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purplerainbow used the exact same subject for her last entry as I was planning to use for this one. “Tiny, tiny babies!” Hee. A truly weird piece of dialogue with an equally weird delivery.
But I’m jumping ahead of myself. Last night, we (we being Hannah and I) were descending on Jane for a Buffy marathon of sorts. It was very loosely planned, and while we were supposed to begin at about four in the afternoon, that didn’t exactly happen mainly due to me and a small computer disaster in occupational therapy. But I got there eventually, and I had DVDs, there were some videos, and it was all good. We started with Hush and Bad Girls and moved on from there.
I think. I really can’t remember as much of this as I should do. It’s worrying. Anyway, some reviews:
Hush - I love this episode unashamedly. The basic premise is so simple and so effective, and makes you sit up and pay attention. What little dialogue there is is inspired – Spike and Giles playing the odd couple is so surreal and so right. The bickering about Weetabix, followed by Giles with his head on his desk as Xander and Anya bicker, is wonderful.
There are so many things to love about this episode. The Gentlemen are some of the very few truly scary villains on the show, and the sequence where they chase Tara is frankly creepifying. The best bit, though, is the presentation Giles gives. There are no words to describe how good it is.
Bad Girls – the slash, the slash! I had thought about Buffy/Faith before, but this episode makes it a real possibility. With or without the subtext, it’s an interesting relationship. In any case, a fairly good episode – the Lady Macbeth references made me happy. And I have finally, finally met the infamous Watcher known as Wesley Wyndham-Price! The sequence where Buffy, Faith and Giles gang up against him is just brilliant. We were all commenting on how Wesley seems to bring out the best in Giles, for a given value of “best” – the constant bitching and snarkiness is absolutely wonderful.
We broke off for dinner here, and the conversation was sparked off by a copy of the Crosby Herald on the table and went on to discussing seals, Greenpeace and painting things red. I honestly can’t remember how we got onto it. Then:
Doppelgangland - heh. I adored this. Vamp!Willow is such a perfect character – delightfully evil and yet so familiar. What’s amazing is how Alyson Hannigan pulls off playing four separate characters in the episode – Willow, vamp!Willow, Willow-pretending-to-be-vamp!Willow and vamp!Willow-pretending-to-be-Willow. The fact you can clearly tell the difference between them all is just fantastic. The best bits are the reactions of the others to the fact Willow is dead (the scene with them on the stairs, immersed in bleakest, deepest depression is heartbreaking and funny at the same time) and then their reactions when she walks in alive are fabulous too. Xander thinking the cross is broken, and shaking it is hysterical. So is Angel, whom I loathe as a general thing. His very obvious grief at having to tell the other Scoobies the news is almost indicative of a personality.
At this point, Hannah said something about evil!Willow, which is no big spoiler for me because I do know some scrappy details of what happens to get Willow addicted to magic, but Michael was aggravated. Jane has threatened to kill him on several occasions for spoiling me, so he groused. “This wouldn’t happen if I had perky breasts,” he said.
After a minute, Jane protested, “Michael, you’ve killed my friends!”
He had. Hannah was dying of embarrassment and I was dying of laughter. Michael was persuaded to go to bed not long after that.
Enemies - loved, just loved it. Yay for Angelus – he’s so much of a better character than Angel it’s not funny. Giles and the demon at the end made me giggle for what felt like years. I love these glimpses we get given of Giles’s very weird past – this episode has the demon (“I introduced him to his wife.” Hee!) and another example is in Teacher’s Pet, where we hear so much about his straitjacketed friend who specialises in bugs and fairy-tales. Very odd.
Earshot - I know it was a cop-out, but I liked the concept of vampires’ thoughts being unreadable (no reflection of their bodies, and equally no reflection of their minds). Of course, the no reflection thing is difficult – all the scenes with Spike in Giles’s apartment, you can see his reflection at odd times – but this was just a nice detail. The innermost thoughts of the Scoobies were hysterical – self-doubting!Willow, obsessedwithsex!Xander, and deep!Oz. Oz is the best of the three. Interesting that the only glimpse we get of Giles’s thoughts is his thinking about Buffy’s shoes. How can anyone think he’s straight?
