Halting Hex

When you're reduced to citing this as a positive, we know we're in trouble, right at the start. And I'd appreciate her "standing up to Anya" more if Xander wasn't in the middle of selling out Willow's sobriety to appease his Hellbitch, I'm just saying. Gee, given that Tara just had Buffy sobbing in her lap at the end of last episode about how horrible her "relationship" with Spike was making her feel, you'd think she might react a little more strongly to Buffy's "relapse" here than just a winking acknowledgment (and blessing?) to the Spuffy flirtation going on, no? I guess Tara really has taken it on herself to cheerlead for "those two crazy kids" ("he's done a lot of good, and he does love you"), her memories of Buffy's breakdown (and the visible bruising on Spike's face), aside. Not my idea of good judgment, I have to say. Even moreso when you remember she's never had any claustrophobia before (not when Xander locks her in the closet in Buffy vs. Dracula, for example) and thus it's just a cheap device invented for this episode to justify Xander's betraying Willow and endorsing Anya's utterly batshit "let's have the recovering witch just start throwing random spells around, never mind that we don't know what's causing the situation or what could go wrong" pathetic excuse for a plan. So annoying. "Juvenile Delinquent", nowadays called "Youthful Offender". The Christian Slater character, J.D., in Heathers is a homage to the term. Of course, Willow lives there, too. Willow's spent more time parenting Dawn than Buffy has, given Buffy's "summer vacation" and all. But let's just erase Willow from the Summers girls' lives, let's treat her like another Sophie or somebody, just so we can have our unearned Buffy/Dawn moment. Sigh. And I seem to have skipped Tara reaming out Willow for (horrors!) keeping magic supplies, whereas Tara screws up the spell and nearly gets everybody killed and nobody says a freaking word. Yeah, that's fair. And again, sigh. Slow and boring and contradicts previous canon on vengeance demons and beats up on Willow a lot. And gross Spuffiness. Other than that, reasonably passable. 4/10? (One of the better grades for this season, you'll note.) Also, note that Spike shows up at Buffy's birthday with nothing but a half-drunken six-pack, a party-crashing Clem, and an attitude. Didn't he used to be a romantic? He brought Drusilla better gifts in Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, and he was in a freaking wheelchair then! Oh, Spikey. This "Bad-Boy Boyfriend" bullshit has been hard on you, too, I see. Once more, sigh…

Well yes, I understand Buffy's emotional conflict. I just don't, at all, get what's going through Spike's (alleged) brain. "Girlfriend outside door. Open door." Not exactly rocket science, I wouldn't think. Completely took me out of the moment. On the plus side, while Jonathan is apparently fine with Warren using the [whatever it was called] to rape random girls, he seems to be upset once he learns that Katrina is Warren's ex-girlfriend. See, he can be taught! Give him enough time, and "rape is bad" might finally sink in! And I think I sold the episode short with that "Care to guess [what else I hate about it]?" above. There are actually two things that I absolutely despise that I haven't mentioned as yet. But one is worse than the other, so I only thought of it first. My bad.

You got me there. Van Johnson did many war movies (most memorably The Caine Mutiny, I see), but not that one. My bad.

I must have missed when Willow and Xander thought their girlfriends plotting to kill Buffy would be a big joke. I mean, Buffy does completely forget about Willow in School Hard and she just lets Spike stroll off in Lovers Walk, so its quite arguable that she's never given a shit about Spike trying to kill Willow and Xander, but I expect and demand better of her. "Gallows humor" or not. So no, I will not "give her a break" on this. Spike is an actual murderer who has actually murdered lots and lots of actual people. That's not fucking funny. And if Buffy thinks it is, she can go tower-jumping again and leave the job to a real Slayer.

