Buffy the Vampire Slayer S06 Wrap-Up Post

Sweeney: It’s over. Remember when we finished S4 and we were all about the party gifs? It was all, “SHOTS, SHOTS, SHOTS, SHOTS, SHOTS, SHOTS, EVERBOODDDYYYYY!” and life was good, you know? This is more like wounded soldiers drinking at the bar, solemnly exchanging war stories and comparing battle scars. We’re done. We survived.

Blogging this season has been rough. S6 is heavy and dark and it calls for a lot of breaks. Instead, we watched it twice a week, spending several hours with each episode. That has been a challenge. Admittedly, the other challenge has been the strong feelings of the existing fan base. This season has done some damage that I worry is irreparable. I’ll try my hardest to watch S7 the way I did the first time around, but I’ll probably never be able to appreciate Spike, as a character, the same way again. There’s something about people telling you that acknowledging consent issues makes you a misandrist, or resenting your opinions that leaves a permanent sour taste in the mouth. Navigating all the heated, intense feelings also made writing the recaps a lot harder. Fandom is funny that way, though. Once you get into it, you really can’t ever experience a thing the same way again. It will inevitably color your understanding of something. This has definitely been a learning experience.

Independent of all of that, blogging this season has also been a challenge in that the glaring plot holes have been too hard to ignore. This season is conceptually brilliant – it deals with a lot of very real, demon-free issues. It’s just that the actual execution of those concepts wasn’t always on point. Sometimes it’s genius and hard to watch in ways that it is meant to be hard to watch. Other times, though, it misses the mark entirely. It’s a very hit or miss season, for me. The Trio is conceptually interesting, but too often felt contrived. Additionally, attempts to use them as a means of reintroducing levity to the season also tended to fall flat for me. They felt  more like caricatures of nerdiness than fully-formed human beings.

With all of that as my long-winded introduction, my final note is that these episode rankings certainly aren’t getting any easier. The most brilliantly done episodes of this season are also horrifyingly painful. I should add that while we all have our gripe with The Number Gods, I seem to have gotten the, “S6 Shows Us What Consent Doesn’t Look Like,” highlight reel, with a few, “How does one even recap this thing?” episodes thrown in there. Bear with me, then, as I attempt to sort out my many, many feelings about this season:

1. Once More With Feeling – One day, when my wounds have healed, I will watch this again. It’s the S6 episode I expect to be able to watch soonest.
2. Normal Again – It’s just genius. It’s not exempt from the season-long plot hole epidemic, but the meta brillinace trumps that for me.
3. Bargaining, Part 2 – I’m definitely in the “should have stopped after 5” camp, but the way they dealt with Buffy’s return initially, was fantastic. This was a great way to kick of a season that didn’t seem like it should even be able to exist.
4. Bargaining, Part 1 – Same as above. A+
5. After Life – Still part of this season’s genius introduction. I don’t know what happened because this seasons started out so strong…
6. Hells Bells – FEELINGS. I love that this episode started with all the sweet little Scooby interactions before destroying us emotionally. Well done.
7. Tabula Rasa – A fun episode in S6? WEIRD. But fun.
8. Villains – Alyson Hannigan, man.
9. Older and Far Away – There were some legitimate issues for Dawn that get so pushed aside throughout the season and I liked how they handled it in this episode.
10. As You Were – Riley’s out-of-Sunnydale arc felt weirdly rushed, but his in-Sunnydale presence was productive and I’m a strong supporter of this wonderful bit of progress.
11. Two to Go – BAMF Giles. I don’t really remember the rest of this episode, but that Giles entrance was great.
12. Grave – Here we are, in the middle of the pack, where I care less about things. A finale at #12! This is the only finale to fall to double digits in the season ranking for me. It wasn’t terrible and there were some things I loved (sister feels! Xander to the rescue!), but it was more of the same heavy-handed, inconsistent, contrived stuff that plagued the entire season.
13. Life Serial – This episode was overall #meh, but it has a few really fantastic moments.
14. Dead Things – Tara. Yay for Tara. I don’t care about much else in this episode.
15. Entropy – Yay for the Dawn/Buffy conversation. I don’t care about much else in this episode.
16. All The Way – I liked the Dawn story here, too. Giles was fantastic. Remember Giles?
17. Doublemeat Palace – It was campy fun in places, but also gross and I generally wasn’t a huge fan.
18. Seeing Red – I strongly dislike every episode below this line, so I’m sticking Seeing Red right here as the divider, and the last one that I’ll say things about. I’m confused about where to put this. I really just don’t know how or where to rank it, because there are things it did brilliantly, but I have no idea how to rank it against all other things, so I’m just using it as a buffer between episodes that I would consider revisiting and episodes that I will never touch again. Probably that line starts earlier than this, but the above episodes had a few redeeming scenes I’d rewatch.
19. Flooded – Nope.
20. Gone – Nope.
21. Smashed – Nope.
22. Wrecked – Nope.