And the end is wonderful – “…having sex with my mother!”
He walks into the tree. Sublime.
The Prom - shamelessly schmoopy stuff, but it does actually work. I’m heartily sick of BuffyandAngel, as the unremitting angst does tire, but other things, like the girls’ obsession with their dresses, Xander’s wonderfully mature, grown-up gesture in paying for Cordelia’s dress, Wesley-angst and suchlike, raise the episode up. Giles’s bitching about pink taffetta is delighfully queenly.The remarks he then makes about “ice-cream at some sort” and the moments where he catches Buffy’s eye at the prom itself are unashamedly sweet. And so is Angel. See, I do give him credit when he deserves it. Sometimes.
Graduation Day - I liked the slow build-up to this one, the playing on the characters’ hopes and fears about their upcoming departure. Willow and Oz were particularly sweet. The best bit, though, is when the Mayor walks into the library. Evil bad guys aren’t supposed to just walk in! They’re supposed to swing in through the windows or come up through the Hellmouth or something! Giles fencing with Wesley and reading the newspaper at the same time is a perfect segue into stabbing the Mayor.
That sentence made sense in my head.
And we really should have left it there. We repaired to Jane’s room, chatted about nothing, listened to music, even had sleeping-bags out and everything. It was fun. I can’t remember much about what we talked about. I mentioned my extreme sleep-deprivation, which was becoming genuinely extreme. I haven’t been able to sleep in the heat, as I keep saying. I go to bed, sleep an hour, get up, go back to bed, don’t sleep, pacing up and down the whole night, and because of the work experience, I’ve had to sleep in a regular pattern and it just hasn’t been happening.
Jane asked, “Research for the sleep-deprivation fic?” and laughed when I glared. The truth is, the sleep-deprivation fic is eating my brain without salt. I want desperately to write it, because I feel like it’s a good idea that could be a good fic – it’s the execution of it that’s the problem.
Jane also gave me another plot bunny, which will probably also eat my brain. It’s a very simple idea. How did The Dark Age happen in the Wishverse? My immediate thought, which Jane echoed, was that Giles killed Jenny. He must have done, and it would then explain her lack-of-presence in The Wish (Angelus never turned, never killed her, so where she is is a genuine mystery). Maybe some writing is in order, I don’t know.
Jane has her laptop in her room, and I have DVDs, and, well.
The Yoko Factor/Primeval - I loved these episodes. Loved them. We were actually only watching them so Restless would make sense to me, but that didn’t detract from how good they were. It’s the sharpness of the writing, I think – Spike sets out to be “the Yoko factor”, and succeeds so well in turning them against each other, playing on their insecurities, hitting them where he knows it will hurt them, encouraging them to lash out. It’s an exercise in psychological cruelty.
The great thing is, we get hints of these wounds before Spike opens them. Before Spike starts in on Giles, convincing him that he really is nothing more than “an unemployed ex-librarian with a tendency to get knocked on the head”, the song he was singing and playing was Freebird. The lyrics we hear are: “If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me? / Because if I stay here with you, girl, things just couldn’t be the same.”
Way with the tragedy, and a lot of foreshadowing for Once More With Feeling. Then Willow talking to Tara, trying to explain how she doesn’t want the Scoobies to know about Tara, even before Spike’s machinations. Xander’s belief that they don’t want him around and all he’s good for is the army is too sweet and sad, especially as he’s so afraid they might be right. The final confrontation, with all its bitterness, drunkenness and shouting (and happy Spike) is a brilliant set-piece, so well-written.
As is the bit where they begin to reconcile. Standing in a circle, trying to put it together – well, I like it. I have always liked the four original members of the Scooby gang, and it reminds me of Stargate fandom where people griped that there were no proper team episodes any more.
At that point, I uttered a sentence I have never had cause to say before or since. “I feel a gestalt entity coming on.”
And I was right. I absolutely adored the bonds being renewed between them, the attempt-at-hug-whilst-dropping-down-lift-shaft, and the gestalt spell was perfect. Buffy’s mind, heart and spirit, all together – and how fitting that Xander was the heart. A real “Awww!” moment in the midst of all the shooting and destruction. The melded voices were freaky cool. Yes, intellectual opinion there.
