Batman: The Animated Series- I Am the Night

"A weary body can be dealt with. But a weary spirit... that's something else."

The title of this episode reminds me of Audioslave's "I Am the Highway"... but I digress before there's anything to digress from. Anyway, contrived though Batman's depression may be, this is a good episode. And contains another instance of homages to creators as cops refer to the "corner of Adams and O'Neil", a nice touch.

It's the anniversary of the murder of Bruce's parents, so he's already out of sorts, but then we have the double whammy of Jim Gordon being badly hurt while Batman is elsewhere and... well, for me, the contrived nature of it all doesn't work. This kind of depressive episode seems out of character for someone like Batman who, while I'm certainly no psychiatrist, just doesn't seem the type to doubt his purpose.

Regardless, though, it's a good episode for developing Bruce's relationships with those around him- Alfred, Robin, Lesley Thompkins, Jim and Barbara Gordon, and it gets away with its flaws. It's just that I suspect this is a highly popular episode... and, for me, it isn't quite up there.

What If... Howard the Duck Got Hitched?

 "Captain Mohawk stole our baby!"

Just to be clear, I quite like a lot of KISS. But "I Was Made for Loving You" is a disco-tinged abomination. Just to be clear.

That said... otherwise, I like this episode. Yes, it's very silly having the concept. of Howard the Duck and Dacy (Mr and Mrs "the Duck"...) have a hybrid kid together, absolutely leaning into the interspecies sexz fun of 1986's Howard The Duck (nice touch, the reference to "Mrs Switzler"). And naturally this egg is the most important child ever, whose coming has been foretold and who is therefore fought over by all the cosmic entities of the MCU, from Zeus to the Grandmaster to Dormannu to Thanos to SHIELD.

Only for it to turn out that it's the parents who should raise the child after all, as that's how childrearing works. This child is special... but aren't they all? This episode, broadcast on a day which commemorates the birth of a child, is a rather nice and fun metaphor for all the things we parents go through, and it's lovely.

But also fun. And with a surprisingly high amount of star wattage.

I'm left wondering, though... yes, this works as just a metaphor. We don't need to take the metaphor literally and see what this little girl becomes... but will we?

What If... Nebula joined the Nova Corps?

 "Seems a bit morally grey, with the guns and all."

You'll have to excuse me: I didn't know that What If? was about to drop now, at Christmastime, one episode per day, and I'm a few days late. I'm already blogging Better Call Saul, Twin Peaks and the 1943 Batman serial. I still am. Plus there's Doctor Who tomorrow. Aaaargh. I'll do my best, as this is a current show, to blog it as quickly as I can while not neglecting the others.

Anyway, I love this opening episode. Yes, there's a big central sci-fi idea, with more than a dollop of William Gibson and Blade Runner in the aesthetics of a dark, crime-ridden metropolis and the protagonist being a cyborg. Yet, to me, this feels very much like it's channelling Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, except with Karren Gillan, outstanding as Nebula, as the principled agent of justice in a world where no one else can be trusted at all. It is this, the mood, the setting, perfect for Nebula as a character, that makes the episode so good.

The plot is clever, though, with the twists and turns somehow working brilliantly both as high concept science fiction if written by Raymond Chandler.

It's wonderful to see Seth Green's Howard the Duck too, obviously. And Taika Waititi's Korg is always a joy. I'm impressed, once again, that an animated series is able to recruit such a high calibre of actors. And it's interesting to get a focus on Xandar and the Nova Corps, very much cosmic side characters with the MCU... but, of course, Nova is coming.

Oh, and Merry Christmas:)

Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999)

 "You know, what's remarkable is how much England looks in  no way like Southern California."

I'm not in the mood for anything serious, so this it is then. It is, of course, just more of the same sort of stuff from the first film with pop culture jokes combined with lots of metatextual fun, but I for one am not complaining. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

This time we're introduced to Mini-Me as well as Fat Bastard, a third character to be played with aplomb by Mike Myers. We get rid of Vanessa with hilarious simplicity and then get introduced to the wonderful Felicity Shagwel and... well, it's an Austin Powers film. You know the drill. It's very, very silly indeed.

What's interesting, though, about a film from 1999 being all nostalgic about thirty years earlier is how very '90s it all is from a quarter century later. Even this version of the '60s is very much a version of the decade curated to '90s sensibilities, more Oasis' "All Around the World" than "Yellow Submarine" in aesthetic. But we get the late Jerry Springer, absolutely in his pomp and a reminder of how even trash telly back then had a layer of basic decency to it that would eventually be got rid of. Even Starbucks was sort of newish back then.

The film works so well because it knows full well how daft it is and leans into that, with the time travelling shenanigans and the best knob, fart and poo jokes in cinematic history. The script is magnificent. So is the cast. But praise has to go especially to Mike Myers, absolutely at the peak of his career here. Brilliant stuff.

What If... Thor Were an Only Child?

 "We never get to fire the nukes...!"

I think it's fair to say this is a lighter episode in both senses. Yes, it's light-hearted and yes, it's funny... but it's not that funny. And, as it's fairly lightweight in every other respect, having little of substance to say, it nearly needs to be funnier than it is in order to be more than ok.

The premise is that Frigga and Odin never adopt Loki, and Thor therefore develops into a bit of a frat boy, spending the whole episode partying on Earth.

The episode plays everything for laught. Countries are emblazoned with their names, as we see Thor hurl Captain Marvel from land named "France" to land named "United Kingdom". The characterisation and dialogue are funny; Jane Foster and Darcy are a great comedy double act. Yes, people act out of character for the sake of having witty lines and visuals, but an episode like this can get away with that.

This isn't unfunny. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just... well, ok.

What If... T'Challa Became a Star Lord?

 "You are very articulate for a duck..."

"That, Sir, is very closed-minded!"

