Battlestar Galactica: Season One

I started Battlestar Galactica without knowing anything about it besides the fact that a friend gave me the DVDs. The course of the two part miniseries that kicks off the season did not seem particularly unpredictable at first. Man created the robotic Cylons; they rose up against us; we won; now, everyone get ready to gasp, they are coming back for blood. Still, the unfolding chaos was extremely well done. Some of the characters – such as Katee Stackhoff’s Starbuck and Jamie Bamber’s Lee – seemed dangerously close to being brash archetypes, but everything I saw had heart, Edward James Olmos won me over immediately with his portrayal of Commander Adama, and I was soon sucked into each of their stories. Furthermore, amidst the chaos of the war’s eruption, the show had numerous wonderful and small moments. Two pilots fit as many refugees aboard their ship, but they can save a bare fraction of the crowd. Then, spotting a genius scientist that could contribute so much to humanity after the war, one of them gives up his seat. As his only chance of escape flies away, he raises his hand in farewell.

Only one thing seemed off: the pacing. The war seemed to be flying by. In fact, Commander Adama and the rest of the cast onboard the old-fashioned, about to be decommissioned and museum-ized (and what a nice touch, that!) Battlestar Galactica don’t have their guns loaded when the rest of the human fleet is annihilated. Slowly, it dawned on me that, while Battlestar Galactica was quite capable of showing humanity fighting a defensive war for its survival, it had its eye on a bigger prize. Indeed, by the miniseries’ halfway point, humanity has lost its war. By the end of the miniseries, even Adama has given up the idea of combat.

By the start of the first regular episode, we are left with Adama and the Battlestar Galactcia escorting a ragtag fleet of civilian refugees away from our devastated system while the Cylons destroy the rest of humanity. We are heading towards the mythical and long lost earth, Adama says – but, though he doesn’t admit it, even he doesn’t know where it is. We are alone in space, we are all that’s left, and we are pursued. And we have a damn brilliant premise for a TV show right there, I think.

It’s not a premise that the show squanders. The transition from explosive, fast paced miniseries to episodic storytelling is brilliantly made with 33, in which flight turns our survival from an epic clash to a never-ending test of endurance which will end us if we fail once. Into all of that comes a terrifying realization: the Cylons can, if they so choose, look just like us. They are among those of us that are left, and their strikes from within might be enough to finish us off.

The show’s morality is not so simple, though, to paint anyone with genuine flesh and blood as good, and any discussion of its characters would be incomplete without James Callis’ Gaius Baltar. He is the genius scientist I mentioned earlier, he is the man who (unknowingly seduced by a Cylon agent) allowed the attack to take place, he is the one who hallucinates the Number Six Cylon speaking to him, he is key in the fleet’s power structure – and he is a brilliantly amoral bastard. The show does an early and excellent job establishing his intellectual prowess, and it then does just as good a job throwing him out far past his depths. Episode after episode, we see his confidence stripped away until he is at the utter mercy of Number Six. In the few realms in which he is outside her influence, we see him abandon right and wrong and cleave to simple survival while the rest of the fleet, still trusting in him, knows nothing.

He is not the show’s only standout character. Battlestar Galactica has a massive cast and does the best job I’ve seen on television of giving the feel of a military organization with more than four or five blokes in it. More impressive still, that varied class is developed. Characters like Lee and Starbuck are half heart and half swagger, capable of depth when focused upon and capable of riveting motion when on the sidelines. Michale Hogan’s Saul Tigh, the ship’s XO, is an often present but rarely focused upon character who, when given a bit of the spotlight in episodes like Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down, shows a powerful but quiet strength and struggle. Such understated arcs give the viewer confidence that, though we don’t get to study every crewmember of the ship, each of them likely does have a powerful story.

My favorite personal arc in the show, though, is definitely the question of the Cylon’s humanity as exemplified in Grace Park’s Boomer. Early on, the audience learns that the pilot is a Cylon agent, but even she does not know her true origins. We see her face the piling evidence against her, and we see her growing terror at the possibility and determination to prove herself worthy and human. Early in the season, her relationship with Chief is likely the show’s warmest element; his leaving her and the action she takes in the season’s penultimate episode, meanwhile, are heartbreaking.

Boomer’s story, and the question of whether Cylons are truly alive or even human, is contrasted against Tahmoh Penikett’s Helo’s adventures on Caprica. Helo was the pilot who gave up his seat in the miniseries. Left behind, he is now navigating a deserted world in the company of a duplicate of Boomer’s model of Cylon. She’s there to manipulate him to some nefarious purpose, but the two fall in love.