Restless - I don’t have much to say about this yet. I get the feeling I’d have to watch it at least twenty times to get even a quarter of the references and symbolism. It was very, very good, though, I know that much. Very original and well-imagined. And you’ve got to love the Cheese Man. “I wear the cheese. It does not wear me.”
I did say that this show seems to have an obsession with cheese, similar to the Harry Potter obsession with socks. It crops up in the strangest places – when Willow attempts to matchmake Riley and Buffy comes to mind (“She likes cheese.”), but I’m sure there’s more.
At this point, I looked up at the window and saw it was getting light. I had absolutely no idea where the last ten hours had gone; it was six o’clock in the morning and not really worth going to bed at all. Especially in my case, because I knew my sleep-dep was going to kick in when I did sleep and keep me under for days.
Because of the sleep-dep fic research, I know way too much about the symptoms and irreversible brain damage and so on. This made for illuminating conversation in the small hours of the morning. To keep ourselves awake, we tried conversation, non-soothing music, then Queer As Folk, which I’d never seen before and liked. Good stuff.
This progressed into coffee at some point, not tea. “Tea is soothing. I wish to be tense.”
It was about half ten when Hannah and I departed, into a sunny day without sleep and some singing. We managed to sing Wish I Could Stay before having to take leave of each other. I was very tired when I got home. My parents were on their way out, thankfully.
So I went to bed at one o’clock in the afternoon. My mother attempted to wake me up four or five times during the course of the afternoon, and once I even had lunch before going back to bed, but it was a lost cause, really. I’ve only really got out of bed in the last half-hour or so, or however long it took me to write this.
Okay, too much American television. I nearly wrote that as “gotten.”
And I’m still tired, natch. But it was very much worth it. A good night, and I’m going back to bed now. August 14th 2004 never really happened for me.
purplerainbow used the exact same subject for her last entry as I was planning to use for this one. “Tiny, tiny babies!” Hee. A truly weird piece of dialogue with an equally weird delivery. But I’m jumping ahead of myself. Last night, we (we being Hannah and I) were descending on Jane for a Buffy marathon of sorts. It was very loosely planned, and while we were supposed to begin at about four in the afternoon, that didn’t exactly happen mainly due to me and a small computer disaster in occupational therapy. But I got there eventually, and I had DVDs, there were some videos, and it was all good. We started with Hush and Bad Girls and moved on from there.
I think. I really can’t remember as much of this as I should do. It’s worrying. Anyway, some reviews:
Hush - I love this episode unashamedly. The basic premise is so simple and so effective, and makes you sit up and pay attention. What little dialogue there is is inspired – Spike and Giles playing the odd couple is so surreal and so right. The bickering about Weetabix, followed by Giles with his head on his desk as Xander and Anya bicker, is wonderful.
There are so many things to love about this episode. The Gentlemen are some of the very few truly scary villains on the show, and the sequence where they chase Tara is frankly creepifying. The best bit, though, is the presentation Giles gives. There are no words to describe how good it is.
Bad Girls – the slash, the slash! I had thought about Buffy/Faith before, but this episode makes it a real possibility. With or without the subtext, it’s an interesting relationship. In any case, a fairly good episode – the Lady Macbeth references made me happy. And I have finally, finally met the infamous Watcher known as Wesley Wyndham-Price! The sequence where Buffy, Faith and Giles gang up against him is just brilliant. We were all commenting on how Wesley seems to bring out the best in Giles, for a given value of “best” – the constant bitching and snarkiness is absolutely wonderful.
We broke off for dinner here, and the conversation was sparked off by a copy of the Crosby Herald on the table and went on to discussing seals, Greenpeace and painting things red. I honestly can’t remember how we got onto it. Then:
Doppelgangland - heh. I adored this. Vamp!Willow is such a perfect character – delightfully evil and yet so familiar. What’s amazing is how Alyson Hannigan pulls off playing four separate characters in the episode – Willow, vamp!Willow, Willow-pretending-to-be-vamp!Willow and vamp!Willow-pretending-to-be-Willow. The fact you can clearly tell the difference between them all is just fantastic. The best bits are the reactions of the others to the fact Willow is dead (the scene with them on the stairs, immersed in bleakest, deepest depression is heartbreaking and funny at the same time) and then their reactions when she walks in alive are fabulous too. Xander thinking the cross is broken, and shaking it is hysterical. So is Angel, whom I loathe as a general thing. His very obvious grief at having to tell the other Scoobies the news is almost indicative of a personality.