S1 is the foundation for the greatness that is S2; it works hard every episode to convince you that these characters are good people and good friends and you should care about them. It integrates the gang so thoroughly into the plot that all four of them are involved with the climax of every single episode (sometimes Willow's just watching, but she's there), whereas in S3 characters disappear for half the episode, time after time after time. The Master is an iconic villain, representing Buffy's fear of death, one of the basic elements that defines her calling. ("One Slayer dies, the next one's called." "Giles, I'm 16 years old. I, I don't want to die.") I've yet to figure out how the Mayor is in any way relevant to Buffy's Journey…when the Big Bad of the season is eclipsed by the subvillain, you know you've screwed up. The first half of the season is pissed away on relationship plots, with no forward momentum whatsoever, because they were setting up Angel to leave at midseason. And then he sticks around for the back half, after all. Oy. Likewise, my precious Cordy has so little to do after Amends that they forcibly undo all her S2 growth, even announcing it ("She certainly has reverted to type"), just so they can do it all over again on the spinoff. And then they reduce her to sniffing after Wesley, and I like Wes (even here), but come on, now… S3 has nicer sets and higher-quality film stock (although it's arguable that switching from 16mm to 35mm actually hurts the series, takes away the atmospheric "Gersh-light" of the first two seasons) and features an array of exciting new characters, from Anya (who doesn't start sucking until Hush) to Wesley (as I say, I like Brylcreem™!Wes) to Mr. Trick. And of course, any season that's dedicated to Eliza Dushku's 17/18-year-old ass in tight black leather pants is starting very heavily on the plus side. (Hey, just because it's not as good as S2/S1 , that doesn't mean I don't like it.) But the season is hollow at its core, and thus keeps spitting out clunker after clunker after clunker: Anne, Beauty and the Beasts, Band Candy, Lovers Walk, Helpless, The Zeppo, Enemies…they may all be better than anything DawnVerse (bar Normal Again, obviously), but none of them really rises above "meh" for me, and I don't feel any sadness if I decide to give them a skip. And let's end by contrasting the two climaxes, both with Buffy-in-peril. In S1, her Inevitable Prophesied Death is the true test of her heroism, and she only survives because Xander himself is a hero, growing as a character as he shames Angel out of his skulking. Whereas in S3, Buffy's only in danger to begin with because she fell for Faith's distraction tactics, she compromises her morals by deciding to feed Faith to Angel, she flubs that job by not taking the tranq gun or backup (because Joss needs his "kewl" girl-fight, dontcha know?) and when she decides to offer herself in Faith's place, it turns out not to mean anything because, oops! Angel didn't need to "drain the blood of a Slayer", after all! Never mind, just bad hype! I mean, seriously? That's your resolution to the Hero's Dilemma? "Oops, never mind"? Sheesh. So yeah, I'll take S1, thanks.

Well, "Balance of Terror" is just a remake of an old WWII movie (The Enemy Below [1957], starring Van Johnson and Curt Jurgens), submarine v. destroyer warfare translated to space. Stiles's bigotry against the Romulans is shown to be abhorrent, and the Romulan commander is humanized, so I wouldn't call it "Un-PC" necessarily. Whereas "The Enterprise Incident" is more Viet Nam justification, just like in "A Private Little War". No, just…no. Back on the actual BtVS topic, I went all over Adam Bitterman's IMDb page, but couldn't find a listing for his height. So there's an "actual size" joke that will remain unmade, alas. Sorry, I tried.

