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The early monster of the week episodes in s7 are the best part of s7 actually. I couldnt stand the potential poo poo in those middle episodes
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Nov 21, 2014 22:16
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GimmickMan posted:Angel S5 is generally agreed to be the best in spite of Cordelia's absence so if you don't even like her you should give it (and maybe S4) a go. Wesley goes from being one of the worst characters to probably the undisputed best. That's a good highlight I think.
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Nov 21, 2014 22:29
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zVxTeflon posted:The early monster of the week episodes in s7 are the best part of s7 actually. I couldnt stand the potential poo poo in those middle episodes Seriously. The second half of the season was speech after speech of ineffectual General Buffy and falling rear end backwards into victory at the end cause Angel shows up with a magic amulet. Season 7 was a mess through and through.
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Nov 21, 2014 23:04
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hope and vaseline posted:Seriously. The second half of the season was speech after speech of ineffectual General Buffy and falling rear end backwards into victory at the end cause Angel shows up with a magic amulet. Season 7 was a mess through and through. There is also the pointless stuff with Giles that was a pointless red herring.
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Nov 21, 2014 23:05
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Season 7 had a very good Anya episode early on. And later, it had that Ashanti cameo.
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Nov 21, 2014 23:08
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Wasn't Anya originally slated to die in Selfless? It would have been way more emotionally resonant than her biting it in the finale. That was so goddamn pointless. Guess I'm spoilering for the one dude currently watching the season.
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Nov 21, 2014 23:13
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That sounds right. Make that a good Anya episode instead with a very good song
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Nov 21, 2014 23:18
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Okay, I'm at the start of episode 11 of season 7 and I've done my darndest to avoid getting spoiled on stuff. But here are my predictions for how Buffy will end. First off the stuff that has been spoiled for me: 1: Xander will loose an eye at some point. I know this because every picture of him has him with an eye patch. 2: Dawn (unfortunately) doesn't die. This was spoiled when I looked her up right after she appeared in the show because I was sure I was loving crazy and hadn't been paying attention for the entire first 4 seasons. 3: Giles doesn't die since I know he's in the comics that are set after the end. Now my predictions. 1: Buffy will die (again). 2: Willow will die trying to do magic to save everyone because she's been vasalating between completely useless and universe destroyingly powerful and they need to do something to resolve that. 3: This stuff with Buffy's mom will turn out to actually be her mom's spirt and not the work of the big bad from this season. 4: Spike will be semi useful and actually be the one who kills/stops the big bad since Buffy's speeches lead me to believe that they're working a redemptive arc on him. And for the stuff that I've liked in the series: 1: The musical episode was great. Best in the entire series. I especially liked the fact that they created an in universe reason for the musical. 2: Buffy's mom's death. I saw it coming for about 5 episodes. Ever since she went in for the brain tumor and came out apparently okay. They had been obviously leading up to her death but I thought it would be an on-screen death. Buffy coming home to that after a fairly light and fun robot episode was pretty shocking and "The Body" episode actually brought me to tears with Anya's utter confusion on how to express her new emotions of loss on the death of a loved one. 3: The Mayor. Easily the best big bad of the entire series. 4: The running gag with Andrew being Tucker's brother. They even explain him that way to Spike. And the stuff I hated: 1: loving Dawn. Holy poo poo she's annoying. Nearly as bad as Cordelia. 2: Xander running away at the alter. They didn't lead up to it at all, at least with the justification he gave. Xander never sees himself do anything like his father does to his mother, and yet one illusion spell from a demon makes him leave his bride to be, even after it's cleared up. I don't think we've ever seen Xander get abusive before, so that whole thing came out of left field. Having him just regular chicken out would have made way more character sense. 3: Soulja Boy. I liked him at first, but it became apparent he had the acting range of a foot long pole. His departure from the show just screamed him getting written out because he was a poo poo actor.
