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Movies 2003! Yay or Nay!? -- grifter, 17:12:15 01/09/04 Fri

I remember we did this last year, and I´m kinda bored right now, so here goes:

Yay:
Hero (simply stunning)

Daredevil (very dark, very brutal, very interesting)

X-Men 2 (better then the first one, although Halle Berry might just be the most annoying and overrated actress in history)

It´s All About Love (beautiful, beautiful movie; plus I just adore Joaquin Phoenix and Claire Danes)

Pirates of the Caribbean (just funny; plus Johnny Depp at his best!)

Master and Commander (the plot was weak, but the historical details where nifty)

Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (do I need to say anything about this?)

Lost in Translation (funny, smart and beautiful)

Nay:
Ghost Ship (well, Julia Marguiles and John Byrne where in it, but they couldn´t really save it from sinking like that damn ship)

Solaris (I expected more from it, but maybe it was just those damn 13 year old girls talking during the whole movie that runied it...)

Darkness Falls (Emma Caulfield has shown she can act a lot better then this...maybe she just can´t play the stereotypical damsel in distress after all those years of girl-power on Buffy ;)

Hulk (the first hour or so of this movie was great, then he turned into the Hulk and it went all downhill from there)

Charlie´s Angels 2 (I´ll never forgive my mother for dragging me to the cinema to see this)

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (so, so painful if you´ve read the comics)

American Pie 3 (ok, Aly was in it, lets move on...)

That´s all the movies I have seen in the cinema this year, feel free to comment and add your own.

Replies:

[> Re: Movies 2003! Yay or Nay!? -- Finn Mac Cool, 20:23:32 01/09/04 Fri

Yay:

Once Upon a Time in Mexico (a brilliant action/dark comedy that always had me either in awe of the stunts or laughing my as off, sometimes both)

Kill Bill (my first Quentin Tarantino film; like Once Upon a Time, this movie creates its own reality where impossible feats of action can occur; also, it was fun to see how much weird stuff Tarantino could throw at the screen)

Love Actually (eight stories of love in the Christmas season that hit every comedy subgenre known to man)

Gothika (it scared me; that ain't easy to do)

Something's Gotta Give (for its seemingly done to death plot, this movie is a great combo: 88% comedy, 12% touching character development)

Matrix: Reloaded (how can you go wrong with mind blowing action, great comic relief, and an insightful look at fate and destiny)

Scary Movie 3 (a completely silly and ridiculous movie, ya gotta love it)

Nay:

Matrix: Revolutions (most dissapointing movie of the year; how how HOW could the Wachowski brothers ruin everything that made The Matrix great?)

Lost in Translation (the worst movie I've seen in quite some time; this is a perfect example of realism taken too far; it was so boring that I spread myself out over three seats and took a nap)

Return of the King (not truly bad, per se, but definitely inferior to The Two Towers)

Underworld (if I'd slept for two hours instead of watching this, pretty much nothing would have changed)

[> Re: Movies 2003! Yay or Nay!? -- Rob, 21:29:12 01/09/04 Fri

No time to explain why right now, but...

Yay:

Big Fish
Kill Bill
Matrix Reloaded
Finding Nemo
Pirates of the Caribbean
American Wedding
Elf
28 Days Later
Charlie's Angels 2

And a movie that is so Yay that the mere word, Yay, doesn't come close to describing its greatness:

Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Nay

Matrix Revolutions (as much as it pains me to say it, and it isn't awful, but so not what it should have been)
View from the Top
K-19: The Widowmaker
Darkness Falls

Honestly, can't think of many more, since I rarely go to movies that I don't think I'll like, and the ones I do think I'll like I usually think so due to careful research of reviews and the like, so I usually end up liking them. Some of these nay examples are actually movies I ended up seeing because everything else I wanted to see was full, not playing, or I was with a group of friends who wanted to see something I didn't think I would.

Rob

[> Re: Movies 2003! Yay or Nay!? -- Vegeta, 08:41:34 01/12/04 Mon

Didn't see that much in the theatre but here goes:

Yay:

Kill Bill: Vol. I (This movie kicked ass in all the right places)
LOTR: Return of the King (Awesome third chapter to an epic, but the end was way too long)
X2 - X-men United (Everything a comic book film should be)
Cabin Fever (Everything a retro style horror film should be)
Matrix: Reloaded (Kick ass)

Nay:

Matrix: Revolutions (Not what I expected, but I think it will be better after multiple viewings)

I think that's all the films I saw last year... As you can see I don't spend the money unless I am pretty sure I am going to like it.

[> Re: Movies 2003! Yay or Nay!? -- CW, 05:10:07 01/10/04 Sat

Being an old guy who sees movies almost exclusively months later on DVD, I'm still catching up on 2002. Mostly what I have to say about Lord of the Rings: Two Towers and Pirates of the Carribean is never let any film maker watch the original Batman EVER again. I am thoroughly tired of color movies with long 'monotone' sequences!

[> Re: Movies 2003! Yay or Nay!? -- Monsieur Xander, 09:39:54 01/10/04 Sat

Yay:

X-Men 2 (as I like to call it. Whoever does the publicity for the X-Men movies needs to be shot. X2: X-Men United? How Cheese. And the first one's tagline, "Trust a Few, Fear the Rest"? Isn't that in direct opposition with the film's philosophy? And Halle Berry is very, very rich and can afford to hire a vocal coach to teach her an African accent and NOT destroy a long-beloved character. Hmmph. Anywho, the film was great beyond these points.)

Kill Bill (Pretty, pretty violence.)

Lord of the Rings (Long and juicy.)

Pirates of the Carribean (Johnny Depp in eyeliner.)

Finding Nemo: (So, so cute.)

Love Actually (The rebirth of cheesy romance movies. Long may they live.)

American Wedding (True, it's cheap teen shock-humour, but Aly and a few of her costars save this movie from cine-blivion.)

Nay:
Darkness Falls (Emma? We're disappointed in you.)

Wrong Turn (Eliza? Ditto.)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre MASSACRED a classic movie. F***ers! The original was brilliance; the 2003 remake was a pile of music video dung.

The Rules of Attraction (I'm not exactly sure if this film came out in 2003, but I saw it this past year and in my opinion it is the number one complete waste of time, money, and effort, a completely useless piece of cinematic sheisst. Go back to the Creek, Dawson.)

That's all I can remember at the moment.

[> [> Re: Movies 2003! Yay or Nay!? -- rsfayez, 16:12:55 01/11/04 Sun

the single most amusing scene in the Rules of Attraction was Dawson's suicide attempts. i hope i didn't offend anyone but given the context you'd understand!

Also, Lost in Translation has to be one of the most beautiful movies i've ever seen. i think to whedon fans, the character development is greatly appreciated. i found this post on the movie's board at imdb by a user, aaron1677(for the life of me i can't find the link!), and i thought s/he captured an elusive notion in words, which i'm always fond of:

"On one hand, I envy those who saw Sofia Coppola's "Lost in Translation" and didn't enjoy it. On the other hand, I don't envy them at all. And here is why.

I envy them for this reason: whoever saw it and didn't find the film to be to their liking must really have their lives together. They must be on a really great path in life, and know exactly what they want and how they plan on bringing themselves and those around them happiness. They must know just how to make the people that they care about fulfilled as well.

For the rest of us, the confused and curious lot, letting "Lost in Translation" gently wash over us is an experience that we will not soon forget. This was the best film I've felt in quite some time, and in an industry seemingly starving for stories about what it feels like to be human, "Translation" was a refreshing and beautifully affirming delicate work of art. To not feel this is why I *don't* envy those who this film didn't appeal to. It is a subtle and masterfully well-paced tale of two people at different stages of life who are lost - all at once geographically, culturally, and most importantly - emotionally. "

[> Re: Movies 2003! Yay or Nay!? -- d'Herblay, 15:49:14 01/10/04 Sat

I saw more movies in the theater this year than most, and I did hew closely to my plan to not see anything for more than four dollars.

Super-yay:

Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (original theatrical release). I didn't get around to seeing it until May, but it was only fifty cents!

Holes. I haven't seen a lot of praise for this, but it deserves whatever praise it might get. The contradictions that form America, with lizards. Has ending problems, though.

Yay:

Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (expanded edition), Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (expanded edition), Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. I spent the last half of December basically binging on these.

X Men 2. Blockbuster! In all senses. Except, of course, for the sense in which actual blocks get actually busted.

Intolerable Cruelty. At this point I'm tired of justifying my approval or disapprobiation.

Pirates of the Caribbean.

Whale Rider.

Master and Commander.

Bend It Like Beckham.

Cypher.

Meh (not quite yay but not quite nay):

Hollywood Homicide.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Nay:

Chicago.

Tomb Raider 2.

Super-nay:

Love Actually.

Legally Blonde 2.

It is possible that I am leaving some movies out. These would all obviously be filed under "meh."

[> [> <i>Whale Rider.</i> wooo! *does the dance of joy for the whole of her little country* -- angel's nibblet, 01:50:09 01/11/04 Sun

*sniffle* it killed me too!

[> Re: Movies 2003! Yay or Nay!? -- Rahael, 18:15:56 01/10/04 Sat

Yays:

Cypher

Pirates of the Carribbean

Bend it like Beckham

Intolerable Cruelty

Throne of Blood (bloody brilliant. saw it on the big screen, so it should count, right?)

Meh:

T3. I love T2 so much, this isn't a patch on it.

Hollywood Homicide : though Joss Hartnett looked great and it had Lena Olin in it.

Nays:
Love Actually (so self consciously cynical that it offended me)

I also saw American Splendor tonight, which I loved.

[> Re: Movies 2003! Yay or Nay!? -- fresne, 08:13:56 01/13/04 Tue

Just to show my contrary or my trary
Yeah
Hulk - Even the big green guy was contemplative in the midst of smash. Simply freaking beautiful imagery. And the internal to the external to the internal to the external.

Love Actually - Those little girls in those princess outfits. Fun cheesy fluff.

Matrix: Reloaded - All is Dharma and I was afraid to drive afterwards. Instead I went dancing and was very quite (and quiet) as I spun around.

Peter Pan - Simply luscious. And disturbing. And sensual. And dreamlike luminescent thimble clouds.

Pirates of the Caribbean - Incredibly fun, in or out of a corset.

Return of the King - Sniffle, "Don't go where I can't follow," sniffle.

Russian Arc - Ummm...hard to describe, really cool though.

X-2 - Simply fangirl-tastic. And a darn good story too.

Nay
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - The worst flaw in an action movie, boring.

Underworld - Well, I got to wear a leather waist cinch and stopped traffic on three occasions walking to the theater, so it wasn't a total loss.

Actually, I rarely go see movies that I don't think I'll like. The slightest hint of meh and I try and I not go. It could be the best movie ever and if the mood ain't right, it's garbage. Conversely, in the right mood, well, Manos, Hand of Fate, very amusing movie.

[> [> I'm adding 'Peter Pan' to my 'Yay' list too. That movie was amazing! -- Rob, 11:00:06 01/13/04 Tue

Spike in 'Seeing Red'. Was it anger, or guilt? -- Nirvana 1, 18:43:47 01/09/04 Fri

Hi. I have another question (because I only come here for help and insight, as I really suck at this!): In SR, after Spike's attempted assault, I have read somebody say that he didn't guilty for what he tried to do, but angry, rather, because his attempt to get back with Buffy failed. In other words, the argument was that the whole scene, him in the crypt with Clem, etc., was NOT about him feeling guilty, but about him thinking "hmmm. I failed at trying to get with her. I guess I have to try again." Like he was just angry it didn't work and there was no guilt. I figured that this was the best place to ask for help or viewpoints on it. Any?

Replies:

[> Re: Spike in 'Seeing Red'. Was it anger, or guilt? -- Finn Mac Cool, 20:05:42 01/09/04 Fri

In my view, he did feel bad about it, but it wasn't guilt in the traditional sense. I think Spike felt bad because he was in love with Buffy, and, when you love a person, your happiness and their's becomes somewhat intertwined. If someone else had hurt Buffy like that, I think Spike would have been in close to the same amount of pain (not entirely, since that wouldn't have produced the self-doubt and questioning that he got from doing it himself). Guilt would be Spike feeling bad because he did something very wrong; instead, I believe Spike felt bad because Buffy felt bad, regardless of morality.

[> [> Thankyou for that! But... -- Nirvana 1, 20:21:06 01/09/04 Fri

also, the argument was that he *only* felt anger for himself, like "oh, man. It didn't work! Better go get a soul!" instead of feeling anything AT ALL for Buffy.

[> [> [> Yeah, I don't agree with that, but I won't go to the other extreme, either -- Finn Mac Cool, 20:25:01 01/09/04 Fri

[> [> [> [> Re: Yeah, I don't agree with that, but I won't go to the other extreme, either -- skpe, 08:14:10 01/10/04 Sat

I agree his feeling for Buffy have always been very conflicted. He took a pounding from Glory to protect her but also chained her up in his crypt

[> [> [> Re: Vampire's ability to feel love -- Ames, 09:51:42 01/10/04 Sat

I think if Spike felt love for Buffy, then he could feel real remorse. Remember Dru's words in S5 when Buffy said to Spike "You can't feel love" - Dru said "We do, you know. We can love very well" (rough quote - I didn't look it up)

[> [> [> [> Crush: Dru's line & Quasimodo -- heywhynot, 11:53:59 01/10/04 Sat

Dru did point out that vampires can love she said it in Crush.

What I find interesting is the reference to the Hunchback of Notre Dame either in that episode or the episode before. Tara makes the point about Quasimodo doing everything for selfish reasons and that is why he was doomed. His actions were to get the love of a woman who could never love him. Obviously the parallels to season 5 Spike are there and I think that was the point.

Of course, Spike grows beyond that first by getting a soul and then moving beyond his lust filled devotion driving him. He saved the world because he believed saving it was the right thing to do, not because he believed it was what Buffy wanted.

[> Re: Spike in 'Seeing Red'. Was it anger, or guilt? -- puss, 08:43:51 01/10/04 Sat

Don't remember all the exact details from S6-7 (don't own copies), but didn't he still have the chip at that point? Did he get the big headache after his assault? If he had done it with intent to harm Buffy, wouldn't the chip have fired?

Seems to me that the whole redemption-of-Spike arc is about the fact that he WANTS to be good, and tries hard, but since he's a vampire and inherently evil, he doesn't really know how to do it, so he keeps screwing up and making the wrong choices. Spike figures getting a soul will make him know how to be good. All evidence post-soul implies that it does help.

[> [> My point being... -- puss, 08:47:17 01/10/04 Sat

Since he didn't yet have a soul, I don't think he felt guilt, but frustration because he'd miscalculated yet again. Lost without a moral compass.

[> [> Buffy was a fluke with the chip -- Finn Mac Cool, 09:14:57 01/10/04 Sat

The spell used to resurrect her had to rebuild parts of her body that had decayed over the month. Somehow the process of this recreation caused Buffy's body to be slightly altered, not to the extent that it really affects her life, but just enough so that the sensors in Spike's chip don't read her as human.

[> [> [> Oh, yeah. I knew there was something I was forgetting! -- puss, 09:41:38 01/10/04 Sat

Once again I am spanked by lousy recall!

I wonder if the chip would have fired if she had been a normal, unresurrected human. I like to think it wouldn't have. Usually Spike knew when he was doing something that would cause the chip to activate, but I'm not so sure he would have expected it in this case -- I think his feelings were muddled enough to make it unclear.

It's true that with people we feel passionately about our sense of what's right or wrong is often faulty. I wonder if this was the primary reason that the writers had her come back "wrong"

[> Re: Spike in 'Seeing Red'. Was it anger, or guilt? -- littlebit, 13:53:40 01/10/04 Sat

As I recall it, he showed both anger and guilt. He was clearly distressed at what he had done, and the outcome of those actions, but its counterpoint was anger at why he wasn't able to do it. Was he or wasn't a vampire? Was he or wasn't he evil? He wasn't a man, he wasn't a demon; he'd lost his identity. And once again followed by guilt that he'd been able to go as far as he did in hurting Buffy.

So the two feelings were there, and that combination sent him off to make a change, which happened to be his getting a soul.

[> Useless to argue with anti-Spike fanatics -- Kansas, 14:17:34 01/10/04 Sat

Nirvana 1, I think I know which forum and which poster you're referring to... I can tell you that this whole business is futile. This person is a fanatic who needs to believe that Spike is an out-and-out villain, and (s)he will never budge. Even if Joss or Steve DeKnight were to come in there and say otherwise, (s)he would tell them they were wrong.

It's time to leave this one alone.

Reptile boy- Not much nice to say. -- CW, 19:09:28 01/09/04 Fri

The best all-time Buffy episode featuring a frat party and high school girls in chains. In other words, not so hot.

Xander on frat boys - "I hate these guys." Who wouldn't?

Pledges and phoney pledges dressed as women plus female victims in the basement. These guys have got serious male insecurity issues.

The initiation - The psuedo-religious rite followed by brewskies. Yeah, it sounds like a fraternity.

Buffy - "I told one lie. I had one drink." Didn't learn your lesson did you girl? You would only spend one hot night with Angel, too. As Angel told you in this ep, - "This could get out of control."

Those brown robes - Wow, Joss sure got a lot of use out of those. Frat guys, Czech monks, Glory's minions, the First Evil's minions...

Replies:

[> Brown robes are cheap at walmart :-) -- Vapthorne, 04:24:00 01/10/04 Sat

[> Re: Reptile boy- Not much nice to say. -- Ames, 09:46:00 01/10/04 Sat

It did have that fine exchange between Angel and Buffy that you mentioned (i.e., "This could get out of control ..." etc

[> [> Re: Reptile boy- Not much nice to say. -- phoenix, 15:03:19 01/10/04 Sat

Was that the scene where Buffy said, "When you kiss me I want to die."? That is not something to be said lightly when your honey is a vampire...oh, it still gives me chills.

I agree that Reptile Boy is by no means a great ep, but there are some wonderful things in it, for instance, Willow losing her temper and giving Giles and Angel a good telling off.

[> Re: Reptile boy- Not much nice to say. -- Sheri, 15:44:09 01/10/04 Sat

It's not on my must see list either. However, it does have the somewhat positive point of being one of the only episodes for which I was genuinely scared for Buffy (e.g., the scene with her passed out and the frat guy coming into the room). It helped make Buffy more human to me and not just the little blonde super hero.

[> [> Wow, no one liked Reptile Boy at ALL? -- AngelVSAngelus, 22:21:10 01/10/04 Sat

Not exceedingly relevant to the overall story arc of any of the characters, but I think it at least deserves to be given credit for that special Greenwaltian touch. Greenwalt has a tendancy, one that I quite fancy, to take his disdain for real life conformist authorities/organizations (i.e., here the frat boys, or later on Angel law firm Wolfram and Hart) and exaggerate it within a fantastical storytelling frame. Here he, literally, demonizes the organizations' acquisition of money and fame through someone else's exploitation, and through 'short-cut' channels to just have these things handed to them.

I dig it.

[> [> [> I liked it for some of the small moments... -- Rob, 13:01:50 01/11/04 Sun

The kids walking in on Giles fighting with an imaginary opponent. Willow scolding Giles and Angel, and the introduction of her "resolve face". Cordelia "playing dumb" for the college boys.

Rob

[> Yeah, but... -- Darby, 08:59:04 01/11/04 Sun

There was a lot of good character stuff in this...

It continued the opening up of Cordelia without losing the bitch (an extremely difficult thing to do!).

Willow takes over when the chips are down, and knocks some heads.

Xander into the breech and out of his breeches (that last wasn't a shining moment). Sure, his motives were suspect, but he stepped up.

Taciturn heroes Angel and Oz might not be ideal beaus.

I like the episode structurally - there are layers. If anyone who knows the show looks at you quizzically when you praise the metaphors of BtVS, what better example than the frat boys who worshipped the snake demon downstairs?

Plus, one of the alltime great little black dresses - after Cordelia told Buffy not to wear black!

OT: Studying Literature by the Numbers (from the NY TIMES) -- Rufus, 01:16:15 01/10/04 Sat

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/10/books/10LIT.html?th

January 10, 2004

Studying Literature by the Numbers

By EMILY EAKIN

If Franco Moretti had his way, literature scholars would stop reading books and start counting, graphing and mapping them instead. For an English professor, this is an ambition verging on apostasy. But Mr. Moretti, a professor of English and comparative literature at Stanford and director of the university's center for the study of the novel, insists that such a move could bring new luster to a tired field, one that in some respects, he says, is among "the most backwards disciplines in the academy."

Mr. Moretti, 53, has been honing his vision of a text-free literary scholarship in books and articles over the last two decades. And now he is issuing a manifesto. "Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History," which just appeared in the November/December issue of New Left Review, a British journal of politics and culture, is merely the first installment. (Two more will follow in subsequent issues.) But in it Mr. Moretti makes his most forceful case yet for his approach, a heretical blend of quantitative history, geography and evolutionary theory.

Literary study, he argues, has been a random, unsystematic affair. For any given period, scholars focus on a select group of a mere few hundred texts: the canon. As a result, they have allowed a narrow, distorting slice of literary history to pass for the total picture.

"What a minimal fraction of the literary field we all work on," Mr. Moretti declares, tactfully including himself among the guilty. "A canon of 200 novels, for instance, sounds very large for 19th-century Britain (and is much larger than the current one), but is still less than 1 per cent of the novels that were actually published: 20,000, 30, more, no one really knows - and close reading won't help here, a novel a day every day of the year would take a century or so."

The perils of such a method, he writes, are clear: "A field this large cannot be understood by stitching together separate bits of knowledge about individual cases, because it isn't a sum of individual cases: it's a collective system, that should be grasped as such, as a whole."

Equally clear, he maintains, is the remedy: the way to "a more rational literary history" is to replace close reading with abstract models borrowed from the sciences.

Where other scholars quote from "Pamela," "Moll Flanders" or "Tom Jones" - traditionally considered among the first modern novels - Mr. Moretti offers bar charts, maps and time lines instead. A vast synthesis of material (much of it gathered by other scholars working on a single period or genre), his is a history of literature as data points, one that looks as if it could have been lifted from an economics textbook.

Here the 18th-century British novel is represented by its publication rate: a single, undulating fever line. Likewise entire genres - including the epistolary, the gothic and the historical novel - as well the literary outputs of countries like Japan, Italy, Spain and Nigeria.

Viewed from this level of abstraction, Mr. Moretti argues, literary history looks significantly different from what is commonly supposed. For example, it is clear, he writes, that the novel did not experience a single "rise," as is frequently taught (following the title of a famous book by the critic Ian Watt), but went through repeated cycles of growth and retrenchment, with political crises corresponding to dips in publication rates. So, too, according to another graph, did the ratio of male to female authors.