All of that might have been interesting, but Helo’s storyline proves the show’s only real annoyance. Simply put, nothing happens. The two just wander around on Caprica, and the entire thing seems utterly without significance to anything or anyone else in the universe until the final episode. The arc does also raise and then forget some uncomfortable questions that, if they weren’t about to be answered, should probably have been left unsaid. For one thing, since the majority of the city they are in actually seems perfectly intact, where did all the people go? Why isn’t it rubble? Where are the bodies? Why are there no other survivors?

A far more interesting source of questions and conflicts is that of the fleet’s political situation. By following the constitution’s chain of succession far into the double digits, the fleet has appointed Mary McDonnell’s Laura Roslin President, and the interplay between the military and political branches of command is fascinating and surprisingly well handled. Principles and practicalities come into conflict, and one must wonder how desperate the situation must be before democracy and right should be cast aside. Other impossible choices are often presented with the same skill, such as when the characters are forced to destroy a civilian ship, passengers aboard, that the Cylons have managed to track time and time again. Such successes go a long way towards forgiving the show’s occasional thematic flops, such as its weak attempt to evoke 9-11 by discussing a “no fly” list that prevents a known traitor from moving about; it is true that prisoners cannot fly, but the reasons for that have rather more fundamentally to do with the fact that they are not allowed to do anything than with a specific barring from aviation.

In terms of dramatic moments, the show does have the occasional jarring failure. No less than two plots rely completely on future military technology having no safety features and simply being dropped by various incompetents, the strangest part of which was that there was already an established saboteur plot that could have picked up the slack with something deeper than “oops!” Elsewhere, we have an address to prisoners that is, for some inexplicable reason, preceded by freeing them from their cells, and you have the usual insistence on characters making objections to dubious plans not in the planning stage but in the “burst in and save the day” one when it would really be better to just get on with it.

Such qualms, though, are only so noticeable in comparison to the show’s high quality level. Battlestar Galactica throws a well drawn cast into a stunning situation and delivers on that setup. The universe feels filled with promise, and I look forward to seeing what it can throw at the fleet and at me in future seasons.

Serenity

I aim to misbehave.

Serenity is the movie that continued Joss Whedon’s stunning Science Fiction/Western Firefly. It doesn’t fall short of that series.

[Note: the following review will have SPOILERs.]

Admittedly, the transition from television series to movie is not a perfect one. Besides the alterations done to the world’s and characters’ backstory, the change in format from successive forty minute segments to a single two hour block requires a vast shift in pacing and in focus. Here, we have a far faster pace that frequently explodes into violence and often delves into darkness. Of course, all the strength and mounting emotional destruction of the movie is still offset by Whedon’s omnipresent humor, here manifesting itself in countless one liners and fantastic reaction lines. One particular choice bit near the beginning has the ship plummeting down to the planet below when Mal tells Wash to just get us on the ground, to which Wash responds: That part’ll happen pretty definitely. Still, The laidback, horses and towns under the hot sun feel of Firefly that brought out the Western elements is largely absent, swapped out for a greater focus on the epic and the Science Fictional.

Along with the aforementioned changes comes the shift in focus away from the ensemble cast and towards Mal’s character. Some of the others, like Wash, still manage to define themselves in an iconic scene or two without taking much screen time. Others, like Jayne, never get to do a great deal but are still a notable presence. But some, such as Kaylee, end up becoming part of the background; her role in the movie is pining after Simon and just about nothing else. Furthermore, the shift pushes some unresolved questions from Firefly into the abyss. Mal and Inara get a few small interactions but make no ultimate progress. Book, meanwhile, responds to Mal’s you have to tell me about [your past] sometime with No, I don’t, which, when one considers his brutal death not long after, rather shuts the lid on our ever knowing.

But while I might wish we could have a few more stories in the world, I certainly don’t mean to cast aspersions on the power of this one. In two hours, Whedon takes River’s storyline and manages to fully develop it and her in a fashion that, even if it’s not completely consistent with the hints we received in the show, is nonetheless satisfying and resplendent with awesomely choreographed action. It’s Mal’s development, though, that makes Serenity truly excellent. Here we finally see the exploration of evolution of Mal’s philosophy and character, and we see it in stark contrast to the Alliance’s Operative that pursues him to slay River.

In his pursuit of Mal, the Operative does great evil. This is not a subjective determination necessitated by nothing but the camera’s choosing to follow Mal, rather than the Operative, around. No, the Operative owns up to his evil. In fact, it defines him. When Mal accuses him of killing the innocent, the Operative proudly, determinedly says: I do [murder children]. If I have to.