It's fascinating, with a second episode, to see what is just format and what is not. Hence we see the same intro with the Watcher, equally effective. But then we see a fascinating tale of T.Challa, in many ways a batter and more beloved Starlord, who even convinces Thanos(!) to join the Ravagers, is adored by Yondu, and tries hard to reconcile Nebula with her father. All while acting as an interstellar Robin Hood, naturally... and co-opting his foes, as the wonderful first scene demonstrates.

Chadwick Boseman is, of course, superb. T'Challa gets to be a huge hero, ending universal poverty and freeing Howard the Duck to boot. There's just the minor inconvenience, after a happy family reunion in Wakanda, that the world is going to end because the wrong Star Lord was chosen. Bummer.

Yes, this is, like all of this series, a short half hour bit of fun. But I loved it.

Krampus (2015)

"Because that's what family is. We have to get along with them, even if we don't have much in common."

This film was suggested for me by Mrs Llamastrangler in a particularly evil moment as the Christmas film to blog this year. Next time I'm doing bloody Die Hard.

The German legend of the Krampus seems not to have travelled to this country with Prince Albert alongside Christmas cards and Christmas trees, but it seems to be impinging more and more on popular culture, particularly in the United States; I first heard of the legend from an episode of Grimm a couple of years ago. I suppose it's calling out for a good horror film but, well, this is not it.

Let me tell you the plot, shall I? A family squabble a lot. A kid wishes for it to stop. The Krampus arrives and offs them all. The kid regrets it and the adults all come back, except for those who really don't deserve it. And that's it. No stars, no wit, no fun. You don't care about any of the characters and it's boring, boring, boring.

Yep. Definitely Die Hard next year.

IT

Part One

"A clown brought us down here. We all float."

I hadn't heard of this before, but my uber-coulrophob ic fiancee bought this years ago and, in spite of her phobia, rates it very highly. It's a 1990 two part US TV adaptation of Stephen King's novel of four years earlier, a novel which, arguably, did as much as John Wayne Gacy to make clowns in the modern world figures of fear rather than fun. Also, Tim Curry is superb, John Ritter is in it and we even get a glimpse of a very young Oz from Buffy. What's not to love?

It's a fairly straight, for which read long, adaptation. The first part is the atmospheric one, and thus the better of the two. We begin, though, with a little girl, and a little cultural difference between Yanks and us Limeys; apparently for them it's Itsy-Bitsy Spider, not Incy-Wincy, who falls down the spout. Fancy that. There are also cultural and visual differences between the two time frames within the film- the 1980s present day and the late 1950s, a time when I Was a Teenage Werewolf was a current film. Mike, our central character, is a black man living in the USA,a fact which has somewhat different connotations in our two time zones, either side of the Civil Rights era as they are. The contrast between these two particular time zones make it hard not to think of Back to the Future.

We have a small group of seven kids / adults, including Beverly, our one token girl, and we follow their contrasting fortunes, haunted by the awful Pennywise, up until the present. Mike, the only black character, is our point of view yet also an oddly passive and unambitious character. Bill, a successful writer, is Stephen King, but harbours a deep guilt over his brother's death. Ben is annoying as an adult, yet more vulnerable and likeable as a kid, and demonstrably the same person. He reminds me of Tony Stark. Stan is the intellectual Jewish kid who dies at the end of the episode rather than face Pennywise again. Eddie is the sexless, mother-dominated hypochondriac, a deeply tragic figure. Richie is, if you'll forgive me, the clown. And Beverly is an abused woman whom we desperately want to get together with Ben, her childhood sweetheart. All of them have character traits that, rather too neatly, reflect their future jobs as adults.

Glimpses of Pennywise are, rightly, rationed and put in a child's perspective, but are deeply effective for all that. He has a strong New England accent.I 'm not sure what this is meant to signify: is this a traditional Maine accent or does it paint him as an outsider? He represents, I think, paedophilia, a subject so awful that it is often wise to approach it obliquely. He's not the only villain, of course; there is also the deeply disturbed bully Henry Bowers, seen here only as a youth. He is left the most marked by Pennywise, becoming confined to an institution.

One of the creepier moments is where a photo is made to move; this is like something straight out of Sapphire and Steel and is deeply unsettling.We end with a showdown, some excellent use of stop motion, a pledge, and a suicide.


Part Two

"You're too old to stop me. You're all too old."

This episode is not as good. Having said that, though, it is perhaps inevitable that the atmospheric set-up episode will outshine the part that has to do the donkey work of resolving the plot; the two episodes should not really be considered separately.

Our protagonists, passive until now, are faced with having to go after Pennywise and destroy him, thus achieving catharsis over their childhood demon(s). They have quite a foe; we begin with Pennywise goading them with the above quote and a library soaked in blood. There's rather a lot of blood; even tea becomes blood, proving that nothing is sacred. That's before we even get to the fortune cookies. And a lot of people from our protagonists' pasts are possessed and say awful things. Henry, meanwhile, being weaker than our protagonists, becomes its pawn.

Our protagonist have a good wine-fuelled night, but the time comes to face what they have to do. Eddie is the most reluctant. His back-story is perhaps the most developed; his asthma is non-existent, he's a virgin and, it's implied, he's gay and closeted. The scary events continue apace, including a scene of a typewriter typing with no typist which may well have influenced one Steven Moffat for both Doctor Who and Jekyll.  There's a moment, where Henry stabs Mike, where we assume he's dead because of the "black guy dies first" trope. He doesn't, but there's still a bit of metatextuality there, methinks. Henry, rather predictably, dies next. There's nowhere else for him to go having fulfilled his plot function, besides he's both a baddie and a tragic figure. He has to die.

We approach the climax, and there's a rather good stop motion giant spider. Eddie dies a forty-year-old virgin.The rest all survive the showdown, but there's no conclusion; Pennywise will be back in  thirty years' time. If we're looking for a happy ending then we must make do with Ben and Bev finally getting together.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: New Moon Rising

"A woman in Tibet traded it to me for the Radiohead record."

