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Colonel Cool posted:Buffy had a lot of quips in it, but I think it lands completely differently than a lot of more modern quippy media because I think there's an undertone of the characters making a lot of quips because it's their way of dealing with the fact that they're a bunch of teenagers that have been thrust into life and death struggles with inhuman monsters. Yeah, it's an extremely quippy show, but there's also a lot of genuinely harrowing moments which are as dramatic as the jokes are funny. It's not all fun and games. In some way, I think what made the quips stand out was that they coming from a show which was at least horror-adjacent, not a sitcom or whatever.
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Jun 25, 2023 16:58
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Fun fact: high school teacher Robia LaMorte is about two weeks older than high school student Charisma Carpenter.
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Jun 30, 2023 20:18
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LividLiquid posted:Cordy is also literally part demon when all is said and done. Speaking of which, this scene from that episode is still one of the funniest things I've ever seen.
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Jul 1, 2023 23:54
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It didn't click with me when I first watched it, but last time I went through Angel, it struck me that the first half of Season 4 (which, Cordelia character assassination aside, I do quite like) is extremely similar to the X-Men event Inferno, with the whole hell on earth thing going on.
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Jul 3, 2023 20:24
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Pinterest Mom posted:Caleb was never part of any plan, come on. He was clearly "well, we've figured out the First sucks as a villain because we can't punch it and Nathan Fillion is available and we don't have any other ideas" thing. Yeah, I'm assuming they thought the First being able to take on the form of anyone who's dead would be a neat enough concept to hang a big bad around, but it turns out you'd just have a lot of Sarah Michelle Gellar talking to herself.
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Jul 4, 2023 01:58
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The prophecy stuff is the weakest part of the show for sure, although it does get a good payoff with Angel signing away any right to fulfilling it (for good? no backsies?) as a step in his plan to Godfather 1 all the bad guys at the end.sebmojo posted:The cosmology of angel is just one bonkers asspull after another Both shows, really. Hell, even just the vampire thing is bizarre. You die, you get turned, and then a demon inherits (?) your soul-less body, but the demon doesn't have a mind of its own so it's just you but you don't have any inhibitions on account of not having a soul? The demon is a pretty unnecessary middle step here IMO. Also heaven is real. Is Angel's soul in heaven before he gets it back?
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Jul 9, 2023 03:24
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Does a vampire need an invitation to come into a house if nobody's home? And if they're still there when the owner returns, can they stick around, or do they get pushed out?
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Jul 10, 2023 15:19
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On my last watch Season 3 dragged a whole lot more than I remembered. There's a lot of middling episodes, and while there are some highs, they don't come close to Season 2, the back half of which is basically perfect. That was really my reaction to the series as a whole, too: I came out harsher on Seasons 3 and 5 and with less ambivalence towards 6 and 7.
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Jul 15, 2023 01:47
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Yeah, Giles was entirely in the right to do what he did, and also entirely in the right about why Buffy couldn't. The Slayer is an individual with extraordinary power, but importantly, an individual. You want somebody like that taking on the bruisers, not doing calculus about whether it's okay for X number of people to suffer to save Y number. I get that there were issues with Anthony Stewart Head wanting to be with his family, but the last two seasons really suffer for his temporary absence. Season 6 at least manages to make it a plot point, but he barely does anything in Season 7 except turn on Buffy. And I do like that episode, but I wish they'd have found him a more central role.
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Jul 16, 2023 01:33
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I remember laughing at that, but in hindsight it's out of character and really gross now knowing what we know about Whedon.
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Jul 16, 2023 02:16
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DrBouvenstein posted:I've heard that rumor before, but how does that reconcile with the line they have after Illyria first appears that Fred's soul was burnt up in the process? Or was that line/episode written afte they knew they were cancelled? Eh, you can walk that back if you really want to. Gather all the soul fragments in an orb or something. It's been years since I read the Angel comics, but I think she kinda gets brought back in that? Speaking of comics that are (probably) bad, has anybody read the Boom! comics Buffy reboot? Anytime I've seen the solicits, it looks... interesting, but that doesn't mean it's worth reading, and the art at least leaves a lot to be desired. There's some pretty crazy departures right off the bad, like I think Xander gets turned into a vampire, Robin Wood is a student the same age as the Scoobies, stuff like that.
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Jul 17, 2023 18:51
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There is clearly some kind of effect that the human and demon portions of Angel have on each other. Angel, after he is first re-ensouled, is traumatized by the actions he took as Angelus and he's rather more reflective than he ever was as Liam. Likewise, I think Angelus, while he was always manipulative, finds Angel's pining for Buffy embarrassing and leans into it as a way of mocking the behavior. That being said, yeah the whole vampire and soul thing is just a mess. I guess the demon that becomes Angelus is just supposed to be uniquely psychopathic? And the one riding around in Spike just happened to be kind of a romantic?
