Halting Hex

Still OT, but I may as well make it a matched set; here's Sarah with her eldest, Charlotte, at the Do Revenge premiere last September. Fairly impressive that Char was almost mom-sized and it was still a few days before she turned 13…but catching up to a woman called "Smidge" doesn't exactly qualify you for the WNBA, obvs.

So I'm in the I Robot You Jane thread, and I see where I did that Haiku about Buffy's possibly-smutty motives for prowling the showers. and I thought it might be cool to do some to summarize (Summersize?) other episodes. But the only one that called to me immediately was The Body: Yeah, I'm still finding the ep a bit one-note, there. And on a familiar note: Man, she's really going to be pissed once she learns that Cordelia's been doing the Vulcan Death Grip since she was 5, huh?

OT-ish, but Aly & Alexis's oldest, Satyana, is about to turn 14 (birthday in March, I don't know which day) and dang do kids sprout up. She's as tall as Aly nowadays:

I just found that block this morning (missed some of it but caught "Chick Flick"/"Ex Libris"/"Astral Monkey" ["His name was Curtis"…aww]) and I was shocked by the absence of "How Soon is Now" as well. Especially since the theme isn't the original version of the song, by The Smiths. It's the cover by Love Spit Love, as heard in the movie The Craft. Not to be too hard on Love Spit Love, who must have made a decent chunk of change off of their version through the years, but I have a hard time imagining their charging exorbitant royalties, considering how very much they are not the Smiths. But apparently SyFy is getting like $0 budgeting help from being part of the NBC empire. I keep seeing their promos for their original series (The Ark) and wow do the production values on that show look sad. I have about 100 jokes about how SyFy could get more funding out of NBC, but they're all political so I have to skip them. Bummer… (I guess performances within a show are covered by the general royalty for the episode? Because otherwise that Goo-Goo Dolls guest spot in Ex Libris would be a bit more pricey that Love Spit Love, I'd imagine. Maybe even more than the Smiths.)

Hmm, wouldn't think Spike would have much tolerance for dolls after putting up with Dru's fixation on Miss Edith. But perhaps he's evolved. An unexpected side effect of the Sodding™ Chip? Now that I think about it, perhaps the reason that Drusilla gave Spike such a tough time in Brasil (as seen in the flashback in Fool for Love) is because he left Miss Edith behind when he hastily departed during the fight in Becoming, Part 2 ? (We see the doll amongst the unclaimed property in Beauty and the Beasts.) Leave a girl's favorite toy behind, where any passing Slayer might grab it, and no wonder she's chasing chaos demons the moment her spine heals. Live and learn, Spikey; live and learn.

I keep threatening to unleash the unabridged script; why don't I at least do a couple of excerpts? I'm pretty sure I remember how to Copy+Paste. Deviations from the aired episode noted in bold. Uh, yeah, Marti. We're on the WB; we've got kids watching. Remember how you wanted Octarus's blood to ooze from his corpse (after Buffy sliced his throat with the skate blade in episode 9) and make a pool on the ice, so that Kendra would see Buffy kissing Angel with his vampire face on while they were standing in a pool of blood? Remember how that didn't happen? Ix-nay on the ood-blay, already. Yeah, the part where The Bronze is in Buffy's bathroom pretty much cues the "it's a dream!" reveal. We don't need the extra beat. Cut it. Yes, if Drusilla kills Angel in front of Buffy, it's reasonable to assume she'd see it, rather than be looking over the vamps' shoulder to check out the Knicks game on the TV. Redundant; cut it. Actually, I'm not even sure that we need the "right in front of me" here, given that in a dream, literally everything is something that Buffy observes. But I guess she could have dreamed that Giles told her that he had seen Drusilla kill Angel, so I suppose "right in front of me" does help us specify. In the aired version, this becomes "Angel, this happened before. The dreams that I had about the Master…they came true." The first change is just good writing; you want to end your sentence on the key word or phrase, in this case "happened before". Terms of address, such as "Angel", belong at the start of a dramatic sentence, not the end. And for the second change, somebody (Joss? Smidge?) rightly remembers that Buffy had at least two aired dreams about the Master (Welcome to the Hellmouth, Nightmares) and Giles's referring to "the nightmares" in the Bronze in the premiere indicates that she might have had others. Hence the plural. (Really should have watched S1, Marti.) Okay, nothing meaty yet. But I'm going for comprehensive here. it takes longer. ******************************************* As far as the aired episode itself goes, I'm surprised (pun!) that I only recently noticed that we start (almost) with Buffy waking from a nightmare, and we end (almost) with Angel waking from…whatever disturbed him. Neat mirror-image. Well-done, Marti.