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Nov 22, 2014 00:03
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Well some stuff you're right on, some stuff you're wrong on, and as for what you hate/like it's nothing we haven't all heard before. I agree with Xander at the altar and Riley being written out because he wasn't a great actor. The Mayor is by far the best Big Bad and it was a joy seeing him cameo in Season 7. "Once More with Feeling" is indeed a top 10 episode and Buffy's Mom is one of the most powerful arcs in the series., but I'll agree to disagree on Dawn. (very vague spoilers for the back half of Season 7 regarding Dawn) It's not that she's not annoying but she starts to mature a fair bit by the end of Season 7 and you get the impression that if the show kept going she would have ended up like Cordelia or Wesley on Angel or even Xander after he stopped being a creepy "nice guy"-- someone who was annoying as gently caress at one point but grew out of bad habits, as decent people under pressure and with good company in real life actually do sometimes, especially after puberty ends. The "canon" comics afterwards actually do show her having matured a lot, but she's also very tertiary to the narrative of the comics so we don't see much of her so that might just be inference on my part and she's still a screechy brat when we don't see her. Also Andrew does in fact suck. That's kind-of the entire point of his character-- he's what Xander would have been if he had doubled down on the nerd and never found girls like Buffy or Cordelia to keep him on the straight and narrow, with a much worse body/face to boot. He does grow on you, but I still think of him as the Jar Jar of the series if anyone has to be.
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Nov 22, 2014 00:19
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Andrew is a mockery of TV Tropes before there was TV Tropes. His focus episode season 7 is entirely about how he misunderstands the purpose of fiction and doesn't understand reality or people very well either, despite wanting to live in an epic story. I liked Dawn, I can sympathize with a lot of the poo poo she goes through and can understand her reactions most of the time. And I liked season 7 as a whole, despite its flaws like a nebulous villain.
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Nov 22, 2014 00:28
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Acne Rain posted:Andrew is a mockery of TV Tropes before there was TV Tropes. Very much agreed and well said on both.
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Nov 22, 2014 00:30
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I'll probably regret asking this, but what's going on in the comics?
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Nov 22, 2014 00:40
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PriorMarcus posted:I'll probably regret asking this, but what's going on in the comics? I can't say for sure. I stopped reading them sometime around Season 9 (not out of disinterest, my local library stopped carrying new ones and I moved and I just haven't gone hunting for more). None of it seemed particularly awful, although I wouldn't go so far as to call it a must-read or even very good, and there are definite flat stories/moments. Season 8 especially is loving bizarre, even by the standards implied by the end of Season 7. Season 9 seems to be a much more back-to-basics approach, and I liked what I read despite some very controversial plot points, but I haven't read enough of it to have an opinion of it as a whole. I haven't read much of the spin-offs or any of the Angel/Spike stuff either, so aside from how they appeared in the main Buffy book I can't comment on it, although reading some synopsis of "After the Fall" makes me curious about what's going on in Angel but I haven't found a TBP of it anywhere and for some reason I just don't want to read it digitally. ------------- I'm going to go out on a limb here and say something controversial about Anya's big moment in "The Body." I think it's a really bad mischaracterization of her and easily the only truly sour note in the entire episode. I get why she says what she says-- Joss needed a child-like character to speak from a perspective of ignorant disbelief in the face of true mortality to round out the various portrayals of grief felt by the cast, but it just isn't what I believe Anya would ever actually say. That's a general problem with her Flanderization (sorry for the TVTropes term) from Season 3 to Season 5 though. She went from seeming reasonably intelligent as a vengeance demon to being a reborn human rediscovering her humanity to being a childlike autist, and it just never parsed with me, though thankfully that smoothed out by Season 6 and 7. Yes I totally buy that she was desensitized from her humanity after all those centuries being able to teleport and wreak crazy magic and not needing to pay attention to the details of humanity as a whole. I don't buy that she just up and totally loving forgot what death is. She is frequently described by herself and others as having been very into her work and wreaking crazy spells on men that make Willow's flaying of Warren seem like a loving Sunday picnic. I totally believe that she lost touch with exactly how sadistic she was being and started to view mortality and human pain as just noises and opportunities for creative expression, but even after centuries of mental and emotional numbing she still had to have an intellectual grasp on what mortality is. Everyone she ever grew up with died at some point. She must have seen another vengeance demon bite the dust at some point. She had to have seen the fallout and grief of those close to the men she punished at some point over goddamn centuries. What she should have said was something more akin to "I know I have no right to say this, given what I used to be and what I used to do, but it's hard for me to understand that Joyce is gone. I used to take lives all the time. Sometimes I would see their families grieve. It's just.... I don't understand. I haven't lost anyone close to me in hundreds of years. Now she's just... she's gone. And I don't understand." Same basic idea as before, but totally in-line with her history. But nope, Joss was working from the Season 5 playbook which had Anya firmly in goofy comic relief territory spouting nonsense about capitalism and bunnies and he was doing a real life moment so he couldn't possibly mention her supernatural backstory. I know I'm going to get some poo poo for saying that, but it's always bugged me. mind the walrus fucked around with this message at 01:18 on Nov 22, 2014 |
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Nov 22, 2014 01:16
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Star Trek really did ruin everything.
