Bitterswete

I totally agree here. So many of the highly-praised episodes of BtVS just don't do much for me, and "Tabula Rasa" is definitely one of them. Not only did TR seem pretty "meh" to me on first viewing, but then I saw "Spin the Bottle" (an AtS episode that I really liked which had a similar storyline) which made TR seem even more "meh." Me, too. Riley might not have been the most exciting of guys but I liked him, and I liked him with Buffy. Sometimes, I enjoy couples who aren't high drama all of the time. For example, I think one of the reasons I eventually grew out of Buffy/Angel was that, by the end of season three, I had just gotten tired of the angst. Which was a shame because I found them most interesting when there was angst. So, basically, I got tired of what I found most entertaining about them. That's not why I didn't like Kennedy. While I liked Tara, I wasn't so invested in Willow/Tara that Willow moving on to someone else would make me hate the other character for it. I just didn't like Kennedy, mainly because she's exactly the kind of character that can get on my nerves.

Whenever someone says they don't like season 5, and explains why, I find myself agreeing with most of their criticisms. And, yet, I still really liked season 5, despite the flaws. Take Glory. Thinking about her character, and other characters like her, I really shouldn't have liked her as the Big Bad. Yet, for some reason, I did. Which is probably part of the reason I liked the season overall. I thought Faith was a bad girl cliche her entire run on BtVS. I could see why she was popular, she just didn't interest me all that much. Or at all, really. But her stints on AtS made me really like her. And, by the end of the BtVS finale, I liked Faith more than Buffy. How's that for a UO? The difference is that season 6 felt like such a drag. Season 5 had its dark, sad elements. But it just didn't feel as grim and depressing. In fact, I found a lot of season 5 enjoyable and entertaining, even with the dark and angsty stuff going on. Season 6 was depressing to the point of being mind-numbing. And there wasn't much fun in the season to balance things out. Actually, I think the Trio was supposed to balance out the grimness and provide comic relief. But that didn't really work because a lot of viewers didn't like them or think they were funny.

I couldn't stand Chloe in season 2, even before she seemed willing to sell out Clark. Then, through season 3, I liked her more and more. And, by season 4, she'd become one of my favorite characters on the show. I'm actually cool with a character doing a truly terrible thing if they learn from it and become better as a result. In fact, I've grown to love characters who've done far worse than anything Chloe ever did. Also, it's hard for my brain to not to see that season as a huge aberration for Chloe's character given some of the stuff I know about why she was written the way she was in season two, and why they seemed to do such a 180 with her character in season 3. I never thought there was anything wrong with Clark keeping his secret. If he had something he didn't want to tell anyone, it was his business. However, I didn't think it was wrong for the other characters to be upset because they knew he was hiding something from them, which caused him to lie to them on a regular basis. Because nobody really likes being lied to, or knowing someone they care about is hiding stuff from them. So I guess I saw both sides.

The producers said two things that always stuck in my head. (Partly because we discussed them quite a bit on the other board.) The first was that they wanted to portray Lex as being a better friend to Clark than Clark was to Lex. And the second was that they wanted Clark to have a hand in creating his greatest enemy. So, a lot of the time, they had Clark act a certain way towards Lex on purpose as part of the theme they were going for. I think they wanted Clark to have this powerful, heart breaking moment at the end of the show where he realizes Lex might not have become a villain (and they might still be friends) if Clark had done things differently. The problem was that they weren't the best at executing on this idea. But even if they had done it really well, the way Clark treated Lex sometimes just made Clark look bad, and really affected how I felt about his character. I actually think that's what Clark's "I'm sorry I couldn't save you Lex" line in the finale was all about. Clark taking some responsibility for how Lex turns out. Only, the way it's worded, it sounds like Clark did everything he could to try to "save" Lex, including being the most supportive friend he could possibly be. Which is a total crock.

I agree with most of this except for the part about Lex trying to be a good guy. To me, that implies that Lex was never really good. It was just an act he was putting on for everybody (including himself), and him turning to the dark side was him finally dropping the act. But I think that, in the early seasons, Lex had genuine goodness in him but he also had that dark side (he was raised by Lionel after all) that caused him to do something questionable every now and again. And those two sides were battling with each other. Through the early days of the show, his goodness was in charge. (That was kind of what "Onyx" was about.) But then things happened that pushed him further and further towards the dark side. If lots of positive things had happened to him instead, I think he would've gone in the opposite direction. Really, if Lex had been innately evil, he would've eagerly followed in Lionel's footsteps from the beginning, and it wouldn't have taken so much badness to get him to finally turn to the dark side. What got me was when Clark would lie about things that he really didn't have to lie about. I think he just got used to lying about anything that had to do with his powers at all, even if it was in the most indirect way possible.