This isn't even Buffyverse related, but somebody was doing occupational puns ("I dated a fireman, but I got burned") so I figured I throw in a few, and just put them on Buffy's tab. All my own work, this is too trivial to bother with theft. Buffy dated a plumber…but the relationship went down the drain. Buffy dated a doctor…but she got sick of him. Buffy dated a banker…but she lost interest. And so forth.

You know, we might object to the Xanya-sex in this episode because we're tired of the relationship, or because she didn't even bother to come visit him in the hospital, or because he was so sick yesterday that he could barely stand, or because that dirty kitchen floor is likely to give him an infection (the eye socket must be prone to bacteria, as it can't have fully healed yet)… …but isn't there an even simpler issue? This is Buffy's house. Or Dawn's, if you feel that Buffy's abandoning the property last episode means that little sis "inherited" it. Or Willow's, if you count her as the adult with the longest continuous residence (even though that only goes back to Same Time, Still Stupid). Xander has his own apartment, which we've seen multiple times throughout the past few seasons. Why aren't he and Anya there? What, he's too injured to travel? Across town? Come on, now. And surely Anya's the one tending to his medical issues, if any care is needed, and she'd be pretty happy to be back in her old residence, I'd think. I mean, if Chao An is actually a genius accupuncturist and Xander needs her treatments to deal with the pain, that hasn't been mentioned in the text. Let the dude rest (or whatever) in his own fucking bed, surely. Not to mention that the X-Pad is currently home to a bunch of young and vulnerable SiTs, who not only need somebody to make sure the Bringers don't drop by for tea, but who, last we saw, were pretty much wrecking the plumbing and who knows what else. Seems to me that Xander might want to keep an eye (he's still got one, at least) on his possessions. It's not as if they can move the whole kit and caboodle into Buffy's place; they're bursting at the seams with guests as it is. Just four episodes back, Anya was kvetching at Andrew for taking too much time in the in-demand bathroom. I suppose that, with the general evacuation of the populace, the SiTs might have been spread out into Buffy's neighbors' houses, and so Colleen (Rachel Bilson) and Caridad (Dania Ramirez) and the others are now sleeping in the late Mrs. Kalish's place (1628 Revello) and 1632 on the other side, but in that case, Buffy wouldn't have needed to wander across half the town before she decided to throw 2nd Amendment Bob out of his house (and, apparently, cause his death, as discussed upthread). She could have just gone around the corner. (Indeed, there's no reason for her to not do that, anyhow. The writers just wanted any cheap excuse to fluff Spike's SuperNose. Blech.) So Xander's apartment is apparently abandoned, and ALL the SiTs are supposedly crammed in at Buffy's, story logic be damned. Gee, I'm glad Whedon's back running things, aren't you? 🙄

Further discussion of the argument in Part 1 will eventually appear in that thread. I only brought it up to reference the possible impact on Willow's assumption about who said "I love you". And, speaking of that…it occurs to me that if X had just kept his yap shut and let Willow keep on snoozing, Angel would never have had his soul restored, and Buffy would have just cut his head off, and that would be that. Now, to be fair, a healthy Willow is an objective good thing and I could even argue that Buffy's only able to be as effective against Angel because she doesn't have to worry about Willow possibly dying; knowing that Willow head is still head-shaped is one less thing weighing on Buffy's mind. But still,

