Buffy - Season 6 impressions (episode 15)

[thalia_seawood]

I haven't posted any Jossverse reviews in ages due to a very busy RL which resulted in a lack of fannish motivation.
Then I spend an evening showing Buffy to my oldest friend hopefully winning another fan. (She liked the show and took season 1 with her for further watching

Comments

[elisi]

Lots of good thoughts. If you want more of my Riley thoughts then there's these:

The problem with 'As You Were', Buffy/Riley. Lots of meta. (I must be insane...) and Buffy/Riley... why it didn't work.

As for the business with The Doctor, then peasant_ wrote the best post I've ever read: I Can Explain - Spike in 'As You Were'.

About Sam, then this fic really made me re-evaluate her: Miss Perfect by honorh. (Sadly takes the Doctor stuff at face value, but it's excellent character exploration: Meeting your husband’s ex-girlfriend is enough to make any woman nervous, but add in the fact that she’s also 1) his first love, and 2) perfect, and you’ll find yourself turning into a quivering mass of insecurities.)

Anyway, I should go... *is very sleepy* I'll look forward to your reviews, whenever they come! :)

[selenak]

Seconding the rec for honorh's "Miss Perfect", which is a great story and makes it impossible to dismiss Sam as a Mary Sue afterwards.

[spikendru]

Oh, I've missed your episode recaps/meta! I never, for one moment, bought the idea that Spike was the Doctor. It's been discussed a lot, so I won't go into it here, but I definitely agree that it's totally out of character and makes no sense for all the reasons others have listed. I totally agree with your additional thought about Super!Riley, which sort of negates my quibble with an earlier point of yours.

You said, Oh dear. First, the episode establishes that Buffy is still attracted to Riley what with her drooling for him, crying "Riley" a lot and them sharing a moment. I was planning to add that I didn't feel it established that buffy was still attracted to Riley, as much as she was attracted to the idea of Riley, and what he represented to her. Her actual relationship with Riley wasn't good enough that she would even consider asking him to stay until Xander talked her into it; in the time that he's been gone, her life has gotten so bad, with being unwillingly resurrected to having to parent dawn to having to earn a living

[spikendru]

I forgot to add that Riley's little speech: Buffy, none of that means anything. It doesn't touch you. You're still the first woman I ever loved ... and the strongest woman I've ever known. And I'm not advertising this to the missus ... but you're still quite the hottie. and Wheel never stops turning, Buffy. You're up, you're down ... it doesn't change what you are. And you are a hell of a woman. left me unmoved. He hasn't been around for ages. He has no idea what herlife - or death - was like. The speech mirrors Spike's to Buffy in Touched, but Spike was actually there - he saw everything she went through and how she coped even when she was stressed out or tired or cranky and just wanted to be warm and loved and finished with the job, and tried to help when he could. So, it meant something coming from Spike. From Riley, who left her because he wasn't feelin' the love when she was stressed out or tired or cranky . . . not so much.

[thalia_seawood]

I agree with you on all counts. I'm not fond of Riley's speech myself. Like I said I didn't like it as Buffy's motivation for ending things with Spike

[spikendru]

IMHO, the episode is sloppily written, but BtVS fans are not shallow people; we tend to look for the meta, even when it's not intentionally there, so it makes perfect sense to *see* the episode as Buffy's fantasies about what she claimed she always wanted, and what she could have had - a normal relationship with a normal guy. Of course, when she actually had it, it didn't come close to meeting her needs, but viewed through the severe depression she experiences throughout S6, she *remembers* it as a better relationship than it was. And Riley is no longer getting sucked off by vampire whores - he has a productive job (in which he gets to wear cool black kevlar rather than traffic cone orange), he has a stable relationship with a demon-hunting wife/partner (instead of a 'dirty little secret' that could have been a relationship with a demon-hunting partner if she wasn't terrified of rejection by her friends), so the fans choose to believe that the episode dumps us into Buffy's brain, and events are seen through her skewed viewpoint.

[selenak]

Re: As You Were in general - mediocre episode, absolutely, but what cracks me up about it is something meta: until this episode, Doug Petrie was revered as as demi god among (some) Spike fans because he wrote Fool For Love. Afterwards, there was much "how can he write Riley Superstar, the traitor", and apparantly it hadn't occured to people until then Doug Petrie also wrote The Initiative and spend a good deal of his Fool For Love commentary praising good old Riley. *veg*

More seriously: I saw the episode as basically from Buffy's pov and about her self perception, absolutely. Regarding her calling Spike William, I always liked that and the scene, because she spent a good deal of her sexual relationship with Spike trying NOT to see him as someone other than a demon. Here, she changes that, and it goes back to their pre-sex relationship and Spike telling her, in The Gift that he is a monster, but she treats him as a man. So she tries to give him that again when leaving him. Hence William.

[spikendru]

And now one wonders exactly *how* much of FFL Petrie actually wrote. It seems that most of the best scenes in favorite episodes were tweaked by Joss, and sometimes entire scenes re-rwitten (the church scene in "Beneath You" comes immediately to mind), and there were many others I remember reading about at the time. It almost suspends belief to think that the same person wrote "Something Blue" and "Beer Bad", without some Joss help on the former.

[thalia_seawood]

I think I really have to check out which author wrote which episodes because I'm pretty much clueless when it comes to this.

"Beer Bad" was an episode a lot of fans disliked, wasn't it. (I found it very funny, though. Have to rewatch it; SMG's performance alone is worth it.)

I just read the alternate version of the church scene in "Beneath You", however, and was not impressed. It lacks subtlety.

[selenak]

Here I have to jump at the chance to defend my favourite hated underdog among the writers - no, not Tracy M. of "Something Blue" and "Beer Bad" fame, but Marti Noxon, because she, like Joss, did a lot of uncredited rewrites of crucial scenes. For example, Jane Espendson and Ultimate Drew are credited as writers for Conversations with Dead People in s7, but we know via interviews the episode had actually four writers - Joss wrote all the Buffy scenes, Marti wrote all the Willow scenes, Jane wrote the Dawn scenes (to everyone's surprise when she revealed this, because we all had thought she wrote the geeks!), and Drew Goddard wrote Andrew & Jonathan.

Marti also did uncredited rewrites of the occasional Angel episode, like, famously, Dear Boy in s2. David Greenwalt's original scene between Darla and Angel at the climax wasn't nearly as good and very unsubtle (it was online for a while, when all the shooting scripts were), whereas the Marti-penned broadcast scene is one of my favourites on either show, containing one of my all time

[my_daroga]

Hmm. I like that last point, that Riley/Sam is almost seen through Buffy's eyes. That makes it more palatable, because yes, the Mary Sue is strong with these two. And while I don't like Riley, I have to admit he was a soldier. Even so, that shouldn't make Buffy--who, if you recall, made a rather belated and half-hearted attempt to get him back to begin with--trip all over herself in seeing him again.

I'm glad there's someone else around who likes S6. I love it, too.

[thalia_seawood]

I think on my flist a lot of people enjoy season 6. E.g. elisi or selenak. Both have written some great essays for Buffy/Angel.

I do enjoy all seasons of Buffy, but season 6 is were things previously hinted at become big issues. I have a thing for heroes who have flaws and fail - and then get up again. And this is exactly what season 6 and season 7 deal with.

[my_daroga]

Not to mention displaying relationships--damaging ones--in ways we never get to see on television. Or even, a lot of the time, in movies.

Glad there are others, though.