So, Oz liked Kid A. I approve. It's by far my favourite Radiohead album. Well, In Rainbows is close. Anyway, after last week's lacklustre and skippable episode, this one was both very good and hugely significant.

We'd forgotten about Oz, but he's back, he's done the whole Jack Kerouac thing that Xander didn't (although more The Dharma Bums than On the Road, it seems), and it's really, really awkward. Then he's off again. This episode is a useful reminder to heterosexual people, like me, of the many, many awkwardnesses that gay people have to face in a world that assumes people are straight until told otherwise, having to constantly out themselves throughout their entire lives. I don't blame Willow for not telling Oz about Tara- it's still not fair on Oz, but it's still not Willow's fault that society's heteronormative assumptions make these things so difficult.

There's a nice parallel drawn, albeit a little too blatantly, between Buffy's awkward reaction to discovering Willow is in a gay relationship (I assumed everybody knew) and Riley's instinctive reaction to Oz being a werewolf. It doesn't necessarily make either of them any more racist or homophobic than most well-meaning liberals are deep down in their subconscious. I suppose I'm a bit surprised by Buffy's reaction, though- surely being gay wasn't that bit a deal in Southern California at the turn of the Millennium? To be fair, I suppose that being part of Doctor Who fandom has made me rather more casually accepting of homosexuality than the average person.

Arc stuff happens too, this time with Riley well and truly deciding which side he's on. It was inevitable that the Scoobies and the Initiative were eventually going to end up at daggers drawn, and Riley was always the person with the most to lose when it happens. He's given up everything for Buffy, tragically, I think. Yes, it's an important moment that Buffy now feel able to tell him all her deepest, darkest secrets (i.e. about Angel), but I still get the impression that the two of them are not soulmates. Buffy loves Riley only for as long as the initial passion lasts. After that, she'll discard him.

I'm glad the show has finally decided that the Initiative are not very nice people. What they do to Oz- a citizen of their country, who should have legal rights- is horribly, unspeakably Orwellian. And the "medical" experiments have overtones of, well, you know. And watching it now, in the context of Guantanamo and the "War on Terror", it's even more disturbing.

In other news, the Scoobies are now fugitives, presumably, with the weight of the US government after them, something that can't just be solved by a reset button. And Spike makes some sort of deal with Adam which is to unfold in a future episode, of which there are only three more this season. Why do I get the impression I'd have Adam far more figured out if I'd read Frankenstein…?

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Wild at Heart

" Giles, I've never seen her like this. It's like it hurts too much to form words."

This episode was utterly heart-wrenching to watch. There is nothing on this earth, nothing at all, which is more upsetting than seeing Willow crying and utterly, utterly wretched. Alyson Hannigan in so very good in this episode, perhaps too good. I cried, and I'm a flint-hearted bastard.

It's a testament to the script that you don't end up hating Oz, because there's no way around it: he's unfaithful to Willow, and then abandons her. There are no extenuating circumstances whatsoever to the unfaithfulness; his evasiveness makes it very clear that he's hiding things from Willow deliberately and, anyway, the whole werewolf thing is pretty much a metaphor for wild sexual urges. Oz may well be "not himself" when he has sex with Verruca (or so it's heavily implied), but so is any person who cheats on their partner and then instantly regrets it. The only reason we don't end up hating his guts is that he obviously realises what he's done, and seeks to make amends, and penance. But that only means we fall short of hating him, not that we forgive him. And his decision, in which Willow quite blatantly gets no say, is simultaneously abandonment. The character absolutely has to cease being a regular at this point; he's burned his bridges with the audience. Personally, I could never like him again. No one does that to my Willow. And that's twice that she's had her heart broken by a man. Buffy alludes to how long it took to recover when she felt the same about Angel, and the extreme reactions she took. We get a hint at the potential for some truly awful consequences as she almost uses a spell to curse Oz, but can't quite bring herself to do it. This does not bode well. What happens to poor Willow now?

At least Buffy shows herself to be a wonderful friend. And, it seems, she's beginning to do well academically, much to her own surprise. This reminds me so much of my own University experiences; I was twenty-three and worried about failure, having dropped out of another Uni after one term at eighteen. Would the disorganised habits of my younger self show themselves again? It was such a joy to gradually realise that I was, in fact, perfectly able to keep on top of the work, and I was over the Moon when one of my essays was awarded a First for the first time. Here's hoping that Buffy gets as much out of Higher Education as I eventually did.

Giles' mid-life crisis arc gathers pace, as he turns up at the Bronze to show that he's down wiv da kids, and is reduced to filling his hours with daytime television. He's overjoyed when Buffy turns up with a problem, bless him. One of these problems is a story arc problem, though; who are these mysterious soldier types who keep showing up on campus? Buffy is beginning to notice them.

Spike will certainly have noticed them. That pre-credits sequence was such gloriously metatextual fun. I rather suspect that the season's arc is about to start revealing itself…

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Beer Bad

"Nothing can defeat the penis!"

Oh dear. Things have been going so well. It feels like a long, long time since I've had to give a good, hard lambasting to an episode of Buffy, but it's that time again. Stand by to witness a spanking.

It's not that this episode, written by Tracey Forbes, a name I don't recognise, is all bad. It might be a rather so-so plot, and the dialogue, for Buffy, is rather lacking in sparkle. And there's some rather interesting character development stuff, which we'll come to in a bit. It's just that the subtext is deeply, deeply wrong, and dangerous. There's nothing big or clever about mindless Puritanism. Beer good. Excess bad.  And excess is bad in a much wider context than beer. Sending out the message that we should avoid things, rather than learn to use them responsibly, is appalling. Also, you know, I like beer. I drank rather a lot of it on Friday night. I had fun. And yet none of us turned into cavemen, we had quite a civilised if merry conversation, and a good time was had by all. That's sort of what usually tends to happen.

