Keith Devens .com

Entry 1403

Why is this season of Buffy the worst ever?

"How do you go from praising The Musical, to slamming the whole season as sucking, and the worst one ever??? I would really like a few reasons why you think it sucks so badly."

Dude, (Chandler voice) have you seen any other seasons of Buffy? How long have you been watching the show? Considering when I started watching and from reruns on FX, I've probably seen almost every episode. Consider the first season... remember the episode when Angel kills Miss Calendar, or when Buffy sends him to hell? Now, the musical episode was great, but the season as a whole has totally sucked.

The third season is probably the best. Here are all the people who were on the show in the third season who are no longer on the show: Angel, Cordelia, Oz, Wesley, Faith, not to mention Giles. All those awesome people were on the show, Willow wasn't a lesbian or suffering from an "addiction", we had a really good bad guy, aaah, life was good. Joss Whedon must have been well rested rather than producing four different serieses and writing a book or comic book or two, and it showed.

Fourth season you had the Initiative, Riley, and Adam. Fifth season you had Glory and Dawn. Now we have three nerds and stupid plotlines. For the last few seasons, during the season they built up the story as they went along. In the third season you had the Mayor. Faith slowly turned to his side, and they Mayor kept getting more powerful and more of his plot and his power were revealed throughout the season. And the Mayor ate big spiders... that was cool. Fourth season there was the initiative. At first you just had guys in masks running around inexplicably. Piece by piece, they revealed more of what was going on. It turns out that there's this big government military organization fighting demons, and that there's a huge underground laboratory. It turns out Buffy's psych teacher was leading the whole thing, and that Riley was involved. Riley and Buffy each didn't know that the other was fighting demons, and then there was one of the best episodes ever, Hush, where they found out about each other. It was also the only episode done by a show ever where most of the episode was silent. They had no dialogue and had to act everything out. It was excellent, and another example of Buffy pushing the envelope.

Fifth season brought Dawn on, which wasn't a bad thing. It was a good season, a little more disjointed as far as the story went than the previous two seasons, but you had a charismatic bad girl, who was more powerful than Buffy! Buffy fought to find out who she was for a bunch of the season, and it turned out she was a god trying to send the world to hell, and that Dawn was the key to her hell. Buffy's mom got sick and then died, in another one of the most amazing hours of television ever. Meant a lot to me too, since my mom died earlier that year, and my experience was eerily similar to Buffy's. Buffy was about my age, and my brother was about Dawns age. My mom was ill and died, and I too had to break the news to my sibling. The episode was incredible, and had no music. No soap opera deaths here, that was real pain, and Buffy showed it better than I've ever seen anyone act out pain. Then at the end of the season, Buffy sacrificed herself for the world and died.

Fast forward to this season: Buffy comes back which is cool. They have the musical episode which is cool. Giles goes away which sucks. But another person is in charge of the series from what I know, and she doesn't know what to do. Turns out they fought a god last season, so they have nowhere to go from there. Turns out they made Willow too powerful, to the point where she could probably whoop Buffy's butt and any enemy would be too easy to overcome. So in an attempt to deal with "real issues" and kill two birds with one stone, they turned her powers into an addiction which she has to break. The main point is... it's not clever. Their message is so obvious that it's insulting. If they couldn't think of anything else but to strip Willow of her powers in order to further the plot of the series, I could take that, but the way they did it is pathetic.

And of course there's Buffy's really gross relationship with Spike. Fine, it's supposed to be a "real issue" thing about abusive relationships, but again it's so obvious that it's insulting, not to mention that it's just gross seeing Spike ram Buffy in public places all the time. Everyone lives in Buffy's house, Dawn goes to school but never sees her sister because she's whoring around with Spike, no one seems to work (yes, I know Xander works), but now Buffy works in McDonald's which is even more annoying, Willow's going through withdrawal and Tara isn't around, Giles is gone, Xander and Anya are around, but the episodes hardly seem to include them, and overall there's little interaction between everybody like there used to be. The entire situation is just depressing. Not to mention that they have the most bottom-of-the-barrel bad guys they could come up with, and even Spike, who I've always liked, disgusts me.

I guess that's why this is the worst season ever.

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04:36 (utc-5)