On Mar 5, 10:06 pm, chr...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
> I started writing this sometime last month, and I'm going to finish it
if
> it's the last thing I do. (Which is not to say I'll make it *good* or
> anything....)
Here's to manufactured triumph!
> Meanwhile, Sadness Personified's mantra of "We didn't do anything" is
not
> especially quotable, but it still infuriates me every time. Looking
back
> on him with S7 (and AtS S5) in mind, I think the key is that Andrew is
the
> ultimate empty man. He's so weak-willed that Warren was able to warp
him
> into a nasty villain, and after a crisis got through to him in
> Storyteller, a better leader will warp him just as sincerely into a
> fighter for good. But if he had met Buffy and friends first, then lost
> them and found Warren, he could just as easily have made the same
> transition in the other direction.
It's always a bit weird seeing him as one of the principals in S7 for
that reason. The weird thing is how well it mostly works, but how I
think of him as a source of humor who's tied very specifically to that
time and place. When the character appears in another setting (i.e.
ATS, the comic), he's not nearly as enjoyable.
> Willow raising the temple is PF cool, even if the effigy of Proserpexa
> does look a bit like an illuminated lawn decoration from Satanic
> Christmas. (And I'm not sure about the idea that an earthquake buried
> something at the *top* of a high bluff. Maybe that goes to sup****t the
> theory that it wasn't a natural earthquake.) However, while it looks
> cool, it does feel a little contrived. I wish they had worked a mention
> of the temple into an earlier episode, to lay the foundations.
The temple (and to a lesser degree, the coven)... where'd all these
plot points come from? I guess they figured the explanation would be
boring, but if you don't establish things before throwing them in,
people get the impression that the "plot" only exists to serve the
character moments or something. That's a feeling I've of course never
once gotten from anything else in the ME canon.
> Oh well.
> IIRC the commentary track reveals that DF meant for us to understand
that
> the temple was buried by the same earthquake that buried the Master, and
> apparently didn't realize that the phrase "70 years ago" would mean a
> different year in 2002 than in 1997.
I guess when you're used to your evil coming from longer farther in
the past, when a few years don't make a difference in how you refer to
it...
> > Additional comments on S6D6: I managed to make it through the thread
> > without mentioning (except elliptically here) a certain character who
> > dominates all the discussions despite appearing for a grand total of
> > maybe four minutes on this disc (a few seconds of which are really
> > really im****tant, but still)...
>
> An interesting choice, unusual, perhaps controversial; but I liked it.
> Since you mention that character, this time around I proved to myself
that
> I could FF or track-skip over every Spike scene on this disc without
> detracting one bit from the climactic story. All of them, even the
> legitimately im****tant part, are really setup for S7. They could also
be
> called a resolution to Spike's S6 story, I guess, but they still aren't
> part of disc six's story at all.
I'm not sure how much I like it, but the double ending comes because
Spike's story is the only one that can't be called a resolution.
Every BTVS season has a bona fide *ending*, but then S6 also has an
extra little tag that's itself simultaneously cliffhanger and Big
Reveal.
-AOQ
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