Tag Archives: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

April 28, 2010 · 12:01 am

Cultural Catchup Project: “Ted” (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

“Ted”

April 28th, 2010

You can follow along with the Cultural Catchup Project by following me on Twitter (@Memles), by subscribing to the category’s feed, or by bookmarking the Cultural Catchup Project page where I’ll be posting a link to each installment.

What strikes me about “Ted” is that it was entirely possible that the story within the episode could have been real. Being that this is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and not Buffy the Normal Teenage Girl, we presume that Ted is some sort of demon, and that his sudden intrusion on Buffy’s life as an unwanted father figure is some sort of dastardly plot. However, the less-than-malevolent stepfather figure is both a real circumstance and a fairly familiar trope independent of the supernatural, which means that for much of the episode we’re wondering whether this could really just be Buffy and her mother being victims of an angry, abusive man rather than a robotic Frankenstein monster obsessively trying to recreate his creator’s wedded bliss.

It results in the right kind of standalone Buffy episode, one which captures a unique tone that differentiates the episode from the rest of the series while still fitting into some ongoing storylines and the dominant themes of the season.

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April 27, 2010 · 12:01 am

The Cultural Catchup Project: “What’s My Line Parts 1 & 2” (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

“What’s My Line Parts 1 & 2”

April 27th, 2010

You can follow along with the Cultural Catchup Project by following me on Twitter (@Memles), by subscribing to the category’s feed, or by bookmarking the Cultural Catchup Project page where I’ll be posting a link to each installment.

The end of what is almost a four-episode arc, the two-part “What’s My Line” manages to play perfectly into Buffy’s crisis of identity which stems from both the concerns regarding maturity and the future in “Lie to Me” and the threads of responsibility and consequences in “The Dark Age.” Buffy has spent a few episodes questioning the life she leads, and the Career Fair does a great job of both crystallizing those concerns and transferring them into the realm of the ordinary teenage girl who wonders about her future.

Just as Giles’ inescapable future as a Watcher led him to leave Oxford and fall in with the wrong crowd in London, Buffy watches her classmates become excited about their future and starts to worry about her own. However, “What’s My Line” introduces so many different roadblocks, including a trio of assassins and the wonder that is Kendra the Vampire Slayer, to her experience that she starts to reconsider what it’s like to live a day in her shoes, and the show nicely unites a potentially chaotic episode within key themes that resonate throughout the second season.

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April 26, 2010 · 12:01 am

The Cultural Catchup Project: “The Dark Age” (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

“The Dark Age”

April 26th, 2010

You can follow along with the Cultural Catchup Project by following me on Twitter (@Memles), by subscribing to the category’s feed, or by bookmarking the Cultural Catchup Project page where I’ll be posting a link to each installment.

Picking up where “Lie to Me” left off in an indirect fashion (actually owing more to “Halloween” in terms of direct connection), “The Dark Age” is an important episode for the series’ negotiation of the student/teacher relationship between Buffy and Giles.

While the events in the episode do a lot in order to add depth to Giles as a character, including complicating his relationship with Ms. Calendar, it makes explicit the parallels between Buffy and Giles’ experiences. Like Buffy, Giles has inherited a responsibility, and there was a time in his life when he threw everything away to run with a bad crowd who happened to awaken some bad magic.

It allows Giles to avoid feeling “above” Buffy’s problems with the demonic, meaning that the show has the potential to both confound and envelop Giles’ character just as easily as it can corrupt and complicate Buffy’s life, a potential which can occasionally result in an episode which feels congruous with past stories but finds some new life by placing Giles at its centre.

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April 25, 2010 · 12:16 am

The Cultural Catchup Project: “Lie to Me” (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

“Lie to Me”

April 25th, 2010

You can follow along with the Cultural Catchup Project by following me on Twitter (@Memles), by subscribing to the category’s feed, or by bookmarking the Cultural Catchup Project page where I’ll be posting a link to each installment.

[Note: I’m wary of trying to shoehorn too many different episodes together this week, especially since a lot of them feel like they deserve to be analyzed more on an individual basis (although I’ll still be taking continuity into account, of course). As a result, I’m going to do some smaller “capsule reviews” for the six-episode stretch between “Lie to Me” and “Bad Eggs” for the next five days, before getting deeper into the season after that point. If it works out, and feedback is good, I might do this every now and then when I’ve got the time – however, if you object to this sort of analysis and would like strictly big ideas, do let me know!]

Written and directed by Joss Whedon, “Lie to Me” is not exactly what one would call a paradigm shift for the series: no new “big bads” are introduced, no major plot developments are revealed, and you could make the argument that what happens in the episode doesn’t fit into any definitions of continuity as a result.