At this point, Hannah said something about evil!Willow, which is no big spoiler for me because I do know some scrappy details of what happens to get Willow addicted to magic, but Michael was aggravated. Jane has threatened to kill him on several occasions for spoiling me, so he groused. “This wouldn’t happen if I had perky breasts,” he said.
After a minute, Jane protested, “Michael, you’ve killed my friends!”
He had. Hannah was dying of embarrassment and I was dying of laughter. Michael was persuaded to go to bed not long after that.
Enemies - loved, just loved it. Yay for Angelus – he’s so much of a better character than Angel it’s not funny. Giles and the demon at the end made me giggle for what felt like years. I love these glimpses we get given of Giles’s very weird past – this episode has the demon (“I introduced him to his wife.” Hee!) and another example is in Teacher’s Pet, where we hear so much about his straitjacketed friend who specialises in bugs and fairy-tales. Very odd.
Earshot - I know it was a cop-out, but I liked the concept of vampires’ thoughts being unreadable (no reflection of their bodies, and equally no reflection of their minds). Of course, the no reflection thing is difficult – all the scenes with Spike in Giles’s apartment, you can see his reflection at odd times – but this was just a nice detail. The innermost thoughts of the Scoobies were hysterical – self-doubting!Willow, obsessedwithsex!Xander, and deep!Oz. Oz is the best of the three. Interesting that the only glimpse we get of Giles’s thoughts is his thinking about Buffy’s shoes. How can anyone think he’s straight?
And the end is wonderful – “…having sex with my mother!”
He walks into the tree. Sublime.
The Prom - shamelessly schmoopy stuff, but it does actually work. I’m heartily sick of BuffyandAngel, as the unremitting angst does tire, but other things, like the girls’ obsession with their dresses, Xander’s wonderfully mature, grown-up gesture in paying for Cordelia’s dress, Wesley-angst and suchlike, raise the episode up. Giles’s bitching about pink taffetta is delighfully queenly.The remarks he then makes about “ice-cream at some sort” and the moments where he catches Buffy’s eye at the prom itself are unashamedly sweet. And so is Angel. See, I do give him credit when he deserves it. Sometimes.
Graduation Day - I liked the slow build-up to this one, the playing on the characters’ hopes and fears about their upcoming departure. Willow and Oz were particularly sweet. The best bit, though, is when the Mayor walks into the library. Evil bad guys aren’t supposed to just walk in! They’re supposed to swing in through the windows or come up through the Hellmouth or something! Giles fencing with Wesley and reading the newspaper at the same time is a perfect segue into stabbing the Mayor.
That sentence made sense in my head.
And we really should have left it there. We repaired to Jane’s room, chatted about nothing, listened to music, even had sleeping-bags out and everything. It was fun. I can’t remember much about what we talked about. I mentioned my extreme sleep-deprivation, which was becoming genuinely extreme. I haven’t been able to sleep in the heat, as I keep saying. I go to bed, sleep an hour, get up, go back to bed, don’t sleep, pacing up and down the whole night, and because of the work experience, I’ve had to sleep in a regular pattern and it just hasn’t been happening.
Jane asked, “Research for the sleep-deprivation fic?” and laughed when I glared. The truth is, the sleep-deprivation fic is eating my brain without salt. I want desperately to write it, because I feel like it’s a good idea that could be a good fic – it’s the execution of it that’s the problem.
Jane also gave me another plot bunny, which will probably also eat my brain. It’s a very simple idea. How did The Dark Age happen in the Wishverse? My immediate thought, which Jane echoed, was that Giles killed Jenny. He must have done, and it would then explain her lack-of-presence in The Wish (Angelus never turned, never killed her, so where she is is a genuine mystery). Maybe some writing is in order, I don’t know.
Jane has her laptop in her room, and I have DVDs, and, well.