The Operative is fighting because he believes in something, because he believes in a better world […] without sin, and he will commit any crime to reach that world. Of course, he is stained in the process. The Operative knows this. His and the Alliance’s morality is black and white, but it is not a black and white so selfishly twisted as to color their own actions white. The Operative will have no place in the promised land he brings about; his role, rather, is to create it by destroying those foes, like Mal, that stand in its way.

Mal, needless to say, is not the black that the Operative thinks him. He cares deeply about his crew and ship, and, as we saw demonstrated innumerable times throughout the series, will put his life on the line to save the innocent. But neither is he white on some alternative spectrum that the Operative fails to see.  Mal had his morality, once. In the first episode of the show (confusingly enough also entitled Serenity), we saw the last vestiges of his faith in man die in the Battle of Serenity Valley, die when free men failed to fight their oppressors and, overmatched, bowed before them.

Since, Mal has been a rogue and a smuggler, capable of identifying evil and loving to prick it and save the little man from it but knowing he can do nothing against it. As he says: War’s long done. We’re all just folk now. And he has committed crimes of his own. His code allows any actions needed against those that stand in his way and don’t have the luck of falling into his few protected categories. In Serenity, we first witness him in a heist. When things go wrong, when the Reavers storm the town, he finds himself with a choice: he can save the loot or save an innocent man. He keeps the loot and gives the man a mercy killing.

In Serenity, Mal is forced out of subsistence and back into the larger conflict. He is forced to, as Abigail Nussbaum discusses in her piece “Oh Captain, My Captain: MalReynolds, Anti-Anti-Hero,” become a force for moral good in an amoral universe. At no point does he regain his faith in men or in grand causes. But the Operative’s relentless hounding, the Operative’s slaughtering of all those associated with Mal and all those associated with them, the Alliance’s crimes and refusal to let anything stand before them or stand untouched and unmanipulated by them, force Mal to take a stand against them, even if his stand is more one against evil than one directly for good. This ability – the ability to be a force for right, even without direct guidance as to what it might be – was espoused by Shepherd Book throughout Firefly. And, through Book is sadly almost absent from Serenity, he does get to crystalize that view in the movie, telling Mal: I don't care what you believe in, just believe in it.

Mal comes to stand opposite the Operative and the Alliance, but the axis he opposes them on is not the black/white or good/evil that they operate upon; it is, rather, that of freedom/oppression. The Alliance has taken the political independence of the worlds. As we saw in Firefly, its reach is ever expanding, deeper and deeper into space, limiting and meddling on every world. But its reach is not just political. The Operative speaks of a world without sin, and the Alliance has taken steps to achieve that world. On Miranda, they pumped gasses into the atmosphere to render the population docile, to strip them of their aggression. As the report says: The people here stopped fighting. […] There's 30 million people here, and they all just let themselves die. Those that didn’t die went mad with rage and became the Reavers.

It is this kind of control, the control that takes people’s very emotions and humanity from them, that Mal is against. It is, ultimately, the idea that people can be progressed beyond themselves. As he says, the Alliance holds the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that. At the movie’s climax, once Mal has beaten the Operative and restrained him, Mal broadcasts the knowledge of what the Alliance did on Miranda. Hell, I’m going to grant your greatest wish, Mal tells the Operative before showing him the footage. I’m going to show you a world without sin. There is, indeed, no sin amidst the corpses on Miranda and no humanity either. Mal is fighting for man as they are, not for man as they might someday be twisted into being.

Though the freedom/oppression battle waged here also comes to, by the end, seemingly coincide with our conventional definitions of good/evil, it is a mistake to limit its impact to that of that axis and to try and shoehorn all that Mal is into the role of white knight. The darkness we see in Mal’s character in the movie’s opening is not banished with his shift from survivor to warrior. It is no coincidence that Mal’s first words after his conversation with the Operative that forces him to accept his new role are, Get these bodies together […] I want them laid out on the nose of our ship. It is immediately after his transformation that Mal engages in his darkest acts. He disguises himself as a Reaver, takes on the guise of ultimate evil to fight the Alliance’s oppression and desecrates the corpses of those who died for him in order to do it. In fact, in his role as warrior, Mal abandons his previous code as a survivor. By going toe to toe with the alliance, he puts his crew, the family he would do anything to protect, into mortal danger and ultimately kills Wash (and, if you’ll allow me to unprofessionally fixate on that for a moment, what a death scene it is!).