As Mr. Moretti sums up the point: "It's fascinating to see how researchers are convinced that they are all describing something unique (the gender shift, the elevation of the novel, the gentrification, the invention of high and low, the feminization, the sentimental education, the invasion . . . ), whereas in all likelihood they are all observing the same comet that keeps crossing and recrossing the sky: the same literary cycle."

In some ways, Mr. Moretti's quantitative method is simply the latest in a long line of efforts to make literary criticism look more like science. From Russian formalism in the 1920's to New Criticism in the 1950's and structuralism and semiotics in the 1960's and 70's, the discipline's major movements share a desire to portray literature as a system governed by hidden laws and structures whose operations it is the critic's job to reveal. But in its formal renunciation of individual texts - and, more provocatively, of reading - Mr. Moretti's approach, at least as he sketches it in New Left Review, is conceivably more radical than anything his predecessors dreamed up.

Which doesn't mean that he always knows what to make of his findings. For example, disparate novelistic genres, when mapped out together across a time line, appear to share some intriguing features: an individual life span of about 25 to 30 years and a tendency to emerge and die out in clusters. Thirty years is the length of a human generation, Mr. Moretti notes. But then, he concedes, people are born - and generations begun - every day. So what explains the regularity with which genres appear and disappear? Mr. Moretti isn't sure. But it is precisely this kind of question, he argues, that scholars have overlooked by focusing on specific texts rather than literature as a whole.

As he put it in a telephone interview from Rome, where he was on vacation: "The big picture is not just bigger in terms of the number of texts. The system is literally a system with different properties than individual texts. This is something literary studies would never face if we just kept reading and rereading the same texts."

Maybe so. But given the extent to which instruction, research and reputations in the field are yoked to just that activity, even Mr. Moretti's admirers say his approach is unlikely to win many converts. "It's an extraordinarily brave and promising project that carries the danger of taking the study of literature away from reading, which is what keeps us and our students going," said Jonathan Arac, the chairman of the English department at Columbia University and a specialist in the 19th- and 20th-century novel.

Harold Bloom, the Yale English professor famous for his prodigious command of canonical literature, was more dismissive. Interrupting a description of the theory, he pronounced Mr. Moretti "an absurdity."

"I am interested in reading," he said with an audible shudder. "That's all I'm interested in."

Mr. Moretti cheerfully acknowledged that his ideas were controversial. But that has not dampened his enthusiasm. "After Christmas, I'm going to teach a class on electronic data in which we will work on 8,000 titles from the mid-18th century to the 19th century," he said, eagerly elaborating his vision of what he called "literature without texts."

"My little dream," he added wistfully, "is of a literary class that would look more like a lab than a Platonic academy."

Replies:

[> Re: OT: Studying Literature by the Numbers (from the NY TIMES) -- CW, 04:39:43 01/10/04 Sat

Back in the late 1960's I attented a conference during which a professor presented a paper, in which he basically told his colleagues the number of metaphors, similes, and other figures of speech he'd counted in a particular long poem. One of my own professors assured me that approach was nothing new, although she said there was debate about that kind of analysis. Although I had, and still do have, an interest in mathematical approaches to things, it didn't seem very productive at all. In fact,, I learned in grad school a few years later that what the professor had done and what Professor Morretti is doing now was an extreme version of Formalism (as suggested in what Rufus quoted). One of my grad school profs was a very firm structuralist. But he was nowhere near as extreme as Prof. Moretti. I probably learned more about literture from my structuralist professor's narrow approach than I did from anyone else. But clearly, my prof still had a solid grip on the reasons one writes in the first place.

Thirty odd years later, I can't say that these extreme positions on literature, like Moretti's, have produced anything of value other than the obvious reinforcement of the old saying, "Some people just can't see the forest for the tress!"

[> [> I don't think it is extreme -- Rahael, 17:15:50 01/10/04 Sat

if you are writing about the growing popularity of the novel, wouldn't you need some data on how many novels were being written, who they would be written by, what genres, etc? I thought this would be bread and butter stuff.

[> [> [> That kind of thing is really more of interest to the publishing side. -- CW, 20:34:36 01/10/04 Sat

It would be more appropriate for a professor in a business school of a university than one in a department where the literature was the primary interest. Remember, you can never keep track of how many novels are written, only those that are published. ;o)

There is some historical interest in the changing trends in reading habits, which I think is what Moretti is after. But, to cover 8000 books in a term, I think you have to call it bookkeeping of cultural trends rather than studying literature. I'm not sure it makes any difference for his mode of analysis if he's studying literature, music, sports teams or shampoo.

But, since Stanford University is paying him to study literature, by definition that's what he's studying. So, as far as that goes good for Mr. Moretti.

[> [> [> [> I still can't agree -- Rahael, 03:42:11 01/11/04 Sun

The period he refers to is rather important. He points out that a lot of assumptions are made without proper information.

It's not about the change in reading habits, it's about the formation of reading habits itself! This ties into a lot of cultural and political history. It has uses for historians, students of gender and culture too.

I don't understand why just because it is about 'numbers' it has to have nothing to do with 'literature'.

[> [> [> [> [> Re: I still can't agree -- CW, 04:58:03 01/11/04 Sun

I think the problem is that for me and 90% of the folks out here studying literature means looking at why a particular work or body of works appeals to us, where as the professor is looking at what sorts of works appeal to us. Why and what are two rather different questions.

I don't know much about British and European universities and how the study programs are structured there. But in the US since about the mid 1960's there has been a big shift to what is called 'area studies' so that related fields can be studied in some coherent manner. In my own field, of Russain it was difficult to bring together enough students interested in just the Russian language for many universities here to offer much in the way of a degree program. But, when those students were added to people with interest in Russian history, people with interest in the Communist political system, and people with interest in the economic system, it was fairly easy to make up an area studies program that would cover all of these aspects, and be interesting to suitable number of people. Area studies also helped people who wanted specialize in fields that fell through the cracks of the traditional divisions of study.

What Moretti is doing is well within 'literature area studies,' but it's not going to tell you anything about the difference between a work that will be avidly read a hundred years from now, compared to one that will be forgotten in a decade. To me that is the difference between literature and recreational reading. If that difference isn't important for you, and doesn't fit your interests, that's certainly a valid point of view.

[> [> [> [> [> [> Re: I still can't agree -- dmw, 06:24:56 01/11/04 Sun

What Moretti is doing is well within 'literature area studies,' but it's not going to tell you anything about the difference between a work that will be avidly read a hundred years from now, compared to one that will be forgotten in a decade. To me that is the difference between literature and recreational reading.

No one can tell you that before that century has passed. The best the professors of literature can do is if you leave out the word "avidly," they can require their students to read that book for the next century but requiring that they so avidly or outside of their schools is beyond their power. Perhaps before the scientific and industrial revolutions when society was changing more slowly, such predictions may have been possible (say, in the classical era,) but I don't think anyone would be much more accurate than chance today and with the rise of other media in the 20th century and the growing power of computers to present information through speech and images, I won't give you even odds that the majority of the first world will be literate in 100 years, much less reading any of today's books avidly.

[> [> [> [> [> [> Re: I still can't agree -- Darby, 08:16:50 01/11/04 Sun

But what if there is more to the "enduring" works of literature than subjective value? Are there patterns that can be discerned? How is one to analyze when the approach is so narrow?

Maybe it's because science is almost by its nature multidisciplinary - a biologist must know some chemistry, physics, geology to truly understand their field, so it seems the right slant to me. There is an underlying approach in common to the interlocked fields, which makes it a bit different from literature (or maybe not), but still...

What's being approached here is a literary form of meta-analysis - using the works of others to supply data for Big Picture study. But meta-analysis won't work without the support structure, and neither will this; it's almost like the folks naysaying this approach are somehow fearful that it could totally replace reading in literature study, but how likely is that? -Although I have to add that a friend in SUNY Albany's graduate English Department has complained that there, at least, there has been a shift toward structural analysis..

Additionally, I have to say that I hear "memes!" screaming in the background here...

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> Re: Screaming memes -- definitely -- d'Herblay, 14:22:05 01/11/04 Sun

I have to admit that whenever I see "evolutionary theory" mentioned in a context other than biology, paleontology or geology, I mentally substitute for it the phrase "common-sense Smithian economics that is reducible almost to tautology," but as I reflected on this last night I decided that there's definitely some Dawkins in the bushpile here.

Of course, any application of evolutionary economic thought to the history of ideas which produces meaningful results would, by default, become the standard example of memetics.

[> [> [> [> [> [> Why I studied literary texts -- Rahael, 15:25:13 01/11/04 Sun

I studied poems and novels for itself. Not for why its appeal still exerts its influence - after all who determines what is read now and what isn't? How many people on the board read Frances Burney, Smollet, Sterne? How many people have read Marlowe? Does a work get devalued because it is no longer popular? Many good works are neglected. SOmeone, dmw, I believe has already pointed out that even Shakespeare went in and out of fashion. Let alone Donne, or Milton, who apparently is now 'unfashionable'.

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> Well,. I've read Sterne and Marlowe... -- CW, 17:40:30 01/11/04 Sun

without being forced to as a part of any class and I don't make any pretensions of knowing much about English lit. ;o)

My point is that I would rather see literature departments digging up old treasures, than counting how many romance novels were published this month. But, I'm also admitting the later activity should have a place if people want it.

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Well, then, I will disclaim any pretension too -- Rahael, 17:53:42 01/11/04 Sun

[> The Bioinformatics of Literature -- Ann, 05:17:14 01/10/04 Sat

Arm chair scientist here. One of newest ways of looking at genes is with Bioinformatics. Using computer modeling to read DNA. Faster. This looks very similar in that it looks at the big picture very quickly. Another layer of analysis I guess. No one type of analysis gives the whole picture but we can welcome all. Any style of analysis says as much about the analyzers as it does about the object being analyzed.

[> [> Leaping in... -- Celebaelin, 15:38:20 01/11/04 Sun

...quite possibly before I should, since I haven't read the whole thread yet. To be honest it was just your post that caught my eye initially. Thing is, FASTA and BLAST and other DNA sequence search processes do their job within the job requirements, i.e. search for similarities in genes that have been found in multiples (moderately large multiples hopefully, 20-30 or so would be credible) of organisms. Protein depiction software based on X-ray crystallography data [DeepView / Swiss-PdbViewer 3.7 (SP5)] is free and relatively easy to download (Chime and Rasmol have, relatively lately it seems to me, become rather exclusive; further information would be appreciated) but doesn't give the easily accessable sequence information of the less complex program available at the SCOP site.

I'm getting obscure aren't I?

If you would like to view a protein and are happy to download the free version of Swissview then 1G5PSwiss is the NifH protein from Azotobacter vinelandii, a dimeric electron donor with a cubane (4Fe:4S). I enjoy this WAY too much so I'll shut up now and read the rest of the thread. Enjoy your armchair science.

C

[> [> [> Science by way of osmosis -- Ann, 16:51:42 01/11/04 Sun

My husband is a fungal geneticist so I come by science from what I learn from him. I also am a recruiter for a life science program that has a bioinformatics component. Hence a little knowledge. I recognize some of what you describe. My husband uses FASTA and BLAST with his work. He has heard of SCOP but has never used it. Thank you for the info and the response.

[> [> [> [> My pleasure -- Celebaelin, 17:24:29 01/11/04 Sun

[> Oh, gosh, thanks Rufus! -- dub ;o), 12:33:19 01/10/04 Sat

That's the best laugh I've had in quite a while.

And we're absolutely sure that Mr. Moretti is serious here, aren't we? No chance that it's a parody, a la, say, Monty Python? Ah, well...

Harold Bloom (my hero) declares Mr. Moretti "an absurdity." I'd say he's just hilarious.

;o)

[> [> I only have one word to say in response to this: bizarre! -- angel's nibblet, 13:56:07 01/10/04 Sat

[> [> [> How so? -- dub ;o), 20:59:08 01/10/04 Sat

If Franco Moretti had his way, literature scholars would stop reading books and start counting, graphing and mapping them instead.

Granted, this is a statement by Emily Eakin, rather than Franco Moretti, but the idea that scholars of literature should stop reading books is absurdist in the extreme, and more than worthy of Pythonism.

As ...director of the university's center for the study of the novel, [he] insists that such a move could bring new luster to a tired field, one that in some respects, he says, is among "the most backwards disciplines in the academy."

It appears to me that Moretti's method of restoring the "luster" to the study of literature is simply to create a well-publicized controversy. (It appears to be working.) I worked in universities for 13 years; I'm familiar with the concept of "sexing up" a discipline in order to increase publicity, enrolment, and funding. I contributed to many of the strategy sessions where department and course descriptions were composed, and they were every bit as creative and hilarious as a Python skit.

Mr. Moretti, 53, has been honing his vision of a text-free literary scholarship in books and articles over the last two decades.

The phrase I have emphasized is oxymoronic.

I could go on, but there's no need. I recognize that Moretti is serious, and I understand that his approach may indeed add to the overall understanding of the discipline. This article, however, is funnier than many deliberate parodies I have enjoyed. I do wonder at Eakin's style; seems pretty tongue-in-cheek to me.

;o)

[> [> [> [> Sorry I meant to reply to the article :-)!!! -- angel's nibblet, 01:53:37 01/11/04 Sun

I'm still not quite sure what the guy means. But on the whole amusing in that it was slightly absurd.

Hehe yes it would be perfect for a Python sketch *sigh* if only...

[> [> [> [> [> Ah, I though that might be the case! -- dub ;o), 11:45:40 01/11/04 Sun

[> [> [> [> Oxymoronic? -- Rahael, 03:54:31 01/11/04 Sun

I read what he was trying to do without the framework and assumptions laid out by the journalist. I didn't find it amazing or oxymoronic. The phrase you highlighted was written by the journalist.

When I was doing my Literature and Politics course I often ended up throwing pure literary critic texts across the floor. Even self proclaimed 'world experts' on a writer would completely misunderstand some references, possibly due to their disdain at looking at anything but the 'text'. On the other hand there were breathtaking studies that pointed up the true significance of poems or novels dismissed by others, that I found truly inspiring and enhancing of the text. Moretti's work may be considered an absurdity by his colleagues, but many historians will continue to find this useful.

If he's been working at it for two decades, how is he even trying to 'sex' it up to get more funding? It looks like he;s been slogging away by himself for yonks!

Anyway I'll leave it be now.

[> [> [> [> [> Perhaps we must agree to disagree? -- dub ;o), 11:46:48 01/11/04 Sun

[> *Oy* -- Masq, 13:36:22 01/10/04 Sat

Scientific methodologies are not the end-all and be-all of approaches to take to the study of anything. They have a certain heuristic value in understanding the natural world within a particular frame of reference.

I thought this kind of knee-jerk scientism had gone away with modernism.

[> The Forest of Literature is Important -- dmw, 15:53:49 01/10/04 Sat

I went into this post with a dubious attitude about the usefuleness of a quantitative approach to literature, but upon reading the article, I discovered that it's something quite different than what I expected. I'm rather puzzled by the other responses, as they don't seem to have read the article that I did.

Yes, he's overenthusiastic about his approach, but that doesn't mean that it's not useful. He has a very important point--we don't look at most published works when we study literature, and that limits our ability to understand its history. It also limits our ability to find what's good. Shakespeare has gone in and out of vogue as being considered great English literature or not. How many others are we missing?

Of course, the forest of literature is more than just the vast majority of trees that we don't ever see, it also has a lifecycle of its own and that appears to be something that he's studying with his analysis of the rise and fall of genres. No, I don't think we should restrict our study of literature to quantitative means, but we also shouldn't ignore their usefulness either. Too much of history is limited to the study of a few important men (and this effect is exaggerated to a greater extent in literary history), when in actuality most of their leadership consisted of finding a parade and getting in front of it rather than having the ability to move the people of their own accord.

[> [> I couldn't agree more - I think it sounds interesting! -- Rahael, 17:12:59 01/10/04 Sat

As someone who loves the literature of the period under discussion, and loves the history of hte period under discussion, and is interested in print culture, politics and popular culture, I thought this sounds fascinating.

I sometimes find that literary critics dismiss any attempt to contextualise texts of the time - for them the text stands alone.

I am interested in the full variety of the print culture, and there is indeed a valuable place for such an endeavour. It doesn't diminish the 'great works', it enhances them, in my eyes. In fact, I've read a number of quantative analysis of print culture, so it's not that revolutionary.

I am slightly surprised at the reaction here!

[> [> [> I think... -- Masq, 18:45:43 01/10/04 Sat

I am slightly surprised at the reaction here!

The reaction is less about the approach he suggests than the impression that he wants to replace the reading and analysis of texts with his "big picture quantiative" approach. This (if it is indeed true) is short-sighted, and I think that's what people are reacting to.

Ann has it right, I think, that a variety of approaches to the study of literature have value.

My reaction comes mainly from my study of the historyof the social sciences, where a century of attempts to make everything quantitative and reductionistic robbed these fields of their richness. There is room for quantitative, bean-counter approaches is the social sciences and in literature, but they will miss out on a great deal of the phenomena if they are exclusive.

[> [> [> [> Re: I think... -- Rob, 20:22:54 01/10/04 Sat

The reaction is less about the approach he suggests than the impression that he wants to replace the reading and analysis of texts with his "big picture quantiative" approach. This (if it is indeed true) is short-sighted, and I think that's what people are reacting to.

That's my discomfort with it: phrases such as "literature without texts" bother me, because he doesn't seem to be implying such a study as a supplement to reading but a replacement. While a method such as his could be an interesting tool to analyze the evolution of literature in a greater depth and farther reach than most people receive, literature is an art form, not a science equation. He says that to only focus on "the canon" is limiting, and I am inclined to agree, but the proper course of action should be to then read texts that are not normally considered, to broaden one's literary horizons. His method, just from how it's described here, seems to be to take a huge step back from studying singular works and instead to take in all of literary history as a whole, but to then ignore the works themselves. Taking a step back is a good start to getting a broader look at literary history, and I admire the audacity of his idea. But the next thing that should be done after considering that is to still return to the literature itself. Just because one can't experience every important piece of literature ever written doesn't mean that one has to give up reading all of them. A future where this is the only way literature is studied would be a future that would produce no new literary works, because it would go from a creative artform to a qualitative and quantitative chore to anyone not interested in science. In short, it destroys the primal joy and wonder one can get from reading. If he at any point implied that the act of reading a great novel is rewarding in and of itself, I would be more inclined to support him; as it stands, it seems to me that if he were to propose a class on art history, he would make sure that not one painting or sculpture be seen by his students throughout the semester.

Rob

[> [> [> [> [> Don't Confuse Creation with Analysis -- dmw, 06:08:50 01/11/04 Sun

A future where this is the only way literature is studied would be a future that would produce no new literary works, because it would go from a creative artform to a qualitative and quantitative chore to anyone not interested in science.

Why would you think this? Creation and analysis are not the same, and each is conducted with its own differing methods today. The sciences are as much creative fields as literature is, most obviously in the formation of hypotheses, but if you've ever tried to design a modern science expirement, you understand that it's rarely so obvious as rolling balls down an inclined plane. The constraints of reality don't make the sciences less creative any more than the constraints placed upon the forms of poetry make writing a poem less a creative act than writing a novel.

[> [> [> [> [> [> Because... -- Rob, 07:26:26 01/11/04 Sun

...as I said, I think that if everyone studied literature this way, it would go from being an artform to a science, and many of the great potential literary minds of the future would not create literature, for a number of reasons: (a) the focus for the future generations has left reading the actual works all together, so why create new ones that no one will read?; (b) the joy that one can get from reading has become so lost in all of this scientific analysis that future generations will not feel the same connection to reading that earlier generations did, and as I said would go from pleasure activity to chore; (c) as they have not had much contact with the actual classic works themselves, the art of crafting a great novel might be lost, and at the very least I fear that a cultural void would start. I never said that the sciences aren't creative, but for many people they are two completely different brands of creation and not all people like both: for example I excel at literature courses and adore reading and writing, but I cannot sit for three minutes in a science class without fidgeting. Most of the material itself goes right over my head. And I doubt I'm the only literary-minded person who shivers at the thought of melding literature to science in this method, because with this method the literature itself disappears. Luckilly, I doubt that this method will ever actually replace reading as the professor wants it to. As I said before, one wouldn't teach an art history class but show no slides of actual pieces of art, and to expand, one wouldn't teach a music history class and not play any music for the class, so therefore I don't see why one would teach a literature class without any actual literature.

And...

The constraints of reality don't make the sciences less creative any more than the constraints placed upon the forms of poetry make writing a poem less a creative act than writing a novel.

I would argue that they do, because science cannot be done without these constraints, but a formless poem or novel is a possibility. One could choose to do a novel, for example, with no grammar or punctuation or plot, if one felt the artistic need to do so, and it would be okay. One could not, however, proclaim that a longheld scientific theory is false without some serious research, which again all must be logical.

Rob

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> But... -- Rob, 07:33:28 01/11/04 Sun

I would like to clarify as I said before that I am all for such literary study be done as long as the intention isn't to replace literature. I have no problem with the course itself or of people studying this way, just the attitude Moretti seems to have, as it is conveyed in this article, that it would be best for everyone to study literature this way. Although it wouldn't be great for me since I can't sit through science class, this course could be great for many people and could in fact interest science majors who aren't usually interested in literature, but only if Moretti made clear that this is a supplemental method of study and that there is no replacement for reading an actual novel.

Rob

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> Re: Because... -- Ann, 07:48:46 01/11/04 Sun

"I would argue that they do, because science cannot be done without these constraints, but a formless poem or novel is a possibility. One could choose to do a novel, for example, with no grammar or punctuation or plot, if one felt the artistic need to do so, and it would be okay. One could not, however, proclaim that a longheld scientific theory is false without some serious research, which again all must be logical."

But I think the scientist who invents a truly new scientific theory needs to have a mind of a poet. I think the source of both of these creations are the same. The clever and the unexpected is what has made for great science. Not just by using the scientific method. That is for after the good idea. Its the proving part that needs the scientific method. That is another ballgame.

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> Re: Because... -- dmw, 08:56:02 01/11/04 Sun

I excel at literature courses and adore reading and writing, but I cannot sit for three minutes in a science class without fidgeting.

It's worth noting that science classes teach you virtually nothing about what scientists actually do. I understand why this is--after all, almost no one who's not in those fields studies physics or math much beyond the 17th century at a level at which you actually understand what it means. The experiments given to the students bear little or no resemblence to the ones scientists actually do, because you're generally following rote steps of a pre-designed experiment where your teacher grades you on pre-determined outcomes. Of course, that bears no resemblence to a experiment you designed to discover something new about the world that no one else has ever seen. Such an effort requires completely different skills, creativity, and inspires much different emotions.