The Yoko Factor/Primeval - I loved these episodes. Loved them. We were actually only watching them so Restless would make sense to me, but that didn’t detract from how good they were. It’s the sharpness of the writing, I think – Spike sets out to be “the Yoko factor”, and succeeds so well in turning them against each other, playing on their insecurities, hitting them where he knows it will hurt them, encouraging them to lash out. It’s an exercise in psychological cruelty.
The great thing is, we get hints of these wounds before Spike opens them. Before Spike starts in on Giles, convincing him that he really is nothing more than “an unemployed ex-librarian with a tendency to get knocked on the head”, the song he was singing and playing was Freebird. The lyrics we hear are: “If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me? / Because if I stay here with you, girl, things just couldn’t be the same.”
Way with the tragedy, and a lot of foreshadowing for Once More With Feeling. Then Willow talking to Tara, trying to explain how she doesn’t want the Scoobies to know about Tara, even before Spike’s machinations. Xander’s belief that they don’t want him around and all he’s good for is the army is too sweet and sad, especially as he’s so afraid they might be right. The final confrontation, with all its bitterness, drunkenness and shouting (and happy Spike) is a brilliant set-piece, so well-written.
As is the bit where they begin to reconcile. Standing in a circle, trying to put it together – well, I like it. I have always liked the four original members of the Scooby gang, and it reminds me of Stargate fandom where people griped that there were no proper team episodes any more.
At that point, I uttered a sentence I have never had cause to say before or since. “I feel a gestalt entity coming on.”
And I was right. I absolutely adored the bonds being renewed between them, the attempt-at-hug-whilst-dropping-down-lift-shaft, and the gestalt spell was perfect. Buffy’s mind, heart and spirit, all together – and how fitting that Xander was the heart. A real “Awww!” moment in the midst of all the shooting and destruction. The melded voices were freaky cool. Yes, intellectual opinion there.
Restless - I don’t have much to say about this yet. I get the feeling I’d have to watch it at least twenty times to get even a quarter of the references and symbolism. It was very, very good, though, I know that much. Very original and well-imagined. And you’ve got to love the Cheese Man. “I wear the cheese. It does not wear me.”
I did say that this show seems to have an obsession with cheese, similar to the Harry Potter obsession with socks. It crops up in the strangest places – when Willow attempts to matchmake Riley and Buffy comes to mind (“She likes cheese.”), but I’m sure there’s more.
At this point, I looked up at the window and saw it was getting light. I had absolutely no idea where the last ten hours had gone; it was six o’clock in the morning and not really worth going to bed at all. Especially in my case, because I knew my sleep-dep was going to kick in when I did sleep and keep me under for days.
Because of the sleep-dep fic research, I know way too much about the symptoms and irreversible brain damage and so on. This made for illuminating conversation in the small hours of the morning. To keep ourselves awake, we tried conversation, non-soothing music, then Queer As Folk, which I’d never seen before and liked. Good stuff.
This progressed into coffee at some point, not tea. “Tea is soothing. I wish to be tense.”
It was about half ten when Hannah and I departed, into a sunny day without sleep and some singing. We managed to sing Wish I Could Stay before having to take leave of each other. I was very tired when I got home. My parents were on their way out, thankfully.
So I went to bed at one o’clock in the afternoon. My mother attempted to wake me up four or five times during the course of the afternoon, and once I even had lunch before going back to bed, but it was a lost cause, really. I’ve only really got out of bed in the last half-hour or so, or however long it took me to write this.
Okay, too much American television. I nearly wrote that as “gotten.”
And I’m still tired, natch. But it was very much worth it. A good night, and I’m going back to bed now. August 14th 2004 never really happened for me.
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no subject
on 2004-08-14 03:21 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-08-14 03:36 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-08-15 01:30 am (UTC)taking notesdiscussing it.And you're right about Giles' strange past. I think there should be more fic about his friends and how he came to meet them, and the like.
no subject
on 2004-08-16 04:21 pm (UTC)There should definitely be more fic set in Giles's past. There ain't nearly enough.
no subject
on 2004-08-17 01:13 am (UTC)Yes indeed.
I vote that you write some more!