What the episode accomplishes, however, is something more subtle: while “When She Was Bad” indicated that the consequences from Buffy’s near-death experience were not going to be forgotten, “Lie to Me” makes sure we understand that there are going to be more terrifying experiences in the future, and that the show will not shy away from some dark conclusions for the sake of trying to force this series into definitions of good and evil which fail to take into account the show’s inherent liminality.

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April 24, 2010 · 12:54 am

The Cultural Catchup Project: Season Two’s Cult of Personality (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

Season Two’s Cult of Personality

April 24th, 2010

You can follow along with the Cultural Catchup Project by following me on Twitter (@Memles), by subscribing to the category’s feed, or by bookmarking the Cultural Catchup Project page where I’ll be posting a link to each installment.

When a show is making the transition between its first and second seasons, personality is perhaps its greatest asset. If you’re going to be creating new stories, and if you tied off a lot of the show’s loose ends in the previous season, you’re creating a situation where suspense and anticipation are replaced by creation and expectation. These are different beasts, and if you’re not ready to fully commit to a fast-paced serialized series then your best strategy is to use your show’s personality in order to “weather the storm,” so to speak.

What Buffy the Vampire Slayer does early in its second season is use personality as its ultimate goal, if not necessarily doing so in a straightforward or consistent fashion. The show has always been about its characters, and our attachment with the series’ strong but somewhat uneven first season is likely based on Xander’s wit, or Willow’s pragmatism, or Giles’ cantankerousness, or Buffy’s hidden vulnerability. However, while the second season does continue to rely on Xander’s one-liners or Giles’ dry sense of humour, it is not content to coast by: starting with the premiere, “When She Was Bad” and extending into “Halloween,” the show puts each personality under a microscope in ways which verify the importance of personality to the success of this series on the sides of both good and evil.

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April 21, 2010 · 4:00 pm

The Cultural Catchup Project: Promise and “Prophecy Girl” (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

Promise and “Prophecy Girl”

April 21st, 2010

You can follow along with the Cultural Catchup Project by following me on Twitter (@Memles), by subscribing to the category’s feed, or by bookmarking the Cultural Catchup Project page where I’ll be posting a link to each installment.

Going into “Prophecy Girl,” I was expecting something big – everyone had indicated that this episode, as Whedon returns to writing and takes over directing duties, is when the show finally finds itself. Because I know that the series is going to eventually become heavily serialized, and that the first season finale is supposed to be the start of that push towards more complex stories, I expected to have all sorts of new potential to be writing about.

Instead, I’ve discovered that “Prophecy Girl” is ultimately a subtle rather than substantial shift in the series’ trajectory, a question of execution rather than some sort of creative shift. With Whedon behind the camera, the emotional resonance of the episode and its stories is the strongest its been thus far, and there are a couple of pretty key bits of character development which sort of clears the slate heading into the second season. However, produced like many first season finales, you can tell that this was either a beginning or an end depending on if the series was picked up, and so it spends as much time resolving as it does complicating.

The result is that all of my prophecizing and pontificating about earlier episodes is probably more substantial than what I have to offer about “Prophecy Girl”: it was entertaining and emotional, and signals the show is coming into itself quite nicely, but it’s only made me anxious to move on already. However, I made a promise to write about it, so some thoughts on the finale and the first season overall are necessary at this stage in the Cultural Catchup Project.

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April 20, 2010 · 3:55 pm

The Cultural Catchup Project: Hellmouth [versus/and/within/without] High School (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

Hellmouth [versus/and/within/without] High School

April 20th, 2010

You can follow along with the Cultural Catchup Project by following me on Twitter (@Memles), by subscribing to the category’s feed, or by bookmarking the Cultural Catchup Project page where I’ll be posting a link to each installment.

For those who have waited patiently for me to get through the fairly short first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a process which has taken a week longer than it would have under normal circumstances, you’ll have to wait a little bit longer: while I’m about to get to “Prophecy Girl,” which everyone seems to be labeling as the show’s turning point, there’s a few observations I want to make about the show before I get into the finale and trying to contend with what the season is accomplishing.

Like any first season, this was obviously a learning experience for Whedon and his crew of writers – to borrow the ominous message from “Out of Mind, Out of Sight,” Whedon’s job was pretty much to “Look, Learn, Listen” to the effectiveness of these episodes. What struck me about the three stories which lead into the finale (“The Puppet Show,” “Nightmares,” and “Out of Mind…”) is that they all offer subtly different takes on the show’s central premise, each using the Hellmouth (which, yes, I’ve discussed before) as the source of a different kind of phenomenon: while the diversity speaks to the endless potential to the Hellmouth, the varying quality of the episodes indicates that even subtle differences in function can heighten the dramatic interest in a pretty substantial fashion.