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Jul 18, 2023 04:32
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Pan Dulce posted:I wasn't taking crazy pills! S3 E17, "Enemies," has a quick scene after Angel and Buffy go to the movies and see a made-up film called Le Banquet D'Amelia. It's implied to be a risque movie, veering into naughty territory. That's WEIRD, she's still underage. That seems like it's riffing on the idea of walking into a "European" movie that turns out to have a lot of sex in it than them walking into a porno by mistake. It's the same joke as Les Cousins Dangerous in Arrested Development, of course the French would make a movie where cousins are loving each other.
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Jul 19, 2023 13:53
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Bisexuality wasn't invented until the early 90s, so you can't expect the show to pick it up so quickly.Everyone posted:Color me un-surprised. I dropped the comic when he decided to turn Buffy gay, because Joss Whedon is clearly a person who does not respect the idea of sexual orientation. it's been probably a decade since I touched those comics, but I'm pretty sure is was just a fling. Which, sure, okay. Buffy's maybe a little late to be experimenting but it's fine. Everyone posted:Except that Joss decided that her sexual "preference" had changed. Because, I dunno. Lesbians are "hawt." There's definitely a whole can of worms around the number of gay male relationships vs gay female relationships in media, and I do think "it's hot" for the imagined male consumer is one of the reasons, but an equally important one is that, for that same audience, women who are into woman are non-threatening in a way that men who are into men are not. A straight guy has the potential to be sexually menaced by a gay guy, and that's not something you have to worry about with lesbians. Heck, look at the gay male character in Buffy, Andrew. He's the least threatening character you could imagine! tl;dr male gaze, male gaze, i dunno
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Jul 27, 2023 03:33
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NikkolasKing posted:Re-watching S5, it has a note of...mundane tragedy I overlooked last time. Somehow. Of course there's everything with Joyce but also Buffy's and Riley's relationship. Buffy and Angel could not work because of very supernatural reasons. Buffy and Riley fell apart because of very human reasons. Her refusal to cry around him, for instance, to let herself be vulnerable and let him be her partner. Yeah, it's so creepy in Season 5 that Buffy/Spike never really works beyond maybe the very first time it comes up where Spike has a dream about making out with Buffy and is horrified, which is actually a pretty funny bit. I guess early in Season 6, too, when Buffy is basically getting with Spike out of self-loathing. It also makes his relationship with Dawn kind of creepy, which is a shame because those two have really great chemistry. I watched the Jonathan opening credits when it was posted above and despite having watching the whole series half a dozen times, when Marc Blucas came up for a minute I was like, "Who?" And I swear I did the exact same thing when I read Riley in your post. I guess he is really on the show for like a season, but even besides that he's such a boring character.
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Jul 30, 2023 16:34
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LividLiquid posted:Don't skip anything? Skip lists are up there with listening to podcasts at 1.5x speed as a marker of a genuine psychopath. Unless it's an episodic thing like The Twilight Zone where each episode has a completely different cast and story, just watch the drat thing! And if it's not worth watching, what are you doing in the first place?
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Aug 7, 2023 00:26
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NikkolasKing posted:Also Amber Benson/Tara never got a opening credit spot. Bullshit. Yeah, it makes me so mad I'm seeing red.
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Aug 10, 2023 00:21
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roomtone posted:Lilah in Eve's place alone would probably have made S5 of Angel close to my favourite. Bring Holland Manners back too for the full W&H classic trio and bring this thing full circle. It would've made the show so clean. I think Lilah's sendoff at the end of that season is as good as you can get with that character. I'm sure if it were her in the position of Eve the story would have been reconfigured, but I like sending her off with that sweet, sad moment of Wesley ripping up her contract, only for Lilah to tell him that it won't have any effect, but she appreciates the effort. Also, I just flipped through the episode looking for that scene, and having just finished a rewatch of Mad Men, oh my god Vincent Kartheiser is a baby. Especially given how each season he shaved back his hair more to simulate a receding hairline. Everyone posted:Season 6 is the one where the Scoobies no longer have either adult supervision or a real Big Bad (the trio doesn't really count) to focus their attention. After half a decade of weird, horrifying magic poo poo, Xander is still the guy that decides "Maybe a music demon would be fun?" After she comes back Buffy starts hate-loving Spike. This is all good stuff. Season 6 has its issues, but it's not like it's built on unstable foundations. It really hits the sense of ennui and aimlessness, even Giles leaving fits pretty well given it was done for personal/budgetary issues. It could have just another draft maybe.