I doubt that this method will ever actually replace reading as the professor wants it to. As I said before, one wouldn't teach an art history class but show no slides of actual pieces of art, and to expand, one wouldn't teach a music history class and not play any music for the class, so therefore I don't see why one would teach a literature class without any actual literature.

Given this statement and your following post, I suspect we agree that the methods of the article won't replace reading texts but are another useful means of studying literature.

One could not, however, proclaim that a longheld scientific theory is false without some serious research, which again all must be logical.

It's true that you couldn't but that's the very confusion of creation and analysis/verification I was talking about. The act of creating a scientific theory is different from the act of verifying one, and uses different faculties, though of course there is tremendous creativity in figuring out ways to test modern physics, which deals with things that happen so quickly or slowly and at such small or large scales as to be far beyond our perceptions.

I would argue that they do, because science cannot be done without these constraints, but a formless poem or novel is a possibility. One could choose to do a novel, for example, with no grammar or punctuation or plot, if one felt the artistic need to do so, and it would be okay.

The constraints of poetry don't restrain your creativity--they enhance it. Instead of your brain following its everyday paths for generating language, the constraints of rhyme and form force you to think outside of those paths, to find new words and forms. That's one of the reasons why poets created such constraints; they're not just there for their effect on the listener, but also for their effect on the creator.

As for a novel without grammar, that would be a jumble of meaningless words and that's not what distinguishes creativity. Sure, there are far more random arrangements of words than there are ones that make any sense. That doesn't mean that we would be more creative if we gave up grammar. A trivial algorithm could easily generate such works. What distinguishes our creative works is their information content, not how different they can be from each other.

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> The Freedom of Mathematics -- dmw, 09:04:57 01/11/04 Sun

As an addendum, if you do want freedom from the rules of your language, like grammar or punctuation, I suggest taking up mathematics. In mathematics, you get to create your own universe in your axiom system, with not only its own language for expressing yourself, but with its own rules for what makes sense and what's not. I mean, where else but the world of topology can you cut apart a metaphorical object the size of an orange and reassemble it into one the size of the Sun without leaving any holes?

Once again, students miss most of the fun, creative stuff, as most never go beyond classes in calculation. It's not until you get beyond classes like linear algebra and differential equations that you get to actually study mathematics, as opposed to studying calculation, which unfortunately is what almost all lower math classes focus on.

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Re: Because... -- Rob, 09:38:37 01/11/04 Sun

As for a novel without grammar, that would be a jumble of meaningless words and that's not what distinguishes creativity.

I was using an exaggeration to make a point. But a good example would be a science fiction book I read a few years ago that had three alternating narrators. One of them was mostly illiterate, so his sections were written out semi-phonetically, with periods the only punctuation. An example:

b4 i wint 2 th stor i deecidud 2 eet sum fud b-coz i wuz hungree but wen i lukt in th fridg it wuz emtee.

Rob

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Feersum Enjinn? -- dmw, 10:33:45 01/11/04 Sun

Was that Iain Banks' Feersum Enjinn?

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Yes! I completely forgot the name and author... -- Rob, 11:40:31 01/11/04 Sun

...Took it out of the library a few years back and couldn't for the life of me remember how to find it again!

Rob

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> cud that bee th sinkrunissitee enjinn menshuned in th res-q thred b-lo. -- uh-nom, 19:20:17 01/11/04 Sun

'Cause it does sound pretty feersum, & you did say the book was science fiction.

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Sharna pax and get the poal? -- MsGiles, 02:34:36 01/13/04 Tue

Russell Hoban. Not that often done though - it's a way of working that's hard work for the reader. But then again - James Joyce, anyone?

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> Well -- Rahael, 15:35:41 01/11/04 Sun

I come from a very mathematically inclined, science oriented family. Believe me, my grandfather can make anyone see how beautiful mathematics can be. He loves it, and would happily spend all his days working with numbers.

My eldest aunt was prodigiously talented at mathematics and music. She was also a gifted actress, translated people like Tennessee Williams and put on plays. Her son is studying to be concert pianist - he has some unusual talents, some of it related to the way his mind can work with numbers and transpose notes and chords.

(I can't describe it cuz I can't understand how he does it or indeed what he does!)

He has an inherent musicality, while also, being excellent at maths. I have often noticed this double talent in quite a few people.

The idea that maths is itself a kind of language and way of seeing the world, just as much as literature is second nature to me. That's where my puzzling comes in, the idea that somehow numbers and numeric data is souless, passionless, and nohting to do with the arts.

THe arts/science dichotomy is a false one. They enhance each other. THe idea that numbers and words cannot go together baffles me.

BTW, my favourite philosopher, Wittgenstein, started off studying the rules of maths, and went on to studying languages.

[> [> [> [> [> [> I think this thread ties in nicely with -- Ann, 07:38:08 01/11/04 Sun

Darby's thread about Crichton's rant where there was discussion about new science and theories building upon old science to get a broader and ever growing picture. I think this holds here as well. Discovery, as creation or analysis, can't happen without history to give it substance and nuance. All parts of discovery, the good and the bad, the right and the wrong all paint the picture. I think the same qualities that make for outstanding science are the very same as for outstanding literature and/or analysis. Curiosity, creativity, chance taking and a strong command of those that went before you; none of these can be done as well in a vacuum.

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> Exactly the reason I posted it....;) -- Rufus, 03:07:56 01/12/04 Mon

[> [> [> [> [> Re: I think... -- Celebaelin, 05:01:11 01/12/04 Mon

Taking a step back is a good start to getting a broader look at literary history, and I admire the audacity of his idea. But the next thing that should be done after considering that is to still return to the literature itself.

Absolutely, presumably to read some of the lesser known individual works associated with similar portions of the cyclical trend described. Is there an identifiable or perceived commonality in the nature of published works emerging at similar points on the cycle? That kind of stuff. Of course the fact that you're asking the question assumes to some extent that the answer is going to be yes, one hopes that this would not influence the random choice of books to study if the findings are to be considered scientific. If you were to choose the books studied then I think that returns to the fold of conventional comparative literature.

[> [> [> [> Huh -- Rahael, 03:46:54 01/11/04 Sun

I didn't really get that sense at all. Anyhow just because it involes numbers it doesn't mean it is about 'bean counting'.

Wow, ti turns out I am less prejudiced against maths than a lot of people here who are better at it than I am!!

But it may be that I am comfortable with the study of long term trends being the key foundation to understanding exciting things like the rise of literacy, social & cultural revolutions and the widening of the traditional political nation.

[> [> [> Re: I couldn't agree more - I think it sounds interesting! -- Arethusa, 10:02:33 01/12/04 Mon

Eakin's article is a little silly. Her counterpoint quotes are knee-jerk responses, instead of thoughtful considerations of Moretti's work. It doesn't necessarily follow that everyone will stop reading texts because Moretti adds to the study of literature with a scientific method of analysis. Is Eakin misrepresenting his work to make her article more controversial?

[> [> [> [> Re: I couldn't agree more - I think it sounds interesting! -- d'Herblay, 16:15:22 01/12/04 Mon

Quite probably.

I must admit that I felt a little abashed because I didn't recognize her name -- I read the Times's "Arts & Ideas" section every Saturday (I drink lattes too), but I couldn't tell you who writes for it. So I did some Googling, and the top few hits were people criticizing her. She seems to specialize in academic controversy: she wrote about the woman in France who received a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne for a thesis criticized as a 900-page advertisement for astrology; she wrote about a professor who used probability theory to prove that Jesus rose from the dead. I think she uses conflict to frame her subjects, perhaps in an attempt to make people interested in abstruse matters, perhaps in an attempt to herself get a handle on complicated academic discussions.

I tried reading the papers by Moretti which prompted the article, and while I can't say that I gained much understanding of his subject, I would say that he doesn't seem to play up the "revolutionariness" of his approach as much as Eakin makes him out to. On the other hand, the confusion with formalism, which I thought was a misunderstanding on Eakin's part, does originate with him. ("So, let's start looking for good sorting devices. 'Formalism without close reading', Arac calls the project of 'Conjectures', and I can't think of a better definition.")

I have no conclusion for this post; I have drawn some conclusions on its subject, but they seem less clear the more I look into it.

[> Thanks for this Rufus -- Rahael, 17:49:03 01/10/04 Sat

I shall watch out for anything that may be published as a result!

This is one of my especial interests, one might even say, appropriately, a 'hobbyhorse'.

[> This is very, very old news -- KdS, 05:31:36 01/11/04 Sun

I would be very interested in reading Moretti's actual work, but from the brief description here it appears to be straight, and very elementary, bibliometrics - a field of study which has been thriving for around eighty years in relation to scholarly publications, especially in the sciences. There are very few introductions to it for lay people, but anyone who is tempted to follow the author of this article in dismissing Moretti's work as mere bean-counting should read here, here, and here.

I'd better declare an interest by revealing that I spent a great deal of time last year writing a masters dissertation in this broad field, so when people dismiss it as worthless I take it a bit personally.

Bibliometrics is, broadly speaking, about the patterns of text production in a given area - the sizes of texts, their quantities, their national origin, their linguistic characteristics. In terms of the study of individual texts, it overlaps with the linguistic and stylistic analysis of writing. The most powerful aspect of bibliometrics as applied to scholarly texts is in using the formal links between texts formed by explicit citation (citation analysis) to study the historical development of academic subjects and whether coherent schools of thought and sub-disciplines exist. (The same approach can have very interesting results when applied to the links between websites. The ranking algorithm of Google is believed to be largely based on citation analysis.) The lack of explicit citation in literary texts would make citation analysis difficult, if not impossible, but I would have no difficulty with the concept that serious bibliometric analysis of publication patterns in different literary genres, nations and communities would be a powerful historical and sociological tool in studying the history of reading, literature, and popular taste, and the social and political influences on text production.

As an example of what can be done, in my masters project I studied an experimental electronic repository of academic articles and showed that the statistics of how many papers were published by each author followed the same mathematical model as those of articles in traditional journals, but had unusual parameters. From that I could hypothesise how the motivations for publishing in the repository were similar and different from those for publishing in journals, and show that the statistics of publication in a new medium were similar to those of publication in a new subject. I'd like to know how this is absurd, or knee-jerk scientism, or Pythonesque.

Of course this doesn't replace literary criticism of individual texts, it's a whole new area of study that could fruitfully and powerfully interact with literary criticism to expand human knowledge. I would be astonished if Moretti had actually said that it would replace literary criticism. I would have hoped that some of the people on this board would be open-minded enough not to be fooled into contemptuously dismissing a highly-respectable and hugely interesting, if little-known, field of intellectual enquiry due to the mischief making of tabloid journalism and/or the overenthusiasm of a single EngLit academic with a new toy.

And this broadly confirms my long-held suspicion that Harold Bloom is a small-minded, bigoted publicity whore.

[> [> Pigeons -- dmw, 06:29:44 01/11/04 Sun

Excellent post, but I just had to point out that most people are wrong when they believe:

The ranking algorithm of Google is believed to be largely based on citation analysis.

It's actually based on pigeons. See the following URL: http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html. It explains all the details of how it works from PCs (pigeon clusters) to how the pigeons are obtained using PHDs (pigeon-hunting dogs.)

[> [> [> LOL! Always wondered how Google managed all that info! -- Jane, 01:06:26 01/12/04 Mon

[> [> Thanks for the name: I figured there had to be one -- Ann, 07:16:48 01/11/04 Sun

I did this in college to specific poems rather than the broader areas you list but don't recall ever be told the name Bibliometrics. Thanks.

[> [> Re: This is very, very old news -- dub ;o), 12:43:16 01/11/04 Sun

I'd like to know how this is absurd, or knee-jerk scientism, or Pythonesque.

It isn't. It's quite a leap to take a reaction to a piece written by a fourth party about a third party and apply it to your own work, isn't it?

And this broadly confirms my long-held suspicion that Harold Bloom is a small-minded, bigoted publicity whore.

Similarly, I could choose to take umbrage at this and assume that you are really referring to me, as I named him "my hero," but why would I? Even Harold wouldn't mind; he's been called worse.

;o)

[> [> [> I didn't notice he was your hero. Sorry. -- KdS, 12:59:58 01/11/04 Sun

I don't think he'd consider BtVS worthy of serious notice though ;-)

[> [> [> [> Well, he did write . . . -- d'Herblay, 14:25:48 01/11/04 Sun

. . . a Gnostic-influenced Science Fiction potboiler which those few who have read it agree is unreadable. So he might have some sympathy for season 7.

In any case, I don't have strong feelings one way or the other on Harold Bloom. Allan Bloom, you shouldn't get me started on.

[> For some reason, my mind invents . . . -- d'Herblay, 15:05:29 01/11/04 Sun

. . . a scene set in 19th Century Germany where an old philologist says, "Jakob, how can claim to be 'studying' these languages when all you're doing is analyzing phonetic changes? Everyone know the only proper way to study language is to immerse yourself into the learning of dead languages to attempt to comprehend their beauty and sublimity and, you know, to say things that you don't want the peasants to hear. Don't want them getting ideas." Of course, because my knowledge of the history of linguistics is pretty inaccurate, this probably never happened.

In any case, I understand why people would react so vociferously to Moretti's vehemence. Saying that the study of English is one of "the most backwards disciplines in the academy" is not a way to win friends. (I cannot speak to whether or not his assessment is correct -- the few classes in college I took in the English department were ones in fields such as linguistics and composition which were little concerned with reading.)

I do, however, think that there is room for a more social-science based approach to the subject of literature, and I can certainly speak to the ahistorical views that can arise from a concentration on canon. When I was at college, I took (as everyone did) several Great Books-based survey classes. When, in the class on moral/political philosophy & science, we reached Thomas Aquinas, it was obvious that what Aquinas was doing was applying a new neo-Aristotelianism to the dominant Catholic ideology. I was a Philosophy major, but I concentrated in modern political and mathematical philosophy, so it wasn't until after I left college that I was exposed enough to Averröes, Maimonides and Ramon Llull to realize that what Aquinas was in fact doing was reasserting Catholic ideology in the face of the then dominant neo-Aristotelianism.

In any case I must admit my fondness for attempts to unweave the rainbow. It would be a strange situation for this board to argue that "Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings."

[> [> Re: For some reason, my mind invents . . . -- Rahael, 15:27:55 01/11/04 Sun

Well we do *do* rankings and give points to seasons and tot them up :)

SEVEN SEASONS OF BUFFY: SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY AUTHORS DISCUSS THEIR FAVORITE TELEVISION SHOW -- skpe, 09:40:58 01/11/04 Sun

I ran across an interesting book at the Barns & Nobel library 'SEVEN SEASONS OF BUFFY: SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY AUTHORS DISCUSS THEIR FAVORITE TELEVISION SHOW '. It is reviews of Buffy by professional writers (usably favorable but with one scathing denunciation of season 7). Mostly it is stuff that has been hashed out on this board. But several authors had interesting slants especially how JW broke the standard mold.

Replies:

[> SEVEN SEASONS OF BUFFY: SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY AUTHORS DISCUSS THEIR FAVORITE TELEVISION SHOW -- matlack73, 17:55:53 01/11/04 Sun

I am currently reading this. The essays are better written than than most of the ones written by academics in "Fighting the Forces...". They are much less dry.

Does becoming a Champion make that being stronger? -- xavier, 10:16:37 01/11/04 Sun

When Buffy fought the master she lost and died but when Xander brought her back she was stronger. When Angel left for his calling in L.A. he became a champ. He got alot stronger than he was in Sunnydale. After Spikes reensouling and dying at the hellmouth he became a champion. From the ep. Destiny both he and angel fought but Spike won. Angel admitted that he was stronger and wanted it more so that could be a factor.

Replies:

[> an interesting observation -- Seven, 10:59:55 01/11/04 Sun

While the likely answer is practical and not part of the buffyverse metaphysics, becoming a champion does seem to raise the power level. When characters started to refer to Cordelia as a Champion, she seemed to kick a little more @$$ than usual. Metaphysically, I doubt it would be explained on the show, but we can fill in the blanks as much as we like. If one does become stronger as a result of being a champ, who provides the power? the PTB? Do these people just tap into an otherwise unknown potential that all people have?

Hard to say. Essentially though, the more popular the character, the more @$$ they kick. When Spike started to fight for good, he seemed to come out on top more often. When Angel got his own show, same thing. As Buffy headed to a second season, the same. So, what have we learned? Not much really.

Yeah, I'm goin nowhere with this.

7

[> [> Not sure if this has been touched upon ... -- Mighty Mouse, 17:25:53 01/11/04 Sun

Within the last few seasons (I don't seem to recall it really being mentioned in Season One of Angel) the term "Champion" has been tossed around a lot. But has this ever been accurately defined? From what many of the characters have said, a Champion does indeed seem to be a powerful warrior whose actions benefit the Powers that Be (and therefor, the world). Yet, are Champions a known supernatural legion throughout the world ... is there an army just waiting to come together to fight the Apocalypse when the time comes? Are Slayers to be considered Champions, or are they of a different sort? It would be confusing, in my opinion, to consider a Slayer on the same level as a Vampire or Demon as far as the Good Guys go, even if they have a soul or have chosen to ignore their natural "evil instincts."

Technically, I do not believe that Slayers (while being on the Good Guys side, and fighting the Good Fight) are Champions. Champions seem to have a strong connection to the Powers that Be, and seem to usually do their bidding in one fashion or another (whether directly or indirectly. In the case of Angel, this would be directly because of his "seers," Doyle & Cordelia, who hold [held] his visions). Champions are usually (or from what we've seen of Angel, that Demon from "Judgment," etc.) "called upon" by the Powers that Be to embrace their destiny in one fashion or another. However, the Slayer line was forged by those Old Witch Men through use of demon essence. It seemed they, as representatives of humanity, had decided themselves to take this action of defense. But that's just my observation. For all I know, those Primal Watchers were following the call of the Powers that Be in raising the Slayer line.

So, after all that rambling, I'm left with the same questions as before: How do you define the Champions? Are Slayers part of the Champions? Etc. Hopefully (to cure my curiosity) Joss will answer this some day. Plenty of Angel episodes left to do it. :-)

Golden Turkey Awards -- Cactus Watcher, 19:18:45 01/11/04 Sun

How about listing your all time favorite bad moments in BTVS history? Not necessarily from bad episodes just moments you think ME should have thought twice about before airing. Your reasons can be bad acting, bad concept, whatever.

My list in no particular order:
Giles with the Dracula babes in Buffy vs Dracula - The humilation of Giles' hits a new low.
Demon Bikers in Bargaining part II - Weren't they awful enough in part I?
Dawn goes evil in Him
Sid's snappy jokes in the Puppet Show
Willow's "Reefer Madness" act in Wrecked
The 'snakehead demon' from Doublemeat palace.
The return of Lyle Gorch in Homecoming. - Again wasn't once enough?
Buffy and Riley's 'torrid' love scenes in Where the Wild Things Are.
The broken-down Winnabago in Spiral - as a fighting platform, neat; as a get-away vehicle, are you kiddng me?
Truckin' Willow in Two to Go - If they'd shot this scene and watched it first thing in the season, maybe they would have given up on the whole Willow goes evil idea.

For AtS
Everything in casinos.
Rain of Fire, still worse Angel playing Peeping Tom during Rain of Fire.

Replies:

[> Re: Golden Turkey Awards -- Mighty Mouse, 19:33:17 01/11/04 Sun

I don't agree with all of your ideas, but that's not the point of this topic, so lemme think of some of my own:

- The Joyce-Angel / Mebbe the First / Whatever thing from "Conversations with Dead People." A great episode made somewhat 1/3rd pointless when that entire subplot goes nowhere ... (and if it was the First, they never explained it)
- Dark Willow vs. the Police in "Two to Go." It was a good scene ... I guess I would've just preferred her fighting her way into the police precinct, Terminator style. But that's just my opinion, and it might be too twisted, moving on ...
- The Demon Biker Gang from "Bargaining" was pretty lame.
- The Magic is a Drug analogy throughout the later half of Buffy Season Six. "Absolute power corrupts" would have been a better way to go about it. I liked how they handled her going Dark though. Even though it cost us Tara. :-/
- Anya's death. Joss is twisted. I miss our "Bunny hater." :-(

As far as Angel goes:
- The entire Angel & Cordelia love thing-a-ma-bob. Too much history, and I never really saw the chemistry there. Them being best friends / soul mates, whatever, would have been much better. Angel and Lightning Lass or some other character that wouldn't stay around for a bit would have been better.

[> [> Right. No concensus necessary, here! ;o) -- CW, 19:40:50 01/11/04 Sun

[> [> [> Phew!!!! for a sec I thought you said no conscience...... ;o) -- Rufus, 21:38:44 01/13/04 Tue

[> [> The subplot didn't go nowhere, precisely -- Finn Mac Cool, 20:19:05 01/11/04 Sun

Yes, we never found out exactly what told Dawn "Buffy won't choose you", but we did find out what this not choosing meant: Buffy trying to send Dawn away in "End of Days". Yes, it wasn't really that significant an event, but it fits a theme/motif the season had of things not being as bad as the first appear (see the Turok-Han, Giles's "death", Spike's chip, and the First Evil in general).

[> [> [> Re: The subplot didn't go nowhere, precisely -- Mighty Mouse, 20:30:58 01/11/04 Sun

Hmmm ... good point, never thought of that. Thanks!

[> [> [> Re: The subplot didn't go nowhere, precisely -- Claudia, 13:22:31 01/12/04 Mon

{Yes, we never found out exactly what told Dawn "Buffy won't choose you", but we did find out what this not choosing meant: Buffy trying to send Dawn away in "End of Days". Yes, it wasn't really that significant an event, but it fits a theme/motif the season had of things not being as bad as the first appear (see the Turok-Han, Giles's "death", Spike's chip, and the First Evil in general).}

Dawn beat Buffy to the punch by kicking her out of the house in "Empty Places". Giles' death was explained in the beginning of "First Date". The removal of Spike's chip played a significant part in that it increased Giles' paranoia of the vampire, which led to his betrayal in "LMPTM", which led to Buffy shunning him in "Dirty Girls" and her mistake with Caleb, which led to Buffy being shunned by the Scoobies and the SITs in "Empty Places"/"Touched".

The First Evil was as bad as it appeared. Just not in the obvious sense like the previous Big Bads, who were corporeal. It managed to trigger Spike, recruit Caleb as a henchman (which led to the destruction of the Watcher's Council, the deaths of many Potentials, the disaster in the vineyard, manipulating Buffy into going after the Scythe [which would have been disasterous, if she had not killed him]), convince Andrew to murder Jonathan, convince Wood to bury Jonathan's body, and plot with Giles to murder Spike, and convince Chole to commit suicide. It played on the Scoobies and SIT's feelings, which also led to Buffy's expulsion and the near disaster in the sewers with Faith and the Potentials.

