Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Selfless

"This isn't springy, high-flying fun!"

So here comes the Anya episode we were sort of expecting, and it's simultaneously hilarious and tragic. That'll be Buffy, then.

The hilarious bits are, of course, the flashbacks, starting with "Aud" back in 800 AD with her very Viking husband Olaf who we have, of course, met before. I love the Old Norse with witty translated dialogue, and the sepia tones with scratched picture quality- and the fact that Anya has always been Anya. The tale of how she became a vengeance demon may have no surprises but it’s fun, and that’s the point; the rest of the episode is pretty grim. Anya is back to her killing ways as a vengeance demon, guilt notwithstanding, and it seems Buffy has to kill her. This leads to a gripping argument between her and Xander which, the rather Judge Dredd line “I am the law” aside, is fascinating in both how Buffy as the Slayer is, in the end, always alone with the hard decisions- and, of course, she once had to send Angel (he gets a mention, despite the different network!) to Hell. It also eves that, hard though things may be, Buffy is over last season’s angst.

Other stuff happens; there’s a big CGI spider; Spike is still consumed with guilt over his attempted rape of Buffy; and Willow’s eyes and attitude go a bit Dark Willow for a few seconds as she casts a protection spell: interesting.

It’s Willow who summons D’Hoffryn to solve the whole mess; Anya is able to reverse the deaths she has caused, but for magic there is always a price. And, D’Hoffryn being the boss from Hell, literally, he lets Anya think she’s sacrificing herself only to sacrifice Halfrek instead, her best friend, just to be a bastard, and then fires her for good measure. I’m sure we’ve all had a manager like that at some point.

We end on a hopeful note, perhaps, with a strangely non-awkward scene between Anya and Xander, but are reminded, again, that “from beneath you, it devours”. Yep. That’ll be another bloody good episode.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Hell's Bells

"Nothing on Earth can stop this wedding now...”

We all know what television wedding episodes are like- Light-hearted, funny, relaxing, with a little bit of drama but everything turning out ok in the end. Except this is a Joss Whedon Show. So we get most of the above aside from the ending, which takes your heart and repeatedly stomps on it.

Still, most of the episode is fun, witty, and let’s the characters breathe in contexts we don’t usually see, with Buffy as best man while Willow and Tara bond again, and Spike brings some ransomed as a date to get at Buffy, except that this ends up in the kind of bizarrely heartwarming conversation between the two of them that few lesser shows would do. We finally get to see Xander’s family, and they are every bit as awful as we might imagine- and his parents’ marriage is a big part of why we get the ending we do.

But then it ends, and Xander can’t go through with the wedding, not because of the token baddie but his own innate, pathetic, yet very human fears and, having seen his family, we are horrified but can sort of understand. Like Willow, we feel we should hate him but can’t. Anya, though? It’s heartbreaking how her loving monologue is juxtaposed with Xander’s doubtful body language, and the blow is utterly devastating in a brutal piece of televisual excellent. In the end she’s back with D’Hoffryn- to be a vengeance demon again? Heart-wrenching telly.

Angel: I Fall to Pieces

"What is stalking now? Like, the third most popular sport among men?"

"Fourth, after luge."

Is it just me, or does this episode's title mean that the song by Velvet Revolver is going through your head too?

It's interesting how much more coherent Angel feels when not crossing over with the parent show. There's a different directorial style, of sunsets, cityscapes and jump cuts. And the format of the show is different, with a much smaller ensemble of regular characters and a greater focus on the client of the week. This show pushes the private investigator angle much further; when Melissa visits the office it begins to feel more like Sherlock than Buffy. Angel's attitude to charging clients seems rather similar to Sherlock Holmes', too. Sherlock could probably do with a Cordelia.

This episode is very evocative of the late '90s, not only in the horrible office fashions but in the focus on stalking, an issue which had only recently started attracting media attention at the time. Here in the UK, certainly, it was only defined as a a specific criminal offence shortly before the 1997 election; I assume the concept was also quite zeitgeisty in the US. And this is a proper exploration of the subject; both Kate and Angel are given powerful and effective dialogue explaining the psychology of the stalker and the effect on the victim.

The main supernatural concept is gloriously creepy; a "psychic surgeon" who can detach and reattach parts of his body including, most disgustingly, his eyeball, which for some reason is also able to levitate. And then there are the disembodied hands under Melissa's bedcovers!!!  Most of all, I'm sure the idea of being watched all the time by a disembodied eyeball must be exactly what stalking feels like, and that's the point. It's just a slight pity that the in-universe explanation for this relies on a load of new agey bollocks, including that tired old false belief that 80% of our brains go unused.

Angel's handling of the case is clever and impressive, and its interesting how much psychological insight he seems to have, not only in his understanding of the stalker's thinking but also in his rather clever little deception. I'm not sure how well this squares with him not being much of a "people person", but perhaps this is an example of how "helping the helpless" is affecting him for the better. Then again, it might be inconsistent characterisation.

It's a good episode, well paced, and it deals with the issue of the week rather well. But I'd like to see a larger cast and more of an arc; one-off episodes are fine in themselves but characters need development. I find myself in the paradoxical position of liking the episode itself but disliking the concept of a series made up of one-off episodes like this one. Yes, there's a slight mention of Wolfram and Hart. But I'd like a bit more story arc.

Firefly: Serenity

“We are just too pretty for God to let us die.”