Aside from everything else (and I do mean EVERYTHING else), the angle for Spike giving it to Buffy up the ass is all wrong. Plus seriously, dude, if you're going to cornhole her, bring some lube. I know she has a Slayer Healing factor, but even so. That said, I like this episode. Well, not THIS episode, exactly…I mean the one where they stole the plot and a good chunk of the dialogue from, Consequences*. (Spike's quoting Faith so hard, he should have given her attribution.) Laziest bit of brain-dead plagiarism I ever saw on the show. I hope Marti took at least half of DeKnight's paycheck. And speaking of Spike being To Stupid to (Un)Live, even by his own very poor standards, let's not forget his decision to "hide" Katrina's body in the river. You know, that thing that corpses float in? Meanwhile, where does Spike live? Oh, yeah, in a cemetery. Think real hard, Spikey, and maybe, just maybe you'll figure out where you could hide a dead body in there. (Hell, take it home with you. If they haven't noticed that you're running electricity to the fucking crypt already, they won't start now. You get nice semi-warm blood to snack on, and nobody finds Katrina. Everybody's a winner.) Hey, you know that awful pathetic soap-opera-esque door-fondling sequence, with Bush's careers withering in front of our very eyes as that song plays ("straight out of Days of Our Lives", one commenter wrote at the time) and Buffy all angsty and conflicted and so reduced to feeling Spike's dark passion through the door (oh, vomit, vomit, vomit!) and all that…why exactly doesn't Spike, oh, I don't know…JUST OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR??? I mean, he's not ambivalent and shit! He wants her, she's out there, open the goddamn door, you asshole! I mean, I'm 180° removed from being a Spuffy 'shipper, but anything to end this fucking idiocy! To be fair, they took Buffy's PTSD "iss-yews" from When She Was Bad and streeeeeeeetched them on forever, so why shouldn't they do the same with Eric 2.0 (aka Andrew)? I mean, aside from wanting to tell good stories effectively and not send their audience screaming into the night and things such as that. But clearly, "economy of storytelling" was long gone by now. On the plus side, when Warren's trying to rape Katrina (and eventually kills her), he gets a "kewl" scar in his eyebrow, just like Spike! So now maybe Buffy will start having obnoxious, joyless, public sex with him! Bound to be a huge step up! Team "Barren", all the way! To (mis)quote Neal from Ted: "Nobody beats the (guy who built the) machine!" A filthy fucking disgusting pile of shit, and not even an original one. Second-worst episode of the entire series. (And for a reason I haven't even mentioned yet. Care to guess?) Marks: 0/10. If I could go lower, I would. Much lower. *-Oh, and apparently, it's not 3.15 that I'm supposed to be seeing a "homage" to, but 4.16; Buffy's beating up Spike at the end is supposed to reminiscent of Fuffy beating up Baith at the end of Who Are You…she's saying all these bad things about him, but she's really talking about herself, you see! How deep! Yeah, yeah, whatever. All I know it that when I first saw that scene, I was standing up and cheering. Because IMO Buffy was describing Dear Sweet Spikey to a tee, and I had spent months suffering and waiting for her to see through his bullshit. It wasn't until I came online after the episode that I was disabused of the idea that Fucked-Up Buffy could ever say a bad thing about St. Sunkencheeks. "Put it all on me." I'd like to put a swarm of piranhas on your genitals, Spike…will that do? What a fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking piece of shit. Steven S. DeKnight should be gang-raped on a regular basis for having subjected the audience to this excrement. But JMO ;)

Wait, WHAT???? Sub-Commander Tal was on Buffy? Holy shit!!!! I take back anything bad I ever said about Spiral! (Even if it is the episode that made David Hines give up reviewing the series.) My world is all askew. The Prison Break fans can have General Exposition, I'll take Cleric!Tal. And a very happy 90th birthday (and hopefully many more) to Jack. (Mind you, "The Enterprise Incident" is still a vile piece of imperialist propaganda and one of the worst episodes of the original Star Trek. But I have affection for anyone who spanned both of my favorite shows [I only knew of Michael Ansara before this] and besides, Tal's another "enemy" subordinate stuck in a dysfunctional hierarchy, with that useless hormonal Commander of his practically humping Spock and believing every lie he fills her empty head with. I have great sympathy for him, just as I do for Drea in "By Another Name", alone on the bridge flying the ship and wondering what's going on with her fellow Kelvans that Kirk and company are driving insane. So yay for Jack! [As useless an episode as Spiral continues to be. But it's not as if Ansara's Enemies was a winner, either.])

Whoops, missed the joint citation. (It was the "1" through "6" numbering that did me in; if I had a tie, I would have put "T3-4" or some such, just so the worst of the worst could have its well-"earned" rating of "7". But that's just me.) And I don't know…it's true that Xander didn't get the best reception for "Way I see it, you just want to forget all about Ms. Calendar's murder so you can have your boyfriend back", at the time. But at the end of the day, I'm so glad he said it, just so that when Little Miss Ego (name also from this ep :) ) tries to pull this crap again in Revelations ("But you have to believe me, if I thought Angel was going to hurt anyone—"), X is already on record as having been on the right side of history, here. That said, I do understand that you're protective of Xander, just as I am of Willow. So I get where you're coming from. I do try to judge the eps in a larger context, though; IMO, Flooded blows as television, not merely as a "Willow is so CRA-ZEE! Thank God Buffy has Spike!" pile of vileness and character assassination. So I still appreciate "It's a big rock. I can't wait to tell my friends. They don't have a rock this big." in 2.21…even if it comes from the exact same asshole who will "joke" about "I could probably thin the herd a bit" (and Buffy smiles at the idea of his murdering her friends) 71 episodes later. One works for me, and one (really, really) doesn't. "Rank arrogant amateur" slurs aside. But again, JMO.