[> [> [> Re: Please tell me more! -- triffic, 02:40:21 01/13/04 Tue

Finn - or anybody for that matter - I'd be really grateful if you could expand on your point that one theme of S7 was things not being as bad as they seem. In particular, why do you think ME would choose this theme for the final season - what's the underlying significance?
I remember reading quite a long post a while ago which described S7 as the season of the fake out (and marshalled lots of evidence in support of that claim) but which - again - didn't say why ME would bother.
My only thought is that they might be pushing the idea of the insubstantiality of evil - i.e. evil is simply privation of the good (or God, if you will) and does not have any independent existence.
Anyhow, I'd be grateful for any ideas on this as I find many season 7 episodes maddening and a little baffling because I feel there's something there that I'm not quite seeing properly. Maybe this was Joss' aim all along - to instil in the viewer feelings of paranoia that reflect those in his characters...

[> Re: Golden Turkey Awards -- Cheryl, 20:04:17 01/11/04 Sun

This was actually harder than I thought, but here are my top of mind "ick" moments, or things I could have done without (in no particular order):

Buffy:
- Agree with CW on Sid, Gorch, demon bikers, and Doublemeat Palace demon
- Buffy battling the giant snake that Glory created
- The Willow/Kennedy storyline
- Sam Finn

Angel:
- The Cordy/Connor storyline

[> Re: Golden Turkey Awards -- KdS, 02:44:29 01/12/04 Mon

On BtVS:

Most of the S1 monsters of the week
Any scene involving drunkenness (except when it's Giles)
Kendra's accent
Ted's alive!
Gorch
Seth Green on all fours
Wes grovelling before Balthazar
Spiky-haired ionisation
Buffy wrestling a plastic snake's head intercut with really bad CGI
Olaf, in general
Over-long scenes in Bargaining II
Druggy Willow
Penis-head woman
Sam Finn
OTT Darth Rosenberg
SMG utterly floundering at the end of Beneath You
Cassie's poems
Buffy taking on the TH single-handed in Showtime
Buffy ignoring Xander's deep stomach wound to tend Spike's minor bruising
The Watcher's Council as eternal rapists
"I don't give a piss about your mother!"
Buffy snuggling with a guy who tried to rape her on her bathroom floor
Caleb, in general
Angel knocking Caleb out with a single punch after Buffy's been fighting him desperately for ages
Softie Turok-Hahn
Baseball Slayer

AtS

Meltzer's floating eyeball and hands
Angel, Cordelia and Doyle not having a single qualm about torturing Meltzer to death
I WIll Remember You, in general
Cordelia being impregnated by demons three times in four years
The inter-dimensional feminist avenger being dressed like she's just stumbled out of a fetish ball
Wes Benny Hill-ing over the Oden Tall women
The clothes-buying scene in Disharmony
Wes and Gunn ignoring the fact that their client is a murderer in Provider
Kyerumption
Any scene involving gambling
"Gangster's Paradise"
Cordelia glowing and ascending
Sketchy CGI in Jasmine's world
Shots tackily centred on AA's legs
Lorne as the Hulk

[> [> Angel did not knock Caleb out -- Finn Mac Cool, 14:14:00 01/12/04 Mon

He knocked him off Buffy, but he got right back up again. Considering Caleb was taken by surprise, it makes sense that Angel would get a good blow in, just like Buffy occasionally had.

[> this one bugged me -- anom, 23:06:27 01/13/04 Tue

In Two to Go, when Buffy catches up w/Willow at Rack's, her response to Willow's speech about the only good thing in her life being "when Tara would look at me...and I was wonderful" comes off as lame to me. The moment when Buffy hesitates & picks up again with "Willow, there is so much..." sounds completely artificial. I know, the point is she's trying to tell Willow something she can't believe in herself. But it's so obvious--& should be even to depressed Buffy--that the response should be "Willow, you are wonderful! Not because of Tara, not because of the magicks..." or at least something along those lines. But better written. If they'd had Buffy take that tack, would it have been harder to make it plausible that Willow wouldn't be convinced? I don't know, but I think they could have done it better.

Shoes as metaphor on BtVS - longish -- Ann, 20:06:11 01/11/04 Sun

BtVS and shoes. There are many references to shoes in the seven years of dialogue of BtVS. (Aside: I only have the season one DVD so I was unable to do a visual analysis but I do recall from memory that Buffy tends to wears boots when she is feeling powerful and wedges (wedgies?) when she is depressed or weak. Perhaps this represents a chink, a wedge in her armor.)

----------------------------

Whedon and Co. kick off this metaphor in the very first episode. Shoes seem to be of minor importance. Heck they are just shoes. Hey, Buffy is only a girl! But in fact using shoes as metaphor uncovers much about the characters as they cover and reveal the "sole". Humorous as it may seem, shoes are a metaphor for characters deepest fears and hopes, dreams and wishes. Shoes are passion. Shoes are choice and change. If the "shoe" doesn't fit it is discarded. Shoes are power.

In Welcome to the Hell mouth S1, Cordelia is, not surprisingly, the first character to mention shoes.

"CORDELIA: Oh, I would *kill* to live in L.A. That close to that many shoes? Well, you'll be okay here. If you hang with me and mine, you'll be accepted in no time. Of course, we do have to test your coolness factor. You're from L.A., so you can skip the written, but let's see. Vamp nail polish."

Her temptation for shoes tells us a lot about her. She will do anything to get what she wants. She will be close to the Slayer, "That close to that many shoes", but never The Slayer. But being close to power has its own rewards and she becomes a powerful scoobie. She enjoys shoes and power. They are one and the same.

In Angel S1, Cordelia proclaims the value of her shoes, her power.

"XANDER: (dancing) Hey, Annie! (sees her boyfriend) Dino, just leaving!

(He backs away and bumps into Cordelia.)

CORDELIA: Ouch! Please get your extreme oafishness off my two-hundred- dollar shoes!

XANDER: I'm sorry, I was just...

CORDELIA: ...getting off the dance floor before Annie Vega's boyfriend squashes you like a bug?"

Cordy does give herself the power. Perhaps foreshadowing of Chosen even this early. She feels it, knows its, and wants it and is willing to use what she has. She wants everyone to know it and acknowledge it. Cordelia won't share this power she feels, but over time finally acknowledges Buffy's power. But Buffy, still learning about her power, isn't able to share her power either. In Dead Mans Party S3:

"XANDER: Look. I'm sorry that your honey was a demon, but most girls don't hop a Greyhound over boy troubles.

CORDELIA: Time out, Xander. Put yourself in Buffy's shoes for just a minute. Okay? I'm Buffy, freak of nature, right? Naturally I pick a freak for a boyfriend, and then he turns into Mr. Killing Spree, which is pretty much my fault...

BUFFY: (interrupts) Cordy! Get outta my shoes!"

Cordelia, having the first reference in the show to shoes, which is why I started this essay with her, feels her own power pretty comfortably - so represented by shoes. But she feels jealousy about Buffy's power. She knows Buffy has all of the Slayer power and that is why she feels comfortable putting herself in Buffy's shoes. Buffy realizes this and wants her out of her shoes. Buffy is starting to revel in her own strength.

In "The Witch" S1, Zander's character is revealed with a shoe metaphor. He hasn't had a taste of this power. He is the ordinary. Never having real "shoes", only shoes to help accomplish tasks: old shoes, bowling shoes, principal's shoes.

"WILLOW: You're not invisible to Buffy.

XANDER: It's worse! I'm just like a part of the scenery, like an old shoe. Or a rug that you walk on every day but don't even really see it."

Later in Whats My Line PT 1 S2

"XANDER: Principal Snyder! Great career fair, sir! Really! In fact, I'm so inspired by your leadership, I'm thinking principal school. I wanna walk in *your* shoes. Not your actual shoes, of course, because you're a tiny person. Not tiny in the small sense, of course. Okay, I'm done now."

He tries out different "shoes", because he has not found his place, his "career". He does not feel this power. He can only look to it. He is "inspired" by it, so he looks to authority figures to try to find this power in himself but acknowledges their smallness, their lack of power. He is sensing this power, starting to view it as something he might want. He wants to separate himself from those with this lack.

In Dark Age S2
"JENNY: I'm reviewing some computer basics for the couple of students who've fallen behind. Willow's helping out for extra credit.

XANDER: Those poor schlubs have to attend school on Saturday!

JENNY: 9 am okay with you, Xander?

BUFFY: Got a bit of schlub on your shoe there."

Zander is acknowledged as a schlub, but just a "bit" and indeed his shoes are acknowledged. He does the ordinary stuff, he is the ordinary guy and is always being shown up. In Fear Itself S4, Zander tries, he plays the role he thinks they want him to play but it still is not enough. He is trying, is still looking to those that he admires.

"XANDER: And here I was wasting time buying them flowers and complimenting them on their shoes. So, you go through the whole house of horrors downstairs and it ends up here. Sweet. You frat guys have a nice setup."

Zander can recognize this weakness about himself even as he compliments others about their shoes. Note in Doublemeat Palace S6 he again recognizes others like himself by their shoes:

"BUFFY: I, I didn't say demons. It's just a vibe. I mean, you guys still haven't seen this manager.

ANYA: Well, isn't that him over there, getting the pickles wet?

XANDER: Yeah, with the saddle shoes...

WILLOW: ...and the glasses?"

He recognizes the fellow with the shoes, but there is a counter in between. The separation, the change has begun.

In The Gift S5 he tries to speak up for his own value. He is gaining a more powerful voice:

"XANDER: Hey, I happen to be --

SPIKE: A glorified brick-layer?

XANDER: I'm also a swell bowler.

ANYA: Has his own shoes.

SPIKE: The Gods themselves do tremble. "

Anya tries to proclaim Zander's value, acknowledge his power, but this is just as much to increase her own value. Zander finally get some power - some shoes. He is ceasing to be ordinary now having his "own" shoes. Getting and giving power can't be done for selfish reasons like Anya does. Buffy discovers this in Season 7. But by Hells Bells S6, Buffy has acknowledged Zander's value and power. She has found his power.

"XANDER: How do I look?

BUFFY: Well, let's see. Found your shoes ... your fly's zipped. I'd say you look like you're ready to get married. You're one of the decent ones, Xander. I hope I'm as lucky as you guys someday."

He has received this power. He knows this about himself now. He is not blind to the power of the "shoe".

Now for Buffy.

In The Pack S1, Buffy's power is described as something she has not chosen, but has thrust upon her with this calling of Slayer. Shoes tell us:

"WILLOW: Not even for a dangerous and mysterious older man whose leather jacket you're wearing right now?

BUFFY: Goes with the shoes!"

This calling is something she has to do, a fashion requirement for the Slayer if you will. She has no choice. In Some Assembly required S2:

"ANGEL: So. Another vampire has risen tonight.

BUFFY: I don't think so. Look at those tracks. Whoever was buried here didn't rise from this grave. (finds a girl's shoe.)
She was dragged from it."

Buffy was dragged into this calling. The tracks of her previous life are gone. Now she has risen to the calling and has made new tracks.

When She Was Bad S2 has the whole family reacting to the remains of her previous life and all of the changes that went with it.

"Hank: Okay, then. This is the last of it.

JOYCE: More clothes?

Hank: Oh, do shoes count as clothes?

JOYCE: How much shopping did you let her do?

Hank: Oh, I just thought I was saving you from the big back-to-school clothing nightmare.

JOYCE: My nightmares of Buffy in school have nothing to do with clothes. Did she manage to stay out of trouble in L.A.?"

He is trying to be the indulgent father, tries to give Buffy "shoes", but hasn't a clue about his daughter or ex-wife. Mom is worried about Dad being permissive, but Buffy's needs are bigger than that. Shoes, clothes, power; her parents just don't have it to give or understand it.

Buffy's previous life was important to her, but now the markings of her as the slayer have to be kept hidden:

"BUFFY: You know what the worst thing is? I was saving up for some very important shoes, and now I have to blow my entire allowance to get this stupid tattoo removed. Let's just hope my mom doesn't see it first. " Priorities have changed as have the "shoes".

In Earshot S3

"BUFFY: When I walked in a few minutes ago, you thought 'Look at her shoes. If a fashion magazine told her to, she'd wear cats strapped to her feet."

She still follows the "fashion". She does behave for now. She is still being "good" with her power. But not for long. The power evolves, as do the shoe metaphors. The control of the "goody-two-shoe" will change and grow. Perhaps it also reflects the two lines of the slayer now. But nothing will stop this power, this passion, these eventual choices Buffy will make about power and her path.

Unlike Buffy, Faith does feel joy with her power. Faith acknowledges Buffy's behavior. In Consequences S3:

"FAITH: For me to change and be more like you, you mean? Little Miss Goody-Two-Shoes? It ain't gonna happen, B.

BUFFY: Faith, nobody is asking you to be like me, but you can't go on like this.

FAITH: Scares you, doesn't it?

BUFFY: Yeah, it scares me. Faith, you're hurting people. You're hurting yourself.

FAITH: But that's not it. That's not what bothers you so much. What bugs you is you know I'm right. You know in your gut we don't need the law. We *are* the law."

In Doppelgand S3"

"Faith jumps up on the bed and bounces.

MAYOR: (appalled) Oh, hey, hey, hey! Shoes! Shoes!

FAITH: (smiling sultrily) Thanks, Sugar Daddy.

MAYOR: (admonishingly) Now, Faith, I don't find that sort of thing amusing. I'm a family man. (briskly) Now, let's kill your little friend."

Even the mayor acknowledges the power - the shoes and Faith's obvious delight in using it. Buffy will soon come to deal with this power. She learns from Faith that she can use this power any way she wants. Her choice.

In No Place like Home S5, Dawn's theory about Buffy tells us about the origins of her power.

"DAWN: I tell you I have this theory? It goes where you're the one who's not my sister. 'Cause mom adopted you from a shoebox full of baby howler monkeys and never told you 'cause it could hurt your delicate baby feelings.

Buffy takes a few steps into the room.

BUFFY: That's your theory?

DAWN: Explains your fashion sense. And your smell."

Buffy's powers are not to be explained fully but do come from the source of all powers - here seen as a shoebox. The potentials as "howlers" image is hilarious and the Summer's household did truly become this shoebox in Season 7 with all of the potentials living there. There will be more on shoeboxes later.

After Buffy's destructive relationships with Angel and Faith she needed a little stability. Buffy's need for the sensible, which results in her relationship with Riley, is described in The Initiative S4:

"WILLOW: Ok, she's wearing the halter top with sensible shoes. That means mostly dancing, light contact, But don't push your luck. Heavy conversation's out of the question."

Buffy's is the goody-two shoes that Faith claimed she is. She is being a good girl, behaving and getting a "proper boyfriend" and she wears sensible shoes. She won't be having another relationship were there is heavy conversation and angst aka Angel. More foreshadowing for Riley, poor guy.

Now shoeboxes. In Season 5, Glory was constantly surrounded by shoes and shoeboxes. The source of Glory's power was very primal as she was a god. Again represented by shoes:

In Shadow S5
"DREG: Perturbed, yet ultimately merciful- Glory sweeps a pile of shoeboxes off the sofa in annoyance.

DREG: Please, don't-

GLORY: What is taking so long, Dreg? You told me snakey-wakey would find my key. Now why isn't he back here with a beautiful message for me?

DREG: I grovel like a bug, most silky and effervescent Glorificus- (She throws more shoeboxes at him) Glory! Glory. Your most fresh and cleanness, it's just a matter of time.

GLORY: (angrily) Ohh! Everything takes time! What about my time? Does anyone appreciate that I'm on a schedule here? (Dreg nods nervously) Tick, tock, Dreg! Tick frickin' tock!"

Glory can't control her power or her shoes in this dimension. The shoeboxes get tossed around. She, as strong as she is, battles herself. Shoes fly. The worst thing that can happen to a shoe lover - a broken shoe, represented Glory's confusion about Buffy's powers in Family S5. (Was it a heel?) Buffy is making her mark on Glory.

"GLORY: Blonde ... short ... strong for a human ... and massively rude! Broke my shoe, took my monk, do you have any idea who I'm talking about? A slayer?? Oh god, please don't tell me I was fighting a vampire slayer! How unbelievably common! If I had friends, and they heard about this ... and you know she's going around telling everybody, I mean she probably just- Pay attention! I am great and I am beautiful, and when I walk into a room all eyes turn to me, because my name is a holy name, and you will listen! Get your friends ... find the girl ... kill the girl ... okay baby? You have the cutest little suppurating sores! Has anyone ever told you that?"

In Shadow S5, Glory wonders about her own power by studying her shoes and feet:

"GLORY: Uh-huh. (trying on another shoe)

DREG: And great dangers have been faced to...

GLORY: (sticking her leg straight up in the air) Does this pump make my ankle look bony?

DREG: No! No, no, your terrifically smooth one, it is the epitome of ankles. (Glory ignores him, trying on another shoe) To touch such an ankle would be - but I'm not touching. I'm backing away.

Glory kicks out her foot and the shoe flies off it, hitting Dreg in the forehead.

DREG: Ow! Thank you."

She wants to find a solution to these power issues. Glory uses her shoes to contemplate her existence. Her changing of her shoes repeatedly also reflects her changing back and forth between her and her human half, Ben. And in Checkpoint S5:

"GLORY: Fine. (puts mirror down) I have been cooling my heels in this crappy little town long enough. (lies down on bed) Sunnydale's got too many demons and not enough retail outlets. (Picks up a pair of shoes)"

Shoes, and shoeboxes represent Glory's power and her contemplation of that power and her relationship with it. She is not a happy contented god.

The metaphor continues as Buffy dies and is returned to life. (When she climbs out of her grave, does she have bare feet? Is there not a practice of being buried with bare feet? I am not sure if that is true but this might extend the metaphor.)

In Wrecked S6, Buffy is lost. She is depressed and has lost her sense of power. Again shoes reveal this. Her death and rebirth have resulted in her feelings of loss. She can't find her shoe, her power. But she still knows she needs this power to survive.

"SPIKE: I don't know. Must have been sometime between the first time and the, uh...

BUFFY: Oh. Oh my god.

(...)

BUFFY: Shoe, need my shoe.

SPIKE: What's the hurry, luv?

BUFFY: The hurry is I left Dawn all night. And don't call me love.

SPIKE: You didn't seem to take issue with that last night. Or with any of the other little nasties we whispered."

Her relationship with Spike eventually forced her to face the fact that she needs to find her shoe, her power.

Willow's sexual identity and its changes are viewed through shoe metaphors.

In Beauty and the Beasts S3
"BUFFY: (reading from "Call of the Wild") 'One night after supper, the lead dog turned up a snowshoe rabbit. The dog lay down low to the race, his body flashing forward, leap by leap.'

dissolve to Willow @ the library, also reading:

WILLOW: 'He was sounding the deeps of his nature and the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the wombs of time. The rabbit could not...'

(Oz/wolf gets excited)"

Initially this appears to be Oz's metaphor - beast within, but I think it might be an early indication of Willow's sexual identity issues. Willow needs to go to the deepest parts to find her true nature. Oz is excited but she is not. Clue one. The snow and shoe could represent this burying of her own nature but with the hope and the ability to dig herself out - to elevate herself above the confusion to find her true self. The rabbit might represent the death of the innocence of her present nature. (Bunnies of course represent the worst of fears for Anya.)

In Lovers Walk S3
"WILLOW: It's *bad* bowling. I-it's a double date, with all of us, and they're gonna know!

XANDER: How are they gonna know?

WILLOW: It's a very intimate situation. It's all sexy with the smoke and the sweating and the shoe rental...

XANDER: You're turned on by rented shoes?

WILLOW: That's not the issue."

The issue is she is turned on by something she cannot yet own. She is "renting" her sexuality for the time being. She is fearful that everyone might know. Zander is just one step toward the place to where she is evolving. The men in her life seem to be stepping-stones to discovery that they are not for her.

But then in Something Blue S4
"(Willow sees them and walks over to the table, just as happy as can be)

WILLOW: Hey, guys! C'mon! This music's great!

XANDER: It's nice to see you brought your boogie shoes tonight, Will.

WILLOW: Yeah.. I-I know I've been sort of a party-poop lately, so I said to myself, "Self!" I said, "It's time to shake and shimmy it off."

It is time for her to shake off her heterosexuality and these boogie shoes will help. The power has come out.

In Yoko Factor S4
"BUFFY: Enough! All I know is you want to help, right? Be part of the team?

WILLOW: (unison) I don't know anymore.

XANDER: (unison) Really not wanted.

BUFFY: No! No, you said you wanted to go. So let's go! All of us. We'll walk into that cave with you two attacking me and the funny drunk drooling on my shoe! Hey! Hey, maybe that's the secret way of killing Adam?!"

Willow doesn't know which "team" she should be on. Shoes are being mistreated, as Willow can't decide. Killing Adam is a metaphor for killing her indecision and perhaps her heterosexuality. He does represent the ultimate male after all.

But by Tough Love S5, Willow has worked her way through this issue:
"WILLOW: It wasn't anything really. Buffy was just a little crabby at Dawn about her schoolwork.

TARA: That's understandable.

WILLOW: Yeah, sure it is! I'd totally be blowing off classes if I were in Dawnie's shoes.

TARA: Sweetie, you wouldn't blow off a class if your head was on fire. I meant Buffy."

I take this to mean that she can now be the "rule breaking" girl. Not the girl that everyone expects. She has done the "work" necessary to be herself - her true self. She has given herself permission to do the "unconventional" with Tara. Dawn, the key, allows all to be opened and explored.

Dawn's youth and innocence is shown with shoe metaphor. Her song in Once More with Feeling S6:

"DAWN: What I mean
I'm fifteen
So this queen thing's illegal

SWEET: I can bring whole cities to ruin
And still have time to get a soft-shoe in

DAWN: Well, that's great
But I'm late
And I'd hate to delay her

SWEET: Something's cooking, I'm at the griddle
I bought Nero his very first fiddle"

Nero's Fiddle (actually a misnomer because the fiddle hadn't been invented yet, was probably a lyre) or the death and destruction that went with it's playing, could be representative of Dawn's power. The "soft-shoe" represents her innocence despite this "key" strength and it also represents ruin and change for others.

Other examples of the shoe metaphor include:

Buffy vs. Dracula S4

"RILEY: Come on, come on. Grab my hand.

GILES: Thank god you came.

RILEY: Come on!

GILES: There was no possible escape... Oh, my shoe. (Pointing back into the pit) Silly me, I'll just pop-

RILEY: No no no, sir! (Pulls him away) No more chick pit for you. Come on."