Of course, the eternal championing of freedom, and freedom uncomplicated by good/evil morality, bears with it a few problems. Chief among them is the issue that, for all a world without sin may be an inhuman proposition, there are terrors yet inherent in sin that Mal seems to be removing the safeguards from, as Abigail Nussbaum (well isn’t this turning into the essay for referencing her?) writes in her “Well, Maybe You Can Take That Part ofthe Sky.” I am not, ultimately, sure that Whedon is as unaware of this problem as Nussbaum seems to suppose. Many of the problems seen in Firefly were caused by relatively small time criminals and crime lords just as on the run from the Alliance as Mal. Admittedly, Mal gives the poor folk oppressed by this lower level of evil little thought in Serenity, but I wonder if that might be more a product of Whedon’s compression of his idea into two hours rather than dozens of episodes than it is a product of Whedon’s actual vision. Still, giving Whedon points for what I think he might have later wrote is growing untenable.

And, within, the bounds of what we do see in Serenity, I found myself incredulous at how Whedon dodged the consequences of Mal’s actions. After Mal’s heroic defiance of authority and acceptance of the death that would likely result, Whedon grabs that seemingly inevitable result back off the table, leaving, despite a few cursory words about a possibility to the contrary, the Alliance’s vengeance one forestalled by them all suddenly turning into very reasonable chaps who are quite aware when they are beaten. Arguing that, if we are just heroic enough, we may get spared the consequences of our heroism seems to be a questionable proposition.

Such gaps and questions leave one wishing Whedon had gotten more time to play with the universe of Firefly. But what he has given us is mighty indeed. Serenity is an excellent Science Fiction movie, one that brims with wit, boasts a plethora of simply awesome sequences, and explores and evolves the philosophy of character of the enigmatic and fascinating Mal.

Doctor Who: Series Five

So... all of time and space, everything that ever happened or ever will - where do you want to start? 

To say that I've been remiss in my Science Fiction viewing after so many years of not watching Doctor Who would be fair enough. It is, after all, the longest running Science Fiction show in the world and one that's supposed to be damn good as well as rather lengthy. Of course, jumping in at the fifth season of a reboot is rarely my style. Faced with the immensity of existing Who material, however, I asked a close friend and fan of the show, and they pointed to here as the beginning of the period with the most awesome. As a fan of awesome, I followed their advice. What I found in this fifth series, means I'll certainly be back for more.

Showrunner Steven Moffat said he aimed at a "fairy tale" feel for the show and that he wanted it to be more "fantastical" and "bonkers" than anything else on TV. He rather succeeds at all three of those descriptors, leading to a program characterized less by any one setting or feel than it is by fast-marching exuberance, lendless possibility, and a beautifully excessive number of ideas. There is an overall plot to the season, but it doesn't become dominant until the last two episodes. Until then, the writers generate entirely new plots, characters, and settings episode after episode. Keep in mind, this is Science Fiction of the most –as Moffat would attest – bonkers variety. We're not simply slotting in a new villain. No, when moving from week to week, we're dealing with entirely new vistas and rules of reality.

This season of Who (and, for all I know, all others) is packed to the bursting and beyond with Science Fiction ideas. Lone episodes often hold enough for an entire series to thrive. The sheer number of rules and bends of reality does occasionally mean that the show ends up contradicting itself, such as when the Doctor sets up a meeting between the subterranean Silurians and humanity in one thousand years' time… long after, we viewers and the Doctor might have noticed, the earth is said to end in The Beast Below. Such slip ups, though, are impressively uncommon, and the writers do manage to just as often rope together odds and ends into satisfying and timely knots.

In order to get across and get through so many plots and worlds, the show needs to employ pacing as quick as lightening. The writers need to get across great swathes of info on their settings without dwelling on any one aspect of it, and they do this through a shorthanded method of worldbuilding and through implication. First, Doctor Who is not above establishing clumps of backstory or whatever else with clichés. In episodes dominated by a few strong personalities, the background is often sketched in by stock characters that are mostly there to show us what we need to know and to give the real movers something to play off of and work with. The Silurian warrior Restac, for instance, is a decently used foe that doesn't burden the pacing. These clichés are sometimes mishandled, however. In the same two parter that we meet Restac in, we meet the regrettable character of Malokeh, who, a byproduct of scripting efficiency gone mad, goes from one extreme cliché to another without a thought between them, from Mengele to the benevolent scientist.

But Who's writers thankfully have more in their quiver than clichés. In order to make their creations fascinating and atmospheric as well as easily graspable, the writers and creators of Who have packed their episodes with striking and intriguing details, hints, and images, characterizing their settings with iconic and intriguing setpieces. Wisely, the writers do not set out to explain away every cool glimmer and mystery they strew about, leaving such things as the carnivalesque aspects of Starship UK in The Beast Below primarily up to the viewer's imagination.