I believe this is covered in the "Best and Worst of Buffy" thread. Merge, please? 2 1 (slight gap) 3 4 (large gap) 5 (interstellar, cosmic-sized gap) (somebody in the other thread had a great joke about what goes here…test patterns, reruns of My Mother the Car, etc.) 7 6 Also, lemberg, you left out S3. Which given your adoration for some parts of that season, I find ironic. (Also, what's wrong with Becoming, Part 1, I ask? I disagree with your dislike for Phases and BB&B due to 'ship preferences, but I at least understand that. But 2.21 doesn't have that issue.)

I'll blame Giles for a lot of things but suggesting that Xander go rescue Buffy by catching a lift with someone who has a car might be a biiiit over the line, IMO. Xander's a big enough boy to make his own decisions. Giles was busy dealing with Willow's frog fear by then.

Re: spoilers…yeah, pretty much.

To be fair, Willoz were now macking all over school (the "school kiss" discussed early on in Beauty and the Beasts was cut from the actual episode, but you can see it in the opening credits), so it's not as though they hadn't kissed since Phases. Nice though the Xillow here was.

Why would they become less comfortable with Spawn scenes as Dawn became more of an adult? Or is JE saying the scenes between them in S5 were a mistake, she now feels? I think Barry Williams only got one uneventful date out of Florence Henderson, as I recall. Nothing truly scandalous. OTOH, apparently Maureen McCormick (Marcia) and Eve Plumb (Jan) did hook up on at least one occasion, although one of them denied it when the other first told the story. (I forget who spilled.) Makes all those "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!" and "Sure, Jan" jokes have an extra meaning, lol. There's a bit of talk about Don Johnson being Not A Nice Person, on many levels. But we're notably OT, now.

Just throw his ass out; it's not as though Spike can fight back, after all. And they might want to haul out the disinvite spell so he can't come back, while they're at it.

If you don't want people to remember that you read (too much of?) that kind of fanfic, you might look for a better phrasing ;) Besides, it's only one "bed scene". A quickie, if you will. ;) Meantime, having referred to Olaf as Anya's "ex-husband" up thread, I'm wondering if that's actually true. Does trollification automatically constitute divorce? I'm not saying one of them might not have grounds for an abandonment claim (it has been 1100 years, after all), but have those bonds ever actually been legally severed?

So…my stuff finally showed up at my new house. (Not newly-built, but newly-owned by me; the first time I've moved out of the renter class.) Thus concluding my cross-country move. JFC, I've got a lot of stuff. Nothing like "looking forward to" opening 100 or so boxes. (And of course they managed to lose the legs for the TV, so now it's just propped up against a bookcase. This never happened before I moved to flat-screens, obviously. The good news is that DirecTV says the installer [due on Sunday] can do something to take care of this. Apparently they have mounting kits. Maybe I'll even put it on the wall, now that I'm no longer in California. Still scared to just imagine it crashing to the floor and taking half my wall with it, though.)

Xandra was always one of my favorite vidders, but I've only found one of her vids on YT so far. "Think Twice", to the song by Eve6, is all about men fighting because women are…less than faithful. Yes, misogynist as anything, but still fun. (I like the "I can't get out" lines set to Oz straining at his cage.) Plus, lots of people punching Spike, so that's good. :) Enjoy.

Couldn't find the Faith character study I was looking for (set to Aimee Allen's "I'd Start a Revolution (If I Could Get Up in the Morning)", which worked so well with the coma clips), but this one, by Marquee777, isn't bad. Set to Linkin Park's "Breaking the Habit", and I suppose that Chester Beddington's suicide (RIP, Chester) gives his music enough self-destructive street cred (the lyrics were always bleak as anything) to fit the theme.

Oh, heck. As I said before, this isn't my favorite Buffy vid set to this song, but I'll link, now that I realized the vidder is one of my favorites, Sadique. Now where's her masterwork, "Don't Mess With Me" (Buffy v. Angelus, set to "Control" by Poe), I ask you? (Don't ask me; I couldn't find it. Sigh.) ETA: A-HA! Here it is, the version I prefer, by Kim and Kristine Anderson (KimKris, as they were known way back then). Thanks to the uploader for unearthing it. Of course, it's all Seasons 1-3, so no wonder it plays to my sweet spot. No Riley/Dawn/Spike/Dark Willow, even if you can make a perhaps better literal match that way. I still prefer the emotional throughline here. (The "Is it enough to die?" bits in this one are the Master (2x), Buffy sending Angel to Hell, and Angel draining Buffy. Which, good enough, IMO.)

