Some Scattershot BtVS thoughts
Mar. 22nd, 2015 05:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shapinglightI've been meaning to make this post for a while. Can't remember how many times I've written it in my head. I just haven't managed to find the will to write it all down properly.
I'm also not sure whether I should flock this post or not. It probably doesn't matter. We'll see.
As you know, I've been rewatching BtVS in its entirety. I'm now near the end of season 5. I meant to post as I was going along, but then the official rewatch started on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
fantas_magoria so I wasn't sure I should. But here are a few muddled thoughts which probably don't belong over there anyway.
I'm finding I'm watching far more through Buffy's eyes than I ever have previously. I don't know if this is because I've written her POV quite a bit in fanfic since I last watched the show, or what. Either way, I am very, very impressed with SMG.
Buffy/Angel is far more of a Big Thing in the seasons after Angel leaves than I remembered. The shadow of Angel looms large in season 4, and is still there in 5. I hadn't remembered it as being quite so all-pervasive. Angel really is the benchmark against which all Buffy's other relationships are measured. Not least by Buffy herself, even when she doesn't mean to.
Spike and Dru are a gorgeous couple, but what the show could have done with them if they'd stayed together was very limited, and they'd pretty much done it by the end of season 2.
I feel less sympathetic to Faith in season 3 than I used to. I do still feel sorry for her, especially early on. She obviously comes from a very unstable background and doesn't have any of Buffy's advantages in life. By the time she arrives in Sunnydale, she doesn't even have a Watcher. (Speaking of which, has anyone ever written fic about Faith and her first Watcher? All we know is that the Watcher was female and that Kakistos killed her, but I bet there's fic anyway). Despite that, my sympathy for her plummets when she shops Buffy to Giles as the killer of the deputy mayor (bitch!), and I no longer think that Buffy didn't do enough to help her. Buffy does plenty. She gives Faith one chance after another. Giles should probably have done more (got Faith away from that horrible apartment, for instance), but then again, Faith is so unstable she might not have let him.
Season 4 is really great. I love it, and I love Riley. He's so sweet. He's so nice. He really was Buffy's best chance at normality. I'm just so annoyed with him for being such a bloody idiot. And at such a terrible time.
Season 5 is probably the most coherently plotted season of the show. It's also the most emotionally demanding of the viewer. Yes, season 2 has some harrowing moments, but nothing - not even sending Angel to hell- can really beat Buffy losing her mother. The fact that it's down to mundane illness rather than something supernatural gives it even more power.
Finally, some stuff about Spike. As of where I've got to in season 5 (Forever), he is only just beginning to show some glimmers of the character I came to love. Okay, he's a good villain in season 2 and he's funny in season 4 and early season 5, but it's only after he falls in love with Buffy that there's the slightest inkling he might still harbour some small trace of humanity deep within him that his particular circumstances (being chipped) will finally bring out (in both good ways and bad ways). You see it first in the porch scene at the end of FFL and then not again until Forever. For most of the season, though, he's floundering, trying totally ineptly, to make himself into someone that Buffy could love, and having no clue that when he tries to be helpful he usually makes things worse. He is developing empathy though, even if who he feels it for is pretty selective.
In other words, he's very, very much a work in progress.
Which brings me to my final point. It's my opinion that, as of the end of the shows (BtVS and AtS, that is), Spike is the only major character whose storyline and potential for character development haven't gone arm in arm (if I can put it that way). As we all know, I think, Joss never originally intended to bring Spike back from the dead full-time after Chosen, but the WB insisted on JM being a series regular if AtS was to be renewed (and I've never before wondered if that rankled with the other cast members. Surely it must have), and so we got Spike in AtS season 5. And he was a very different Spike to the one in BtVS. Basically, he was meant to be a foil for Angel so he would be all the things Angel, as a vampire with a soul, was not - rude, unrepentant, abrasive.
He's only nice to Fred, and by the end of the season is barely beginning to learn how to play nice with other people.
Which is sort of my point. By the time NFA comes around, Spike has only had his soul for a year. Maybe if he'd not died in the alley along with Angel, Gunn and Illyria (which, if you ignore the comics, is probably what happened) he might have changed for the better down the road (the way he has in Buffy season 10). After all, Angel didn't exactly become a paragon of virtue the minute he got his soul, did he?
And Spike does have good instincts. Yes, he says rude and obnoxious stuff all the time in AtS season 5, but he always does the right thing.
So, though of course there's plenty you could say about what all the characters did next, I've ended up feeling that Spike in the show was sort of cheated (which I know will make the subset of fans who think he took over the show and ruined it roll their eyes, but there it is). Either he should have stayed dead after Chosen, or he should have been allowed to go on past NFA, live and learn, and perhaps (one day) become a better person. As it is, I feel like all the characters in both shows got a proper send off (as it were, and I know some won't agree with me) with completed character arcs (which is not to say there's not more to be said about them, just that they finished at a place where it was okay to finish emotionally) but Spike, because he came back, got sort of awkwardly stuck in the middle, neither fish nor fowl.