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Nov 22, 2014 08:16
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mind the walrus posted:I know I'm going to get some poo poo for saying that, but it's always bugged me. Na youre right about all that. Shes basically a totally different character in s5 then slowly turns back to her s3 version by the time s6 ends.
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Nov 22, 2014 10:25
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So I finished Buffy. Guess I was really only right about Spike saving the day. Honestly though, I wasn't really impressed with the sudden appearance of the device that will defeat all the bad guys being delivered by Angel out of the blue. I mean maybe it would have made more sense if I was watching both shows at the same time but it seemed like a Deus Ex Machina sort of solution to the first evil problem. Overall I liked the series, not my favorite one ever, but a pretty good one. My major complaint for it was the lack of a real feeling of urgency in many of the storylines. I think a lot of it was due to the dilly dallying each season seemed to do. Pretty much every season's first half expands on the characters but doesn't really push the plot forward. It's usually about halfway through the season that things actually happen to make the big bad actually seem threatening or important. The final two seasons suffered from this especially badly since they introduced the primary face of the big bad very late (with Nathan Fillion) or completely dropped the folks they were building up as the big bad (as in season 6). I watched the first 4 episodes of the last season of Angel after I finished Buffy and I really get the feeling that the writing or direction was better over there. I honestly feel like there's a real time crunch and a problem that needs to be solved NOW. Also I'm getting pretty wierded out by Jonathan M. Woodward playing Knox since he previously played a completely different character in the same universe in the episode "Conversations with Dead People" on Buffy. And it wasn't just a side thing in that episode since he had a major talking role there. Nitrousoxide fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Dec 5, 2014 |
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Dec 5, 2014 04:38
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Re: Jonathan M. Woodward, it's just a Whedon thing, ignore it. The doofy guy who played the government agent in the first episode of Firefly was also on both shows, he was a demon in Anne on Buffy, then he was the new beau of Doyle's ex on Bachelor Party for Angel, back in the first season. There's been a crazy amount of actors who got on his rotation and have been on Agents of SHIELD plus Dollhouse plus Much Ado.
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Dec 5, 2014 05:02
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Apoplexy posted:Re: Jonathan M. Woodward, it's just a Whedon thing, ignore it. The doofy guy who played the government agent in the first episode of Firefly was also on both shows, he was a demon in Anne on Buffy, then he was the new beau of Doyle's ex on Bachelor Party for Angel, back in the first season. There's been a crazy amount of actors who got on his rotation and have been on Agents of SHIELD plus Dollhouse plus Much Ado. That was Carlos Jacott, and Woodward also appeared on Firefly.
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Dec 5, 2014 05:04
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Thank you, I couldn't remember his name off the top of my head. And yeah, in The Message. One of the best episodes, there.
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Dec 5, 2014 05:09
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And please don't call Knoxie, "Knox"
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Dec 5, 2014 05:11
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Okay, Lorne is pretty great. I might go back and watch the earlier seasons just for him.
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Dec 5, 2014 20:59
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Nitrousoxide posted:Okay, Lorne is pretty great. I might go back and watch the earlier seasons just for him. You will if you know what's good for you.
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Dec 5, 2014 23:05
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Lorne should've died at the end of season 2. He's funny but he was more interesting as a neutral party in the demon-human conflict. He kind of became a crutch for the investigations because of his power. I have many issues with post-season 2 angel.
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Dec 5, 2014 23:10
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I really liked the tension between Lorne and Connor. It was like racism.
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Dec 5, 2014 23:12
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Acne Rain posted:Lorne should've died at the end of season 2. But please, do not elaborate on your Angel complains, we'd hate to breathe life into this thread.
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Dec 5, 2014 23:19
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It's hard to tell what I can and cannot talk about without spoiling things since we have a new watcher, and most of my problems are from season 3 onwards.
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Dec 5, 2014 23:21
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Acne Rain posted:It's hard to tell what I can and cannot talk about without spoiling things since we have a new watcher, and most of my problems are from season 3 onwards. Talk away and spoiler it?
