Annoyances in today's Buffy

[avram]

OK, it’s a bridge episode, intended to give us a few more details and set up the Cool Stuff. Not great like some of the recent ones have been, but OK. Still, some gripes...

• What’s with the drowning Spike scene? Will the writers ever make up their minds about whether vampires need to breathe?
• Did it ever occur to Buffy to say, in the presence of the other characters, “Hey, stakes don’t work on this one, but it’s still afraid of sunlight”? I guess we can assume that she’ll be telling them between episodes.
• And why exactly did that little Slayerette run off like that? Could we maybe have spent some time establishing a motivation for the character to do something stupid that’ll get her killed?
• Oh, and nice job killing off the gay one again. Are they farming the scripting out to Fred Phelps?

Comments

[elisem.livejournal.com]

It may have been a bridge episode, but that doesn't account for how very much it did not work, in my opinion. The whole thing smelt of last-minute changes and rewrites on the fly and, er, vamping to fill time. Juan and I noticed that the captions did not match the dialogue in the last scene at the house, and that's happened before in Mutant Enemy shows when there was a last-minute change, but it's never been for more than three or four words before. (example: the comment about Angel kicking Connor out of the house was, if the captions are accurate, originally phrased in terms of Ward kicking the Beav out of the house. The captioned version was much funnier. We wondered why they backed off and changed it.) In this episode, whole interchanges of dialogue were different. This suggests major last-minute changes. That, plus the whole "this is a clipisode" feeling, and the way the new material wasn't tight or well-paced or, frankly, very interesting dramatically, suggests that this episode was something cobbled together under very difficult circumstances and under major constraints.

At least, that's what I'm hoping it suggests, because the alternative suggestion would simply be that the show has begun to suck in new and boring ways.

The last speech was good, though. Pity the rest of the episode never came near it.

[avram]

I thought the last speech was a bit overdone. Nice to see them getting proactive, if they do indeed do that.

And one thing they seem to be forgetting: It may not be possible to fight the First Evil itself, but the minions are (or were, till the neandervamp showed up) probably quite killable. The Bottom Feeder can't do squat without people to do his bidding.

I kept wondering if they were going to phone up Riley and the Initiative and ask to borrow some heavy ordnance. Worked real well on the Judge back in Season 2.