Driving all this weirdness and all these plots forward is, of course, the Doctor, the center of it all. Matt Smith is the eleventh actor to hold the role, and, though I can't yet compare him to any of his predecessors, he is simply brilliant to watch. Like the times and worlds he traverses, the Doctor can't be so much pinned down to a single quality as he can to an endless ability to flit between them. At all times he is convincingly off from humanity and in some ways more than it. Often, he speaks and thinks in thick and flowing streams of free-association deduction, spouting wisdom and nonsense and endlessly quotable lines in the same verbal onslaught. He is, at once, involved with those around them and trying to do his best by them and also hopelessly distant from them, connecting to them on a few levels and utterly unrelated to them on every other. Above all, at least in his own words, he is a madman with a box. Uniting the manifold oddities of the character into a coherent whole should have been a near impossible task, but Smith manages to pull it off and look like he's having the time of his life while doing it.

Still, the avalanche of personality that is the Doctor can grow overwhelming, and that may be why some of the series' strongest episodes have him interacting with, or butting heads against, an equally forceful character. The Eleventh Hour, Vincent and the Doctor, and the Lodger all have this in spades. Perhaps because of their focus on character, they all also have rather weak villains and Science Fiction elements. Still, the relationships are enough to carry the show. The Lodger seems wholly inspired by a single gag – the Doctor forced to live as an ordinary bloke for a time – but his interactions with James Corden's Craig and the charm of every actor involved serve to bring the whole thing off.

Vincent and the Doctor. meanwhile, is daring enough to focus on Van Gogh and his internal (and external) demons. The episode's end – in which, for all his skill, the Doctor could not save Van Gogh from himself – is a strange cross of sentimental ( The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don’t always soften the bad things, but vice versa the bad things don’t always spoil the good things and make them unimportant. And we definitely added to his pile of good things) and futile. No matter its conclusions and other elements, the whole thing would be worth if it its only moment of grace was how beautifully overwhelmed Tony Curran's Van Gogh becomes when brought to the modern day Louvre to see his own exhibit.

The Eleventh Hour is the season opener, was my first introduction to Who, and shows the first interactions between the Doctor and his main companion for the season, Karen Gillian's Amy Pond. When we begin, however, the Doctor doesn't meet the fully grown Amy but the child she once was, Caitlin Blackwood's Amelia. Having just been  regenerated, and after a hilarious scene coming to terms with his new taste buds, the Doctor tells her that he'll be back in five minutes and doesn't return for years, not until she's grown and Amy. That abandonment and other abandonments forge her character, and her life is shaped by her longing for the return of this one-time visitor from her childhood that no one believes in. The episode's overall plot is rather weak, but the Doctor's relationship with both actresses, and the way that the two work together to form a complete and powerful character, all works quite well.

In future episodes, such as the Beast Below, where Amy travels with the Doctor and in which her relationship with him develops, all is more than well – but the crux of her character is her relationship not with the Doctor but with her fiancé, Arthur Darvill's Rory, and things don't go nearly so well there. Rory isn't unlikable, but her interactions with him have none of the chemistry that her interactions with the doctor do, and her time with him feels like dull restraint just waiting to burst forth into another adventure. At the end of Flesh and Stone, she tries to seduce the Doctor, and, though he rebuffs her, it doesn't seem that her feelings for him and the endless adventure he provides end there. The episode Amy's Choice seems supposed to settle her conflict and ends up leaving the opposite feeling in the viewer. Contrasting an adventure with the Doctor and comfortable boredom with her fiancé, Amy seems all set to pick the former until the thought of losing the latter makes her supposedly realize how she feels. Yet, besides how much it might hurt to lose him, there's not much of a sign of he and her having much there to lose in the first place.

But enough of those around the star; it's time to turn back to the Doctor himself. Unlike so many TV heroes, he is a pacifist who eschews the use of weapons and violence both, relying instead on his quick wit and interpersonal skills. This leads to many of the season's strongest parts, where the Doctor establishes his true superiority over his foes not by his bigger gun or their laughable accuracy but by his intelligence. In the two part The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone, he's a wrathful trickster against impossible odds but brimming with incredible schemes. When he gives his defiant speech at the first episode's end (Didn't anyone ever tell you? There's one thing you never put in a trap. If you're smart, if you value your continued existence, if you have any plans about seeing tomorrow, there is one thing you never, ever put in a trap. […] Me!), it's a moment hard to describe as anything but awesome.

