(I really need to revamp my category structure - a lot of the stuff I’ve posted lately seems to me to fall just this far out of any one of my existing categories.)
So I, along with a couple of million other people, watched the Buffy series finale yesterday….
A little background on my history with Buffy: I watched the show religiously - watched, taped, rewatched, bought the videos, bought the DVDs - for four years or so, starting with reruns of the first season and picking up new episodes at the beginning of the second. I watched the Master kill Buffy and then die in turn, Buffy kill Angel, everybody participate in blowin’ up the Mayor, and the fall of Adam. I identified with (at one time or another) every character that got significant screentime - including Jonathon. I loved the show … but somewhere along the way, once Dawn and Glory came into the picture and Spike turned into a besotted, neutered comic foil, I got lost.
I missed a number of episodes from season five and more from six, and I’ve only seen a handful of season seven eps. Sure, I kept up with the storyline a bit - enough to have a general idea of what was happening if ever I tuned in (thanks, Craig and Kerri, Jamie, and Television Without Pity), but I wasn’t absorbed by the show anymore. I can only remember a few episodes from the past three seasons: Buffy’s sacrifice at the end of season five, her return at the beginning of season six, and the musical stand out most strongly. In other words, I’ve felt something lacking, something that was present in the early seasons and was (in my view) essential to the series.
All of which brings me to the finale. I watched; like I said before, I haven’t seen much of this season, but I have seen enough to know what was happening in general. I thought the finale took an interesting idea and did nothing with it - and that sums of my impression of the last few years. The fantastic concepts the show pulled out just weren’t put to good use. DarkWillow could’ve been a fantastic longer-term villain (much like the Dark Phoenix was for the X-Men), but she rose and was resolved in what, two episodes? The Big Idea that Saved the World in this episode was brilliant - but I thought it undermotivated (when did we hear that the status quo was “a rule thought up by really powerful guys a long time ago”, to paraphrase?) and too quickly executed. Something like that will have major repercussions, and I think it would’ve been appropriate to show some of the less immediate and obvious ones.
Alas, the Joss only had an hour to tell the end of a story he’s been working on for seven years, and this hour didn’t really do it justice.
Oh, and the altered Mutant Enemy zombie was great!