Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Twenty five years later (Part seven)By Matthew Martin| November 19, 2021 TV Blogs Previous Page Season seven can best be divided into three parts. The first third of the year, constituting the season’s first seven episodes, offers a lot of the one-off fun, Scoobie-like hijinks, and throwback charm that was missing for a lot of season six. There are moments here that rival the absolute joy of the one-offs from seasons three and four. The episode “Him,” for example, which features a love spell gone awry, offers what might be the second-greatest silent gag in the series (second only to Giles and the wizard costume), as Buffy (under the spell) decides the only way to prove her love for the man in question is to blow up Principal Wood with a bazooka… Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party. YouTube privacy policy If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh. Accept YouTube Content The second chunk of the season (episodes eight through seventeen) is the largest of the three, and the messiest. To its credit, I will say that this stretch of episodes works remarkably better when binge-watched, something that also proves true when rewatching season six. Back in the day, having to go through these one by one, a week (or more) at a time was agony, as many of these episodes were highly serialized, without any proper beginning or ending, and little in the way of theme or three-act structure to each outing. The worst offenders of this are the pair of episodes “Bring on the Night” and “Showtime,” in which Buffy first fights, and then kills her first übervamp. The plot that is spread thinly over these two episodes would have been better served within a single forty-five-minute runtime. There’s a kind of meandering and padding in these two that makes it feel like the worst of Angel’s fourth season. I remember a lot of grief about them too, much of which was due to there being a huge three-week gap in between. There was a buzz going around that the season was unfocused and lacked a strong arc. I think a lot of the angst was because everyone knew this was the last season and people had expectations of it being something “more special” than the rest, when the fact is, it was always going to be a relatively normal Buffy season, at least in terms of its format. The middle of the season spends its time putting the pieces in place to go warp-speed to the finale, while still finding time to have more great one-off episodes that give a last little spotlight to the show’s lesser characters. “Potential” serves as our last proper “Dawn” focused episode, and it really highlights how far the character has come since her debut two years back. “Storyteller” brings great closure to a character that the writers clearly fell in love with this year, Andrew. And “Lies My Parents Told Me” gives us more backstory on the seemingly bottomless well of backstory that is Spike. I didn’t even mention the episode that ended the first third of the season, “Conversations with Dead People,” which won the Hugo Award (every nerd’s Oscar). I’ve said in previous articles how Buffy wouldn’t have been Buffy without these great one-off episodes, which are basically a lost art in the 8-10 episode seasons of today’s streaming world. The big picture arc of season seven doesn’t kick into high gear until episode eighteen, and the set-up, which was sprinkled across seventeen prior episodes, probably could have been condensed to two or three without much lost along the way. What would have been lost are the viewers’ final chances to watch these characters we’ve grown to love cut loose, have fun, chew scenery, and just be themselves without the burdens of the season’s arc weighing everything down all the time. All the same, the big arc of the season rounds the final corner starting with episode eighteen and the introduction of Caleb. Played by the ever-delightful Nathan Fillion, Caleb provides a physical presence to operate on behalf of the formless “The First.” Caleb can hit, stab, slap, jab, even poke an eye out, and ultimately, he can take a magic axe to the gonads in the name of girl-power. Also, Faith is back, which only reinforces the “tying up loose ends” feeling of the final season. Unfortunately, while the middle of the season is the messiest, the end of the season is the most frustrating. With only five episodes to go, it’s more than a little disappointing that so much time is devoted to the idea that Buffy is a bad leader and that somehow Faith is the one who should be in charge of the potentials. They try to hang the lampshade with Faith herself declaring that she’s not leadership material, and she’s right, but that line feels hollow when everyone from Dawn, to Willow(!), Xander(!!), and even Giles(!!!) all agree that Buffy should leave the house (her house by the way) while Faith takes over the group. I’m sure there’s a way to make this all work as a story-point, but the way they go about it, especially in how immediately hostile everyone is toward Buffy, just never clicks. The only saving grace in it all is that it makes Spike the ultimate hero, friend, and loyalist. He goes looking for Buffy, finds her, and then gives her the queen mother of all motivational speeches… Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party. YouTube privacy policy If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh. Accept YouTube Content The moment leads to the two of them sharing a bed in a platonic way, bringing their insane “love” some much-needed closure. The issue of Buffy/Spike, especially when compared to Buffy/Angel will forever be a point of contention among fans of the series. For me, the Buffy/Angel relationship was about a sixteen-year-old girl being smitten by a brooding, mysterious guy with a dark past. Angel’s curse meant that they could never be together, which gave it a tragic Romeo & Juliet vibe that Whedon and co. knew exactly how to play (the climactic scene in season two’s “I Only Have Eyes For You” is basically the meta-commentary on this). The more she couldn’t have him, the more she wanted him, and vice/versa. With Spike, the relationship was different. At times it was raw, abusive, toxic, even flat out “wrong,” but unlike with Angel, Buffy knew who and what Spike was from the outset. She didn’t know Angel’s secret until she had already gone head over heels for him, and she didn’t know the particulars of the curse until it was literally too late. With Spike, Buffy saw him at his worst, hated him for it, and still fell for him all the same. In the final minutes of the final episode, she tells him she loves him, and even though he doesn’t believe it, and even if she doesn’t believe it, I believed it. Not all the time, but here and there, fading in and out over the course of multiple seasons, Buffy and Spike loved each other. They’re “twin flames” as far as I’m concerned.