So you're thinking there's a reason why the Council decided to stick Legacy Boy with the Slayer who'd already gotten Merrick killed, huh? "Give him six months and then give our condolences to his father", is that it? Hmmm… Speaking of this subject, I fortuitously took another look at that "Talk" thread I mentioned on the trivia board, and found…this: From the days when Spike was actually still floating around at Wolfram & Hart. (October, 2003.) Which case of Marsters shmooping up the script was I referring to, I wonder? Huh. ETA: And that's with Giles only knowing about the Yellow Crayon speech. If X had ever mentioned that whole "one time I woke Willow from a coma" deal, that would be more evidence of how he can "save the world with [his] mouth". But he didn't tell anyone (apparently not even Willow during the "fluke") about that, so… ETAA: Another contributor on that trivia board liked Lessons more than I did. But that still left plenty of room for improvement: Way too generous wrt S5 being "fun", IMO, but still on point. I'd only disagree that Buffy should be allowed to show maturity and grow into her responsibilities; IMO, that's the point of S1-S3. It's not that Buffy (and Buffy) evolves, I'd say…it's that it loses its sense of self along the way. So instead of High School Buffy becoming College Buffy and then Young Adult Buffy, suddenly we find ourself enduring Joyce the Demon-Slayer. (As vampires are no longer allowed to be dangerous, which might make Bad Boy Spike look sketchy.) Oh, joy. Or utter lack thereof, more honestly. Whedon also seems to have been unable to see that his characters wanted to develop but retain their cores, instead swapping in (IMO piss-poor) substitutes. Dawn is the New Willow, the innocent Buffy must protect! Andrew is the new Xander, the whacky geek! Anya is the new Cordelia, she's so HI-larious, who needs an inner core of decency? Feh and feh and feh again. Although to be fair to Key-face, she wasn't Whedon's first attempt to replace Willow. From the ass himself, on the commentary for Hush: So I guess Joss hadn't been watching S4 at all, huh? One of the drivers behind the explosion of Buffy/Willow 'shipping during the first half of this season (that's when the fanfic lists started) was that not only was Angel finally gone (soon followed by Wolfboy), not only were the girls sharing a room with the resultant opportunities for cuddling, but that Willow was getting more damsel action than she'd had in a while. From being rescued from the fire by Cave!Buffy in Beer Bad to being rescued from Oz-wolf by Buffy in Wild at Heart to being rescued from Spike/the Commandos by Buffy and her ridiculous flare gun (I love "contain this!", but come on, now), Willow had shown plenty of physical vulnerability this season. As for emotional vulnerability, Oz had put her through the wringer, the dirty dog, and as for being shocked by the coldness of the world, Willow had literally said, just two episodes previously, that every innocent life lost still hurts her. from Killed by Death (re Dr. Backer, RIP): And from Pangs (adieu, Prof. Gerhardt): Feels like pretty much the same Willow (and the same B/W dynamic) to me. Aside from Alyson having a different haircut and finally being allowed to wear heels. But, apparently, we "needed" someone "more vulnerable:. Whatever, genius. How'd that work out, exactly? Sigh.

Here, have a working link. Seriously? I've always raged about how in Beneath You, Willow is all nervous about coming back to Sunnydale and neither she nor Giles (both fairly smart, allegedly) think to use "the ingenious speaking-tube" to call and find out how B/X/D feel about that, but I didn't recall that we were told that nobody had talked to her all summer. JFC, that makes Willow's returning home even less sensible. I mean, read the room, Rosenberg. (Checking the script, I see that's not made explicit. Sarah's just assuming it because Willow's too petrified to get in the cab. [Get in the fucking cab with her, Giles. What, you've got to stay and feed your horse?] Still, this ain't great: Even if you can fanwank that Willow was locked away with the coven and couldn't come to the phone [which, bullshit], how was Xander not writing her letters regularly? We know Xander can write; we see his yellow-crayon sign next episode. But for the sake of "drama" [and a hugely stupid plot for 7.03], we're supposed to believe that there's been no communication whatsoever. And way to go Giles, sending an allegedly-dangerous Willow back to the Hellmouth without even trying to help her through her crisis. That whole "Giles can be an idiot sometimes. The smart kind, but still" deal is looking pretty spot on, I'm thinking.) I can remember that Spuffy fans on the boards were scrupulous about simply referring to it as "the AR". Because apparently spelling it out might bring up the point where Spike's a goddamn rapist. His incompetence isn't really the issue, it's the moral character. To be fair, Buffy's "I know I can take him" could just be indicative of her being in denial about the whole issue. But it's not as if we get much follow-up in 7.03, so… Again, not so much. Marti may have loved the "bad boy" angst with Angel, but it's clear that she had little use for Spuggy. In five of her seven Dawnverse scripts, Buffy and Spike don't even meet. Yes, she wrote that grotesque post-sex talk in Wrecked, but perhaps she deliberately made it repellent. She never wrote even one single solitary kiss between the two scrawny a-holes. In fact, Marti isn't even on staff at the moment. (She was on maternity leave.). The cross-hugging rewrite was all Joss Whedon, the man who gave them both their first romantic kiss (in Very Pretty Crap) and their first relationship kiss (Once More, with Spuggy). The man who said he'd had the vision of Spike drilling (an apparently panty-less) Buffy in the ass "for years". Marti is certainly not without her sins (she's the woman who wrote Buffy deciding to take her 15-year-old virginal sister to her attempted rapist's for "protection" in Villains, even though Warren wasn't after Dawn, and Buffy knew that Warren had Spike's crypt under video surveillance and Spike's chip meant that he'd be helpless to stop a human Warren, anyhow), but you can't pin this shit on her. JMO.