The episode plays a little trick which is clever, I suppose, but entirely missing the point. Xander, the working class person behind to bar, is the target of cruel, snobbish mockery from some upper middle class students, only for the tables to be turned as the beer slowly takes away their intelligence. And everything in the episode is telling us, rather heavy handedly, that it's the beer that's the problem here. And it isn't; it's social class, Bullingdon Club type snobbery and social inequality. In my own university days I had to put up with ex-public school rugby types who thought it was big and clever to sing loud drinking songs and thus ruin anyone else's conversations. But the problem was their arrogance and sense of entitlement, not the beer. After all, the other people in the bar were drinking beer, too, and we were just having perfectly civilised conversations, as the vast majority of beer drinkers tend to do.

Admittedly, there might be cultural differences here for me, an English country boy, dealing with American attitudes towards beer, which are certainly different. After all, in most of the US the legal drinking age is twenty-one. To me that's hard to imagine. My University life revolved around pubs, clubs and bars. Heck, there was a bar in every Hall. Oh, and we know Giles went to a British university. He really wouldn't give Xander such a hard time about serving beer to the eighteen-year-old Buffy. Yes, he should have stopped serving when she was clearly the worse for wear, but I don't think that's supposed to be the point.

Ahem. Elsewhere, it's nice to see Buffy quite clearly getting closure vis-à-vis the Parker situations. Whacking him with a pointy stick was rather an elegant solution, I thought. But  most concerning is the situation between Willow and Oz; who's this girl who seems to be obsessing him so, right in front of Willow, and causing him to neglect his studies? And then there's Willow's brilliant confrontation with Parker. It's almost as though she's starting to go off men entirely. Hmmm…

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Fear Itself

"Creatures of the night shy away from Halloween. They tend to find it all too crass."

So here we arrive at the now-traditional Halloween episode. On the one level, predictably enough, it's a comedy episode to contrast with the heaviness of Buffy having her heart broken by that bastard Parker. But there's something else going on, a sort of taking stock. This is an episode that analyses all the regular characters and where they are at this exact moment, using their greatest fears to underline a point about each of them. The fact that the show stops to do this sort of thing is, of course, a blatant sign that things are going to change.

Oh, and at last we get a haunted house episode. Cool. Is it just me, though, or does this haunted house, supposedly just set up by students for a party, look a little too good to be realistic?

Buffy's still depressed, obviously, and there are some equally obvious parallels with her reaction to being rejected by Angel back in Season Two. That time she pushed people away, including her friends; this time she begins to do the same. Yet again she has trouble trusting people, and retreats into herself. She's very detached right until the end, and looking for excuses to avoid social activity, but she doesn't have any. Everyone, even Giles(!) has embraced the Halloween spirit, and the bad things, annoyingly, are refusing to come out to play.

Still, she isn't really reacting as badly as she did last time, and her friends are more aware of what they need to do. She gets some good advice, too, both from the rather nice Riley, who has "rebound" written all over him, and from Joyce, who is wonderful. It's so nice to see these two together these days, and the connection that they have without any secrets to act as a barrier. It's great that they can have these chats about the divorce, and men, and the importance of friendship. Of course, I love Joyce's line about her last boyfriend turning out to be a homicidal robot!

Buffy's fear as induced by the haunted house is a little unclear, but I think it's the fear of her friends getting hurt. Willow's is a little more obvious: a spell, more powerful than any she's ever casted before, going out of control. She's at a crossroads; she's done the run-of-the mill hedge magic, and is rather nervous about what the next step, into actual conjuration, might involve, and whether she can handle it. Still, as she says, "I'll know when I've reached my limits". Definitely no dramatic irony there.

It's rather touching that Oz is so worried for her. Being a werewolf, his own fear is being out of control, and he'd hate to see that happen to Willow. Of course, in the haunted house, losing control is exactly what happens to him, and he struggles to control his inner wolf. It's interesting, I think, that there's such a contrast between the laconic, inexpressive Oz and the raw animal fury of the wolf. It's almost as though he's repressing a powerful id very, very tightly. Again, definitely no dramatic irony there.

Finally, Xander is invisible and inaudible to his friends, an obvious reflection on his worries that not being at college has driven a wedge between him and his friends, as Anya rather helpfully points out. Still, he's a lucky man. Anya might not be the epitome of tact but she must really, really love him. This is the woman who ran away from danger at the end of last season, but here she runs unthinkingly into danger, unable to bear the thought that he might be hurt. While dressed as a bunny, naturally. Bless.

The ending is well funny, though. I let out a huge belly-laugh at Buffy summoning the demon and Anthony Stewart Head's perfect delivery of "… ...is not one of them, and will in fact immediately bring forth the fear demon itself." And Willow's right; the ickle demon is cute. And also, as hinted in the title, a nice metaphor. Our fears often are just blown out of their real proportion.

Oh, and who were those commando types again? Never mind. They were just Halloween costumes, right?

Angel: In the Dark

"This is not a needle in a haystack. This is a needle in Kansas."

Yes, I know, this is a nice follow-up to the preceding episode of Buffy both literally and thematically, with even the episode's title being a nice link. But is it really all that healthy for a spin-off which is still trying to establish itself to be crossing over with the original series in only its third episode?

For one thing, it feels a little strange to see Oz, of all people. He doesn't seem to belong in this show, as even the dialogue seems to concede with the comical awkwardness of him and Cordelia "catching up". Spike is a much more natural fit, and his first scene is well funny but, again, he's a recurring villain from the parent show. Is this healthy?

Such worries aside, though, on its own terms it's a brilliant episode, and a superb examination of Angel's character, and how profoundly shaped he is by the desire for atonement, forgiveness and brooding opportunities. The physical tortures he suffers are more or less a metaphor for the mental tortures he forces upon himself every day through his self-flagellating instincts. He can't allow himself to have the Ring Amarra, in spite of all the good it would do, because he feels he doesn't deserve it. This isn't the reason he was sent back from Hell. Better to brood, in the dark. A lot.