Giles is always the one who is in control. When he loses his shoe, his choice, he loses his power. Ironically, this is just before Willow realizes she wants the "chick-pit".

In Never Leave Me S7:

"ANDREW: Careful with my coat. It's expensive.

ANYA: Is it new? (throws it on the floor, and steps on it with her shoes)"

Anya's demon nature destroys the valuable; the corruption of this power and use of the "shoe". She, as a vengeance demon takes wishes, and turns them into something other. Andrew's innocence, and perhaps sexual nature were stepped on. As evil as he might have acted, I always thought there was such innocence about him. This may have been the turning point for Andrew to strive for goodness. The coat (of evil) had been destroyed. (No comment about other coats here.)

Even the Bringer's shoes made a statement and had a voice. In First Date S7:

"GILES: I have to ask-why on Earth did you make that decision?

BUFFY: Guess it was instinct, like you were talking about.

GILES: I made that up! I knew the Bringer was there because his shoes squeaked. Buffy, it's crucial that we keep these girls safe. I can't count the dangers-the First, the Bringers, random demons, and now Spike?"

The Bringers bring with their squeaky shoes, true power to all.

Lastly, the series ends with shoe metaphor. In Chosen, Buffy has shared her power with all potentials but still craves more. In Chosen S7:

"BUFFY: So... what do you guys want to do tomorrow?

WILLOW: Nothing strenuous.

XANDER: Well, mini-golf is always the first thing that comes to mind.

GILES: I think we can do better than that.

BUFFY: I was thinking about shopping- as per usual.

WILLOW: There's an Agnes B in the new mall!

XANDER: Good. I could use a few items.

GILES: Aren't we going to discuss this? Save the world and go to the mall?

BUFFY: I'm having a wicked shoe craving.

XANDER: Aren't you on the patch?

WILLOW: Those never work.

GILES: And here I am, invisible to the eye, not having any say...

(Xander, Buffy and Willow start to head off down the hall.)

XANDER: See, I need a new look. It's this whole eye patch thing.

BUFFY: Oh! You could go with the full black secret agent look.

WILLOW: Or the puffy shirt, pirate-slash-poet feel. Sensitive yet manly...

XANDER: Now you're getting a little renaissance fair on me.

BUFFY: It's a fine line.
GILES: (to himself) The earth is definitely doomed."

From the first episode to the last, shoes are seen as a metaphor for power, passion and change. Who would have thought a shoe could reveal so much.

I am not as familiar with Angel the Series but from this dialogue listing of shoes as metaphor, this we can only imagine the shoe power on Angel. San shoe as I call it (lol) has excellent potential for the continuation of this metaphor.

I used http://vrya.net/bdb/index.php as a Buffy dialogue search engine.

Enjoy and all puns were intended.

Replies:

[> Re: Shoes as metaphor on BtVS - longish -- Jane, 22:27:49 01/11/04 Sun

Great post Ann. Shoes as metaphor for power and self esteem - wonderful! Don't know what my shoes would say about me; sneakers, riding boots, work shoes; not a high heel to be seen :-)
Just thought of another: Spike:"I'm drowning in footwear!"

[> Re: Shoes as metaphor on BtVS - longish -- Ames, 10:58:33 01/12/04 Mon

What the heck was Buffy wearing on her feet when she jumped from the collapsing school rooftop to the school bus in Chosen? Looked like those shoes with ridiculously long, pointy toes. This is what the Slayer chose to wear to the final apocalyptic battle with the hordes of hell? Or was there a continuity problem there?

[> [> Re: Shoes as metaphor on BtVS - longish -- oshunwunmi, 14:42:10 01/12/04 Mon

I loved those boots! Those where totally saving-the-world-boots! I'm getting a pair just in case I have to save the world shortly...

[> Re: Shoes as metaphor on BtVS - longish -- Dandy, 16:38:39 01/12/04 Mon

Lovely post. Dogs would be another good topic.

[> Stylish yet affordable! -- MsGiles, 02:08:21 01/13/04 Tue

[> Wow, this requires more thought and mulling -- Rahael, 06:08:40 01/13/04 Tue

One note though - when Buffy climbs out of the grave in bargaining, she isn't barefoot. She's definitely wearing shoes, becasue I think there was soem comment that there was a continuity error - the shoes change from sensible to impractical.

This is from memory. I can check my S6 VCD's tonight!

[> [> Shoe continuity -- Pony, 07:12:40 01/13/04 Tue

I counted nearly half a dozen shoe gaffes while watching my s5 dvds. I can completely understand SMG switching to comfortable footwear when she thinks the shoes aren't in the shot but someone should have persuaded her to wear darker coloured sneakers. The white ones really show up!

[> Re: Shoes as metaphor on BtVS - longish -- Arethusa, 08:34:07 01/13/04 Tue

Very interesting, Ann. Shoes also cover the soles, like power covers or obfuscates the soul. Power obscures the soul's ability to see itself, twisting motivations and disconnecting a person from his/her inner guide. In movies villains often wear heavy boots, which might represent their heavy-handed use of power and heavy covering of their conscience. Throughout history, delicate and flimsy shoes are worn by women, perhaps a symbol of how women give up their power? And of course like Glory, our own Honorificus changes shoes like she changes form. Perhaps she's conflicted by her desire for power versus her strong yet hidden inner morality.

[> [> Re: Shoes as metaphor on BtVS - longish -- Ann, 17:09:59 01/15/04 Thu

Yes. I like the connection you made about desiring power and Glory. She is conflicted and I always thought that she actually, despite the evil she manifest, didn't use her powers as a god in a hugely evil way. Tara might disagree though. She could have done much worse. But she had this goal to get home. Your note about shoe styles also is correct I think. Glory also wore very binding clothes. She really was wound up tight - literally and figuratively.

[> Re: Shoes as metaphor on BtVS - longish -- undeadenglishpatient, 11:17:12 01/13/04 Tue

I've always viewed shoes to represent 'souls'.

Hence, san-shoes or Shanshu - no soul.

The other representation is from the Wizard of OZ - the shoes having power to transport a being into another dimension. I think that's why Glory was always changing shoes, she didn't have the right ones to get her where she needed to go......she needed Dawns.

[> [> trivial, but... -- Vickie, 17:13:06 01/13/04 Tue

The other representation is from the Wizard of OZ - the shoes having power to transport a being into another dimension. I think that's why Glory was always changing shoes, she didn't have the right ones to get her where she needed to go......she needed Dawn's.

And during the key ceremony, Dawn is barefoot.

[> [> [> Re: trivial, but... -- undeadenglishpatient, 00:02:30 01/14/04 Wed

Excellent point!!

Did you notice that this year's ATS has Fred barefoot in the first episode? Conviction?

That makes her barefoot in 2 episodes, Home and Conviction? Wonder what's up with that?

[> [> [> [> Fred shoeless -- Vickie, 07:51:20 01/14/04 Wed

She has cute feet?

This reminds me of the old "Paul is dead" frenzy
(any other antiques out there?) when fans noticed
that McCartney was walking barefoot on the Abbey
Road cover.

I don't see any metaphorical significance in Fred's
lack of shoes--but others here are much better at
that than I am. I always thought that Dawn was
barefoot in The Gift so the director could get that
pathetic shot of her blood dripping on her feet, then
off them to form the portal/nexus/thingy.

[> [> [> [> Hmmm. -- KdS, 15:40:18 01/14/04 Wed

She might as well be at times. Always annoyed me the way she'd go into combat in flip-flops.

[> [> [> [> [> Re: Hmmm. -- Ann, 17:22:16 01/15/04 Thu

But there is a message in that as well!! Flip-flops and indecision. I assume you mean Fred. Well combat was not her strength so she probably had major insecurities battling foes. She is much more at home in a lab where she is wearing sensible shoes.

If you mean Buffy, which episode?

[> [> Re: Shoes as metaphor on BtVS - longish -- Ann, 17:15:46 01/15/04 Thu

I like this comparison very much. Shoes transport us and his characters in many ways, again figuratively and literally. Whedon uses soles very well. And we are along for the ride. lol

[> And it cont'd tonight on Angel -Spoilers tonights epi -- Ann, 19:11:52 01/14/04 Wed

This theme is continuing on tonights epi of AtS. Harms's Way. Harmony was shown getting ready to face her day. She was showering, brushing her teeth - all the routine stuff. She then got "changed". Her pink pumps were predominantly shown. She lost one and then found it under her dresser. Much the same way she threw off her old self and found her new one by the episodes end. The head of Eli also landed at her feet still in pink pumps. He certainly was changed. I had a flash of John the Baptist's head had Harmony picked it up and dealt with it. But not.

Somewhat Cinderella-esque as she loses a shoe. But the prince doesn't find it she does. She has been given the power for herself.

Also a quote "gazing at ankles leads to eye gouging". Potentially Oedipal here. All of this foot/shoe metaphor is excellent. I am glad that Harmony found herself and her shoes. lol. It has been a long time coming.

[> [> And also -- Ann, 19:21:49 01/14/04 Wed

The pink shoes she was wearing turned red by the end of the episode. Either a mistake or the "blood" is flowing, and it is good and red.

[> [> [> Re: And also -- undeadenglishpatient, 09:05:59 01/15/04 Thu

Red is not usually good in the Joss world.

Harmony's shoe scenes reminded me of: Wrecked. In the aftermath of Buffy/Spike bringing the house down, she cannot find her other shoe. Maybe loosing one shoe, is a soul slip.....LOL

Harmony finding it with her 'super strength' is pretty interesting..........maybe she's not as dumb as their making her out to be.

[> [> [> [> Harmony is... -- Ann, 17:34:52 01/15/04 Thu

all of us that are not in the elite, warrior - fill in the blank - groups. We can't be heroes in that sense of the word, but I think each of us has to find what we can do. We might not be able to save the world in a blazing stream of light and fire, or have super strength, or whatever. But we can choose to do what we are able. Harmony is doing that. A lesson for all. This lesson seems to be repeated in buffyverse a lot.

'Apocalypse, Nowish' vs. 'Rain of Fire' -- Mighty Mouse, 20:33:20 01/11/04 Sun

Just a quick question, I'm not sure if anyone knows the "behind the scenes" answer to it. I recall that the seventh episode of Angel Season Four was originally to be called "Apocalypse, Nowish" instead of "Rain of Fire." While, there is indeed a rain of fire in the episode, I personally feel that "Apocalypse, Nowish" is a better title, and goes along with the quirky humor of Mutant Enemy. Anyone know why they switched the title?

Replies:

[> Re: 'Apocalypse, Nowish' vs. 'Rain of Fire' -- Invisible Green, 23:12:47 01/11/04 Sun

The real title is "Apocalypse, Nowish." The WB's promotional title was "Rain of Fire." You can download the promo with the network tag from http://acathla.webou.com/videos4.htm, which clearly labels the episode as "Apocalypse, Nowish" and the promo as "Rain of Fire." Direct link to trailer: http://sss1985.free.fr/407.wmv

Also the WB wanted to change the title to "Rain of Fire" b/c they were worried about getting sued by Francis Ford Coppola.

City of Angel has a good interview with David Fury or Steve DeKnight or someone (I forget who) which explains the whole thing.

Anyway, "Rain of Fire" was never an actual title for the episode, people just thought it was b/c the WB used it as a promotional slogan.

[> [> Re: 'Apocalypse, Nowish' vs. 'Rain of Fire' -- Mighty Mouse, 09:22:03 01/12/04 Mon

Ahhh, I was wondering if it had anything to do with "Apocalypse Now" but okay. Thanks for the explanation. :-)

Sunday Times article on Angel 'Angel and Spike back from the Dead' no US spoilers -- Rufus, 20:44:37 01/11/04 Sun

Thanks to deb from the Trollop Board

January 11, 2004

The Sunday Times

Throw off your anoraks and rejoice Angel and Spike are back from the dead - again. And it's all thanks to the weird science of Joss Whedon. By John Harlow

The letter, pinned to a notice board, is well typed and politely phrased, but barking mad. "Did you notice," asks the writer, "an intruder materialise in your office the other night? I was practising my teleporting skills at home in Folkestone, and I think I may have ended up in your office in Los Angeles by accident. Sorry." Welcome to the off-kilter world of Joss Whedon, master of the Californian twilight zone. For the past decade, Whedon - creator of the slyly humane satire that was Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off, Angel, about Buffy's vampiric ex-boyfriend, who has a soul of gold and a dodgy Galway accent - has been the unchallenged monarch of television's bloodsucking hordes (or, in Hollywood PC terms, undead Americans). Questions of super-natural nomenclature are taken seriously in Los Angeles, and not just by teenage goths. The Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, where fundamentalist scholars regard mental illness as satanic possession, is drawing up a map of demonic activity in LA - and Fox Studios, where Whedon has his office, is splat in the middle. Maybe they are on to something? The 39-year-old writer looks too young and innocent to be true. As he steps into the shady domain of his production company, Mutant Enemy, and taps a 6ft plaster demon on its knobbly head, you cannot but think: what if Auberon Waugh and Renée Zellweger had had an auburn-haired surfer love child? He would have looked uncannily like Mr Whedon.

Dressed in cargo pants and a T-shirt emblazoned with an image of the 1940s starlet Joan Leslie - big bonus points for obscurity there, Joss - the press-shy writer is taken aback by my materialisation in his sanctum. He has not sat down with a reporter for a year. The trap has been set by his cor- porate pals, because, frankly, since Buffy dusted her final "big, bad" last summer, the scene has not been rockin' in the Jossiverse.

Buffy has gone, largely because Sarah Michelle Gellar, known on set as "the Duchess", wanted to spread her artistic wings - and ended up filming Scooby-Doo 2. A cartoon Buffy has failed to get off the drawing board: "Too expensive, allegedly," Whedon says tightly. His next venture, Firefly, a futuristic space saga, was sucked into a black hole after 13 episodes, criticised as dull. It may come back as a feature film with the original cast. "

"That is a non-negotiable," he says firmly. "Firefly was the best experience I ever had in television, and it was killed before it could walk." Even Angel faced deep scrutiny in the mass audience shrinkage that has unnerved the TV suits over the past year.

Whedon, son and grandson of influential scriptwriters, whose chipper days (a shared Oscar nomination for writing Toy Story) have far outnumbered the lame (Alien: Resurrection, anybody?), was suddenly facing membership of the Hollywood hellfire club, where writers such as The X Files' Chris Carter and Ally McBeal's David E Kelley are paired up with monkeys typing Shakespeare until they create another hit.

So, Whedon is a little on edge. As he talks, he is stabbing himself with a retractable Buffy stake and his knee is bobbing. Finally, unable to sit still, he picks up my minidisc recorder and weaves around the furniture. It works - at home, later, the machine spits out a few words, groans and melts down. Luckily, old-fashioned shorthand is less vulnerable to demonic influence.

Whedon's battle to save Angel, which starts its fifth series on British television this week, has left its bruises. Last spring, studio bosses told him to cut costs or shut up shop. "I had too many stories left to tell. The series was not the pot of gold everyone might think: at least, that's what the suits told me. It was painful dealing with those people. But we rescued Angel from the grave, again, at least for this series and maybe the next."

While Kelley sacked high-priced stars to save The Practice, Whedon expanded his cast, sharpened the writing and pushed Angel higher in the ratings than ever before. Key to its overhaul is the resurrection of the goodish vamp Spike, once a Victorian aesthete known as William the Bloody (thanks to his awful poetry), who had apparently sacrificed himself in the final, big-budget Buffy. Now Spike is back, still played with British cockiness and snarling wit by the Californian James Marsters. Think Karen out of Will & Grace with better cheekbones and slinkier moves. "The studio wanted him: it was me they were not sure about," says Whedon, half joking. Fans are happy, too - last November, they raised £5,000 for a full-page advert in Variety, thanking Whedon for saving Spike.

Let's be frank. Obsessive fans - from Russian tweenies to scholars who organised a congress on slayerdom at Oxford - know that the Angel series has never quite equalled the intensity, tenderness and optimism that lay at Buffy's ensemble heart. Lines such as "What is your childhood trauma?" and "I am love's bitch, but at least I am man enough to admit it" have entered dictionaries of pop-culture quotations. Angel has not yet reached the heights of Buffy episodes such as The Body, which dealt with the death of the slayer's mother, or the almost-silent Hush, or the episode staged as a musical, called Once More, With Feeling. But, suddenly, with Angel's Anakin Skywalker whiner of a son written out, it is almost as wickedly funny as Buffy at its peak. It gives us hope again.

Angel has taken over an evil law office that runs a "dial-a-
sacrifice" phone service: "Press one for goat, two for pets or loved ones." He seems a little bit less scowly, despite Spike floating around, goading him and trying to have sex with the gorgeously dumb vamp Harmony. She is played by Mercedes McNab, whose dad, Bob, was an Arsenal full-back when they won the FA Cup in 1971. But that is another tale from the twilight zone.

Whedon is an unashamed anglophile. He named his first-born Arden, after the Shakespearian forest. The scripted but unfilmed opening line of the film version of Buffy was pure Python - a medieval knight chatting up a wench: "Some plague we are having, eh?" Even more tellingly, Whedon loves Danger Mouse. His father, Tom, who wrote The Golden Girls, introduced Joss to England in the 1980s. "I was at Winchester College for three years. I nearly took my A-levels there. It was all British authors, except for Emily Dickinson, but I loved it. I named Rupert Giles (his pukka librarian, played by Anthony Head) after Mrs Giles, our matron, a rare point of comfort in a cruel world," he says, mocking his own nostalgia.

"My public-school education was not wasted. For instance, I can write British slang for Giles or Spike, like `wanker', or worse, which nobody here understands.

I can get away with it." He can mock the Brits, too - Spike to Giles: "Bet your whole life flashed before your eyes, didn't it? `Cup of tea, cup of tea, nearly had a shag, cup of tea.'"

What about this talk of a Giles spin-off, set in Britain? "I still want to do something with Tony Head, even if it's only a one-off ghost story for the BBC. There is a clamminess there I look forward to. But I would not do an English school story - Rowling has the lock on that."

Are there any lingering regrets about Buffy? "More music. There were some musicians I wanted to get onto the show. I wrote Lovebomb after hearing Britney Spears wanted to come on, but, of course, it never happened. But we did get Aimee Mann, and when I met her, I said: `Oh, God, oh, God, I am such a fan - and now I have to finish this sentence.'"

Will Whedon ever break away from the world of ghosties and
ghouls? "Why should I? You can make big points without getting pompous, such as showing how a teenage girl can be strong without being bad. I almost wish we had never been nominated for an Emmy for Hush, stayed underground and away from award shows. I am genre, through and through, and this is where I shall remain."

At least until he is teleported to Folkestone, anyway.

The new series of Angel starts on Sky One on Tuesday

Replies:

[> Re: Sunday Times article on Angel 'Angel and Spike back from the Dead' no US spoilers -- Claudia, 13:07:41 01/12/04 Mon

[Buffy has gone, largely because Sarah Michelle Gellar, known on set as "the Duchess", wanted to spread her artistic wings - and ended up filming Scooby-Doo 2. A cartoon Buffy has failed to get off the drawing board: "Too expensive, allegedly," Whedon says tightly."]

After reading this latest bit of SMG-bashing, I lost interest in the article. I didn't realize that THE SUNDAY TIMES was Joss Whedon's mouthpiece.

[> [> Have to agree with the above ... -- Earl Allison, 03:57:02 01/13/04 Tue

Regardless of Joss' potential issues, which may or may not be true, there was no call for his swipe at SMG -- especially since she, and pretty much everyone else in the cast, has remained fairly civil, if not outright enthusiastic.

Last I checked, Joss wasn't the Second Coming, and given the reactions some (not all) fans had to the UPN years, and to Angel S5, he should get over himself.

Classless and tasteless, Joss. Can't wait to see the "Behind the Scenes" in a few years, and hear EVERYONE'S take on things.

Take it and run.

[> [> [> Re: Have to agree with the above ... -- RJA, 06:28:16 01/13/04 Tue

It depends if it was his swipe or not. The comments weren't attributed to him, although its a possible that it was something off the record that *happened* to work its way into the piece.

So while such comments are unnecessary, I wouldnt want to criticise somebody for something they hadnt said. Certainly, in the many other similar interviews I have read with him recently, he makes no such comments.

[> [> [> [> In any case... -- Pony, 07:04:56 01/13/04 Tue

After reading this article and the interview with Joss in The Face I'm feeling a bit depressed. The portrait of Joss against the suits is compelling but it doesn't really bode well for getting future projects off the ground. Maybe it's just the angle the recent press is taking but it feels like Joss is growing increasingly isolated in Hollywood.

[> Oh what! -- Celebaelin, 03:10:18 01/14/04 Wed

'Harmony's' dad played in the Gunners 1971 double winning side? FA Cup and 1st Division (now called the Premiereship) Championship winners for you Americans. Charlie George's winning goal in the cup final that year is what started me as an Arsenal fan. Bizzare.

According to http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/bob.dunning/arsenal.htm

Bob McNab is a successful coach and scout in America, there's a picture if you're interested.

I often confuse the 70-71 season with the 71-72 season. I never will again (but I could have sworn I was seven when I saw that game, maybe I was 'nearly' seven).

The Best and Worst of Buffy (week by week) -- cjl (late to the party and reviving the thread), 06:55:29 01/13/04 Tue

Episode 1
1: Welcome to the Hellmouth, s2: When She Was Bad, s3: Anne, s4: The Freshman, s5: Buffy vs. Dracula, s6 Bargaining Part I, s7: Lessons

BEST: "Bargaining I" may indeed have been the better episode, but it suffers from its role as setup for its disappointing second half. "When She Was Bad" is easily the best season opener because it delves into the deep psychological issues left over from Prophecy Girl AND sets up themes that will resonate for the rest of the series. The dance scene in the Bronze is one of Buffy's darkest and sexiest moments. (HON. MENTION: The Freshman. Sunday and Xander's speech. WORST: Buffy v. Dracula.)

Episode 2
s1: The Harvest, s2: Some Assembly Required, s3: Dead Man's Party, s4: Living Conditions, s5: Real Me, s6: Bargaining 2, s7: Beneath You

BEST: Beneath You gets the nod, despite David Fury's stellar introduction for Dawn and the sheer comic genius of Living Conditions. BY whipsaws the viewer through the fragments of Spike's shattered mind, and delivers some the best Xander/Anya moments of what would be a frustrating Season 7. I'm not as moved by the final scene as some fans, mainly because Gellar's reaction shots range from puzzled to inert. But Marsters' performance is unassailable-and when he collapses onto the cross? Wow. (WORST: Bargaining II. Twenty minutes of action "packed" into 48.)