Next rotation of BtVS on FUSE starts with Welcome to the Hellmouth, today at 2.00 PM, Eastern Time. And if you over-ate at lunch, well, Chosen is on right before, to help you toss those cookies. (Yeesh, only two hours between the desecration of "The Earth is Doomed" and the original, if you're masochistic enough to want to note the contrast.)

Apparently Bill Murray dumped 9-year-old Seth in a trash can backstage at Saturday Night Live in 1983. So I guess having a birthday this close to Groundhog Day isn't as much fun as it could be. Happy Jubilee, Seth! And best wishes on the big 5-0 next year.

Well, the flaw in that logic is that Willow is already defaulting to "Ritual, yay! Save Angel so Buffy can be happy again!" at the start of the scene, long before Xander ever says a word, much less the "Yeah? Well, Jenny's dead" line that Rupert takes exception to. So clearly she's not making her decisions based on any anger (which is probably an exaggeration; "annoyance" is more likely) directed at Xander. Also, while Xander may not be happy that Willow has an opinion different than his, saying that Willow has "chosen Angel" over him is IMO pushing it. There's no either/or dichotomy in place. Willow can still love Xander with all of her heart but disagree with him here. After all, I've heard people (*cough*lembergwatcher*cough*) express annoyance that Willow sometimes seems to automatically agree with Buffy. So if Willow should go against Buffy when she thinks Buffy is wrong, surely the same standard should apply to Xander? He should win his arguments based on his arguments, not because Willow's known him since age 4 or whatever. (I also can recall plenty of times when Willow crossed verbal swords with Buffy, from "God! What is wrong with you?" to "And don't forget to not write!" to "I feel, when I comes to Angel, that you can't think straight" and so on. Conflating a tendency to agreement with slavish devotion rather blurs the truth, IMO.)

Continuing that "excavation of things I wrote in 2004" trend from that old trivia-game board (see my recent post in the thread for The Zeppo), I see they did something we haven't done here, so I thought I'd bring it over. Someone had us name our favorite episodes by number. Different from ranking all the eps of one particular order…you don't have to decide if you think Pangs or Lovers Walk is more overrated (hmm, Joss has Buffy let Spike walk free even though he held W/X hostage, or Joss has Spike be the mouthpiece for excusing genocide? Tough call…), you just have to name your favorite episode 8 (or whichever). Here are my 2004-vintage choices: The asterisk is to note that while I consider WSWB the superior ep, I have a brick-load of nostalgic feelings for Welcome to the Hellmouth. 19 years later, I wonder what I was thinking about wrt 5.13; I might put that behind Surprise, The I in Team, or even The Killer in Me nowadays. (Or even all three.) I do love large parts of Doomed to a great degree, even if Ted is probably objectively superior. And I'm not sure if my preferring The Prom to The Yoko Factor is really anything beyond an anti-Graduation Day vote, my wanting to claim 3.20 as the real end for that season. But overall, interesting to look at. Feel free to make a similar list of your own "all-star season", should you choose.