YMMV, obviously. I know many fans of other characters also feel their favourites were short-changed. And I'm not talking about story. Spike got plenty of that. I'm talking about emotional...er, progress.
I'm also not sure whether I should flock this post or not. It probably doesn't matter. We'll see.
As you know, I've been rewatching BtVS in its entirety. I'm now near the end of season 5. I meant to post as I was going along, but then the official rewatch started on
fantas_magoria so I wasn't sure I should. But here are a few muddled thoughts which probably don't belong over there anyway.I'm finding I'm watching far more through Buffy's eyes than I ever have previously. I don't know if this is because I've written her POV quite a bit in fanfic since I last watched the show, or what. Either way, I am very, very impressed with SMG.
Buffy/Angel is far more of a Big Thing in the seasons after Angel leaves than I remembered. The shadow of Angel looms large in season 4, and is still there in 5. I hadn't remembered it as being quite so all-pervasive. Angel really is the benchmark against which all Buffy's other relationships are measured. Not least by Buffy herself, even when she doesn't mean to.
Spike and Dru are a gorgeous couple, but what the show could have done with them if they'd stayed together was very limited, and they'd pretty much done it by the end of season 2.
I feel less sympathetic to Faith in season 3 than I used to. I do still feel sorry for her, especially early on. She obviously comes from a very unstable background and doesn't have any of Buffy's advantages in life. By the time she arrives in Sunnydale, she doesn't even have a Watcher. (Speaking of which, has anyone ever written fic about Faith and her first Watcher? All we know is that the Watcher was female and that Kakistos killed her, but I bet there's fic anyway). Despite that, my sympathy for her plummets when she shops Buffy to Giles as the killer of the deputy mayor (bitch!), and I no longer think that Buffy didn't do enough to help her. Buffy does plenty. She gives Faith one chance after another. Giles should probably have done more (got Faith away from that horrible apartment, for instance), but then again, Faith is so unstable she might not have let him.
Season 4 is really great. I love it, and I love Riley. He's so sweet. He's so nice. He really was Buffy's best chance at normality. I'm just so annoyed with him for being such a bloody idiot. And at such a terrible time.
Season 5 is probably the most coherently plotted season of the show. It's also the most emotionally demanding of the viewer. Yes, season 2 has some harrowing moments, but nothing - not even sending Angel to hell- can really beat Buffy losing her mother. The fact that it's down to mundane illness rather than something supernatural gives it even more power.
Finally, some stuff about Spike. As of where I've got to in season 5 (Forever), he is only just beginning to show some glimmers of the character I came to love. Okay, he's a good villain in season 2 and he's funny in season 4 and early season 5, but it's only after he falls in love with Buffy that there's the slightest inkling he might still harbour some small trace of humanity deep within him that his particular circumstances (being chipped) will finally bring out (in both good ways and bad ways). You see it first in the porch scene at the end of FFL and then not again until Forever. For most of the season, though, he's floundering, trying totally ineptly, to make himself into someone that Buffy could love, and having no clue that when he tries to be helpful he usually makes things worse. He is developing empathy though, even if who he feels it for is pretty selective.
In other words, he's very, very much a work in progress.
Which brings me to my final point. It's my opinion that, as of the end of the shows (BtVS and AtS, that is), Spike is the only major character whose storyline and potential for character development haven't gone arm in arm (if I can put it that way). As we all know, I think, Joss never originally intended to bring Spike back from the dead full-time after Chosen, but the WB insisted on JM being a series regular if AtS was to be renewed (and I've never before wondered if that rankled with the other cast members. Surely it must have), and so we got Spike in AtS season 5. And he was a very different Spike to the one in BtVS. Basically, he was meant to be a foil for Angel so he would be all the things Angel, as a vampire with a soul, was not - rude, unrepentant, abrasive.
He's only nice to Fred, and by the end of the season is barely beginning to learn how to play nice with other people.
Which is sort of my point. By the time NFA comes around, Spike has only had his soul for a year. Maybe if he'd not died in the alley along with Angel, Gunn and Illyria (which, if you ignore the comics, is probably what happened) he might have changed for the better down the road (the way he has in Buffy season 10). After all, Angel didn't exactly become a paragon of virtue the minute he got his soul, did he?
And Spike does have good instincts. Yes, he says rude and obnoxious stuff all the time in AtS season 5, but he always does the right thing.
So, though of course there's plenty you could say about what all the characters did next, I've ended up feeling that Spike in the show was sort of cheated (which I know will make the subset of fans who think he took over the show and ruined it roll their eyes, but there it is). Either he should have stayed dead after Chosen, or he should have been allowed to go on past NFA, live and learn, and perhaps (one day) become a better person. As it is, I feel like all the characters in both shows got a proper send off (as it were, and I know some won't agree with me) with completed character arcs (which is not to say there's not more to be said about them, just that they finished at a place where it was okay to finish emotionally) but Spike, because he came back, got sort of awkwardly stuck in the middle, neither fish nor fowl.
YMMV, obviously. I know many fans of other characters also feel their favourites were short-changed. And I'm not talking about story. Spike got plenty of that. I'm talking about emotional...er, progress.