Episode 3
s1: The Witch, s2: School Hard, s3: Faith, Hope and Trick, s4: The Harsh Light of Day, s5: The Replacement, s6: AfterLife, s7: Same Time, Same Place

BEST: Harsh Light of Day barely nudges out School Hard. As much as I relish Spike and Dru's amazing entrance (often imitated, never duplicated), Spike's evil sneer when he swaggers toward Buffy in the bright daylight of the Sunnydale U. campus just makes me grin like an idiot. Add the all-time classic X/A seduction scene, and the return of Harmony, and we have our winner. (WORST: Witch - not bad, but simply not up to the level of competition.)

Episode 4
s1: Teacher's Pet, s2: Inca Mummy Girl, s3: Beauty and the Beasts, s4: Fear, Itself, s5: Out of my Mind s6: Flooded, s7: Help

BEST: A surprisingly lackluster selection given the proximity to the start of the season, but "Flooded" is the stand-out. The ep marks the start of Buffy vs. Real Life, with a number of great moments, including Buffy vs. The Loan Officer, the revenge of the nerds, Willow's scary confrontation with Giles, and Anya's dissertation on Spider-Man. "No more copper re-pipe!" (WORST: Teacher's Pet. Two lame villains--Miss French and Mr. Claw--for the price of one.)

Episode 5
s1: Never Kill a Boy on the First Date, s2: Reptile Boy, s3: Homecoming; s4: Beer Bad, s5: No Place Like Home, s6: Life Serial, s7: Selfless

BEST: Selfless. What else? My beloved Anya gets her due. (WORST: Beer Bad is still lame, but the charms of Cave Buffy and the Willow/Parker scenes have grown on me. I have no such affection for Reptile Boy, which gets worse after each viewing.)

Episode 6
s1: The Pack, s2: Halloween, s3: Band Candy, s4: Wild at Heart; s5: Family, s6: All the Way, s7: Him

BEST: Halloween. Just edges The Pack as a key revelatory episode (about Giles and Xander, respectively.) I give Halloween the nod because along with the immortal "Hello, Ripper" from the magnificent bastard that is Ethan Rayne, we get oodles of character development from Soldier Boy Xander, Ghost Willow, Countess Buffy, and not-Cursed of the Cat People Cordelia. Oh, and Larry too! (WORST: All The Way. Dawn's first kiss should have been a cherished, bittersweet memory-but it wasn't.)

Episode 7
s1: Angel, s2: Lie to Me, s3: Revelations s4: The Initiative, s5: Fool For Love, s6: Once More, With Feeling, s7: Conversations With Dead People

BEST: Brutal competition here, but it's Fool For Love by a nose. OMWF is 55 minutes of pure joy, but once Xander opens his yap at the end, the whole thing unravels. CWDP has one of the best MotWs of the entire series-Holden Webster--but it's surprisingly uneven upon re-watching. Fool for Love is brilliantly constructed, and the visuals--especially with Spike battling Nikki on the NYC subway intercut with present-day Sunnydale--are pure magic. Loved Riley's vamp hunting vendetta and Harmony's final speech. Top notch all the way through. (WORST: Revelations. A good episode, but Gwendolyn Post's rather stereotypical motivations drop it below the rest.)

Episode 8
s1: I Robot, You Jane , s2: The Dark Age, s3: Lovers' Walk; s4: Pangs, s5: Shadow, s6: Tabula Rasa, s7: Sleeper

BEST: Lover's Walk. Never bought into Tabula Rasa, because both Spike and Giles seem OOC. Lover's Walk rips open every single one of our cast members, removes their hearts, and stomps them into the ground of Sunnydale High. No wonder we love it. Marsters earns his comeback in Season 4. (WORST: Shadow. How much did ME pay for the lame CGI? Two cents would've been too much.)

Episode 9
s1: The Puppet Show, s2: What's My Line 1, s3: The Wish, s4: Something Blue, s5: Listening to Fear, s6: Smashed, s7: Never Leave Me

BEST: As much as I love The Wish, I'm still bothered by the fact that Cordelia wasn't the through-line of the entire episode. I know Joss says that one of the things he likes about The Wish is that nobody learned anything, but I think it would've been better for the Season 3 arc if Cordy DID learn something. What's My Line I gives us new insights into the Spike/Dru/Angel triangle, introduces us to the second slayer, and brings Marti Noxon on board for the start of six seasons of polymorphous perversity. (WORST: Listening to Fear)

Episode 10
s1: Nightmares ,s2: What's My Line 2, s3: Amends, s4: Hush; s5: Into The Woods, s6: Wrecked, s7: Bring on the Night

BEST: Hush. Joss at his peak. The Gentlemen (and the episode as a whole) are a magnificent tribute to silent cinema. (WORST: Wrecked or Amends-how to choose? The Christmas snow is one of most excruciatingly cheesy moments in the entire series, but the magic crack metaphor just makes your teeth hurt. If you think Wrecked is Buffy's jump the shark episode, I won't argue too strenuously.)

Episode 11
s1: Out of Sight, Out of Mind, s2: Ted, s3: Gingerbread; s4: Doomed, s5: Triangle, s6: Gone, s7: Showtime

BEST: Oh come on, people! Triangle is fun! Abraham Benrubi is a Swedish mackerel barrel of laughs, and the Willow/Anya banter breaks me up every time. I was tempted to go with Gingerbread based on Kristine Sutherland's terrific performance, but Triangle is just a more solid episode overall. (WORST: Showtime. I can accept the telepathy. I can accept the whininess of the potentials. But Buffy's "triumph of the will" smackdown of the previously-unbeatable Turok-Han presages the complete breakdown of suspension of disbelief in Chosen.)

Episode 12
s1: Prophecy Girl, s2: Bad Eggs, s3: Helpless, s4: A New Man; s5: Checkpoint, s6: Doublemeat Palace, s7: Potential

BEST: Doublemeat Palace....nah, just kidding. But you all know I love DP, and if it had less powerful competition, I might have been serious. However, Prophecy Girl, Checkpoint, and Helpless are three of Buffy's all-time best episodes. Prophecy Girl wins by a hair, an emotionally triumphant season-ender on a par with its brethren down at the end of this list. The first truly great episode of BtVS. (WORST: Bad Eggs. It grows on you-especially as a prelude to the great S2 episodes to come-but there's still way too much Gorch.)

Episode 13
s2: Surprise, s3: The Zeppo, s4: The I in Team, s5: Blood Ties; s6: Dead Things, s7: The Killer in Me

(BEST: Despite my affection for the self-reflexive satire of The Zeppo and the classic melodrama of Surprise, Dead Things tops 'em all. It's one of the rare S6 episodes that lives up to expectations in exploring the darker aspects of our main characters. Stephen DeKnight earns his stripes and will go on to do equally remarkable work on ANGEL. (WORST: The Killer in Me. The conclusions of three potentially great plotlines jammed into one episode, effectively diluting all three. A crushing disappointment.)

Episode 14

s2: Innocence, s3: Bad Girls, s4: Goodbye, Iowa; s5: Crush, s6: Older and Far Away, s7: First Date

BEST: Innocence. Who am I to deny its greatness? The scene between Angelus and Buffy in Angel's bedroom still makes me wince. Plus: Willow/Oz flirtage. Xander's speech about linoleum. And--rocket launcher coolness! (WORST: I'm one of Xander's biggest fans, and First Date makes me wish they'd killed him off in Season 5. Whatever his salary, ME didn't pay Nick Brendon nearly enough for this ep. Simply awful.

Episode 15
s2: Phases, s3: Consequences, s4: This Year's Girl, s5: I Was Made to Love You; s6: As You Were, s7: Get It Done

BEST: Consequences and This Year's Girl are dead even in my mind. It's just a matter of preference whether you like Faith's fall off the edge or the start of her long climb back up the mountain. TYG's Faith/Buffy dream sequence and Dushku's affecting performance as the more-alone-than-ever post-coma Faith tip the scales. (WORST: As You Were. Ye gods. What's more ludicrous-Spike as The Doctor, Buffy's addled behavior throughout the episode, or the robotic presence of Sam Finn? What was Doug Petrie smoking when he wrote this one?

Episode 16
s2: Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, s3: Dopplegangland, s4: Who Are You?, s5: The Body, s6: Hell's Bells, s7: Storyteller

BEST: The Body. Joss strips away the metaphors, and it works. (He should have stopped there.) A phenomenal, heart-rending script and even better direction. BBB, Doppelgangland, and Who Are You? would have slaughtered the competition in almost any other week. (WORST: Storyteller. I still like the ep, but in retrospect, I have to admit that Espenson winks at the audience one too many times.)

Episode 17

s2: Passion, s3: Enemies, s4: Superstar, s5: Forever, s6: Normal Again, s7: Lies My Parents Told Me

Normal Again - Speaking of heart-rending, Gellar's performance in Normal Again is almost painful to watch, but you can't stop watching. Buffy's physical and emotional exhaustion, her confusion, and then her calm, detached, murderous resolve-just incredible. Again, it depends on your tastes in drama: you could find the metafictional conceit either annoying or endlessly fascinating. I go with the latter. Sue me. (WORST: None. I would fiercely defend all of these episodes-yes, even LMPTM.)

Episode 18

s2: Killed By Death, s3: Earshot, s4: Where The Wild Things Are, s5: Intervention, s6: Entropy, s7: Dirty Girls

BEST: Earshot. (WORST: Where the Wild Things Are. With the exception of Giles as God of Acoustic Rock and the Spike/Anya moment of wistful nostalgia, WTWTA is a black hole of an ep.)

Episode 19

s2: I Only Have Eyes For You, s3: Choices, s4: New Moon Rising; s5: Tough Love, s6: Seeing Red, s7: Empty Spaces

BEST: Choices. Maybe the best Willow episode of the first three seasons and easily Alexis Denisof's best work during his tenure on BtVS. Harry Groener solidifies his deserved place as Best Big Bad. (HON. MENTION: New Moon Rising. (WORST: Empty Places. DZG completely loses the characters in the last five minutes. Shameful.)

Episode 20
s2: Go Fish, s3: The Prom, s4: The Yoko Factor, s5: Spiral; s6: Villains, s7: Touched

BEST: I'm a softie-The Prom. Yes, the hellhounds are ludicrous, but the excellent character moments throughout the episode outweigh the lameness factor. The prom itself is one of the series' great extended sequences, capped by Danny Strong's triumphant presentation of the Class Protector award. Tears all around. (HON. MENTION: Yoko Factor, for the Riley/Angel smackdown and the hilarious intra-Scooby fight. WORST: Touched. How can an episode about emotional connection leave me so cold?)

Episode 21
s2: Becoming 1, s3: Graduation 1, s4: Primeval, s5: Weight of the World; s6: Two to Go, s7: End of Days

BEST: Primevil. I can't help it. I love the full-scale, cinemascopic blood 'n' death battle that closes out the Initiative. And even though Fury stole it from Alan Moore, the uberBuffy is one of BtVS' coolest conceptual stunts. Plus: Maggie Walsh and Forrest as zombies! Hee! (WORST: Weight of the World.)

Episode 22
s2: Becoming 2, s3: Graduation 2, s4: Restless, s5: The Gift s6: Grave, s7: Chosen

BEST (tie): Restless and Becoming 2. Forgive me, there's no way I can choose. Becoming 2 may be the greatest episode in Buffy history, but Restless almost stands OUTSIDE Buffy history, commenting on the past, a harbinger of the future, haunting and timeless. (WORST: Chosen. All the fractured plotlines and slipshod characterizations come home to roost. If you think about it for a second, Buffy's plan is pure idiocy: twenty girls, super-powered or not, against thousands of Turok-Han? In the BtVS finale, SPIKE saves the world. With an amulet. Brought over from another series. In the previous episode. I was hung over from this ep for a month. DISHONORABLE MENTION: Grave. Alarmingly choppy for a season ender, and he yellow crayon speech never lives up to the hype.)

BEST:

S1 - 1
S2 - 5
S3 - 4
S4 - 5
S5 - 3
S6 - 3
S7 - 2

WORST:

S1 - 2
S2 - 2
S3 - 1
S4 - 1
S5 - 4
S6 - 4
S7 - 7

Wow. S7 takes a beating here. But...well-deserved.

Replies:

[> Well, because I love this game an unexpectedly large amount -- Tchaikovsky, 07:14:55 01/13/04 Tue

I'm going to preserve this thread by mentioning that I think I want to join you in your two wimp-outs. I've felt ghastly ever since condemning 'Normal Again' to the WORST category in Week 17, but Enemies, Passion, Superstar and Forever are just too good, and I like you, would defend 'Lies My Parents Told Me'. I am tempted to get rid of it, but that's only because it's a Fury episode, and every time I watch it I think it's better than it's given credit for.

And I'm also still having bi-hourly schizoid argments with myself about backing 'Restless' over 'Becoming'. I mean, I know for a certainty in my heart that 'Restless' is the best episode of the canon, but 'Becoming' is just unbeatable. It's the irresistible force against the immovable object.

My only bones of contention - your desecration of 'Amends' [beautiful and healing], and your choice of 'Primeval'. Although since you and OnM both pick it, it may be worthy of a re-watch.

TCH

[> [> UberBuffy, *Primeval* and *Chosen* -- OnM, 16:12:01 01/14/04 Wed

cjl's post brings up an interesting point (at least to me! ;-)

*** (Episode 21) BEST: Primevil. I can't help it. I love the full-scale, cinemascopic blood 'n' death battle that closes out the Initiative. And even though Fury stole it from Alan Moore, the uberBuffy is one of BtVS' coolest conceptual stunts. Plus: Maggie Walsh and Forrest as zombies!

Episode 22: (WORST: Chosen. All the fractured plotlines and slipshod characterizations come home to roost. If you think about it for a second, Buffy's plan is pure idiocy: twenty girls, super-powered or not, against thousands of Turok-Han? In the BtVS finale, SPIKE saves the world. With an amulet. Brought over from another series. In the previous episode. I was hung over from this ep for a month. ***

I've commented about this before, but want to do so again, well, because!

A fair number of viewers, including cjl, have expressed what I feel is a misunderstanding about Buffy's role in the final battle in Chosen. Spike does not save the world with the amulet, Buffy saves the world by doing exactly what she did in Primeval, except instead of acting as a mystical focal point for the combined spirits etc. of Xander, Willow and Giles, she combines the spirits of all of those fighting on her side, and then reflects that power back onto them. This follows as a parallel to the entire concept of distributing the Slayer power to all of the potentials in the world. "I have so much power I'm giving it away" (Same Time, Same Place)

The other mislead is the one presented way back in Lessons, namely "There's always a talisman!" I think many fans may have interpreted the 'talisman' as being Spike's amulet, but the real talisman is Buffy herself.

There is not only perfect consistancy in Buffy and crew being able to defeat the Turok-Han 'army', the single biggest previous foreshadowing of the event is the final battle with Adam in Primeval.

"You can never begin to understand our power."

Adam didn't, and the First Evil didn't either.

One final note-- it is also possible to extend the concept of the 'power' of the group effort to include that of all of the Slayers that came before Buffy. (I stated in my ep review back then that the Scythe contained the 'essence' of all the previous Slayers, and this is what Willow channeled in her spell.)

So I really think that the First Evil didn't have a chance, and all that was necessary was for Buffy to realize that it could be beaten, and the rest followed naturally.

But that's JMO, I could be wrong! ;-)

Nahhhh...

;-)

[> Re: The Best and Worst of Buffy (week by week) -- Pony, 07:26:48 01/13/04 Tue

I was going to do my choices but I think I agree with yours, if not all the comments (Amends snow 4 evah!).

Oh season 7, my wounds from you run deep...

[> Re: The Best and Worst of Buffy (week by week) -- Claudia, 08:40:51 01/13/04 Tue

[Episode 14

s2: Innocence, s3: Bad Girls, s4: Goodbye, Iowa; s5: Crush, s6: Older and Far Away, s7: First Date

BEST: Innocence. Who am I to deny its greatness? The scene between Angelus and Buffy in Angel's bedroom still makes me wince. Plus: Willow/Oz flirtage. Xander's speech about linoleum. And--rocket launcher coolness! (WORST: I'm one of Xander's biggest fans, and First Date makes me wish they'd killed him off in Season 5. Whatever his salary, ME didn't pay Nick Brendon nearly enough for this ep. Simply awful.]

I was disappointed by "Innocence". I thought the whole sequence of Angel losing his soul was rather anti-climatic and something of a disappointment, dramatically. ME could have done better.

My choice is a tie between "Bad Girls" and "First Date".

[> [> Wha? -- Pony (doing a triple take), 10:25:34 01/13/04 Tue

Really? I'm not sure anything on tv ever captured the fear of a girl that sleeping with her boyfriend is going to change him, that her friends are going to find out, that her actions are going to have negative consequences. It'd be nice to imagine that some day Innocence wouldn't have any resonance beyond good drama but right now I see it as one of the best explorations of the cultural baggage girls face when losing their virginity.

Also from a pure tv drama point I thought it was a great twist. Faced with the eternal problem of how to keep the tension alive between their two romantic leads, ME came up with a way to keep the stars forever crossed for Buffy and Angel. Back in my innocent unspoiled days it was a jaw-dropping moment to watch Angel bite the hooker and exhale her cigarette smoke. Nasty as all get out, it was also a complete left turn and really really cool.

[> [> [> Re: Wha? -- Claudia, 10:36:17 01/13/04 Tue

It may have been a great twist from a dramatic point of view, but I was disappointed by how this "great twist" was executed. It just seemed anti-climatic to me, especially since his change from Angel to Angelus did not happen before Buffy's eyes. Sorry, but I'm not a great fan of "Innocence", nor of Season 2, for that matter.

[> [> [> [> When did you start watching BtVS? -- dmw, 12:05:33 01/13/04 Tue

[> [> [> [> [> Re: When did you start watching BtVS? -- Claudia, 12:22:57 01/13/04 Tue

I started watching BtVS on the F/X Channel, about a year ago. Why?

[> [> [> [> [> [> I've got a theory -- dmw, 14:48:36 01/13/04 Tue

I've got a theory, that people who started watching after BtVS went to UPN have a different perception of the show than people who started watching BtVS at the beginning on WB and thus tend to prefer the later seasons. There's an obvious explanation of why people who started watching late would prefer the later episodes--people are most likely to have been pulled into watching the show by the episodes they watched early on. After all, if you didn't like the first few episodes you saw, you probably didn't continue watching the show. It's a generalization and obviously doesn't fit everybody, sort of like the classic division between late Heinlein and early Heinlein, but it does seem to fit a lot of people who post to BtVS forums.

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> Re: I've got a theory -- Jane, 17:40:25 01/13/04 Tue

I think you may have a point here. The first episode I ever watched of BtVS was "The Gift". Friends of mine were huge fans, and when I heard about the move to UPN for season 6, decided to see what the fuss was about. So, my first impression of Buffy was the season finale of season 5! Wow. I have trouble making a list of favourite and not so favourite episodes, because truly, I like all the seasons. I haven't had the really personal reactions to some episodes that others seem to; I understand that certain ones seem to touch raw nerves for some viewers, but not for me. Not quite sure why, life experiences perhaps? e.g. LMPTM, an episode I liked a lot. I may not be the sort who analyzes the show as deeply. Anyway, I find it fascinating that this show can trigger such strong and often contradictory reactions in people. Even the weaker episodes can be sources of debate.

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> Re: I've got a theory -- Ann, 18:53:41 01/13/04 Tue

I agree with your theory. I started watching Buffy in rerun on FX I think when Spike was in the wheelchair. I watched irregularily for some time because my kids were small and because the WB was not received where I live. Fox stations picked up some UPN episodes but not with a good quality signal and they cancelled several. Because it was hit and miss, I had a lot of catchup to do in continuity of story arcs. I am pretty sure I have seen all of them now. I can't pick a favorite season. I see such beauty in all of them. Even the clunker episodes like "Bad Beer" are hilarious.

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> Re: I've got a theory -- s'kat, 20:56:53 01/13/04 Tue

It's a generalization and obviously doesn't fit everybody, sort of like the classic division between late Heinlein and early Heinlein, but it does seem to fit a lot of people who post to BtVS forums.

Glad you admitted that it was generalization. ;-)

Honestly? I think it's more than that. I know people who didn't start watching the show until Once More With Feeling who are far more obsessed than long time viewers and despised Season 7 and prefer earlier seasons. Quite a few actually. While I know people who started in 1997 and prefer later seasons. Although when you started watching plays a role in it - if for instance you already knew the whole Angelus turns evil arc - you are going to miss the flip in Innocence. Being spoiled - you may bring your own set of preconceptions. Especially if you were told it was fantastic. Most of us who saw Innocence the first round, were unspoiled for it, it was a surprise. Actually at the time I first saw it - I was bored silly with the B/A romance and the show...it was getting a little formulaic for me and I was considering switching to something else, then I saw Innocence and was blown away. That I hadn't seen done on TV before, not really. Suddenly I realized that I had no idea what the show was going to do next and became obsessed with it - started taping, started hunting info online - nothing major, just one or two websites and ACIN.
I'm a whiz at predicting story-arcs and get bored very easily - so when a tv show surprises me, I take notice. It surprised me. But I was unspoiled at the time and the episode had never aired before. No one told me it was great, and I certainly wasn't expecting it to be. My expectations were very low.

Another thing that informs how we react to something is what we are currently going through and who we are. You can't figure this out from just reading a few posts online.
But, someone who has kids may react to a show differently than someone who is single. Someone who is 22 is likely to see things differently than someone who is 40. Someone who lives in a country town in England will most likely reacte differently than someone who lives in NYC. Someone who is employed and very busy and making lots of money may look at it completely differently than someone unemployed and struggling.

What is incredibly interesting is when our opinions actually coincide. For instance I was far more fascinated by the fact the you and I agreed on the number of episodes that we did or for that matter I agreed with a good portion of KdS' choices, that surprised and interested me. The fact that we agree on the things we do is almost magical - and makes me wonder what universal theme the writers magically hit to make this happen - b/c that is what sells the show. It's when you hit a theme or idea or character so it appeals to a wide diverse audience, one that does not appear to have much in common outside of that.

So instead of trying to figure out why one poster dislikes Innocence, maybe we should be asking ourselves why does 80% of the people posting pick Innocence as amazing? What happened in that episode that made us think - wait? That's cool! And in contrast, what was it about LMPTM that made so many people pick it as a worst choice. The universal element. It's the ingredient some people are paid to spend years attempting to figure out.

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Concurrence of taste -- Sophist, 07:59:36 01/14/04 Wed

What is incredibly interesting is when our opinions actually coincide. For instance I was far more fascinated by the fact the you and I agreed on the number of episodes that we did or for that matter I agreed with a good portion of KdS' choices, that surprised and interested me. The fact that we agree on the things we do is almost magical - and makes me wonder what universal theme the writers magically hit to make this happen - b/c that is what sells the show. It's when you hit a theme or idea or character so it appeals to a wide diverse audience, one that does not appear to have much in common outside of that.