Oh, and to help people. We get a nice example in this episode, where he helps a battered woman escape from her abusive lover, and from her own irrational but all-too-common urge to go back to him.

Spike is fun, and gets all the best lines, but what I love about him here is that he's such a people person, even getting to briefly exchange small talk with Cordelia, something which Angel has manifestly failed to do. We have to remember he's evil, though, although not as evil as the horrible, horrible torturer, with his Heinrich Himmler looks, his hints of paedophilia and, oh yes, the torturing. From the minute we see him we know he has to die before the episode ends; he's just too evil to be allowed to survive, however impressed we might be by his quoting from Hamlet.

As for Cordelia and Doyle… well, they've developed a rapport, but it looks as though Cordelia has Doyle firmly in the friend zone, which is bad new for him. The two of them are great together, although it's looking as though their cultural differences regarding alcohol may be a problem: Cordelia, being American, is rather more abstemious than northern Europeans such as Doyle and, well, myself…! Oh yes… and there's the demon thing. Of course we, the viewers, rather suspect that Cordelia probably won't bat an eyelid when she finds out. But Doyle doesn't know her as well as we do. Oh, and bless her for being so excited about the invoice.

But still, all this reliance on the parent show doesn't bode well. There are some promising signs of independence, most notably in a visibly different directorial style, with jump cuts and all, but the show needs to try and avoid these sorts of crossovers for a bit, until it learns to stand on its own two feet.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Harsh Light of Day

"You love that tunnel more than me!"

"I love syphilis more than you!"

Very clever, that title, when you consider what the Gem of Amara does for Spike and what happens to Buffy in the post-coital morning. But this is a very clever, funny and downright brilliant script from Jane Espenson. I always look forward to the rest of the episode as soon as her name comes up at the start. Other than Joss Whedon himself she's the only writer who does that.

A few random things before we get started. If Oz gives the seal of approval to Giles' record collection then that's good enough for me. I rather suspect he and I would have pretty similar opinions. Also, nice cliffhanger at the end of the teaser.

The structure of the episode is rather clever; three wronged women, in parallel. Actually, it's more about one wronged woman, Buffy: Harmony is the comic relief and Anya isn't really all that wronged, but it's a nice framing device.

Harmony… don't you just love her? And are her and Spike not just the perfect couple? I mean, it's great to see Spike again. In fact, it's really great to see Spike again. But Harmony as a vampire is much more fun. Their relationship is highly amusing, too, which is rather fortunate, given the heavy shit going on elsewhere. Somewhat dysfunctional, perhaps, but they are both evil. Speaking of which… why is it that the evil characters (well, the vampires) always seem to have the best sex lives in the Buffyverse? 'Snot fair.

Wronged woman number two (or "wronged" woman number two- Xander is no Parker here) is Anya, who's come back for Xander after running away in Graduation Day, Part One. She's not quite as funny as Harmony, but she's not far behind, and hogs an awful lot of the best lines ("Oh, I have condoms. Some are black."). In fact, we're rather fortunate that this is a Jane Espenson episode, as otherwise there probably wouldn't be enough great lines for the other characters.

Her plan is to have sex with Xander, and therefore get over him, a plan which has one or two obvious flaws. It clearly brings both of them together, unsurprisingly, but Xander reluctantly tells her what he thinks she wants to hear, only to upset her. It's interesting how in some ways this parallels Buffy and Parker, only with the genders reversed and Anya acting out of genuine innocence, not being a scumbag like Parker.

Ah yes, Parker's scumbagginess. He really hurts Buffy, the bastard. Oh, there's certainly nothing wrong with one night stands or casual sex. I'm no puritan. But there damn well is something wrong with getting casual sex by falsely getting the other person to expect something more than just "fun", and getting them to develop feelings for you. That's callous, and horrible, and downright ungentlemanly. Buffy is utterly devastated, and it's heartbreaking to watch, especially as this is the second time that a man has gone evil on her after sex. The worst and most upsetting part is her thinking she must have done something wrong, and telling that smarmy bastard Abrams that she's sorry. Grrr. Still, at least Willow and Oz are ok, right?

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Living Conditions

"You want to kill her? Don't you think you could just switch rooms or something?"

This suddenly feels weird, going back to Buffy after an episode of Angel. Still, I'll be doing this for a long, long time. I'm sure I'll get used to it.

I don't know about you but, looking back from this age of horrible, cynical, talent show dirges where Autotune is ubiquitous, I've become rather fond of Cher's Believe. She's not using Autotune to cheat, but to sound deliberately weird, and to draw attention to the weirdness. It's exactly the sort of playfully creative sort of thing that you never see in chart pop these days.

So, er, I'm actually with Kathy on the Cher issue. Although not playing the same song all the time. Also, "Lite FM! Love songs! Nothing but love songs!" definitely sounds like my personal Hell. Or possibly Heart FM, which has caused more human suffering than anything I can think of. "Love songs" are just full of generic platitudes. They have all the passion of a crappy poem in a greetings card and are the least romantic thing ever. I hate them. Just thought I'd get that off my chest.

This is a bit of a comedy episode, obviously (expect imminent heartbreak), and the metaphor here is nice and light: Kathy stands for those really annoying people we all know who are all the more annoying for being nice with it, so you can't even tell them to piss of without guilt tripping yourself. I'm sure we've all come across a Kathy. Probably the worst thing is the lack of understanding of personal privacy: you don't have to be "secret identity girl" to find the line "I figure we're almost like sisters now, living together and everything" the scariest thing that's been in Buffy for a good while. People like that absolutely have to be demons.

