Buffy Season Five

[barondave]

I finally figured out The Secret to watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Mute the sound at the end before that horrible theme song comes on to ruin the mood. This may not be for everyone, but it really helped sustain the emotional build in a decent season.

In Season Five, our little girl grows up. She starts wearing lipstick, gains a cup size and...

... gains a sister, loses a boyfriend, loses a mother and battles a god. Mostly, the season didn't work very well for me, but both Xander and Willow came back to form. Anya became almost likeable. The Willow/Tara relationship is still the only one I actually believe, so it was nice to see Riley go. I utterly don't believe Spike being enamored of Buffy, but within the show it works okay. They hammer Spike enough (sorry) that he comes off almost sympathetic.

The direction in Buffy is not that good except when Whedon takes the helm, and one other. I was going to give Marti Nixon credit for directing a good episode, but I don't see her listed as a director in the fifth season.

Geller is more comfortable in her role as Buffy, and has fun in the fight scenes and makes a good robot, but her strength is still pouting. She's in a coma/shock in several episodes.

The best episode, for me, in the fifth season was The Body, dealing with death by Natural Causes (the name of one of the featurettes on the last DVD) and the attendant normalcy that surrounds a sudden personal tragedy.

My favorite moment in the season was when we find out where Spike got the leather coat he's wearing: It belonged to the second Slayer he killed. The whole Spirit Guide thing with the first Slayer isn't played out well. I can barely believe that Slayers go back to the Australian aborigines, since that means that there was a huuuuuge problem with aborigine vampires. And The Slayer has progressed from "the best of the best" to "chosen for her super powers" which takes it further out of reality.

Glory didn't work for me. A god isn't just an RPG character with high stats. They get to cause floods and rain lightening and such.

The Key was an interesting plot twist that mostly worked, but I had to suspend a LOT of disbelief. 14 is when Buffy became a Slayer, but she's The Kid. Trachenberg is very good as the smart mouthed kid sister, which makes the situation almost believable.

I really like Joel Grey, but I never figured out what his character was supposed to do.

Giles gets the same treatment that Wash gets later, but the less said about that travesty of an episode the better.

A season for fans. If you aren't into the series, you can give this season a pass. I'll probably go on to the last two years, but I have other, more pressing, series to catch up on.

Comments

[joshuwain.livejournal.com]

"The Body" is probably the best episode of the series, although some would say "Hush", "Once More, With Feeling" or "Conversations With Dead People" are close contenders. I also enjoyed the final confrontation with Glory more than the rest of the season. I felt it had a sense of finality to it that gave more punctuation to the rest of the episodes. Glory, while not my favorite of the "Big Bads", was interesting: the all-powerful, vapid bitch was not something I'd really seen, before. Sure, no one matches season three's Mayor but Glory had something interesting about her ... and that's saying a lot considering she was, by her very nature, uninteresting. :)

Yours,
Sylvan (Dave)

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

"Mute the sound at the end before that horrible theme song comes on to ruin the mood."

I feel the same way about The West Wing.

B

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you've seen the best now - with the exception of one good episode in each of the last two seasons.

"A god isn't just an RPG character with high stats." Yeah, that bothered me too. Still I enjoyed the character and thought her well-acted, unlike her alter ego.

[cari-rose.livejournal.com]

Put me down for "Once more With Feeling"

Even more fun when they had the sing along at the Riverside Theater.
Very cool And fun.

[mplsvala.livejournal.com]

Aaaww. To still have Buffy yet to watch. Lucky you.