Sarah's Sober Second Thought Series: This Magic Moment

[Primetimer]

Willow's long, strange trip comes to an end as Sarah's Buffy Rewatch closes out Season 6.

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[TeeVee329]

I remember screaming with glee so loud when Giles suddenly appeared and knocked Dark!Willow on her ass.

[Carrie Ann]

Oh my God, Giles in that last screencap...he has never been hotter, and that is saying something. (The other time I find him this hot is when he kills Ben, because I might have problems.)

That moment where he takes all the air out of the ridiculous Season 6 melodrama of bad life choices is delightful. But too little too late. Look, if you could see by Ep 22 that this stuff was over the top, you should have fixed it earlier.

And yeah, Seeing Red. That is an attempted rape. But Sarah makes a really good point about why it was so confusing for people. Because, like their entire sexual relationship, it doesn't jibe well with what we have seen before. For all of Season 5 and the first half-dozen eps of Season 6, Spike "loves" Buffy and wants to help her, to be with her on whatever terms she can accept. What we don't see a lot of is him wanting to make her life WORSE. But then you get to Wrecked, and it's like a record scratch. Suddenly he wants her to come into the darkness with him. He wants her to abandon the things she loves and hate herself and blah blah blah. It just...I'm not a huge late-season Spike fan, but even I can admit that it kinda comes out of nowhere.

So to me, Seeing Red is just kind of another example of that. It's sort of like someone in the writers room came up with this attempted rape-->redemption endgame, and they began writing toward that, instead of writing Spike & the S/B development organically. At any rate, they'd already ruined that character for me before SR, but that sealed the deal. I would never feel particularly invested in him again, except insofar as he affected Buffy herself.

Edited March 19, 2015 by Carrie Ann

[ferretrick]

"They all killed Angel. Giles killed Ben. Innocents die all the time on nights Buffy has a date instead of patrolling. If you're going to make murder of humans the line our heroes can't cross, that's fine."

There is also a moment in the Season 5 sequence with the big RV fight and the Knights of Borezantium where Buffy CLEARLY delivers a lethal wound to one of the Knights-which makes all her pontificating about "we don't kill humans" in Season Six that much more intolerable.

[AndySmith]

And thus season 6 come to a screeching, crashing, thud of an end. Between the magicks-as-drugs story, the whole Buffy/Spike "relationship", Dawn's uselessness, the pointless killing off of Tara, the progression and 'end' of Xander/Anya (quite possibly one of the most annoying couples since Steve/Claire on 90210 circa season 7)...oy, I was glad when this season FINALLY ended.

I wish I could say the Giles return (especially "I'd like to test that theory", though I should be grateful he at least didn't do the patented and annoying Whedonesque head-tilt to the side when he did say that) made me feel the way it made most fans feel...but my reaction is more of a "meh". That's how much season 6 sucked for me.

I wish we ignore the whole Spike-gets-his-soul-back drama...but if anything, it just effs up the Vampire mythology even more.

[swanjun]

This is a minor quibble, given everything else that's amiss with the end of Season 6, but it always really bothered me that Xander was duped into believing that old guy was his future self when DUDE'S EYES AREN'T EVEN BROWN!

[kalamac]

Back when it first aired, I really liked Normal Again, right up until the end when Buffy told Willow she'd been in a mental hospital, back before she came to Sunnydale. At which point I wanted smack everyone involved with writing/approving and filming that line, because no she fucking wasn't.

If she had been she would have been way more scared back in Ted when he threatened her with that very thing, and Joyce would have been all over herself apologizing for locking Buffy up, when she found out that vampires were real in season 3.

[cheezwhiz346]

Back when it first aired, I really liked Normal Again, right up until the end when Buffy told Willow she'd been in a mental hospital, back before she came to Sunnydale. At which point I wanted smack everyone involved with writing/approving and filming that line, because no she fucking wasn't.

If she had been she would have been way more scared back in Ted when he threatened her with that very thing, and Joyce would have been all over herself apologizing for locking Buffy up, when she found out that vampires were real in season 3.

Yeah- like I know some viewers don't mind retcons and think that shows should be able to do that if they want, but when it's done like it was done here it just feels like a lack of forethought/consistency. Like I'd be okay with retcons if they didn't feel so lazy a lot of the time, like the showrunners are depending on their audience members not to remember that far back, which is disappointing.

[cheezwhiz346]

"According to "Entropy," it's not because she's keeping it a secret from her friends, or because she's doing non-vanilla things like cuffs or butt stuff, or really even because she's using him, although the previouslies make sure to cite that so she can be redeemed, which she doesn't need. No, according to "Entropy," it's because she's having sex with someone she doesn't love."

 

Yeah, this was... this was a rationalization that didn't need to be there. The whole Buffy/Spike S6 relationship was primarily an expression of where Buffy was at, head-space wise, just like her other relationships in the show (or lack thereof) at that point in time. Being with Spike in the way she was was a symptom of what she was feeling at the time, and that doesn't mean it was bad in and of itself, but it was made clear that she wasn't feeling right about it. But that summing up of 'because I don't love you' is a weird rationalization. I mean I guess I could see Buffy herself making that rationalization, though, so in that way it kind of makes sense. But I also think this gets to your whole point about how it felt like S6 was written by so many conflicting viewpoints. I think that plays out especially in the Buffy/Spike dynamic.

Edited March 20, 2015 by damngoodcoffee

[ActualSize]

Oh my God, Giles in that last screencap...he has never been hotter, and that is saying something. (The other time I find him this hot is when he kills Ben, because I might have problems.)

I guess I have the same problems, because when I think of hot Giles scenes I think of him kicking Ethan Rayne's ass in Halloween and going after Angelus with a burning baseball bat in Passion. It's when he moves beyond the dorky librarian and shows the steely Watcher inside that he really shines. Oh, who am I kidding? He always shines.

Edited March 20, 2015 by ActualSize

[Smushergirl]

I would love it if Sarah's recap of her Season Seven rewatch were just, "Willow destroyed the world. The end."

[gingerchick]

When it's broken down like this I always think, yes, season six WAS kind of horrible. But for some reason it's still one of my favorite seasons.