As I alluded to in the Part 1 thread, it's pretty silly to finally be able to use Oz again and only see him for an eye-blink in that episode… …especially as we're apparently setting up some "romantic triangle" angst with him in this episode, what with Xander's "I love you" declaration to Willow and Willow's calling the wrong name in response. Tough to remember "Oz and Willow 4EVA!" when they've had one scene of interaction since the days when Jenny was alive, "chair shortage" cuteness or not. And, as I've noted elsewhere, even tougher to feel Xander's pain when he and Willow haven't had a one-on-one scene since he found her in his bed and have barely exchanged any dialogue since. (Willow teased him wrt Cordelia wrestling him in the closets IOHEFY and he commented on her "Final Solution" plan there, but it seemed that most of their talk in Go Fish was directed at Buffy or Cordy, rather than each other.) Or, dealing with the larger issue, that we really haven't seen any "Xillow are lifelong best buds" moments since Reptile Boy. This whole plot is dying from neglect, it seems. But beyond all that…didn't Xander just royally piss Willow off last episode, by nearly getting into a fist-fight with Giles? Wasn't Willow venting on the phone to Buffy after that? ("Willow! My God! You kiss your mother with that mouth?") I grant you that Whedon will in the future build an entire "Language!" subplot in Avengers: Age of Ultron out of nothing more than Tony Stark saying "Dang it!"…but Sarah didn't play that as if Buffy was being sarcastic, it definitely seemed that Willow said something not WB-approved. And while Xillow were both present in the further Library scenes in Part 1 without any apparent fall-out, the lack of any Touching Reconciliation Moment still leaves me wondering if perhaps that Scooby Fight played a part in Willow's subconscious translating "boy saying 'I love you'" as "Oh, it must be Oz"? (Clearly, Xander's anti-Angel statements haven't been forgotten, since Kendra says "I tend to side with your friend, Xander" when opining that she too would rather Buffy slay Angel, rather than attempt the Ritual. So somebody must have told Kendra what Xander said.) Perhaps if W/X were on better terms, she might have heard more clearly? It's just annoying to not know what's going on in Willow's head, because we've neglected the set-up for this story, regardless of how well Nick Brendon sells the actual moment. So yes, we needed more Oz in part 1. (Whedon does just fine by Oz in this one, but that's not the point.) If only build out the framework for the equally-lacking Xillow-flavored set-up. Grr. JMO. Although I suppose the idea that Xander's still in Willow's bad books might offer hope that, down the road, once Willow's reconciled to him as a friend again, she might rediscover her romantic feelings, as well. (It is canon, via both Buffy and Willow's words in BB&B, that Will loved Xander even before the spell.) So there's that hope, still.

A clever person (okay, it was I, elsewhere) pointed out that part of the reason Giles just assumes that Buffy is all #TeamSaveMyBoyfriend! and so starts spewing stuff like "curing Angel does seem to have been Jenny's last wish" is because Giles is the only person in the room who hasn't heard Buffy giving a chorus "I'm ready to kill Angel already", which she's been telling to anyone who would listen all episode while Giles is off looking at exciting obelisks with Doug Perren. (He needs to get a life. I'd say he should get a girlfriend, but Angel apparently objects to that.) Xander got a double-dose of "it's Angel-killing time", because he was in the cemetery when Buffy tried delivering her message in the teaser, but she made a point of saying it again in the cafeteria scene, too. So Xander heard her…and Willow heard her…and Cordelia heard her…and Oz (who?) heard her. If Snyder had been there two seconds earlier, he would have heard her, too. (Which could have been dicey, as Buffy actually says "kill", and Snyder already thinks she's a troublemaker without thinking she's homicidal as well.) So if Giles could get his head out of the Museum, if he actually knew how Buffy's feelings had evolved over the preceding 20 weeks, maybe he wouldn't be all "supporting my Slayer means giving Angel a free pass; my Watcher's duty comes ahead of my own emotions. I'm sorry, Jenny" here. Ah, well. *************************** I'm hardly the world's biggest Oz-fan, but after four episodes away, you'd think that Joss could use him a bit better. He gets one scene. and fewer lines than Snyder. (Snyder 3, Oz 2.). Presumably, you're paying Seth Green for a reason. Might wish to do something with him, then. (There's the chance that Seth got back late from filming Idle Hands, but I'd think it was always agreed he'd be back for the finale, so I don't know why this script is so Oz-light. To quote the guitarist himself, "Huh.")

Occasionally, I mention the rather-complicated trivia game I played from 2003-2006. Out of nostalgia, I recently checked out the board that hosted it, just to reread the quizzes again. (This probably says something about my needing friends, but leave that alone, pardon the pun.) Anyhow, I checked out the "talk" thread on that board, and found some vintage venom I'd written about this episode back in '04. So long ago the S3 DVDs hadn't come out yet… Well, at least I'm consistent. I've disliked Xander's sidelining this season since the first time I saw S1-S2. (I started watching regularly in S3, so I didn't know better. But I know now.)

Would this mean that was "punishment" for Dang. Hard cheese, that. Sunnydale is a rough town, it seems.