This episode is well funny, and a lot of that is down to a combination of Sarah Michelle Gellar's facial acting and some nice little directorial touches. In fact, the funniest scene (toenails vs. pencil drumming!) is just an extended riff of camera cuts and sound effects. And I also love the brief glimpses we also get of the wild parties going on in Willow's room! Also, the misdirection early on is well done: it really works as a twist that the hooded demons, who speak to each other in Jabba about "the one", are after Kathy, not Buffy. It's a nice touch that Kathy finds Buffy's slaying kit- and doesn't bat an eyelid! And it seems that conversations between fathers and errant daughters are the same in every dimension.

It all ends for the best, though, with Willow as Buffy's new roommate. That certainly gives the writers an easier job, what with Buffy being "secret identity girl" again.

As for the rest of the Scooby Gang (Xander actually uses the phrase here for, I think, the first time ever! Anyone know if this is indeed the first time?), stuff is brewing. Who's that girl briefly noticed by Oz? Giles is beginning to look increasingly as though he's entering a bit of a mid-life crisis, like many middle-aged men who find themselves suddenly unemployed. And will anything happen between Buffy and "random adorableness" Parker Abrams?

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Freshman

"Uh, are we gonna fight? Or is there just gonna be a monster sarcasm rally?"

Time to take a deep breath; I'm about to embark on forty-four consecutive episodes of Buffyverse (including the first season of Angel) with nothing else except a film on Saturdays, if I happen to be blogging on that particular Saturday. Otherwise there'll be no interruptions (real life aside).

So…. Buffy is back. And in some ways it's back to the beginning, with Buffy having to adjust to a new environment, just as she did in Season One, except that everything's that much bigger in scale and more grown-up.  With no Angel, of course. Oh, and no Cordelia. Wonder where she's gone, he asked rhetorically?

We're back to the examination of teenage life, both through metaphor (well, ish) and through straight-up depiction. The first few days of University are always overwhelming and stressful, and this episode depicts this really well with its many shots of huge, huge rooms- lecture halls, libraries and the like- crammed with loads and loads of people. You really get a sense of how huge and overwhelming is the world of the campus. And so is the work, which I can certainly remember being overwhelmed by in my first semester until I finally realised that I was doing ok, and I could do it. There's a real contrast between Willow, who's excited about no longer being somewhere knowledge is "frowned upon", and is enthusiastic and organised, and Buffy, who's stressed, intimidated and humiliated by it all. She's singled out, shouted at and thrown out of one lecture hall, intimidated by the scary Professor Walsh in another, and embarrassed by her own clumsiness in the library while meeting Riley, who for the moment is still just a big question mark.

And the vampires are part of this, being a rather neat metaphor for those students who bail out in the early days, unable to cope. They prey on the vulnerable, the uncool. And their leader, Sunday, is forever critiquing peoples' fashion choices and even their posters. She and her gang all seem to be metalheads; speaking as a member of the metalhead community I'm not sure what to make of that!

These vampires are part of a bigger, more adult world in which Buffy isn't sure she can cope. She gets her ass kicked. Worse, she's alone. Willow and Oz are busy with their own introduction to University life, and she's pretty much abandoned by both of her parent figures. Joyce has shoved some stuff in her room for storage while Giles, now a "gentleman of leisure", is now living with Olivia, who seems to be an old flame, and without the resources of a library there's not much he can do to help. His message is clear; as her "father" he'll be there for her, but only if he's needed. Buffy has to stand on her own too feet now. She's an adult. He's probably right, but this isn't a good time. Buffy's forced to go to the Bronze and mope, alone.

(Are we going to keep seeing the Bronze this season? It feels odd that they would keep going to the same place. Still, I suppose it makes sense to use existing sets when you can.)

All this changes when Buffy meets Xander, and she really is glad to see him. By his own admission, he hasn't been a particularly good friend in the past. But this time he really comes through with some much-needed perspective; for all the typical Xander humour, his life, and his prospects, seem pretty grim at the moment, whereas Buffy has real opportunities to seize.

Ok, the plot was a bit blah and perfunctory, but this script had a lot of stuff to introduce and a lot of donkey work to do. There are some intriguing things set up, too. How's Buffy going to get on with her roommate Kathy, she of the (gulp!) Celine Dion poster? Who made that phone call, and why didn't Buffy just 1471 it, or whatever the equivalent is in America? Was that course on American popular culture a metatextual joke on Buffy itself being taught at Universities? And who were those mysterious black ops ninjas…?

Oh, and why is everyone being referred to as "freshmen", even if they happen to be female?

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Graduation Day, Part Two

"There's a certain dramatic irony that's attached to all this; a synchronicity that borders on predestination, one might say"

"Fire bad, tree pretty."

Careful, Giles. You could do some serious damage to the fourth wall, saying things like that. Nice coda to the episode, though. Heck, this episode as a whole would have made a nice final episode ever. That's how perfect it is.

I'm amazed that Joss Whedon managed to fit all this into forty-two minutes, really. He essentially has to tell two separate stories in two separate acts (as the Mayor actually points out!)- Buffy saving Angel with a bit of Faith stuff thrown in, and the final battle- while also throwing in lots of character stuff, lots of thematic stuff, and even a surreal dream sequence which hints at his evil future plans. Whatever entity he had to sell his soul to for these evil scriptwriting powers, it's worked. And not turned him into a nasty, slimy, ugly CGI snake with pointy teeth and no limbs, unlike the Mayor. Yes, no limbs. Did he really want that- an eternity of paraplegic demonhood? Well, I say eternity. Obviously, that part's dependent on proximity to loads of explosives.

Buffy curing Angel by letting her bite him is dramatic, and the perfect end to their relationship. Also, it's more than a little erotic, and very, very kinky in a Dracula sort of way. But the question of Faith hangs over this entire subplot- and, in fact, over the main plot with the Mayor. It seems I was dead wrong about the Mayor using Faith as bait; he really does care. So much, in fact, that it's his downfall. That's a surprise, but it convinces, not least because of how Harry Groener plays it.