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Aug 13, 2023 02:41
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Part of it is supposed to be reinforcing the theme that Buffy thinks she's not cut out for college and she doesn't belong there. But I just watched that scene, and boy they went all out on making that guy a loving rear end in a top hat. He's introduced sipping iced tea (?) from a mason jar, he's basically being set up as the Big Bad of Season 4. I've definitely had lovely professors, but all they succeeded in doing was unifying the class in hatred of them.
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Aug 24, 2023 01:07
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Mokelumne Trekka posted:about halfway through Season 2 on my first blind viewing of the show The back half of season 2 is... I'm not going to say anymore, but definitely want to hear your thoughts on it. Look out for a Quest for Camelot poster! Also, there are some pretty good fights coming up, although DVD fidelity makes it hilariously obvious when they switch to stunt doubles. Mokelumne Trekka posted:- it's hard to see myself changing my mind about this after finishing the whole show, but count me among the "don't skip season 1!" crew. I was entertained throughout. I am tempted to peek at what fans may consider 'dud episodes' but no suspects come to mind, although perhaps the S1 finale could have been more clever - if I got this right, Buffy died, then ended up not dying because [reasons]? I already forget. By the way the scene with Buffy/Giles in the S1 finale after Buddy realizes her fate was strong serious stuff in a mostly comedic show - a hint of things to come? Gosh, Buffy/Giles have a lot of good scenes together. I'm very against skipping parts of shows in general, but yeah skipping S1 is an awful idea. It's not that long, it's an impressive first showing even if some of its ideas don't go anywhere (the killing off of the child character was apparently because he aged too much in between seasons), and it's got a handful of impressively gonzo ideas, like the demon hunter cursed into the form of a ventriloquist dummy. Where else are you gonna get that? Even the worst of the lot, the Internet episode, has aged into quality camp. And Prophecy Girl is genuinely one of the best episodes the show's done. It's the only finale that's basically a self-contained story, is perfectly paced, and has a couple of Buffy and Cordelia's most memorable moments.
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Sep 25, 2023 02:05
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It's worth remarking that Eliza Dushku was significantly younger than the rest of the cast and Buffy was one of her first gigs. She does get better over time, I think, and I don't think she's unwatchably bad or anything at the start, just a little stilted.
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Oct 15, 2023 00:41
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Mokelumne Trekka posted:Also I gotta say I love the episodes that put a spin on the regular character dynamics, like the one with the old people turning into juvenile delinquents. Also the alt timeline with the S1 villain becoming powerful. It's never outright stated but I get the vibe that Buffy defeating the Master in Season 1 was a huge fluke, in that he's probably the most dangerous big bad she faces until Glory (ok, I guess Angelus wanted to literally send the world to hell, but the Master wanted to do vampire capitalism) and she's at the beginning of her career. So I always love seeing him again. roomtone posted:i think the bad eps in S2 are considered to be like: bad eggs, go fish, and maybe a couple of the early stand alones like inca mummy girl or some assembly required. For me, the stand-alones only become an issue when you have like 2 or 3 of them of similar vibes back to back. IIRC you run into that a couple of times in Season 2, like there's two monsters in a Bride of Frankenstein situation in a row or two demonic possession episodes in a row. The back half of that season is so strong though it doesn't really matter.
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Oct 19, 2023 15:16
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Following this skip guide: Skip It
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Oct 20, 2023 00:36
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LividLiquid posted:Angel as Angelus is a distinctly different performance than actually being Angelus, and that always impressed me. He's pretty flat in the first season, too, he comes out of nowhere in the second with Angelus' scene-chewing. You can definitely see why they decided to give the guy a spin-off after that.
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Oct 21, 2023 23:52
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Pinterest Mom posted:IOHEFY is so well constructed, it's incredible how they hid a huge emotional catharsis for the Angelus arc inside a normal-rear end monster of the week episode. You don't see it coming at all because of the gender switch trick, but when it happens it absolutely hits like a brick. I'm just so impressed whenever I think about how the episode is built. It's such a masterpiece, and yeah I think it gets overlooked a little because it's not technically one of the big arc episodes, even though it's really crucial to the Buffy/Angel relationship. I love how at the end after Angelus get dispossessed he just runs off, not believing he still has to do this kissing poo poo.
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Oct 23, 2023 02:35
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She doesn't get to do it a whole lot, but there's a couple small moments where Amber Benson plays Tara as a bit more cutting and sassy that I think suits her a lot better. For better or for worse, though, she definitely encapsulates that feeling where you are friends with somebody but their partner is almost a non-entity to you.Mokelumne Trekka posted:Dawn is annoying, I doubt that's a new perspective, but at least after five episodes there are new developments I'm sure you can guess that there is more coming with Dawn, but I really like Michelle Trachtenberg's performance. She's definitely intended to be annoying to a degree, and that's furthered by a couple of instances of bad writing, but I think she does a good job of playing someone whom the other characters are supposed to find annoying as opposed to being actually annoying.
