightmares here are darker and more painfully emotional than anything in the Freddy Kreuger stories. There’s yet another dig at Cordelia’s hair-related narcissism, which I continue to find very funny. Xander gets almost completely naked, which is probably the best move for distracting everyone from his grungy, junior high haircut.

Buffy has a nightmare encounter with her father, who tells her basically that he doesn’t love her and she’s a burden and a mistake. My god, that was awful. Even I was desperate to wake up while he was spewing his cruelty. It struck me as the inverse of the time in the first TWILIGHT movie where Bella says mean things & shuts out her father, who couldn’t be nicer and more loving but has a twit for a daughter. People are so mean. Is this why shows with a laugh track were so popular in the 80s & 90s?

And in one scene there’s swastikas spraypainted on the wall, what the fuck!

I would like to proactively apologize for the Season 7 episode guest starring Ashanti, however.

The script has several funny moments, ranging from his signature dry matter of fact statements about demons at high school to Buffy worrying about her hairdo after being almost electrocuted to respectful & clever references to HAL 9000. There aren’t many times when I spot an allusion to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and enjoy it, like in The Simpsons; usually that kind of thing enrages me, like in IRREVERSIBLE, or just annoys me, like every time a tv commercial uses “Also Sprach Zarathustra.”

Anyway, there’s dialogue that sounds like leftovers from HACKERS or the goofy science lab parts of DARKMAN or JOHNNY MNEMONIC, like when a high schooler chides the square, 40something librarian/Watcher Giles for not being “jacked in.”

The way the no-name actor delivers these lines, you can tell it’s meant to be humorously over-intense: “The printed page is obsolete. Information isn’t bound up anymore. It’s an entity. The only reality is virtual. If you’re not jacked in, you’re not alive.”
And it’s funny to me because I couldn’t help recalling this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUs7iG1mNjI

Giles has a Vern moment, praising his own older school methods and complaining about the conversion of books into scanned copies of books and intertubesites and kids playing on his lawn, and everyone attacks him for not being with the modern times of 1997. A computer science teacher literally says, “Soon you will join us in the 20th century, with 3 whole years to spare.” And she rattles off some stats about how more e-mail was sent in the most recent 2 year span than regular mail, what we now refer to as “snail mail” since we’re now cleverer than ourselves of 14 years ago (114 years ago if you’re now reading this on your iGoogleEyeLidNetPad, powered by a synapse-operated pluzonium biobattery, in the next century. Don’t say I wasn’t ahead of my time, historians!).

Season 1 of Buffy must have been a real tipping point in the zeitgeist, when people started using the word “zeitgeist” every time there was something new that made both lots of money & magazine covers, when we saw most clearly the evolution from the charms of the slower, less-connected world to the insane hyperconnectivityness of today as the internet & home computers spawned cyberwarring multitaskers as well as little punkasses who hate everything that lacks an on/off switch.

Also, this episode starts in the year 1418 with an evil vampire being magically captured in an ancient magic/religious book, and the book ends up in the 1997 Buffyverse (Am I using that word right?), so there’s probably supposed to be a theme about changes among generations. I don’t think Giles or Vern should be denigrated as a 15th century type, though. That’s not fair to those pathetic old geezers to equate them with Vlad the Impaler. All pre-America human beings were assholes.

Ep. 9
No vampires, this one was about a ventriloquist dummy or something.

Oh, by the way, Xander didn’t kill anyone in that episode. He was mysteriously absent from the scene where his fellow werehyenas ate Principal Flutie, probably because the showrunners didn’t think they’d be able to maintain audience sympathy for him if he devoured a guy in the fifth episode. I am confident that if this plot had taken place in, say, Season Six, he would have been there, though. Pretty much everybody on the show was a murderer by that point so he would have fit right in.

ONE OF US! ONE OF US! ONE OF US!

Just kidding, keep watching and writing, it`s fun to read. I had the impression that you were way into season 2, since you mentioned a certain rocket-launcher? I hope you have the stamina to finish the show before the nerdening of America is complete and your country implodes (may 2012). Oh yes, Joss is an evil mastermind and the final step in his grand scheme, The Avengers, will turn all you yankees into overveight cookiedough eating comic-reading social misfits. Muhahaha. That’ll put marzipan in your pie plate, Bingo!