OKAY, OKAY, BUFFY CHITCHAT (SPOILERS)

Boy, you guys really want your Buffy discussions, don’t you. Okay, fine.

Well, I liked this episode a heck of a lot. I’ve been seeing fan criticisms of it and I don’t agree with a whole lot of them.

Criticism #1–The Wannaslays are annoying and the show’s starting to look like “Facts of Life.” Putting aside that Buffy could kick Mrs. Garrett’s ášš, let’s remember how fairly unpromising Buffy herself was when she first started up, both in the movie and in the flashback sequences shown in the series. She was as much an airhead or worse, and that was when she *already* had been activated. It’s not really fair to hold the Wannaslays up to the same standard that it’s taken Buffy seven years to achieve. Kendra was trained nearly from birth, and Faith hit the ground running, but one got the feeling she was probably able to slap people up oneside and down the other even before she go the power.

Criticism #2–Buffy should have been armed in the Thunderdome throw down with the Ubervamp. Possibly, but I can see her reasoning. One of Buffy’s strengths has always been her ability to improvise. The point she was trying to make to the girls was that, no matter what situation you’re in, if you rely on your innate abilities and think fast on your feet, you will win. If she’d gone in armed with sword and axe, the lesson would have been, “Be sure to be heavily armed.” If the girls had taken that lesson to heart and then been in a situation where they’d been deprived of weaponry, they might well have frozen.

Once again Giles neither removes his coat nor touches anything. Yes, when he stood in the wind, the wind muffed his hair, but some allowances have to be made for the realities of filming. On a cold day, you’ll see mist coming out of Spike’s mouth if they’re outdoors, and since vampires don’t breathe, that shouldn’t be the case (and how DOES he blow out smoke, now that we’re thinking about it?) The point is, they’re still being coy, Giles might be dead, and this is the First. Scuttlebutt is that it’s a red herring. Possibly. But if it is, I stand by my assertion that some spectacularly bad writing was done in order to support the red herring (that Buffy and Co. didn’t hug Giles upon his return is just ridiculous. That the gentlemanly Englishman helped none of the girls with their bags is out of character. And his defeatist attitude was just disheartening.)

Criticism #3: If the First’s agents eliminated the Watcher’s Council through the expedient of blowing up their HQ, why the hëll doesn’t he eliminate the Slayers now that they’re mostly gathered in Buffy’s house? Well, several possibilities. First, they’re not ALL there. And second, he doesn’t want to kill them all. He has some other plan, some other use for them. Keep in mind, we’re only at the halfway point of the season, and in previous years at similar halfway points, we didn’t have a full grasp of what the Big Bad had up his sleeve. At this point in season 5, we didn’t know what Glory wanted. In season 4, Adam wasn’t built yet by now. In season 3, we didn’t know what the Ascension was and Faith hadn’t gone bad yet. And in season 2, Angel hadn’t lost his soul. So there’s still more developments to be seen, and the First may well have far more up his instangible sleeve than just killing all the Slayers.

So we’ll see. I think it’s pre-empted next week, though.

PAD