Alas, the writers are not quite as brilliant as their preternaturally brilliant hero, and so an uncomfortable number of the season's climaxes are not so much composed of trickery as they are of the silliest pseudo-logic that falls apart at the most cursory of examinations. In the finale, the Doctor brings himself back from being erased from all existence by having Amy remember him. But, had he been erased from all existence, she wouldn't have been able to remember him. Nobody else did, after all. Other plot arcs and twists aren't quite as out and out nonsensical but are still nonetheless silly. The Victory of the Daleks in particular doesn't so much have a plot as a series of faux-logical leaps that are a mixture of unsurprising and cloyingly unsatisfying, the pinnacle of which is when the Doctor defeats the Daleks' plan by convincing an android that he is more man than machine by reminiscing about love.

Furthermore, since the Doctor does not fight, and since his enemies are often so threatening because they do nothing but, we are left with honestly rather awkward set ups in which the fearsome villain is reduced to nothing more than growling impotently as the Doctor runs away time and time again. When the Doctor holds the Daleks back by swearing a Jammie Dodger is a self destruct device, one has to admire his daring, if not his prudence. But when he escapes Prisoner Zero, Saturnyne, Eknodine, and innumerable others in episode after episode by simply legging it, some of the show's fiercest villains start to look like they have rather more bark than bite.

A crack in the universe...

The series' main plot comes to the fore in the final two episodes, The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang. The snappiest description I can give of the climax therein is that it is a glorious mess. The Pandorica Opens functions much like the latter episode's namesake, a perpetually expanding and almost impossible to keep up with storm of information and events that twists and turns in innumerable ways. The Big Bang functions in a similar fashion but almost in reverse, covering little territory overall but looping back madly in upon itself to see it from every angle and try to save all of everything. Most of the twists and turns throughout this whole thing are totally brilliant. The rest are utterly nonsensical and hopelessly silly. The emotional burdens range from powerfully hard hitting to just odd. And, of course, the silliness is still delightfully everywhere (fezzes are cool!). Ultimately, the climax is littered with holes, but it's shooting out at you so fast and with so much force that you don't notice them all until well, well after you've been struck and swept along with your jaw on the floor of some other time and some other space.

Really, the entire series functions much like the climax in that regard. Looking back, I can think of only one or two episodes that didn't strike me as flawed in some way or other, whether that flaw was a gap in logic or a failing in some element of the plot or character. Despite that, almost none of those flaws bothered me at the time of viewing. I see the issues that critics like Abigail Nussbaum have raised, but the show proceeds with too much sheer force be derailed. Or, more accurately, it's shot off the rails long ago and is just going along with far too much style for anyone to notice or care. The experience of watching Doctor Who can perhaps be best summed up as a befuddled ecstasy, and I'll be coming back to view the series I missed and find out what happens next.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Seven

If only Buffy had stayed dead. When she fell at the fifth season's close, the show had three absolutely excellent seasons (the aforementioned five as well as its second and third) under its belt and had established itself as a master of humor, drama, and horror. Then came season six, a mixture of poorly executed trauma and failed farce. Looking back, even that utter wasting of great characters and potential – an exploding outward in a thousand unfocused and irrelevant directions instead of a cohesive arc – would have been a preferable ending place. That's not to say that season seven imitates its predecessors faults, mind you. No, this show does get back on what might, from a distance, look like the right track. It's Buffy against the forces of darkness again, everything tied into one character-trying and plot-twisting arc. Only, when we weren't looking, the once-right track eroded, fell to pieces, and – much as this metaphor's starting to go off the rails – lost just about everything that once made it worthy. What's left is po-faced, embarrassingly grandiose, undercutting of everything that has gone before, and jam packed with enough new characters to staff an entire network's worth of awful spinoffs.

Let's start with the characters. Not the main characters, mind you. Oh no. Remember when the show was actually about the people on the box art? When they had focused arcs that interacted with each other, that grew and changed? When we could watch their growth and know them with all the clarity we'd have had if they'd existed? We've left all of that far behind. Of course, this isn't the first batch of new characters we've had. By this point, Buffy'd been going on for a damn fair while, and new blood was always a part of keeping things fresh. But it's not that new people are introduced here, and it's not that they don't work. Some do. D.B. Woodside, for instance, is quite enjoyable as the school's principal, and freelance vampire hunter, Robin Wood. The problem is that there's nothing but new faces here. An onslaught of them. Literally dozens of the bastards, flooding the set in utterly uncharacterized hordes until Buffy's living room is so packed the camera needs to pan for whole seconds to show all of the nameless faces. Before long, it starts to seem that the writers have wholly forgotten how to make us care about characters and are just hoping to hide that fact with sheer numbers. It doesn't work. By the end, I was looking on Andrew (the season's surviving member of the Trio/Three Douchebags in a Van that so marred the sixth) as an old friend in comparison to everyone around him.