And I suppose we need some Buffy/Xander representation here, so here's another one from starryeyesxx1, "Staring at It", to the song by SafetySuit. "You're staring at it…the only love I'll know…" Wish I could find Charmax's B/X vid set to Aqualung's "Strange and Beautiful", but of course no such luck. Just a freaking Spuffy vid, and a Buffy/Giles, which may not be to everyone's taste, either. Oh, well.

Here's the B/W "You're My Best Friend" I was talking about before. Old as the hills, which accounts for the poor quality of the source video, but still a useful artifact. Thanks to tweyelight for his/her work. I believe this is mostly intended as a friendship vid, but of course it's a love song (Queen's John Deacon wrote it for his fiancée), so 'shippers can enjoy it on that level, too. Thankfully nobody has vidded Buffy and Willow's deteriorating relationship of later years to Deacon's other big hit, "Another One Bites the Dust", so we can just enjoy the smiles here.

"She's 18, right?" "Now." I technically don't know when in late-2001 James wrote this song, so MT might actually only have been 15-going-on-16 at the time. Even 16 is an eyebrow raise, given that he was 39, though. And yes, there's reports that she was the one doing the flirting (she did tell a story during an interview on Late Night with Conan O'Brien a few years later about flirting with Hugh Laurie during her infamous House, M.D. guest spot…although given the subject matter of that ep, I don't know how Michelle could have avoided it), but even so, I can see that the producers might have figured the best thing was no more "Little Bit" scenes, rather than relying on/worrying about James's self-discipline to see them through. I mean, he did write the song, after all. Inside the show, it does damage the Spike character a bit. (Not that I necessarily minded that, I'll admit.) It's perhaps most noticeable in Gone, where he actively avoids her, going from the kitchen to the living room via the "sun room" at the back the house, rather than pass by the front stairs where Dawn is. By the time she shows up in his crypt in Seeing Red, they've gone 16 episodes without speaking to each other. So much for all that "Buffy trusts him with Dawn" that the redemptionistas were so fond of…

This always annoys me, with the gang literally stuck up in the peanut gallery. I know this is mostly a Buffy/Giles episode, and those 'shippers (including friendshippers) get some nice pieces thrown their way ("They picked the perfect thing. I can't lose you." "She's not your bloody instrument!" "*cough* retroactive! *cough* "), but I'm too invested in W/X to have them just pushed aside like this. And I really don't like the reduction of the team to just the surface descriptions ("two witches, a thousand-year-old demon, blah-blah field time, etc…"), as I'm sure I've written a time or six. What I just realized today, though, is how sucky it is for Anya to rat out Willow ("Willow's a demon??"), given that she's been portrayed as worried about being exposed as such throughout the episode. ("Kill the current demons, right? Current demons.") So basically, she's throwing Willow to the wolves here. And I know, Anya, but still. Especially as the episode right before this one was our big "Anya and Willow work things out and make up" episode. Was Doug not in the writer's room when they were breaking down the plot of Triangle for Jane to write, or something? I mean, I suppose it's nice of Anya not to choose Tara for "demonhood", given that Tara had been so stressed about her "secret" pre-Family, but I still would like character growth to last for more than 40 minutes, I'm just saying. A nice portion of the blame should also go on Buffy's shoulders, since she's the one who threw "thousand-year-old ex-demon" out there in the first place. And it's not as if she didn't know Anya had these issues; Anya had her "they don't sound very ex-demon-compatible" stress ball right in Buffy's own living room, ffs. Rather than reduce her friends to their "powers", IMO, it should have been something more like this: Lastly, I'm not terribly wild about Willow being all gushing when she says "field time" is "Riley-speak", since Riley did hurt Buffy to the point where she's still mopey when she finds random sweaters. (And he left the rest of them without a proper goodbye, .) But I think I'd put that more on Alyson Hannigan than on the script, which only says that Willow says this "softly". Seems as though there might be room for bit of "wistful remembrance" nuance in there, but Aly just basically beams the line. Oh, well.

Well, she certainly shows some emotion, at least. Her pained "I shot Oz!" always tugs at my heartstrings, and it's not because I'm terribly invested in the romance. But JMO.