The thing about comics is that there are different versions of just about everything, and trying to keep track can be a job in and of itself. I think Chloe was more similar to some teen-aged versions of Lana from comics featuring a young Clark Kent where there was no Lois. That version of Lana often did the "looking into something and getting into trouble" thing. She was also a more assertive and proactive than SV!Lana (especially in early seasons) tended to be. And while I take anything the PTB say with a huge grain of salt, I don't mean the showrunners specifically based Chloe on any version of Lana. Just that I always thought Chloe was more like that Lana than Lana was. And that, for whatever reason, I just never saw Chloe as a young Lois. Except for the fact that they both wanted to be reporters, my mind always saw Chloe as a separate character who was just different from my vision of Lois in dozens of other ways.

That's definitely not what it's about for me. I found Chloe an enjoyable and valuable character no matter what she was doing. And I can think of many professions where she would've kicked ass. But when I really like a character, I want them to be happy. And that includes wanting them to follow and attain their dreams. If Chloe had woken up one morning and thought, "I don't want to be a reporter anymore. I want to do this other thing," and I truly thought she'd be more happy doing the other thing, I wouldn't have had a problem with it. But, the way things played out left a bitter taste in my mouth because it felt like a character I liked was robbed of something she'd dreamed of, worked hard at and clearly still loved because the writers thought another character (who I didn't like nearly as much) should get to realize that dream instead. That's what made me dislike that whole situation. Yeah, I can see how folks not familiar with other versions of the characters saw Chloe as SV's version of Lois. But, actually, Chloe was much more like Lana from the comics. (And also the Lana from the Superboy TV series, who actually worked as an investigator.) I always found it weird how they made another character on the show more like earlier versions of Lana Lang than SV!Lana was. It was like, when the show first started, they decided Lana should exist mostly to be a love interest, and couldn't do other, more interesting things. So they gave a lot of the more interesting parts of the Lana Lang character to Chloe. As for me, I never wanted Chloe to be Lois. To me, any similarities had to do with them being related (because family members are often similar in some ways). But I never looked at Chloe and thought, "Wow, she's totally a young Lois Lane." To me, I always saw the pretty major difference between Chloe and the Lois Lane character.

Chloe definitely did some things in season 8 that some viewers gave her flack for. But when I think about Chloe doing the more "acceptable" thing in those situations, it always ended with Davis Dooming out and slaughtering somebody (Clark, a bunch of cops, random innocents) in a bloody massacre. So, under the circumstances, I was totally fine with her choosing to do "gray" things in the name of saving lives. Then again, I love "gray" characters. (They are good guys/gals, but not afraid to do iffy things for good reasons.) I think I'm with the others here. It's one thing for a character's dreams to change, and for them to want something different. But, in Chloe's case, it really did feel like, rather than deciding she wanted something new, the dream was taken away from her because the writers decided Lois should have it instead. The show even makes it clear that Chloe still wanted to be a reporter but couldn't, so was trying to find other ways to do what she was trying to do through reporting. For fans of Chloe's, all of this made it hard not to resent the crap out of Lois on Chloe's behalf. See, I think the show sprinkled hints that Clark had romantic feelings for Chloe from season one. A lot of the time, it felt like they were doing it just in case they actually wanted to go there. (Which is a pretty common thing for TV shows to do.) And there were a few times when it looked like they actually were going to go that direction before changing their minds and pulling back (which is also common). Basically, while it doesn't bother me that Chlark didn't happen, I wouldn't have been shocked if it had because there was plenty of ground work laid for it.

This made me flash back to so many discussions I had on TWOP about Davis. I don't agree with the idea that Davis was just a mask. Instead, I always sort of saw it as two beings possessing the same body, and Davis (the guy who truly wanted to be a good person and just live his life) wasn't any less real than Dooms (the remorseless killing machine). The fact that he wasn't human, and was created in a lab, had nothing to do with it. Even if his creators only expected Davis to be a shell, Davis turned out to be a being with thoughts, feelings, and a moral code. He wasn't just pretending to care about other people, or pretending not to want to hurt anyone, or pretending to care about his job just to blend in. Those aspects of his character were real. Basically, he was a sentient being and as much of a "real person" as anybody else. And I always fall on the side of sentient beings having a right to live their lives and be treated as real people. Of course, I've been watching stories about characters who aren't human and were created in labs (or maybe some other way) for ages. So thanks to those characters, and storylines that dealt with their issues, I had a lot of opinions on the subject going into season 8 of SV. And that definitely influenced how I saw Davis.

I hadn't completely checked out, but I'd stopped expecting the show to be in any way good or satisfying. Mostly, I was just happy when they turned out a scene I could enjoy all on it's own, without worrying about whatever else was going on on the show (because most of it didn't interest me), and rarely were any of those scenes about Clark, Lois, or Clois. Of course I'm glad SW got to play Davis, because he turned out to be one of my favorite characters. But I still would like to have seen him play Zod, because I think he would've been great in the part. I've seen plenty of actors take on roles that have been played by other people, and manage to make those roles their own, and I think SW could've done the same thing. In fact, I think Clark Kent, for example, is way more familiar to people than Zod, who I don't think most people are nearly as familiar with. But plenty of actors managed to convince me they were CK, including TW. (I never had a problem buying him as CK. He was just a CK I wanted to smack a lot. Which is more the fault of the writers than TW.)