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Dec 5, 2014 23:24
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Nitrousoxide can put us on ignore or you can use spoiler tags. Complain away.
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Dec 5, 2014 23:25
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Acne Rain posted:It's hard to tell what I can and cannot talk about without spoiling things since we have a new watcher, and most of my problems are from season 3 onwards. Good thing we do not have spoiler tags!
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Dec 5, 2014 23:25
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Dont loving peek Nitrous!
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Dec 5, 2014 23:25
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Lorne has the greatest send off from the show in the finale.
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Dec 6, 2014 01:15
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Lorne has the greatest send off from the show in the finale. Yeah, he really does. It makes me very sad that Andy Hallett died so young. I'd just finished "Angel" for the first time when he died, so it hit me extra hard.
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Dec 6, 2014 01:25
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Season 5 is the best. It makes struggling through 3 and 4 seem worth it.
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Dec 6, 2014 01:46
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egon_beeblebrox posted:Yeah, he really does. It makes me very sad that Andy Hallett died so young. I'd just finished "Angel" for the first time when he died, so it hit me extra hard. We were supposed to see him at a con a few weeks later. His death made everyone cry.
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Dec 6, 2014 02:44
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Acne Rain posted:cordelia's cutesy naivette kind of runs counter to the atmosphere they were trying to have in Angel. There's a lot more reasons why the attempts at darkness and maturity fall flat, however. Wow we have like the opposite opinions. Buffy/Angel are both horror comedies and urban fantasies first and foremost, with some serious and dark moments thrown in. Angel casts a dark shade (sometimes literally) over the proceedings but it's still the same show as Buffy at its heart pretty much, even if they dealt with somewhat different themes. Cordy is hilarious and I became so attached to the character that I cried like a loving baby in "You're Welcome" and I've only cried because of fictional things a handful of times (same with Wes oh my god). S4 of Angel is my favorite out of either show- it was, for me, one of the most epic story arcs of any TV show ever, everything was so exciting and horrific and I loved all of the mysteries running through the center of it all. And then came Season 5 and it was just the cherry on top of everything. Season 1 was a bit too much like a police procedural to me but then it became awesome from the first episode and I don't think it ever became dull. I will say that I like Angel much better than Buffy because I found the characters easier to connect to for some reason but I will concede that Buffy had a much greater impact on pop culture, on television, and was probably the best YA/teen tv show ever to air (along with maybe Freaks and Geeks).
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Dec 6, 2014 02:52
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So, apparently Joss Whedon has said he envisions Sunnydale as being along the California coast, near Santa Barbara. Over Thanksgiving, I finally drove from LA (where I live) to San Francisco, and I have to say: Sunnydale is San Luis Obispo. It's a small but upscale suburban town north of Santa Barbara along the 101, with a quaint downtown, mostly white middle class population, and a small CA state college campus. And the entire time I was stopped there, I was waiting for demons on motorcycles to pop in and wreck poo poo. Further proof: SLO was historically a Chumash site, and plausibly has nearby vineyards connected to the Central Valley wine industry. It's about 3 hours north of LA, and 5-6 hours from LA-area desert sites like Big Bear or Joshua Tree.
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Dec 6, 2014 03:02
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Captain Mog posted:Angel casts a dark shade (sometimes literally) over the proceedings but it's still the same show as Buffy at its heart pretty much, even if they dealt with somewhat different themes. I mean...i hear what you're saying but they're completely different shows. Buffy takes place in a black/white universe where good is good and evil is evil, while Angel takes place within a grey, grey world. Buffy's frigidity and adherence to the "rules" are parodied multiple times in her own series, whereas in Angel it can sometimes be hard to tell who the good guys even are. Buffy would never have taken over Wolfram and Hart, for instance. Because, you know, "It's WRONG."  To me the two shows are just diametrical opposites, and in my opinion Angel was the more enduring series mostly because of its loose morals and intriguing ambiguity.
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Dec 6, 2014 04:12
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I just finished marathoning Buffy and Angel over the past month. Oh my God. Let's talk about Wesley's death. I never cry at things in movies/TV shows. I cried at that scene, with him dying and Illyria pretending to be Fred for him. loving heartbreaking, man. Great shows. I think I liked Angel more.
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Dec 8, 2014 03:14
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I think Wes got the death he wanted. He went into that last fight wanting to die.
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Dec 8, 2014 03:17
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"Do you want me to lie to you now?"
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Dec 8, 2014 03:24
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