Buffy Season Two Episode Thirteen

"Better do a round robin. Xander, you go first."

"Good call."

"Round robin?"

"It's when everybody calls everybody else's mom and tells them they're staying over at everyone's house."

"Thus freeing us up for world save-age."

OK, promised not to pick at illogic from episode to episode, but at the end of the last one Buffy was so grounded, like, forever, and now she's gallivanting off to surprise parties and pretending to study at friends' houses, etc.

Nice misdirection: in Buffy's dream, her mom asks her if she's really ready, then the plate falls and breaks; we (or I, anyway) assume that "ready" means "for sex." But then irl Buffy's mom asks her if she's really ready to start driving. But the true direction is a misdirection itself, since sex really is one of the episode's questions, while driving is not.

( Non-demon-related concerns )

Buffy Season Two Episode Fourteen: No Mr. Bond, I Want You To Die

Right. Crackerjack episode. I resisted at first, not because I minded what they did with Angel (my notes say, "OK, first really interesting plot twist of the series"), but because the analogy they were drawing seemed too facile, and I feared that the Big Plots involving Angel and the Judge were going to drown out the psychosocial stuff in school that is my favorite part of the show. But the scriptwriters were right fine at working in the psychosocial, and the human story - what Buffy was feeling - overwhelmed the analogy. And the acting, staging, and camera work were pretty much perfect in all the emotional scenes. E.g., in the library after the hallway fight, the camera did a good unobtrusive job of finding its way to the people who really understood what was emotionally going on (Buffy, Jenny, Willow) without resorting to cuts and reaction shots, and the staging was wise to have Jenny standing in the back with Rupert, understanding, but isolated because of her extra unknown role and so not allowing herself to truly interact.

You should take a look at Dave's commentary on the Ted episode, which includes this thought:

The magic of Buffy, which starts to become clear, I think, as this season goes on, is that it puts its characters in a kind of psychology-space that's more compelling than the "real" space (single mom! step-dad! etc.!) OR the "fantasy" space (vampires! demons! etc.!). The middle-ground, a kind of internal world that doesn't cleanly connect back to Real-World but also doesn't quite make it wholesale into a Sci Fi world. It starts to ride on pure character, and on pure(r?) emulation of a sort of teenaged mind-state (in this case junior year of high school -- senior year is VERY "senior year" feeling, tho, because the show's voice is more assured).

OK, before we get to the SPOILERATION under the cut, a couple of trivial logic questions: (1) If vampires live off people's blood, why would they want the Judge to destroy everyone? Spike has the line, "I know you haven't been in the game for a while, mate, but we still do kill people, sort of our raison d'être, you know," but that can't be altogether true. (2) We know why it wouldn't do any good for living humans to shoot vampires, but say there was a human who is very dangerous to vampires, a slayer, for instance: why wouldn't the vampires simply shoot her?

( Willow watch )