Seriously.

So who are all these people? Potential Slayers, of course. It turns out that the slayers are all part of one bloodline, and we learn that the Watchers' were the ones that kept track of them and trained them so that they would be ready, if they were called up. (Of course, Buffy received no such pre-Slayerhood training, but we've bigger fish to fry at the moment than one little retcon.) Now, the First Evil is hunting them, and it's up to Buffy to collect, protect, and train them. So that's what she does. Before long, her house starts to resemble – and then just outright become – less generic slice of suburbia and more a refugee shelter. As for the potentials themselves, there are so many that there's no time at all for the writers to distinguish them, let alone make us care about them. As a result, they range from faceless to obnoxious, and they never amount to anything until the final (regrettable) episode. In the meantime, though, we are shown them striving to better themselves (they fail) and, occasionally, succumbing to their foes and dying. Surprisingly, the perishing of unnamed, uncharacterized clutter fails to provoke tears.

Only two characters in all of this actually manage arcs, and the main one is, obviously, Buffy's. Arc, though, might be the wrong word. It implies continuous change, moving towards a climax and a new being. That's not quite accurate. Buffy has one jarring shift near the beginning, and then she trudges along, constantly pointing at the aforementioned change in case we missed it, until the show's end. Here, Buffy must go from fighter to leader. She does this by making speeches. Endless, endless, fucking endless speeches. For entire stretches, she'll make one an episode. They're awful, so self consciously inspirational that you want to cover your ears from the embarrassment. To give just one glimpse of them:

I'm beyond tired. I'm beyond scared. I'm standing on the mouth of hell, and it is gonna swallow me whole. And it'll choke on me. We're not ready? They're not ready. They think we're gonna wait for the end to come, like we always do. I'm done waiting. They want an apocalypse? Oh, we'll give 'em one. Anyone else who wants to run, do it now. 'Cause we just became an army. We just declared war. From now on, we won't just face our worst fears, we will seek them out. We will find them, and cut out their hearts one by one, until The First shows itself for what it really is. And I'll kill it myself. There is only one thing on this earth more powerful than evil, and that's us. Any questions?

That's from Bring on the Night. Lest you think it a climactic moment, it's the first of the just-discussed many, the season's veritable hordes of speeches, and it's far from the last time that Buffy will decide to take the fight to the enemy and then promptly not do anything until the next speech.

Spike... is actually still awesome.

Then there's Spike. His arc here works. Amazing, I know. It is, I think, the only complete storyline to do so. Spike, soul in hand, is tormented by what he's done. In his vulnerable state, the First Evil comes to him and vies for control of his soul and purpose. It comes to a head in Lies My Parents Told Me, where Giles and Wood decide that Spike is too dangerous to their team and attempt to slay him and where Spike, as he's beaten by Wood, comes to terms with his vampirism and what he's done. The only blemish on the whole thing is that it's such a small part of the season's overall time and that its buildup, execution, and aftermath are all but lost amidst every(regrettable)thing else. Anya's return to humanity might have managed to reach some of Spike's heights, but suffers far more from its lack of screen time and is wholly submerged by dreck before long.

The pacing of season seven is the worst pacing Buffy's ever had. The levity's almost wholly gone now, replaced with a failed sense of impending doom that just translates into endless brooding. Characters mope, motivate themselves, head out on some ill defined venture with no clear goal, fail, and proceed to mope once more. There's no sense of progress at all, not from Buffy's side and not from her foe's. There's no relief from this at all, because the side stories vanish as we progress. Then again, considering how poor efforts like Him are early in the season, that may be for the best.

Well doesn't this look like an interesting villain.

The enemy causing all of this, our final big bad, is the First Evil, the being of evil incarnate that we first met in season three. Now, the First Evil is incorporeal. That might, you may be thinking, pose a problem. It does. The writers get around this in two ways. First, through the introduction of avatar type characters. In the first half, we get the ubervamp (no, seriously). It's a vampire with far more strength and almost none of the vampire's traditional weaknesses. It also can't speak and, so, has no personality to speak of; it moves about the screen with roughly the same force of character that a scurrying raccoon, inadvertently given super strength, might have. Then, after a brief stint with Spike, it settles on Caleb, played by Nathan Fillion. Now, I love Nathan Fillion. Firefly's Mal Reynolds is likely my favorite character in television. But Caleb is a failure, just another villain who trudges about, doesn't properly react to punches, and hits really, really hard. He also spouts nonsensical pseudo-religious mush. Fascinating. Sadly, things are even less interesting when the First Evil chooses to act with its own untouchable charms. As we see in Conversations with Dead People, it talks to people. Before long, they're all aware that it's evil incarnate they're speaking with. They still listen. Apparently, knowing that it's the embodiment of everything you've ever strove against isn't reason enough to disregard its advice. Needless to say, mayhem ensues. Needless to say, it's stupid.