I was also impressed by how much agreement there was on the good and bad episodes. Sure, everyone had some quirks, but I felt there was surprisingly strong general agreement on most episodes. I'm sure there's a selection bias here, but there may also be some themes which resonate strongly with BtVS viewers.

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Re: I've got a theory -- Ames, 08:16:00 01/14/04 Wed

I think there's some truth to both theories floated here, i.e. that your preference depends somewhat on when you started watching, and somewhat on your personal life experience.

I started watching casually in season 1, and I saw most of the eps haphazardly over the years, but I didn't actually realize I had become a serious fan until the series ended and I was disappointed that there wasn't going to be any more. I like all the seasons for different reasons. It would feel wrong to me to pick one favorite. I went through high school and university, so I appreciate the trials of both the high school years and season 4 at UCS. I have kids and a house now, and I have to support my family in the working world, so I understand something of what Buffy went through in season 6. I'm still waiting for all hell to break loose so that I'll appreciate season 7 more, but I liked it anyway. :-)

I often think when I read comments from people who just "didn't get" season 4 that they probably never went to college. Didn't get season 5? - never dealt with family issues. Didn't get season 6? - haven't had to deal with those life issues yet. Season 7? - no vampire ex or hell spawn to deal with - haven't been divorced yet (kidding!).

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> I'd like to test that theory.....<g> -- Rufus, 21:35:21 01/13/04 Tue

I've been with the show since ep. one and I prefer the later seasons, even the ones at UPN. I've been rewatching season seven and like it better on rewatching.

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> Re: I've got a theory -- Claudia, 11:10:51 01/14/04 Wed

[I've got a theory, that people who started watching after BtVS went to UPN have a different perception of the show than people who started watching BtVS at the beginning on WB and thus tend to prefer the later seasons. There's an obvious explanation of why people who started watching late would prefer the later episodes--people are most likely to have been pulled into watching the show by the episodes they watched early on. After all, if you didn't like the first few episodes you saw, you probably didn't continue watching the show. It's a generalization and obviously doesn't fit everybody, sort of like the classic division between late Heinlein and early Heinlein, but it does seem to fit a lot of people who post to BtVS forums.]

I don't know if this completely works. The first episodes I saw were reruns of the early seasons, before I started watching the UPN episodes. And my first UPN episode was "Potential". Besides, Season 3 is one my favorite seasons.

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Re: I've got a theory -- DEN, 17:58:22 01/14/04 Wed

There are really two tectonic shifts that help shape viewer reaction. One is the network transition discussed above. The other is the internal shift away from the high school metaphor of the first three seasons. Without disputing its necessity (if nothing else, the leads were getting far too old-looking to play high school students convincingly. Any doubters can check out AH in AMERICAN PIE I!), a case can be made that the series spent the next four years seeking an equivalent focus, with corresponding effect on story lines and arcs.

[> Fun game, can I play? -- RJA, 13:25:47 01/13/04 Tue

And without waiting for an answer...

Episode 1
1: Welcome to the Hellmouth, s2: When She Was Bad, s3: Anne, s4: The Freshman, s5: Buffy vs. Dracula, s6 Bargaining Part I, s7: Lessons

BEST: When She Was Bad. I always disregared this episode until I went back and watched it and realised how fascinating and moving it was. Bargaining pt 1 and WTTH come close, but fall down due to guilt by association for their follow up episodes which just lessen both somehow.

WORST: So many to chose from. On the whole, BtVS season openers seem to be characterised by some killer scenes (I'm Buffy the Vampire Slayer... and you are?; The Bander Bronze chat; the BB countdown) and an awful lot of dross surrounding it. Anne probably clinches it. There is some parts I love about it, but the story is as drab and depressing as its subjects.

Episode 2
s1: The Harvest, s2: Some Assembly Required, s3: Dead Man's Party, s4: Living Conditions, s5: Real Me, s6: Bargaining 2, s7: Beneath You

BEST: Living Conditions. Because its funny. Plus, I think I transferred a lot seeing as it aired in my first year of college.

WORST: No episodes I hate, but none I really love either, although I have a soft spot for both DMP and SAR. and the Dawn/Buffy scenes and the Buffybot elevates Bargaining pt 2. While Beneath You always seems like the Emperor's New Clothes to me, Harvest pips it to the post by having absolutely nothing I remember in it.

Episode 3
s1: The Witch, s2: School Hard, s3: Faith, Hope and Trick, s4: The Harsh Light of Day, s5: The Replacement, s6: AfterLife, s7: Same Time, Same Place

BEST: Faith, Hope and Trick. What more can I say, it has Faith... Afterlife runs close though. WORST: The Witch. For, like many other worst episodes, its not bad per se, just forgettable, the ultimate crime.

Episode 4
s1: Teacher's Pet, s2: Inca Mummy Girl, s3: Beauty and the Beasts, s4: Fear, Itself, s5: Out of my Mind s6: Flooded, s7: Help

BEST: I think that Help is probably the best written of the bunch, but its so un-Buffy like that I cant rank it first. So I vote for Beauty and The Beasts. Til I rewatched it one drunken maudlin night, and while I still find the underlying message dubious it had a power that grabbed me, as many of Noxon's episodes do. WORST: Teacher's Pet. The worst episode ever - made me stop watching the show for a good few months.

Episode 5
s1: Never Kill a Boy on the First Date, s2: Reptile Boy, s3: Homecoming; s4: Beer Bad, s5: No Place Like Home, s6: Life Serial, s7: Selfless

BEST: Selfless. Class, although NPLH and Life Serial are snapping at its heels. WORST: Reptile Boy. 'nuff said.

Episode 6
s1: The Pack, s2: Halloween, s3: Band Candy, s4: Wild at Heart; s5: Family, s6: All the Way, s7: Him

BEST: Him. Again, because its funny. And that counts for a lot with me. WORST: Family. Sappy, oversentimental and I cant forgive the bluff of Tara's secret.

Episode 7
s1: Angel, s2: Lie to Me, s3: Revelations s4: The Initiative, s5: Fool For Love, s6: Once More, With Feeling, s7: Conversations With Dead People

BEST: So many to chose from, but most likely Fool For Love because it was so unexpected, whereas OMWF had to be great. And surprise makes it all the sweeter. One of my favourite episodes from one of my favourite seasons, and probably the most effective use of flashback ever. WORST: The Initiative. Not a bad episode, and I love the Xarmony fight, but cant make the grade compared to so many greats (yeh I know about Revelations, but it has Faith)

Episode 8
s1: I Robot, You Jane , s2: The Dark Age, s3: Lovers' Walk; s4: Pangs, s5: Shadow, s6: Tabula Rasa, s7: Sleeper

BEST: Lover's Walk. Tabula Rasa is too schizophrenic to me. I like my all out comedy not to be bookended with really depressing plotpoints. WORST: I Robot You Jane.

Episode 9
s1: The Puppet Show, s2: What's My Line 1, s3: The Wish, s4: Something Blue, s5: Listening to Fear, s6: Smashed, s7: Never Leave Me

BEST: The Wish - never ceases to amaze me. WORST: Listening to Fear - while I love season five, the depresso mini-arc of Joyce's illness didn't attract me at all.

Episode 10
s1: Nightmares ,s2: What's My Line 2, s3: Amends, s4: Hush; s5: Into The Woods, s6: Wrecked, s7: Bring on the Night

BEST: Hush. Nothing I can say hasn't been said before. WORST: Into The Woods. Not as bad as it could have been, but a Biley relationship special doesn't appeal to me. Plus I really really like all the other episodes listed here.

Episode 11
s1: Out of Sight, Out of Mind, s2: Ted, s3: Gingerbread; s4: Doomed, s5: Triangle, s6: Gone, s7: Showtime

BEST: Triangle. Because its both funny and not the other episodes. WORST: Close call, but probably Ted, mainly because of the subject matter.

Episode 12
s1: Prophecy Girl, s2: Bad Eggs, s3: Helpless, s4: A New Man; s5: Checkpoint, s6: Doublemeat Palace, s7: Potential

BEST: Prophecy Girl. Has the advantage of being a Joss season close, which is just cheating. WORST: Potential redeems itself in the last scene, so Bad Eggs.

Episode 13
s2: Surprise, s3: The Zeppo, s4: The I in Team, s5: Blood Ties; s6: Dead Things, s7: The Killer in Me

BEST: Dead Things. One of the finest episodes ever. WORST: Blood Ties. Not a bad episode, but I prefer the others.

Episode 14

s2: Innocence, s3: Bad Girls, s4: Goodbye, Iowa; s5: Crush, s6: Older and Far Away, s7: First Date

BEST: Innocence. This was responsible for my ongoing obsession with the show, so I have to rank it first. Best Buffy episode ever? Almost. WORST: First Date because it just annoyed me. OAFA came close though.

Episode 15
s2: Phases, s3: Consequences, s4: This Year's Girl, s5: I Was Made to Love You; s6: As You Were, s7: Get It Done

BEST: This Year's Girl - Faith, what more can I say. Although Get It Done follows very closely behind, because I think it's a very well constructed, intelligent episode. WORST: As You Were, although I liked it to begin with since I first assumed it was some fantasy from the depths of Buffy's depressed mind.

Episode 16
s2: Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, s3: Dopplegangland, s4: Who Are You?, s5: The Body, s6: Hell's Bells, s7: Storyteller

BEST: The Body. Not the one I rewatch the most (that would be Who Are You?), but its impossible not to rank it first. WORST: Storyteller. Which is a good episode, but I rank it worst for the same reasons as cjl - the nods to the audience. I didn't catch onto why that annoyed me at first, but really,

Episode 17

s2: Passion, s3: Enemies, s4: Superstar, s5: Forever, s6: Normal Again, s7: Lies My Parents Told Me

BEST: Normal Again, for the reasons stated. WORST: Lies My Parents Told Me. A lot of issues I have with this, all still unresolved.

Episode 18

s2: Killed By Death, s3: Earshot, s4: Where The Wild Things Are, s5: Intervention, s6: Entropy, s7: Dirty Girls

BEST: Entropy (although tomorrow it could be Intervention). Because I don't think there has been a better episode of any show about the aftermath of relationship break down. Messy, tender, touching, painful, this covers all bases. Great stuff. WORST: WTWTA, mainly for the subject matter as anything else.

Episode 19

s2: I Only Have Eyes For You, s3: Choices, s4: New Moon Rising; s5: Tough Love, s6: Seeing Red, s7: Empty Spaces

BEST: I Only Have Eyes For You - one of the great Bangel episodes without really being Bangel. Buffy being the anguished killer and Angelus the victim was a masterful and touching twist. WORST: Empty Spaces, because it could have been so much more.

Episode 20
s2: Go Fish, s3: The Prom, s4: The Yoko Factor, s5: Spiral; s6: Villains, s7: Touched

BEST: Villains. The best episode of the DMW arc, and some really great acting from all concerned here. WORST: Go Fish - and it even had Xander in a speedo.

Episode 21
s2: Becoming 1, s3: Graduation 1, s4: Primeval, s5: Weight of the World; s6: Two to Go, s7: End of Days

BEST: Graduation 1.My favourite season closer, even if technically not the best. My TV equivalent to comfort food. WORST: WOTW, and I even like this.

Episode 22
s2: Becoming 2, s3: Graduation 2, s4: Restless, s5: The Gift s6: Grave, s7: Chosen

BEST: Restless. The Best Episode Of Buffy. Ever. Completely mesmerising and obsessing stuff. The first time I saw it I rewatched it three times in a row. Still grips me. WORST: Grave, the only season finale I don't love. If Joss had written this I think it could have turned around season's six reputation. Ending on a high counts for a lot.

BEST:

S1 - 1
S2 - 3
S3 - 5
S4 - 4
S5 - 3
S6 - 5
S7 - 1

WORST:

S1 - 4
S2 - 4
S3 - 1
S4 - 2
S5 - 5
S6 - 2
S7 - 4

Interesting that my second favourite season (5) has the most worst episodes and not very many best.

[> [> Re: Fun game, can I play? -- Claudia, 14:25:40 01/13/04 Tue

Episode 1
1: Welcome to the Hellmouth, s2: When She Was Bad, s3: Anne, s4: The Freshman, s5: Buffy vs. Dracula, s6 Bargaining Part I, s7: Lessons

BEST: Welcome to the Hellmouth. Good beginning of the series.

WORST: Anne. Didn't really appeal to me.

Episode 2
s1: The Harvest, s2: Some Assembly Required, s3: Dead Man's Party, s4: Living Conditions, s5: Real Me, s6: Bargaining 2, s7: Beneath You

BEST: Beneath You. Brilliant, brilliant! Especially James Marsters and Sarah Michelle Geller's performances. That last scene in the church will be considered one of BtVS's finest moments.

WORST: Bargaining, Part 2. Didn't mesh very well with Part 1. And the last 15 minutes seemed to drag.

Episode 3
s1: The Witch, s2: School Hard, s3: Faith, Hope and Trick, s4: The Harsh Light of Day, s5: The Replacement, s6: AfterLife, s7: Same Time, Same Place

BEST: Afterlife. Excellent and haunting episode.

WORST: No choice.

Episode 4
s1: Teacher's Pet, s2: Inca Mummy Girl, s3: Beauty and the Beasts, s4: Fear, Itself, s5: Out of my Mind s6: Flooded, s7: Help

BEST: Out of My Mind. Excellent episode with a great surprise ending.

WORST: Teacher's Pet. Very unimpressive. And cliched.

Episode 5
s1: Never Kill a Boy on the First Date, s2: Reptile Boy, s3: Homecoming; s4: Beer Bad, s5: No Place Like Home, s6: Life Serial, s7: Selfless

BEST: Selfless. Superb Anya episode.

WORST: Reptile Boy. Ugh.

Episode 6
s1: The Pack, s2: Halloween, s3: Band Candy, s4: Wild at Heart; s5: Family, s6: All the Way, s7: Him

BEST: Him. Very funny episode. Band Candy is a close second.

WORST: Family. I like Tara, but . . . not a good episode.

Episode 7
s1: Angel, s2: Lie to Me, s3: Revelations s4: The Initiative, s5: Fool For Love, s6: Once More, With Feeling, s7: Conversations With Dead People

BEST: Great category, but my choice is Fool For Love, my all time favorite BtVS episode. Superb, brilliant, with a dazzling performance

WORST: Once More, With Feeling. Pretty good, but I wasn't a fan of the musical numbers. Could have done without them.

Episode 8
s1: I Robot, You Jane , s2: The Dark Age, s3: Lovers' Walk; s4: Pangs, s5: Shadow, s6: Tabula Rasa, s7: Sleeper

BEST: Sleeper. I really enjoyed this one.

WORST: I Robot You Jane. Really dumb episode.

Episode 9
s1: The Puppet Show, s2: What's My Line 1, s3: The Wish, s4: Something Blue, s5: Listening to Fear, s6: Smashed, s7: Never Leave Me

BEST: Something Blue - Brilliantly funny. I loved i

WORST: What's My Line, Part 1. I found it boring and a bit of a disappointment.

Episode 10
s1: Nightmares ,s2: What's My Line 2, s3: Amends, s4: Hush; s5: Into The Woods, s6: Wrecked, s7: Bring on the Night

BEST: Hush. Among the best of BtVS episodes. Classic.

WORST: Bring on the Night. Bring on the yawn is more like it. Also didn't care for What's My Line, Part 2.

Episode 11
s1: Out of Sight, Out of Mind, s2: Ted, s3: Gingerbread; s4: Doomed, s5: Triangle, s6: Gone, s7: Showtime

BEST: Triangle. A very funny episode.

WORST: Gingerbread. Rather dumb and cliched.

Episode 12
s1: Prophecy Girl, s2: Bad Eggs, s3: Helpless, s4: A New Man; s5: Checkpoint, s6: Doublemeat Palace, s7: Potential

BEST: Prophecy Girl. Best of S1.

WORST: Doublemeat Palace. Worthy of an upchuck. My least favorite BtVS episode of all time.

Episode 13
s2: Surprise, s3: The Zeppo, s4: The I in Team, s5: Blood Ties; s6: Dead Things, s7: The Killer in Me

BEST: Dead Things. Superb episode.

WORST: Surprise. Bit of a letdown, after the word-of-mouth.

Episode 14

s2: Innocence, s3: Bad Girls, s4: Goodbye, Iowa; s5: Crush, s6: Older and Far Away, s7: First Date

BEST: First Date. Despite a shaky beginning, I really enjoyed it.

WORST: Innocence. Ditto on Surprise. Rather anti-climatic, although the episode's finale almost saves it.

Episode 15
s2: Phases, s3: Consequences, s4: This Year's Girl, s5: I Was Made to Love You; s6: As You Were, s7: Get It Done

BEST: Tie between This Year's Girl & Get It Done. Couldn't decide.

WORST: As You Were. I'm embarrassed that Doug Petrie even penned this episode.

Episode 16
s2: Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, s3: Dopplegangland, s4: Who Are You?, s5: The Body, s6: Hell's Bells, s7: Storyteller

BEST: Hell's Bells. Superb Xander/Anya episode.

WORST: No choice. Liked all of them.

Episode 17

s2: Passion, s3: Enemies, s4: Superstar, s5: Forever, s6: Normal Again, s7: Lies My Parents Told Me

BEST: Lies My Parents Told Me. Brilliantly ambiguous. Controversial. I LOVED it! Passions is a close second.

WORST: Superstar. Waste of my time.

Episode 18

s2: Killed By Death, s3: Earshot, s4: Where The Wild Things Are, s5: Intervention, s6: Entropy, s7: Dirty Girls

BEST: Entropy. Emotional and brilliant. A forerunner to the rest of the season's disasters.

WORST: Where the Wild Things Are. Such an infantile episode.

Episode 19

s2: I Only Have Eyes For You, s3: Choices, s4: New Moon Rising; s5: Tough Love, s6: Seeing Red, s7: Empty Spaces

BEST: I Only Have Eyes For You. Athough I hate Bangel, I was very impressed by this episode. Superb.

WORST: New Moon Rising. Bored now. Not an Oz fan.

Episode 20
s2: Go Fish, s3: The Prom, s4: The Yoko Factor, s5: Spiral; s6: Villains, s7: Touched

BEST: Spiral. Despite the ridiculous sight of the Scoobies being chased by the Knights, I was very drawn into this episode.

WORST: Go Fish. Up there with Doublemeat Palace.

Episode 21
s2: Becoming 1, s3: Graduation 1, s4: Primeval, s5: Weight of the World; s6: Two to Go, s7: End of Days

BEST: Primeval. Good solid episode, featuring showdown between Adam and Uber Slayer Buffy.

WORST: Becoming, Part 1. So many plot holes, it was beginning to resemble Swiss cheese.

Episode 22
s2: Becoming 2, s3: Graduation 2, s4: Restless, s5: The Gift s6: Grave, s7: Chosen

BEST: The Gift. Brilliant, with probably the most haunting moment in the series' history.

WORST: Grave. It just got boring. Sorry.

[> [> Re: Me too -- Ames, 16:02:37 01/13/04 Tue

Thanks for listing everything so I don't have to look it up. That motivates me to play too!

Episode 1
1: Welcome to the Hellmouth, s2: When She Was Bad, s3: Anne, s4: The Freshman, s5: Buffy vs. Dracula, s6 Bargaining Part I, s7: Lessons

BEST: I have to go with Anne here, in a complete reversal of some other opinions. Sorry, I just thought Anne worked really well, setting up that single great scene "I'm BtVS, and you are...?". I liked the humour in The Freshman, and how the twist of Dawn's appearance was tacked on at the end of B vs. D., and WTTH has some nostalgic value as the series opener, but it's Anne all the way for me.

WORST: I guess I'd say Lessons. While not really bad, it was more of a waste of time than any of the others, if such a thing can be said about any ep of BtVS.

Episode 2
s1: The Harvest, s2: Some Assembly Required, s3: Dead Man's Party, s4: Living Conditions, s5: Real Me, s6: Bargaining 2, s7: Beneath You

BEST: This is a tough one. It's between Living Conditions, which I thought was hilarious (having lived with college roommates) , and Bargaining 2. I guess I'll go with Living Conditions, because part of the good stuff associated with Bargaining 2 was actually split with After Life.

WORST: SAR. Cheesy.

Episode 3
s1: The Witch, s2: School Hard, s3: Faith, Hope and Trick, s4: The Harsh Light of Day, s5: The Replacement, s6: AfterLife, s7: Same Time, Same Place

BEST: Ok, this is tough too. For me it's STSP, which was a fabulous twist, well played. FH&T and AfterLife are close though.

WORST: THLoD - I thought Spike was idiotic in this one. Come on! He gets the fabulous Gem of Amara and then loses it immediately to Buffy in his first fight? The Replacement wasn't too exciting either.

Episode 4
s1: Teacher's Pet, s2: Inca Mummy Girl, s3: Beauty and the Beasts, s4: Fear, Itself, s5: Out of my Mind s6: Flooded, s7: Help

BEST: Looks like this was a weak week :-). I'll go with Fear, Itself as most Buffy-like.

WORST: Teacher's Pet. What can I say? First season and all.

Episode 5
s1: Never Kill a Boy on the First Date, s2: Reptile Boy, s3: Homecoming; s4: Beer Bad, s5: No Place Like Home, s6: Life Serial, s7: Selfless

BEST: Selfless, I guess. But I have a weak spot for NkaBotFD, the first episode I ever saw. Also sort of like Reptile Boy. And Homecoming was fun.

WORST: I guess I'll put Beer Bad at the bottom, but I don't hate it like some people do.

Episode 6
s1: The Pack, s2: Halloween, s3: Band Candy, s4: Wild at Heart; s5: Family, s6: All the Way, s7: Him

BEST: Hmmm, a strong week, with some great humour. I'll go with Band Candy for the classic Season 3 stuff, but Him and Halloween are pretty good.

WORST: The Pack. More season 1 limitations.

Episode 7
s1: Angel, s2: Lie to Me, s3: Revelations s4: The Initiative, s5: Fool For Love, s6: Once More, With Feeling, s7: Conversations With Dead People

BEST: Here's where this rating scheme breaks down. Too much wealth in one week. First, OMWF - in a class by itself. It would be unfair to count it here. The Initiative - hilarious, one of the funniest episodes ever. Fool For Love - a great episode for both Spike and the Slayer. CWDP - a season 7 classic. OMWF aside, I guess I'll go with The Initiative, for the humour.

WORST: There isn't really a "worst" in this week. I guess the weakest of a strong set is Angel, just because a few elements of the show were still immature in this S1 ep.