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Nov 24, 2023 00:18
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Toaster Beef posted:I feel like the window wherein a proper HD remaster was potentially on the table has passed, especially with Whedon being (deservedly) dead and buried. It's hard to see any kind of momentum gathering around it at this point. A good widescreen conversion, like they did with The Wire, would cost... maybe not a lot of money, but far more than would be cost effective since the days of physical media are behind us. It doesn't earn you anything to put a bunch of effort into one of 315 shows on a streaming service. LividLiquid posted:They're not really making any new Buffy fans unless that long-rumored reboot happens, so unless that goes forward, we're stuck with poo poo. Buffy is a collaborative enough process that I don't really find it difficult to go back to. Whedon is obviously a huge part of it, but dozens of people were involved in the writing and directing alone, let alone actors, stunt people, costume designers, everybody else... I think it comes through most in the show's lesser moments, or ones directly connected to Whedon's on-set harassment, like Cordelia's character assassination in Season 4 of Angel. It's hard to not think about behind-the-scenes stuff in moments like that, but despite the chilling comments Michelle Trachtenberg has made about Buffy as a work environment, Dawn is generally written well-enough that you're thinking about the character and not the actor. EDIT: Open Source Idiom posted:The First's plan here is pretty tight tbh. Every little victory Buffy makes against it ends up costing her the trust of own people, as she increasingly hardens and demands the same hardness from her people -- her soldiers -- while they, in turn, begin to feel some of the same weight Buffy felt for years and resent her for it. And she's got no time for that, you know? I'm not sure what exactly makes the First so credible and present as a villain, but it really is. It seems like something that shouldn't work; half the time it's Sarah Michelle Gellar But Evil and the other half it's random dead characters, but it really feels like an ever-present, constantly building threat in a way no other big bad does save maybe Season 2 Angel, and there he's still a good guy most of the season. I think it's that a lot of the other season's big bads are scary but also undercut with a degree of camp--which is fine for the show Buffy is!--but largely removing that element is a good trick. Rochallor fucked around with this message at 04:15 on Dec 20, 2023 |
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Dec 20, 2023 04:10
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Open Source Idiom posted:I think it helps that unlike a lot of earlier villains, particularly The Master and the Trio (i.e. the deliberately basic ones) it doesn't really do that thing where it throws minions at the gang. It's not Power Rangers. It sets up some psychological insights, usually fairly truthful ones, and then lets the crew stew in them. "Spike's dangerous and you need to neutralise that threat." "Buffy will choose the mission over anyone, even her sister." "Your psychological problems prevent you from seeing yourself as equal to your peers." Yeah that's a good analysis I think. It's also what makes Angelus such a compelling villain, too; he knows the gang well enough to mess with them and similarly to the First is able to manipulate them with the truth instead of with lies.
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Dec 20, 2023 04:35
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I also like Season 4 a lot. It has its missteps, but it's structured really interestingly, in that instead of a big overarching plot or one-shots, it's a series of 4 or 5 mini-arcs with lots of connective tissue in between them. And each of those is pretty solidly paced, never spending too much time on a premise that it wears out its welcome. It's very comic book-y, not least of all because it's ripping off Inferno.
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Dec 21, 2023 22:56
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 12:13 |
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Open Source Idiom posted:I reckon Angel's best stretches are the first two thirds of the second season, and the first and last thirds of the fourth. There's good stuff all over though. I was gonna say that UPN probably had less money to throw around than WB, but looking into it UPN won the bid by offering 2.3 million an episode version 1 million from the WB. Which is... weird, because I'd agree that the show looks noticeably worse in the last few seasons. Maybe some producer was embezzling some of it. Angel season 4 is a mess and I'm even less inclined to defend it now that we know what Whedon was doing to Carpenter behind the scenes, but it does feel really ambitious, like the story you're watching play out is too big to be contained by the television, and you'd much rather have that feeling than the opposite one. Just piling crisis on top of crisis with no sense of how this could possibly be resolved. Open Source Idiom posted:It doesn't help that Angelus kind of sucks here It's been a couple years since I last watched Angel, but I remember being pretty impressed with how Angelus was used in S4. It helps that it's a card the show plays extremely rarely, even when Angelus is an idea that baked into the title character. It's what, 3-4 episodes in this season and that one in the first season where somebody gives Angel ecstasy, and that it outside of flashbacks, right?
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Apr 27, 2024 22:40
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