To show how utterly worthless this season is as a conclusion, though, we must really look closer at the finale. The last two episodes – End of Days and Chosen – are pitch perfect examples of irredeemable, inexcusable failure. As one of my friends and fellow viewers noted, the climaxes in these two episodes somehow manage to combine being contrived and being totally flat. No matter how much the writers cheat in the set up, and no matter how much we might grit our teeth and go along with it, they still can't bring off a good finish.

Apparently, Joss Whedon looked
at this design and thought,
"Yes, that looks suitably ancient."

We begin with Buffy's acquisition of the Scythe, a mythical battle axe that, we later learn, she wrests from Caleb in a bitter struggle. I say "later learn," even though we see the scene in real time, because there's no struggle at all. She just picks it up. It seems, judging by conversations to come, that it was supposed to be a sword in the stone moment, but that's just about exactly the thing that could use some prior set up. Anyway. Buffy gets the Scythe, which looks, at best, like it was from some faux-Medieval video game and, at worst, like it's from Rock Band.

Buffy goes off to research her new toy. Luckily, it's the fifth result on the first website that is tried. She tracks down a mysterious woman to learn more about it. This woman is a pagan, in an Egyptian style tomb, in California. Not a Native American, though, we're told. Alright then. Get out of the way, history, and let's proceed.  The woman gives a long speech. Once she's done, Caleb (who was, evidently, standing directly behind her without her commenting and, maybe, hiding in her dress to stay out of frame) snaps her neck. He and Buffy fight and, as Buffy almost dies, Angel steps in to save her. He then stands off to the side while she almost dies. When Caleb finally falls, Buffy and Angel embrace and kiss. Spike, who was evidently watching from the corner and decided to not intervene as Buffy fought for her life, grimaces. Angel then goes home, but not before dispensing a magical amulet. Fatuus ex machina.

Most of that, mind you, is about five minutes, and I'll spare you a blow by blow of the scene's rest. After all, we've a climax to cover! Once the final episode's first half (consisting entirely of brooding and a planning scene we're so artfully kept away from) is over, we get to the big finish. Buffy, the rest of the cast, and the horde of faceless, obnoxious potential Slayers enter the Hellmouth to have a throw down with the First Evil and defeat its army of ubervamps before they can invade Helm's Deep. Their victory comes from two avenues. First, Willow uses the power of the Scythe to make every woman who might become a slayer a slayer right then and there. This may have been a very good idea. It might have been a powerful closer, a last statement about the empowerment of women in a show that dealt so heavily with such scenes. Completely lacking set up as it is, it doesn't quite make it, to say the very least.

Hey, the amulet that random stranger
gave me with no explanation twenty minutes ago
turned out to save the day!
Well isn't that just dandy!

That's nothing at all, though, compared to the source of their ultimate victory. That amulet that Angel brought, less than an hour ago? It saves the day. When Spike wears it into the Hellmouth, it fills with light, destroys the ubervamps, and saves the world. I'm not leaving out a step, mind you. None of this is set up. At all. In any way. We get no inclination of what the amulet does before it does it. It plays no role in the character's plans. It seems like it would have done the same thing if worn by an invading gerbil. It is a deus ex machina of monolithic proportions, an embodiment of the ultimate failure of every writer that so much as added a comma to the show's script. It is the apotheosis of pathetic writing.

The plot's resolution is ridiculous, and don't be fooled into thinking that the characters save it. They don't even try. In terms of their physicality, there's the slight question of why Buffy, mortally stabbed moments before, not only proceeds to soldier on but totally forgets about her injury. Really, though, that's small beans compared to what happens inside the characters' heads. One can only assume that a side effect of entering the Hellmouth was a complete lobotomy, an end to all personality and emotion. It's the only possible assumption for Xander's only comment upon Anya's death to be, "That's my girl," said with a smile on his face. Lucky we get to avoid an actual display of emotion at the closing, right?

Buffy the Vampire Slayer started rocky, grew great, crashed and bombed with season six, and then seems to have fallen far enough to tunnel through the earth's core with this last miserable offering. The characters are gone, drowned in a faceless tide. The plot is tired and overwrought. The world is saved by an unforeshadowed magical amulet. The season is rubbish. If only Buffy had stayed dead.