Episode 8
s1: I Robot, You Jane , s2: The Dark Age, s3: Lovers' Walk; s4: Pangs, s5: Shadow, s6: Tabula Rasa, s7: Sleeper

BEST: Tabula Rasa. A classic. Has it all. But LW, Shadow and Sleeper were all good.

WORST: I Robot You Jane. This was a close as BtVS got to a bad episode.

Episode 9
s1: The Puppet Show, s2: What's My Line 1, s3: The Wish, s4: Something Blue, s5: Listening to Fear, s6: Smashed, s7: Never Leave Me

BEST: The Wish - another classic among a strong group.

WORST: Listening to Fear is the weakest of a good group.

Episode 10
s1: Nightmares ,s2: What's My Line 2, s3: Amends, s4: Hush; s5: Into The Woods, s6: Wrecked, s7: Bring on the Night

BEST: Hush stands above a another strong group.

WORST: I guess I'll go with Into The Woods as a little worse than Wrecked.

Episode 11
s1: Out of Sight, Out of Mind, s2: Ted, s3: Gingerbread; s4: Doomed, s5: Triangle, s6: Gone, s7: Showtime

BEST: Gone. Don't know why exactly - it just seemed to have the classic elements of a BtVS episode.

WORST: OOS,OOM. That season 1 feel again. Ted dealt with some serious issues.

Episode 12
s1: Prophecy Girl, s2: Bad Eggs, s3: Helpless, s4: A New Man; s5: Checkpoint, s6: Doublemeat Palace, s7: Potential

BEST: Prophecy Girl. But I really enjoyed A New Man and Doublemeat Palace for the humour.

WORST: Bad Eggs. Nothing exciting about it.

Episode 13
s2: Surprise, s3: The Zeppo, s4: The I in Team, s5: Blood Ties; s6: Dead Things, s7: The Killer in Me

BEST: Dead Things by a nose. The concept of The Zeppo was interesting. I liked The I in Team and Blood Ties.
WORST: The Killer in Me. Just didn't click with me.

Episode 14

s2: Innocence, s3: Bad Girls, s4: Goodbye, Iowa; s5: Crush, s6: Older and Far Away, s7: First Date

BEST: Innocence stands out as a classic episode. Bad Girls and OaFA were ok.

WORST: First Date, I guess. Eh, didn't do much for me.

Episode 15
s2: Phases, s3: Consequences, s4: This Year's Girl, s5: I Was Made to Love You; s6: As You Were, s7: Get It Done

BEST: Whew, tough one. This Year's Girl, I guess. Consequences and Get it Done were ok. As You Were was a bit strange in tone, but it hit some painfully emotional moments.

WORST: oh, Phases I guess.

Episode 16
s2: Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, s3: Doppelgangland, s4: Who Are You?, s5: The Body, s6: Hell's Bells, s7: Storyteller

BEST: As with OMWF, unfair to include the Body. Of the rest, I guess it's Doppelgangland, but there's no weak episodes here.

WORST: Hmmm. Most difficult choice yet. I guess it's Storyteller, which wasn't great except for the ending.

Episode 17

s2: Passion, s3: Enemies, s4: Superstar, s5: Forever, s6: Normal Again, s7: Lies My Parents Told Me

BEST: Normal Again. Brilliant and disturbing - insane killer Buffy chasing terrified Dawn through the house was one of the most chilling moments of BtVS.

WORST: Forever, but honestly the ending redeemed it.

Episode 18

s2: Killed By Death, s3: Earshot, s4: Where The Wild Things Are, s5: Intervention, s6: Entropy, s7: Dirty Girls

BEST: Earshot. Great season 3 feel.

WORST: WTWTA, usual reasons.

Episode 19

s2: I Only Have Eyes For You, s3: Choices, s4: New Moon Rising; s5: Tough Love, s6: Seeing Red, s7: Empty Spaces

BEST: A surprisingly weak bunch for ep 19, leading up to the big bang season enders I guess. I don't think IOHEFY is as great as most people seem to think. Could be Choices, but I'm going to break from the pack and go with Empty Spaces.

WORST: New Moon Rising. Didn't need to see Oz again.

Episode 20
s2: Go Fish, s3: The Prom, s4: The Yoko Factor, s5: Spiral; s6: Villains, s7: Touched

BEST: The Prom - who can forget Buffy and Angel's last dance to that great rendition of Wild Horses by The Sundays.

WORST: Go Fish - usual reasons.

Episode 21
s2: Becoming 1, s3: Graduation 1, s4: Primeval, s5: Weight of the World; s6: Two to Go, s7: End of Days

BEST: Graduation 1 out of a fairly strong bunch. The Buffy-Faith fight.

WORST: Tough choice. TTG.

Episode 22
s2: Becoming 2, s3: Graduation 2, s4: Restless, s5: The Gift s6: Grave, s7: Chosen

BEST: Well, it's a bit ridiculous to pick a best from this bunch. I have to exclude Restless, for the same reasons as OMWF and The Body. I'll go with The Gift.

WORST: Grave. Probably the weakest season ender.

Keeping in mind that I excluded OMWF, The Body, and Restless as ridiculous to rate on the same scale:

S1 - 1 best, 5 worst
S2 - 1 best, 4 worst
S3 - 7 best, no worst
S4 - 5 best, 4 worst
S5 - 1 best, 3 worst
S6 - 4 best, 2 worst
S7 - 3 best, 4 worst

Not surprising. I don't dislike S1 and S2, but no question that these early seasons had the weakest episodes. S3 on the other hand has few weaknesses.

S4, S6, and S7 have great highs and lows, as reflected in their scores. S5 was more consistent in tone - I liked the overall season story arc with the fabulous ending in The Gift, but few individual episodes stood out.

[> Re: The Best and Worst of Buffy (week by week) -- Ike, 14:11:39 01/13/04 Tue

Here are my choices for WORST of each week.

( I already posted my choices for BEST of each week of BtVS. It's at: http://www.voy.com/14567/1/32.html
Maybe I'll do a best of "Angel" week by week soon too.)

Episode 1
1: Welcome to the Hellmouth, s2: When She Was Bad, s3: Anne, s4: The Freshman, s5: Buffy vs. Dracula, s6 Bargaining Part I, s7: Lessons

WORST: "Buffy Vs. Dracula"

In tone, the closest ep. to the awful 1992 theatrical movie. Way, way way way way too campy. Still, not one of the 20 worst of the series. It has its moments.

Episode 2
s1: The Harvest, s2: Some Assembly Required, s3: Dead Man's Party, s4: Living Conditions, s5: Real Me, s6: Bargaining 2, s7: Beneath You

WORST: "Dead Man's Party"

An easy choice for me. I utterly loathed this episode. All of the characters acted like idiots. Everyone seemed off. Why would any of the Scoobs let that party get so out-of-hand? They're not the types to let that happen, not even Oz, particularly not in that situation. Why didn't anybody try to understand Buffy's POV, or ask her why she bailed? Did any other ep. have such a threadbare excuse for a plot? Of course, I guess I can't really blame the writer for all of the problems here--she was stuck with the unenviable task of putting the pieces back together and basically pressing the big Reset Button to get Buffy back in Sunnydale and among her friends after everything was shattered at the end of "Becoming Part II."

Episode 3
s1: The Witch, s2: School Hard, s3: Faith, Hope and Trick, s4: The Harsh Light of Day, s5: The Replacement, s6: AfterLife, s7: Same Time, Same Place

WORST: "Same Time Same Place"

Not a terrible episode, but the competition is strong. And it's slow-moving and lacks humor. The premise is neat, but the execution is draggy.

Episode 4
s1: Teacher's Pet, s2: Inca Mummy Girl, s3: Beauty and the Beasts, s4: Fear, Itself, s5: Out of my Mind s6: Flooded, s7: Help

WORST: "Beauty and the Beasts" (Original working title, and more appropriate to the script's mostly hateful attitude towards males: "All Men Are Beasts")

There are lots of atrocious episodes in week four, including the awful awful "Out of My Mind" and the boring boring "Help," but season three's Marti Noxon abomination takes the cake. Pure drivel; easily one of the five worst episodes of the entire series. Gee, let's introduce an interesting counselor character, then abruptly kill him! Let's make Xander a complete dunce who falls asleep while on Oz-wolf duty! Let's shoot fish in a barrel by tackling abusive relationships (without an interesting metaphor)! Let's quickly rush Angel back into coherence and intelligence, eliminating any dramatic impact of his time in a Hell dimension! Even the BBC dislikes this episode; their review calls it "ham-fisted" and "a rather limp who-dunit." But David Hines' brilliant review is best at ripping apart this travesty:
http://www.blueshiftstudios.com/reviews/buffy/304Beasts.shtml

Episode 5
s1: Never Kill a Boy on the First Date, s2: Reptile Boy, s3: Homecoming; s4: Beer Bad, s5: No Place Like Home, s6: Life Serial, s7: Selfless

WORST: "Beer Bad"

I agree with whoever said that this was an easy choice.

Episode 6
s1: The Pack, s2: Halloween, s3: Band Candy, s4: Wild at Heart; s5: Family, s6: All the Way, s7: Him

WORST: "All the Way"

Boring and severely pointless, with way too much Dawn, but "Family" is a close runner-up. I'm surprised that a lot of other posters picked "Family" as the *best* sixth episode. I think Whedon really let us down with that one. Very clumsy and insipid.

Again, David Hines sums it up best here (I don't like all his review--I liked the Glory arc and he didn't, for instance--but he's much more eloquent than I could be) (scroll down for "Family"):
http://www.blueshiftstudios.com/reviews/buffy/Midseason5.shtml

Episode 7
s1: Angel, s2: Lie to Me, s3: Revelations s4: The Initiative, s5: Fool For Love, s6: Once More, With Feeling, s7: Conversations With Dead People

WORST: Um... uh... "The Initiative"

All the seventh eps. are good but "The Initiative" is the weakest due to the heavy dosage of Cardboard Soldier Boy, a.k.a. Chunk Sidebeef. I like the Spike scenes, though. At the time, he was still novel enough that I really enjoyed seeing the writers use an ingenious plot device--the chip--in order to keep Spike around and make Marsters could become a regular. Later, they kinda ran Spike into the ground and made him Buffy's bitch, but oh well.

Episode 8
s1: I Robot, You Jane , s2: The Dark Age, s3: Lovers' Walk
s4: Pangs, s5: Shadow, s6: Tabula Rasa, s7: Sleeper

Worst: Shadow.

I don't dislike "Shadow" as much as many other viewers. A lot of people bust on Glory's snake for being a bad special effect, but I guess I'm oblivious to that because I'm a Doctor Who fan, and compared against all of the BBC's cheapo FX (even in 1989 at the end of the series), everything from Buffy looks 100% convincing. Yes, even the snake in this episode.

However, "Shadow" is basically treading water. It doesn't go anywhere, and it doesn't have a point. Why not an episode about Giles or Willow instead? But no, the talents of the long-running supporting characters are wasted yet again. Also, Dawn starts to get a little annoying.

Episode 9
s1: The Puppet Show, s2: What's My Line 1, s3: The Wish
s4: Something Blue, s5: Listening to Fear, s6: Smashed
s7: Never Leave Me

"Listening to Fear" is an utterly pointless episode that makes "Shadow" look intelligent and focused by comparison. Angst for angst's sake! What was the point of the demon coming from outer space? I like Joyce but surely they could have come up with something better for her to do than THIS.

Nearly as bad is "Never Leave Me," which makes Willow look like an idiot in a very very lame attempt at humor (when she threatens Andrew in an alley), and which brings the vastly annoying Andrew into the fold so he could begin sapping screen time from Xander, Anya and Giles, for no good reason.

Episode 10
s1: Nightmares ,s2: What's My Line 2*, s3: Amends, s4: Hush
s5: Into The Woods, s6: Wrecked, s7: Bring on the Night

"Wrecked." Enough said. I also thought "What's My Line, Part II" was too campy, but maybe I'm alone in that. And I agree with CJL that "Amends" was not Joss's finest hour, either, but it had a few good bits scattered throughout its plotless hash.

Episode 11
s1: Out of Sight, Out of Mind, s2: Ted, s3: Gingerbread
s4: Doomed, s5: Triangle, s6: Gone, s7: Showtime

"Gone." Just not funny.

Episode 12
s1: Prophecy Girl, s2: Bad Eggs, s3: Helpless, s4: A New Man
s5: Checkpoint, s6: Doublemeat Palace, s7: Potential

"Doublemeat Palace." No contest. The only redeeming feature of the episode is the writers' cojones in tackling Big Fast Food, which provided a lot of ad dollars to this program. But they couldn't even satirize the excesses of America's Greasy Gluttony industry without falling on their faces. I'm surprised that many say "Bad Eggs" was worse than "DP." "Bad Eggs" was nothing great--it was easily one of the five worst episodes of S2--but the possessed characters kind of creeped me out, and I actually *liked* the Gorches.

Episode 13
s2: Surprise, s3: The Zeppo, s4: The I in Team, s5: Blood Ties s6: Dead Things, s7: The Killer in Me

A lot of good ones here. I guess I'll pick "The I in Team" for worst episode simply because I hate Widechest Tightbutt. This was one of his more tolerable episodes though. "The Killer in Me" was possibly much more flawed, but it gets a pass from me because I liked the ideas behind it, even if the execution was very very messy.

Episode 14
s2: Innocence, s3: Bad Girls, s4: Goodbye, Iowa
s5: Crush, s6: Older and Far Away, s7: First Date

Again, many good episodes. I even liked "Older and Far Away," with its clever money-saving "bottle show" plot in which the characters get stuck in Buffy's house, and the funny resolution in which Hoffrek also gets stuck there. Earlier, I thought I would pick "Crush" as the worst of this bunch, because of its misuse of Dru, but I'll pick "Older" instead, despite my qualms, because of the whiny Dawn scenes and some missed comic opportunities.

Episode 15
s2: Phases, s3: Consequences, s4: This Year's Girl, s5: I Was Made to Love You s6: As You Were, s7: Get It Done

"As You Were," because it brought back Six-Pack McStonyChest for no good reason, although I didn't hate it as much as I thought I would. Still a pointless waste of time though.

Episode 16
s2: Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, s3: Dopplegangland*, s4: Who Are You? s5: The Body, s6: Hell's Bells, s7: Storyteller

"Hell's Bells" was a catastrophic failure to me, and easily one of the five worst episodes of the entire series, completely mishandling Xander and Anya with sheer boring predictability (who really thought they'd actually end up getting married?) and lame manufactured angst. And a total lack of humor. Anya seems like a completely different character here, and the episode reveals nothing interesting about her or Xander. And after all this time, we finally get to see Xander's family and this is it? Blah.

Dishonorable mention to "Storyteller" despite some very funny scenes. I hate Andrew.

Episode 17
s2: Passion, s3: Enemies*, s4: Superstar, s5: Forever
s6: Normal Again*, s7: Lies My Parents Told Me

A very strong week. I'll go with "Forever." Unnecessary re-hash of "The Body" and a lame rip-off of (not a homage to) "The Monkey's Paw." Not really one of the worst episodes of the series, though, because it had some good character moments. I'm surprised so many people picked "LMPTM" as the worst here... I mean sure, it had some squicky Freudian crap, and soulless Spike was maybe too nice to his mother, but I thought it was mostly clever and funny.

Episode 18
s2: Killed By Death, s3: Earshot, s4: Where The Wild Things Are, s5: Intervention, s6: Entropy, s7: Dirty Girls

"WTWTA"... bleh. Just bleh.

And a dishonorable mention to "Killed By Death" for being a lame stand-alone that mostly ignored the aftermath of Jenny's death. Some good moments, but mostly pointless.

Episode 19
s2: I Only Have Eyes For You, s3: Choices, s4: New Moon Rising* s5: Tough Love, s6: Seeing Red, s7: Empty Spaces

"Empty Spaces"... S7 really ran out of gas here.

Episode 20
s2: Go Fish, s3: The Prom, s4: The Yoko Factor, s5: Spiral
s6: Villains, s7: Touched

"Touched"... see above. I'm mystified that the writers thought Buffy should have a leadership crisis with the Potentials. But then, nothing Buffy did was very interesting to me in S7.

Episode 21
s2: Becoming 1, s3: Graduation 1, s4: Primeval, s5: Weight of the World s6: Two to Go, s7: End of Days

"Weight of the World" for all the reasons mentioned by others. Filler, filler, filler. A waste of a potentially good Joyce appearance too.

Episode 22
s2: Becoming 2, s3: Graduation 2, s4: Restless, s5: The Gift
s6: Grave, s7: Chosen

I'll reluctantly pick "Grave" although I like it. I really liked Xander's speech to Willow--I liked that Xander saved everyone for once. But the writers stumbled with the Willow as Big Bad concept here, by making her too nuts and over-the-top. Having her threaten to destroy the world was just too much. Hannigan didn't even turn in a particularly good performance, even though she clearly has the ability. She and the director must have lost faith in the script. This one could have been so much more.

[> something i didn't understand in this -- anom, 23:34:05 01/13/04 Tue

"The Body. Joss strips away the metaphors, and it works. (He should have stopped there.)"

Only thing I can think of is that you're objecting to the vamp-in-the-morgue scene. Is that it? If it's not, then what do you mean?

[> [> How I read it -- DS, 00:11:28 01/14/04 Wed

My first thought on reading it was that Joss stripped away the metaphor for that one ep and that he should have left it that way - i.e., much of the criticism, I've seen of S6 is that ME abandoned the metaphor for straight storytelling and that, perhaps, contributed to how bleak and sere the sixth season seemed to a lot of people.

Or I could be clutching that, oh so familiar, wrong end of the stick.

[> [> [> Exactly right. -- cjl, 07:15:22 01/14/04 Wed

[> Re: The Best and Worst of Buffy (week by week) -- J, 13:29:58 01/14/04 Wed

Episode 1
s1: Welcome to the Hellmouth, s2: When She Was Bad, s3: Anne, s4: The Freshman, s5: Buffy vs. Dracula, s6 Bargaining Part I, s7: Lessons

BEST: When She Was Bad
WORST: Buffy v. Dracula

Episode 2
s1: The Harvest, s2: Some Assembly Required, s3: Dead Man's Party, s4: Living Conditions, s5: Real Me, s6: Bargaining 2, s7: Beneath You

BEST: The Harvest
WORST: Real Me

Episode 3
s1: The Witch, s2: School Hard, s3: Faith, Hope and Trick, s4: The Harsh Light of Day, s5: The Replacement, s6: AfterLife, s7: Same Time, Same Place

BEST: School Hard
WORST: Same Time, Same Place

Episode 4
s1: Teacher's Pet, s2: Inca Mummy Girl, s3: Beauty and the Beasts, s4: Fear, Itself, s5: Out of my Mind s6: Flooded, s7: Help

BEST: Fear, Itself
WORST: Beauty and the Beasts / Help

Episode 5
s1: Never Kill a Boy on the First Date, s2: Reptile Boy, s3: Homecoming; s4: Beer Bad, s5: No Place Like Home, s6: Life Serial, s7: Selfless

BEST: Selfless
WORST: Reptile Boy

Episode 6
s1: The Pack, s2: Halloween, s3: Band Candy, s4: Wild at Heart; s5: Family, s6: All the Way, s7: Him

BEST: The Pack
WORST: All The Way

Episode 7
s1: Angel, s2: Lie to Me, s3: Revelations s4: The Initiative, s5: Fool For Love, s6: Once More, With Feeling, s7: Conversations With Dead People

BEST: Fool For Love
WORST: Revelations

Episode 8
s1: I Robot, You Jane , s2: The Dark Age, s3: Lovers' Walk; s4: Pangs, s5: Shadow, s6: Tabula Rasa, s7: Sleeper

BEST: The Dark Age
WORST: Shadow

Episode 9
s1: The Puppet Show, s2: What's My Line 1, s3: The Wish, s4: Something Blue, s5: Listening to Fear, s6: Smashed, s7: Never Leave Me

BEST: The Wish
WORST: The Puppet Show

Episode 10
s1: Nightmares ,s2: What's My Line 2, s3: Amends, s4: Hush; s5: Into The Woods, s6: Wrecked, s7: Bring on the Night

BEST: Hush
WORST: Wrecked

Episode 11
s1: Out of Sight, Out of Mind, s2: Ted, s3: Gingerbread; s4: Doomed, s5: Triangle, s6: Gone, s7: Showtime

BEST: Gingerbread
WORST: Gone

Episode 12
s1: Prophecy Girl, s2: Bad Eggs, s3: Helpless, s4: A New Man; s5: Checkpoint, s6: Doublemeat Palace, s7: Potential

BEST: Prophecy Girl
WORST: Doublemeat Palace

Episode 13
s2: Surprise, s3: The Zeppo, s4: The I in Team, s5: Blood Ties; s6: Dead Things, s7: The Killer in Me

BEST: The Zeppo
WORST: The Killer in Me

Episode 14

s2: Innocence, s3: Bad Girls, s4: Goodbye, Iowa; s5: Crush, s6: Older and Far Away, s7: First Date

BEST: Innocence
WORST: First Date

Episode 15
s2: Phases, s3: Consequences, s4: This Year's Girl, s5: I Was Made to Love You; s6: As You Were, s7: Get It Done

BEST: This Year's Girl
WORST: As You Were

Episode 16
s2: Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, s3: Dopplegangland, s4: Who Are You?, s5: The Body, s6: Hell's Bells, s7: Storyteller

BEST: The Body
WORST: Hell's Bells

Episode 17
s2: Passion, s3: Enemies, s4: Superstar, s5: Forever, s6: Normal Again, s7: Lies My Parents Told Me

BEST: Passion
WORST: Lies My Parents Told Me

Episode 18
s2: Killed By Death, s3: Earshot, s4: Where The Wild Things Are, s5: Intervention, s6: Entropy, s7: Dirty Girls

BEST: Earshot.
WORST: Where the Wild Things Are

Episode 19
s2: I Only Have Eyes For You, s3: Choices, s4: New Moon Rising; s5: Tough Love, s6: Seeing Red, s7: Empty Spaces

BEST: Seeing Red
WORST: I Only Have Eyes For You

Episode 20
s2: Go Fish, s3: The Prom, s4: The Yoko Factor, s5: Spiral; s6: Villains, s7: Touched

BEST: The Prom
WORST: Spiral

Episode 21
s2: Becoming 1, s3: Graduation 1, s4: Primeval, s5: Weight of the World; s6: Two to Go, s7: End of Days

BEST: Graduation 1
WORST: Weight of the World

Episode 22
s2: Becoming 2, s3: Graduation 2, s4: Restless, s5: The Gift s6: Grave, s7: Chosen

BEST: Becoming 2, Graduation 2, Restless, The Gift, Chosen
WORST: Grave

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