In Which I Rectify My Recent Lack of Posts About Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I'm finally caught up on my Buffy viewing again! Well, OK, maybe "caught up" isn't quite the right phrase to use for someone who still hasn't seen any of the fifth and most of the sixth seasons. But thanks to my sister, who mailed me a tape of the one I missed when I was flying home from California, I've now finally seen the last couple of episodes. Correction: make that the last couple of new episodes. What's with this pattern of showing a new ep and then a couple of reruns, and then a new ep and then a couple of reruns? It's annoying.

Oh, and I'm going to talk about them now, so here's your SPOILER WARNING. Don't say I never gave you anything.

Anyway, I'm really glad I did get to see the one I originally missed (it was the Spike-centric one with all the flashbacks involving his mom), because it was easily one of the best episodes of the season. Completely character-driven, perfectly paced, involving, and possessed of some genuine forward momentum (in terms of the character relationships, if not necessarily of the overarching plot). Great stuff.

The most recent episode, by contrast, was more of a mixed bag... Rather like this season as a whole, actually. Some really great individual scenes/elements: the subtly-acted emotional undercurrents between Buffy and Giles, the scene where Spike and Faith share a cigarette break, a really terrific speech by Xander. But it suffers at least slightly from the pacing problems that have been endemic this season. I can't claim to know exactly what goes on in the writers' minds, but they must be terribly worried about alienating new or sporadic or even just forgetful viewers, because they seem to feel the need to spend large chunks of nearly every episode recapping the Story Thus Far. Often they find fairly clever ways to do it, but it still gets boring very quickly, and it almost inevitably interrupts the flow of the story. It's not actually as bad in this one as in a lot of other episodes this season, but after watching the smooth-flowing Spike ep immediately before it, the problem becomes extremely noticeable.

I'm not completely sure about this new bad guy, Caleb, either. He seems to have just come out of nowhere, and he's enough of an over-the-top stereotype to be a little bit annoying. On the other hand, there's got to be an interesting story behind him (how the hell does he come to be strong enough to knock out a Slayer with one hand, for cryin' out loud?), and that creepy little role-playing scene between him and the First Evil has a certain twisted brilliance to it. Plus, it's nice to see the cast of Firefly getting work.

I would say that it's also good to see that the action's moving forward again and the promised apocalyptic conflict is finally starting to heat up, but I'm afraid that the show's suffering from a major case of "boy who cried wolf" syndrome on this one. It seems like every other episode Buffy's standing up and telling us that now, for real this time, they're going to take action, and things are going to get serious, and the showdown is coming, and yadda yadda yadda. And every time, within an episode at the most, we just end up lapsing right back into inactivity again. Admittedly, if a new villain, a catastrophic ass-kicking, and the maiming of a major character (!) aren't signs that this time things really are seriously starting to happen, I don't know what else could possibly qualify. But by this point, I'm finding it extremely difficult to get my adrenaline levels up any more.

I'm really hoping that there's going to be a major climax to the season (and thus the series) that'll do justice to the crests in this season and make up for the troughs. (She said, keeping her fingers crossed.)