Chloe and Oliver also had a whole conversation in the finale about their marriage, and whether either one of them regretted it or how it happened. So, according to the show anyway, they were, indeed, married. I also have a very hard time believing the kid was anyone but Chloe's, because it was very much framed as "mom telling story to son," and kind of doesn't make sense any other way. Meaning either the kid were her's and Oliver's, or she divorced Oliver and had a kid with someone else. Hopefully not Clark because, while they weren't married, it's clear at the end of the finale that he and Lois are heading that way. And that would suck for Chloe if they had a thing, she had his kid, then their thing ended and he went running to her cousin. That being Chloe and Oliver's kid, and them still being married (notice the big rock on her finger) is just the most logical read of the situation. But I agree that they left it vague to keep everyone happy. (And I've learned to take anything the TPB of SV say with a huge grain of salt.) Maybe I'd be there too if I was really into Chlark. But, while I liked the idea once upon a time, by the end of the show I disliked Clark too much to want him with Chloe. Basically, I thought Clark was a total ass by the end there, and thought Chloe (a character I still really liked) deserved way better. And, compared to Clark, Oliver was a total prince.

And I really liked Chloe/Oliver. I guess that, by the time they got together, I'd stopped expecting logic and reason from this show. All I know is that I enjoyed watching them together, and it was one of the few things the show had going on that I actually liked and cared about. I've read comments like this around here a few times and it's surprised me. I never thought there was anything all that special about Ollie and Lois's chemistry. I mean, I thought they made a good enough couple, and the scene where they broke up made me a little sad. But I just don't remember thinking much of them beyond that. Of course, chemistry is subjective, so I guess other people saw sparks between them that I just didn't for some reason. I guess to folks who were really into Oliver/BC in the comics, there were a lot of expectations about something happening between them on the show. But I didn't have those kinds of expectations. To me they were just two characters who happened to be on SV, and the fact that nothing happened between them on the show was no big deal. And regarding Chloe ending up stuck in another triangle, I consider SV it's own thing separate from comics canon. And there's no reason to think that, in this reality, anything romantic ever has to happen between Ollie and BC.

Agree to disagree because I don't think there friendship was ever about Elena. It's why they were around each other some before the prison world incident, certainly. But I think them actually caring about each other started in the prison world where they spent lots of time together (talking, sharing meals, etc.) and actually got to know each other as people, something they didn't really do before. And I just don't buy that Elena was their motivation for doing that.

It's very true that Richard brought them together, and they never would've spent two seconds near each other (without one of them ending up dead) without him there. But two people can care about the same person without ever liking each other, which certainly could've happened between Kahlan and Cara. But their relationship eventually grew beyond the fact that they both happened to care about the same person, and they started caring about each other beyond their relationships with him. Which is what I think has happened with Bonnie and Damon. Actually, what I find weird about it is that I do buy it. Because, not long ago, I would've scoffed at the very notion of Damon and Bonnie truly being friends. Now, I actually believe that they care about each other (independent of how they feel about anyone else), and the weirdness comes from the fact that, not long ago, I never would've thought it was possible. And if I thought that the sole basis for their friendship was Elena, that I wouldn't buy. Them becoming friends because of the things they've gone through, and the time they spent together due to some very unusual circumstances, that I can believe. That being said, I'd like it if some of their issues came up and were dealt with onscreen. Stuff like that has made the friendships on other shows stronger. I'm not holding my breath though because this is TVD, and they like to gloss over things like that.

First of all, Damon and Bonnie being friends still weirds out a part of my brain. But that's another story. Which wasn't always a good thing when she was actually there. It would be even less of a good thing now that she's not even around. I've seen other shows that have tried to keep missing (and popular) characters present by mentioning them and building stories around them. And while this might make big fans of the character happy (which I think TVD is trying to do), nobody else ever likes it. And there's usually much relief when the writers stop doing it. And, in my opinion, those shows were much stronger when they didn't try to keep working in that character. And I can think of many TV friends who met through another person (often the lead). But that didn't mean their friendship was based on that person. And, as a big fan of TV friendships (more than 'ships, actually) I really find that idea unappealing. I want my favorite TV friendships to be based on the fact that these people care about each other, not that they care about someone else, and that's what holding them together. Just no. As weird as I still find the friendship between Bonnie and Damon, I also dislike it when people (and the writers, to some degree) try to make it all about Elena because I don't think it is. If it was, they would've become pals ages ago. Damon and Bonnie's friendship developed because of the experiences they had with each other, separate from Elena. It actually reminds me of the friendship between Cara and Kahlan on Legend of the Seeker. (And here's a clip for anyone who doesn't know who I'm talking about.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jn2nhLdkcGU Those two hated each other at first. (There were death threats, and actual attempts on each other's lives.) And they were only around each other in the beginning because of Richard. (In fact, one of his big fears was that they'd kill each other.) But Richard wasn't why they ended up becoming such good friends. That was based on them getting to know each other, and spending time with each other independent of Richard. If I had thought their friendship was all about Richard, I wouldn't have liked it nearly as much. Or at all, come to think of it. So, while Bonnie and Damon's friendship is still a little weird to me, I certainly wouldn't want it to be all about Elena.