The season ends with Faith, who more than anything is its catalyst and its thematic anchor, in a coma, we're told permanently, although we don't believe this. We know how TV works, and she'll be back. But at least Eliza Dushku gets a chance to actually act, with the bizarre dream sequence, full of clues to the dastardly plans inside the evil brain of the esteemed Mr Whedon. "Little Miss Muffet counting down from 7…3…0…", eh? We'll see what that's all about, eventually.

There's one interesting little story telling point, I thought, in the hospital. Angel has to use a payphone to call the Scoobies, whereas of course if the episode were to be made today he'd use a mobile. But this is 1999, as we keep getting told: people have mobiles. It's just that the conventions of TV drama haven't quite caught up.

Buffy leaves the hospital ready for a war, and with a plan. Xander is key; nice echoes back to The Zeppo there. I was wondering if Whedon had forgotten about his military superpowers, but he hasn't. Nice touch. It's also nice that Wesley accepts Buffy's resignation, and simply wants to help before he has to leave. Cordelia, of course, rather wishes he wouldn't ("You got fired, and you still hang around like a big loser. Why can't he?"), until, finally, they kiss. And he's a terrible kisser. End of. It's a brilliant scene, which would never have been written if Whedon hadn't known that Charisma Carpenter had the comic acting talent to pull it off.

Willow and Oz continue to be the sweetest couple ever, too. Whedon is kindly waiting until next season to cruelly destroy their lives, obviously.

Still, the Graduation arrives, and with it the promise of speeches and doom. It's so very weird to hear Land of Hope and Glory in this context; are all American high school graduations suffused with random eruptions of British nationalism? It's very bizarre. Also, there's tension. This is it. The final, epic battle, with the demons and vampires pitched against the Class of '99. It's great to watch. There must be casualties, of course; we see Larry being killed, and Harmony appears to get bitten. Snyder, in the most fitting thing in the history of fittingness, gets eaten. And, in the immortal words of Mr. Vincent Furnier, school's blown to pieces.

So, that was high school. What next? This has been a show about high school; it looks as though some fundamental retooling is needed so the show can deal with the themes of young adulthood. Season Four of Buffy and Season One of Angel are both coming very, very soon to a blog near you…

Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Graduation Day, Part One

"We're gonna need a bigger boat."

This is it, then, or at least the first half of it. You could cut the tension with a knife and, er, Buffy sort of does exactly that. There's mere hours to go until the end of school and, since the Mayor will be making his speech and doing all that Ascension stuff right there, also the end of everyone's lives. Jonathan may have been a bit premature when he said that the Class of '99 has had the lowest mortality rate ever.

The American concept of graduating high school is a fascinating one to me as a Brit; we don't have anything like that. Lessons end, you take your final A Level exams, and you wait until the results come in mid-August, long after school ended, when either you'll have achieved the grades you needed for your provisional place at University or it's time to panic. There's no graduation as such, just separate qualifications in the three or four subjects you studies post-16, and nit much of a sense of ceremony although, obviously, the fact that school, ends means something. On the other hand, my degree ceremony was just like this, with gowns and speeches and balls. It feels odd to me to see that sort of thing happening to teenagers.

There's a real contrast between the liberating feeling of school ending, winding down into yearbooks and games of hangman, and the sense of imminent death, as Xander pretty much articulates at the very beginning. But either way it means leaving childhood behind. In fact, this is an episode full of rituals to do with growing up. Willow loses her virginity and Buffy (finally!) severs all ties with the Watchers' Council, calling it a "graduation". She's an adult now and she'll make her own decisions.

Willow and Oz's short scene of post-coital bliss is incredibly sweet, obviously, and so are Anya's obvious feelings for Xander. I love Anya, as do all right-thinking people. But there's something of a cruel contrast between these two couples being brought closer together by the upcoming apocalypse and the fact that they seem to have no future. The whole mood of this episode is so very ambiguous, yet so very powerful too. But then, that always happens in these episodes where Joss Whedon both writes and directs.

The Ascension is near, but the Scoobies still have very little idea how to stop it, and the Mayor is careful to keep them distracted with finding a cure for the mortally wounded Angel and, much though he may bleat about no father being prouder, he's essentially using Faith as expendable bait; he must have known that the blood of a Slayer was the only cure. She doesn't know it, but it seems she's been tossed aside.

It feels the whole series has been running up to this: an epic showdown between Buffy and Faith. It ends inconclusively, of course, as we need a cliffhanger, but it's so, so meaningful, in the context of these two characters and their arc, to see Buffy actually stabbing Faith. Even Faith is more surprised than anything.

Like all first parts to series finales, though, this is just the build-up, and it seems to end on a big suspended chord, just as it should. Tomorrow there should be a proper sense of closure, as I finally get the end of what is still my favourite season.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Prom

"End of school rite of passage thingy…"

Yes, ok, let's get it out of the way: the hellhounds look awful. There. That's the one bad thing I have to say about this episode, so let's move straight on to the gushing.

We don't really have a great tradition of school proms here in the UK. I understand it's become much more of a thing for the young 'un's today, because of the influence of American pop culture stuff such as, well, Buffy. But I'm thirty-five, and I never went to one when I left school, which would have been back in '95. Neither did any of my friends. I mean, there was a sort of formal dance for people who liked that sort of thing, but there was no tradition attached, or any sense of it being any kind of rite of passage. I seem to recall that I saw a local band called Sckism that night.

As I've said a lot in my Buffy bloggings, although admittedly much more in the early days, American high school life seems to be punctuated by all sorts of events- proms, Homecoming, a tradition of school sports being supported by people who don't play them- which simply don't exist in Britain (or rather England, Scotland being an independent nation for educational purposes), or at least not in the sort or ordinary, if rather large, Midlands small town state comprehensive that I went to. There were classes, free periods, exams, coursework and… not much else, certainly no organised social events in the evenings. So it's fascinating to watch this and see the real cultural power of the school prom as a rite of passage. It's such a massive thing in people's lives, and I can understand why Wesley, a countryman of mine, alas, can't see what's so important about a "school dance". That'll be cultural differences. Of course, I suspect that Wesley's school life would have been just as different from mine as that of the Scoobies, no doubt involving such things as prefects, Matron and fagging.