And yes, you’ll have to read my thoughts on that before I get to the finale, so long as your patience hasn’t run out already.

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April 19, 2010 · 10:07 pm

How I Met Your Mother – “Home Wreckers”

“Home Wreckers”

April 19th, 2010

Ted Mosby’s search for a nuclear family of his very own has always been at the heart of How I Met Your Mother, and the romanticism at the heart of this quest is one of the show’s distinguishing qualities. Ted isn’t just looking for a wife, let’s remember: he’s got a very clear picture of the sort of life he wants, and so “Home Wreckers” focuses less on the eponymous story and has Ted trying to rush his way to the end of the story in a way that some viewers tend to do on a regular basis.

While the episode as a whole feels a bit repetitive, struggling to get over the fact that it’s effectively a long conversation about a subject that the show has discussed a lot in the past, there is an emotional honesty to the conclusion of the episode which demonstrates the value of Ted’s romantic point of view to the show as a whole. If no one on this show followed their instincts and desires, willing to be reckless and go against what everyone expects them to do, Marshall and Lily may not be together, Robin and Barney may have never tried to make it work, and Ted may never have purchased a house.

By pitting reckless agency against the show’s usual focus on fate and circumstance, “Home Wreckers” manages to offer some intriguing commentary on the show’s future, even if the comedy was largely limited to the wonderful game that is “Drunk or Kid.”

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April 11, 2010 · 12:09 pm

The Cultural Catchup Project: An Expectational Course Correction (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

An Expectational Course Correction

April 11th, 2010

You can follow along with the Cultural Catchup Project by following me on Twitter (@Memles), by subscribing to the category’s feed, or by bookmarking the Cultural Catchup Project page where I’ll be posting a link to each installment.

First off, I to thank everyone for the great comments and responses over the past few days – this is an exciting project, and I’m glad that so many seem to be along for the ride. It’s unfortunate, then, that my immediate progress is more or less on hold as a result of some other life commitments, along with a pileup of new television (the Glee premiere, new Lost, the Treme premiere, the Life Unexpected finale, etc.); as a result, those anxious for me to get beyond the first season and into the second will have to wait a while longer (although I intend on trying to get through S1 by next weekend).

However, in an effort to keep up some momentum, I did watch the remainder of the first disc of Season One, and I started to better understand some of the responses to yesterday’s piece. It’s not that I was surprised to see people point out that I was fairly ignorant of certain parts of the series’ future, but rather that it seemed the premiere was saying one thing when many comments insisted that it was saying quite another.

And after watching “Witch” and “Teacher’s Pet,” I think I’m going to go with the commenters on this one, as the episodes have definitely inspired an expectational course correction (but not necessarily a bad one).

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April 10, 2010 · 12:05 pm

The Cultural Catchup Project: Story and Scale in Hellmouth and Harvest (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

“Story and Scale in Hellmouth and Harvest”

April 10th, 2010

[This is the first in a series of posts over the next few months as I catch up with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel for the first time. For more information about the project, click here. You can follow along with the project by following me on Twitter (@Memles), by subscribing to the category’s feed, or by bookmarking the Cultural Catchup Project page where I’ll be hosting a link to each installment.]

I went into Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s two-part series opener, “Welcome to the Hellmouth” and “Harvest,” expecting an origin story. When it comes to mythology-heavy shows – or what I presume to be mythology-heavy shows – like Buffy, there is an expectation that they should start with an episode that tells the origins of (in this case) our eponymous heroine. Considering that I knew the show was at least marketed based on the novelty of a teenage girl slaying vampires, it seemed like those first moments of discovery and revelation would be a logical place to start.

However, as I’m sure fans are very aware, “Welcome to Hellmouth” does not start with an innocent teenager learning that it is her destiny to fight vampires. Instead, it starts with a teenager fully aware of her destiny and fairly adept at handling her superhuman skill set, skipping over the “bumbling rookie” phase and moving right onto the phase where Buffy is confident, jaded, and just wanting to move on with her life.

Perhaps this is because Joss Whedon decided that the 1992 film, despite the liberties taken with his script, had already dealt with the origin story, or perhaps it was a decision designed to help explain how Sarah Michelle Gellar (20 at the time) could pass as a 16-year old. Or, perhaps, Whedon was just very keenly aware of what kind of story would best serve as an introduction to these characters and this world: it may not be a traditional origin story, but the precision with which Whedon plots out his vision makes up an occasional lack of tension, and results in a strong introduction to just what this series means to accomplish (and what I hope it accomplishes in the coming months).

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