Yeah, I can remember Lexi reacting to the cop saying they needed to ask Giles "a few questions" with a bitter "sure! Let's arrest him, too! He is the "logical" suspect, right?" However, there's no actual evidence against him, and that "Upstairs" note shows handwriting that inclines towards the right: Which, as Giles is so severely left-handed that just last episode we saw him reach across his body to grab a book laying by his right hand (honestly, England, just pick it up with the right and then switch hands), means it's very unlikely he wrote that, since any slant to his handwriting would most likely incline towards the left. And besides, Giles has a bit of an alibi from Willow, two scenes before. (Yes, it's theoretically possible that Giles killed Jenny, then zipped over to Buffy's place to establish said alibi and only later returned home to "discover" the murder. But the evidence of the struggle at school makes it very unlikely that Giles killed her there, then brought her to his own place to make himself look more guilty. No jury would believe that. Literally the only person on the planet who has zero reason to go to all that work [Jenny's corpse shows no signs of having been knocked out or bound for transport; it's almost certain she died at the school] in order to taunt and/or frame Giles would be the Book Man, himself.) That said, Sunnydale P.D. doesn't exactly do a great job of inventorying the crime scene. How do they miss that sketch of Jenny's corpse, exactly? I grant you, it's not as bad as but at least that was concealed. The sketch was right in the open. Sigh.

Exhuming, as I will sometimes do, a Waybacked link to Sarah's original essay. Because, if the internet isn't forever, what is? Also, she used a very nice screencap: It would be nice if our S7 Three Musketeers Moments are a) more frequent and b) about something other than shared Dawn-lust, but to a dehydrated man Mountain Dew tastes like Dom Perignon, or something like that. And some clips from the essay, for those of you who are too busy to just read the thing: Yeah, 7.07 is one of the few examples of craftsmanship in this season, but aside from my standard complaint about how it's just set-up and the follow-up sucks, it does drag a bit. And not just in the completely-useless teaser or the "deep" Holden scenes. Or Jonathan getting misty about his locker combination… Yeah, other than "this is Buffy's show", there doesn't seem to be much reason for Windbag to care about our cast. To quote Chuck Palahnuik, "On a long enough timeline, the life-expectancy for anyone drops to zero." Buffy's gonna die. She has died, twice already. She's almost boring now, allegedly: Why should the Evilest Evil Ever give a shit how long it's going to be until Buffy takes the permanent dirtnap? Because Buffy screwed up its plans to mess with Angel four years ago? Well, piling even more guilt on King Brood has its pleasures, but come on, now. To quote the wisest person on the show, I mean, if freaking Glory had enough self-image to not obsess over Buffy, you'd think The First would, too. To quote Sarah again: I mean, yeah. Is "I mindfucked Dawn Summers" really worth putting on your EEEEEEVIL résumé? This is the girl who can't work a crossbow, for Pete and Debbie's sake. Just toss a ball of yarn into a corner and you're done with Key-face, I'd imagine. And speaking of somebody who wasn't even in CwDP, but still won't go away: Seriously. Anya's entire arc is about Xander: Anya dates Xander, Anya wants to marry Xander, Anya wants to kill Xander. If Anya's done with Xander, we should be done with her. And if we have to follow her "finding out who she really is", then hanging out at Buffy's place doing dishes probably shouldn't be it. It actually feels as though Joss was keeping her around just so he could kill her off in the finale. Which, way to shit on Spike's Big Moment, dude. Poor Spikey: he goes from having his impressive debut turned into a joke so the show can fluff Joyce, of all people, to having his big climax copycatted by Vengeance Girl. Dude just can't catch a break in this town.

So Pedro Pascal's new video-game adaptation, The Last of Us, is apparently a big hit for his pals at HBO. (Despite Pedro having basically called down The Great Roofie Spirit upon himself and forgetting he'd been cast. [Okay, just took a sleeping pill and woke up with no memory of the night before, but still.]) And he's hosting Saturday Night Live tonight! It's been a long road, but our Eddie is doing well it seems. Although it looks as though it's been a very long road, too: Okay, so 23 years is 23 years. And some of the dirt and lines are just makeup; he still looks pretty good in civvies. Really, the only down note is that Pedro got stuck with Coldplay as his musical guest. Ugh. I bet they could have gotten Stretch Princess for, like, half the price…

I'm guessing that Jax is meant to be slightly older, so that he's the one who bought the guns, etc., that 16-y/o Devin couldn't. That's why they needed Scott's help for the rest of the money; if it was just a question of cash, Dev could have bought enough to do the job on his own with the $3000 he already had. But Jax was needed to be the "adult" of the two, so that's double the shopping list, now.

I'm feeling a bit more Tales from the Darkside, I think. Not that any of this is bad (I'm a TZ devotee), but it's rather a waste of an episode considering what this series is meant to be. On the plus side, that bathing-in-the-blood-of-virgins deal is working out pretty well for Bilson. Looking pretty nice for 41, I must say. (Some mouth lines when she grimaced, but other than that, impressive.) ALISON (channeling Margaret Hamilton): I'll get you, my pretty pouty! And your little dog, too! Hahaha!!!!