I must admit, I wouldn’t have decided to watch this on a weekday if I’d remembered how long it was, but the Firefly reviews start here. I’m going to fit in the remaining three Sarah Jane Adventures two-parters over the next few days too, but basically it’s Firefly now until it finishes, except with films on most Saturdays. More Whedon to come, though. Appropriately, my iTunes library has just been playing me Johnny Cash and Neil Young’s “From Hank to Hendrix”.

We begin with a flashback to the recent war, in which Mal and Zoe (Gina Torres) fought on the losing sides. They’re essentially Space Confederates, although Zoe’s ethnicity tells us that in this case there’s none of that slavery nastiness. Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) is charismatic, brave, rugged on the surface but deeply caring underneath. Zoe would follow him anywhere in spite of his flaws, but the fact that Zoe is a supremely capable and intelligent woman shows us that he’s earned that respect. Joss Whedon really gets us to invest in the characters during these first few vital minutes. We see people die nobly, and then the war is suddenly over. They’ve lost. It was all for nothing, perhaps.

The present day, and now Mal is captain of a ship, Serenity, and he and his crew make their money through not-entirely-legal means, in this case salvage. Wisely, Whedon is not telling us what year it is. Our heroes are criminals, and they have a relationship with the powers-that-be, the Alliance, which is hardly friendly. There are obvious parallels with Blake’s 7 here, even if it’s clear that planets are going to look like Southern California rather than Southern England. But we should be careful not to overstate this; Mal and his crew are far more concerned about where their meal is coming from, and are not political idealists. And the Administration, while obviously not nice, are not quite so obviously totalitarian. Also, it’s 2002, a generation later. Still, it shouldn’t surprise you that I’ve chosen to follow up Blake’s 7 (give or take the odd Sherlock) with this.

The aesthetic is also very different, and very American. The Western tropes and touches are obvious, from the costumes to the incidental music, and this underlines the frontier feel. There are more settled planets, such as the home planet of Dr. Simon Tams (Sean Maher), which stand for “back East”, but this is a rugged, frontier existence with many planets, such as the one ruled by Patience, seemingly to some extent outside the law. And when Mal states that “It’s what governments are for- to get in a man’s way”, he’s expressing the sentiments of rugged individualism which owe a lot more to the American West than to anywhere remotely close to me, here in Leicestershire. And if all that isn’t enough, there’s an obvious spinning wheel on the Serenity that evokes the feel of a steamboat.

This is a Western in space, all right, and quite rightly this dominates the aesthetic, the message and, I think, the sort of stories we’ll get. But that isn’t all that’s going on. For a start, everyone keeps occasionally speaking, I think, Mandarin, and we’re not given any subtitles. Badger (Mark Sheppard, recently in Doctor Who) is a cockney geezer crime boss who reminds me of Ronnie Kray or, indeed, Dinsdale Piranha. And then there are the Reavers, about whom we know little as yet.

We get a good, proper introduction to all of the people we shall be getting to know, so I’d better introduce them too. It makes a slightly awkward structure for this review but, in spite of Whedon’s assured script and direction, the same is true of this episode. Such is the way of first episodes.

Gina is married to Wash (Adam Tudyk), a rather witty and rather brilliant pilot whose scene with the dinosaurs is the most Joss Whedon thing ever. So far, though, there’s not a lot to him beyond that. Rather more interesting is Adam Baldwin’s violent and self-centred Jayne, a sort of working-class Avon who heavily implies he would betray Mal for the right price. Yet he clearly cares a great deal about Kaylee; Whedon rather interestingly chooses to have him at the front of the shot looking worried as it appears she might die. Even he has a softer side. He’s a great comedy character, too. Whedon manages to make the scene in which he threatens the government agent into a comedy highlight.

Inara (Morena Baccarin) is, of course, gorgeous, and has a rather interestingly ambiguous relationship with Mal. She’s a high-class “companion”, and her profession clearly enjoys a much higher degree of respectability and status than in does in the present day. There are initial clashes with Shepherd Book (Ron Glass), but I rather suspect that they’re going to be friends. The Shepherd is a mysterious one; he says he’s freshly out of the “abbey”, but he hints at a mysterious past and is a shrewd judge of character. His initial scene with Kaylee (Jewel Staite), as she entices him on to the ship is wonderful.

Kaylee, the ship’s mechanic (of course I adore her- she’s lovely!), is irrepressibly cheerful, innocent, a refreshing break from all the angst-ridden characters one sees everywhere, and interestingly perceptive about people. She knows that most of her crewmates (even Jayne) are basically nice and realises that Mal cares very deeply beneath the gruff exterior. Interestingly, we get a rather lingering shot of her eating a strawberry, which seems to be telling us that she’s a rather sensual person. I love the door to her room.

She has a bit of a thing for with Simon Tam (Sean Maher) who is, alas, from a different social class, and both literally and figuratively from a different world. Maher plays his awkwardness very well; he’s got the good looks, but sadly not the easy-going charm, of certain other Simons. Ahem. He also has a sister, River (Summer Glau) who is at this point more of a mysterious McGuffin than an actual character.

There are a lot of characters to introduce and develop, then, as well as an entire world, aesthetic and set of narrative rules. That Whedon manages to tick all these boxes while also delivering an exciting and intriguing piece of strong, character-led drama bodes very well indeed for future episodes, which will hopefully have much more space in which to breathe.

I couldn’t help but smile at the “grrr! arggh!” of Mutant Enemy. I’ll be seeing a lot of that over the next eighteen months or so.