And because the episode is about such a massive rite of passage, it's basically about the characters. I mean, yes, technically we get a supernatural antagonist in Tucker and his Hellhounds, but it's all rather perfunctory. In fact, the funniest scene in the episode (Tucker saying that he has his reasons, followed by a two second flashback of him asking a girl "Do you want to go to the prom with me?" and her  saying "No") is basically just an amusingly metatextual commentary on this. It's not about the Hellhounds. It's about all the nasty things the Mayor was saying at the end of the last episode. He said some cruel things, but they were cruel because they were true.

In fact, arguably we know from the beginning of the episode that this is going to be the one when Buffy and Angel breaking up. Buffy starts talking about keeping stuff in Angel's home, and complaining about it not being "girl friendly", which implies a serious deepening of their relationship and therefore, this being a Joss Whedon show, pretty much telling us that the relationship ends now. It's not a surprise when Joyce turns up, and what she says shouldn't surprise us either. She's right. Angel can never age, can never have children and must never have an orgasm. There's only one was this can end, and it might as well be now. After the mayor's Ascension, he'll leave Sunnydale.

The Mayor knows it. We, the audience, know it. Angel knows it. Even Buffy accepts it, deep down, as she later admits to Willow. But that doesn't make it hurt any less. Buffy is utterly destroyed at Angel breaking up with her, and the scene is utterly, utterly heartbreaking. And she spends the rest of the episode being morose, a little dead inside, and far from her usual wisecracking self. Yet her pain becomes a determination that her friends should not have their Prom night ruined as hers has been. This says a lot about Buffy, and what a hero she is.

There are consolations, such as Willow being such a wonderful friend, and Giles' fatherly offer of support and ice cream, but this is devastating, and all the more so for being inevitable. Fortunately, though, there is some light relief in Anya, former vengeance demon, asking Xander to accompany her to the Prom with the immortal line "Men are Evil. Will you go with me?" Trouble is, her conversation turns out to bore the pants off him. The two of them will never last. Oh, and that thing between Cordelia and Wesley is still going on. That'll really never last.

It's also so very satisfying to see a resolution to the whole Cordelia / Xander thing. When Xander finds out that she's now poor, forced to work in a dead end job and unable to afford any of the universities that accepted her, courtesy of a naughty tax dodging father, the snarking stops. Instead, he keeps her secret and pays for her to have a dress for the Prom. That's a lovely gesture, and fitting recompense after he was such a git to her.

The ending, though, with Jonathan announcing that Buffy has won a special "Class Protector" award by popular demand, even made me cry, and I'm a right stone-hearted bastard. She's been through so much in this episode but now, at last, she realises that she is appreciated, and always has been. The Class of '99 has had the lowest mortality rate in Sunnydale history. Well, so far. Two episodes still to go…

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Choices

"Why couldn't you be dealing drugs, like normal people?"

As often happens in Buffy, the title refers to more than is immediately apparent. Yes, there's Buffy's choice, or lack of, about whether to go to uni somewhere other than Sunnydale. But this episode is also about other choices. Willow makes a positive choice to stay in Sunnydale for the right reasons, because fighting the baddies is what she wants with her life. And Faith has to deal with the consequences of the choice she's made. She and the Mayor may get on fine at the moment, but he's very much the controlling type. This relationship is going to get more and more abusive, and Faith is trapped.

The plot is rather straightforward and blah, really. Its purpose is to get the inevitable and showdown between Buffy and the Mayor out of the way, as it has to happen at some point before the finale, and also to enable the Scoobies to learn more about the Mayor's plans. But the interesting stuff, as ever, is all about the characters.

In the way she responds to being captured, Willow shows herself to be brave and resourceful, yes. But there's more to it than that; this is the episode where it suddenly becomes manifest that she's no longer one of the civilian-type Scoobies; the way she uses that levitating pencil (nice shout out to earlier in the season, that) to stake that vampire shows us that she's beginning to be useful in the field. She's the fully-fledged magic user to the D&D party that is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Er, sorry. Also, she gets the important pages from the Books of Ascension for Giles. That's big. Whatever the increasingly marginalised Wesley might say, the Scoobies are not back to square one at the end.

Of course, the best character moment ever is Oz's angry and eloquent reaction to Wesley's suggestion of not bartering to get his Willow back!

A lot of this episode is about how teenagers' lives are punctuated by huge responsibilities and big decisions which can seem almost crushing in a stage of life where you don't have the experience, and the accumulated confidence that comes with hears, to deal with it easily. I have far more responsibility in my life today than I did when I was the Scoobies' age, but it doesn't cause me stress in the way that pretty much everything did when I was eighteen, on the school-uni-career conveyor belt, where it seems that the slightest mistake will ruin your life forever. Kids that age are experiencing these pressures without any of the benefit of experience which allows us adults to deal with pressure so much less stressfully, and sometimes we forget that. This is an episode about big choices about one's future, and that's scary.

On a more functional note, of course, it's also an episode which begins to hint at how the series can continue after everyone finishes school. They're not all going to disperse to universities all over America, but choose to stay for reasons similar to Willow. Except Xander, of course, who clearly isn't going to college. And what's up with Cordelia? Why is she working in a shop?

The Mayor's little monologue about the doomed nature of Buffy's relationship with Angel is, of course, ominous. He is, as Willow says, evil, but he's also, as no one wants to admit, right. This is clearly foreshadowing. Their relationship is not long for this world.

Oh, and that rather disgusting McGuffin full of spiders… what's all that about?