 

Lorraine: Explaining why I didn’t like this season is complicated. I’ll start off by saying that I absolutely know that good things don’t always happen to characters we love. I don’t dislike this season just because it was dark, somber and intense. There were episodes that were hard to watch, but that isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. It’s important to me to clarify that I don’t resent the show for taking on, for instance, non-consent. It’s a real life issue that shouldn’t be excluded from media because it’s horrible. That line of thinking would rob stories of all conflict.

It would be silly for me to say, “Season 6 was bad because I didn’t like that a, b, and c happened to such and such character.” My issues with the season come in the quality inconsistency, story discrepancies, the sloppy development of Spike as a character, the message that was conveyed through the Spuffy relationship, the contrivance attached to The Trio, and the snail pace and repetitive nature of a large chunk of the middle episodes.

A lot of what happened here was better in theory rather than in practice. Arguments have been made that this season is either best watched at super speed, without stopping to think much about it or if you stop and do some heavy meta-lifting, filling in your own context and plot holes as you go. Not to say that either of those lines of thinking are faulty, but just that in and of themselves, they point to huge problems with the season. If you should either not think too hard about it, or if you are tasked with doing the writers’ work for them? There is a problem.

This season reminded me a little of season 4, which was another “better in theory,” season. I really liked the idea of that first semester in college finding all the characters in flux. It didn’t play out all that well, however, because the show in effect lost so much of what made us fall in love with it across the first three seasons. Season five did a lot to make up for that, but here, it feels like we are once again pushed back to square one. And again, I liked it in theory. I liked that they boldly navigated the world of depression, self-harm, adult responsibility and the evils of real life. It just lost a lot of what I used to love about Buffy. We barely had ourselves a “vampire slayer,” to be honest.

It just didn’t work for me and all said and done, I might actually dislike this season more than season 4. I’ll allow it time to settle and to give myself distance from the things that left a sour taste in my mouth, but as it stands, this was the most trying piece of television I’ve ever experienced.

Still, there were bright spots throughout the season, including what will probably be a couple of top 10 episodes for me. It’s quite the oxymoron, I know, but not even a couple of Top 10s can redeem this season in my regard. Here’s how I rank them:

1. Once More With Feeling – Experiencing this for the first time was amazing and it’s probably the only S6 episode I can imagine revisiting.
2. Normal Again – Bold, moving and nicely acted with a great ending and much to think about.
3. After Life – Combined with the first two episodes, this was such an emotional punch. If we weren’t quite aware of the problems we’d be facing this season, we were after this. The reveal (Buffy was in heaven) was as wonderful as it was terrible and this was the most I liked Spike all season.
4. Bargaining, Part 1 – Perhaps my favorite first episode of the season I’ve seen so far. It deals with the immense fall-out of The Gift deftly, giving us feels after feels until the giant pay-off of Buffy coming back to life in her coffin. Amazing all around.
5. Bargaining, Part 2 – It would be more accurate to rate parts 1 and 2 together. If I had to give one the edge, though, it’d be part 1. The Demon Bikers and a few other things are a little weak.
6. Tabula Rasa – Perhaps the last episode (#8) that I truly enjoyed watching of the season, and what an amusing episode it was. We didn’t get a ton of “fun” in this season, but when it happened it was done exceptionally (see: OMWF.)
7. Villains – Alyson Hannigan was amazing and the episode was so unsettling. Some of the imagery from this episode will stick with me forever.
8. Hells Bells – There were most definitely sloppy and heavy handed bits, but the feels caused by this episode were legit. Lots of great acting as well.
9. Two to Go – I’m giving this the edge over the finale solely for BAMF Giles. Dark Willow quickly went from intense and brilliantly acted to heavy-handed and written like a Scooby-Doo villain.
10. Grave – Overwrought in its delivery. For every one moment that was beautiful done, another fell flat. Perfect depiction of S6.
11. Older and Far Away – A little break from the story lines I hated this season endeared this episode to me. Sorry not sorry.
12. As You Were – PROGRESS. And I still like what Riley’s presence did for Buffy.
13. Entropy – It felt a bit too contrivance heavy, but I appreciated it for setting the end in motion.
14. Life Serial – Stand out moments (the drinking! Clem! Kitten poker! the time loop!) that weirdly amount to just a good episode.
15. Dead Things – Freakin’ uncomfortable to watch from start to finish, but it progressed the story significantly and TARA. LOVE TARA.
16. Doublemeat Palace – This episode was so strange, but oddly enjoyable, to me at least. The horror movie vibe weaved throughout and the tongue in cheek humor about minimum wage jobs was well done. Sure, there was a penis monster and some alley sex, but over all, not too bad.
17. Smashed – Even apart from the gross beginning of Spuffy, the episode #meh for me. Too much Trio does an episode bad.
18. All the Way – Giles is probably the highlight, just so we could get our fix before he left again.
19. Gone – I think my hatred for Spuffy and distaste for Spike was cemented in this episode. Yep.
20. Wrecked – The episode struggled and I really struggled while watching it.
21. Flooded – Exposition heavy. After Buffy resurrected and we established that she didn’t want to be, this episode talked us through the next part of the season set-up and it was just a little artless.
22. Seeing Red – I admit that I’m sticking this at the end because I don’t know what to do with it. It isn’t a low quality episode, though the writing in places left things to be desired and I had issues with the plot developments for reasons beyond the attempted rape. Then again, the bottom of this list is a lot of this same thing: unpolished episodes made worse by unpleasant developments. I don’t know what the right answer is here. So, here it is and here it stays.

 

Kirsti: It’s funny, season 6 used to be one of my favourites (season 3 wins the prize), because I loved how it was all Real World Issues. Plus, season 6 is where I started watching the show, so I had a soft spot for it. Blogging it, and spending three hours recapping each episode has killed that. I still class Once More With Feeling as my all time favourite Buffy episode, with Tabula Rasa in second place. But I’m kind of thinking that when I rewatch in the future, I might just go ahead and pretend that the show finished with The Gift as was originally intended. Because REASONS.

1. Once More With Feeling – There are no words for how much I love this episode. Joss has always been about game changing, and he did it here in spectacular form. It’s magical from start to finish.
2. Tabula Rasa – Look, it may be the proper start of the Nightmare That Is Spuffy as well as the start of Things Are Really Fucking Serious With Willow’s Magic Addition, but I love this episode. I love that they all basically go through their character arcs in 45 minutes. I love that there’s no denying their problems any more. I love that Buffy still chooses to go out and fight.
3. Normal Again – While I hate the Trio side of it, the concept is brilliant. And I’m pretty sure I had an existential crisis after watching it for the first time.
4. Hell’s Bells – ALL THE ANYA FEELS.
5. After Life – I hate the monster of the week, but I LOVE the Dawn/Buffy scene at the start, and Spike’s “Hundred and forty seven days” speech, and Buffy’s big revelation. Plus, some of the cinematography was completely gorgeous.
6. Bargaining Part 2 –  Buffy’s first line since returning – “Is this hell?” – pretty much guaranteed that this was going to be feels-tastic.
7. As You Were – It’s a little heavy and handed and contrivance-y at times, but Riley’s speech and Buffy’s walking into the sunlight at the end place it solidly in the good episodes category.
8. Bargaining Part 1 – Really, this is where we got the first signs that Willow and magic are headed for a rocky road. I mean, killing Bambi is pretty hardcore. Plus, Buffybot. And Giles feels.
9. Entropy – Almost exclusively rated this high because of the squee-worthy Willow/Tara reunion at the end. At least the plot finally started going somewhere though.
10. Life Serial – I wasn’t a fan of the Trio elements of it, but we got that magical gif that Sweeney used at the start of the post, kitten poker, and the working-in-retail-feels-like-this time loop.
11. Two To Go – GILES IS BACK AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!! Other than that, I wasn’t a huge fan of this episode. It felt like Willow should have been wearing a top hat and twirling her villain moustache throughout.
12. Villains – I used to love this three part-ish season finale. But after having to watch the whole thing in-depth and write about it, a lot of it feels really clunky. On the plus side, Warren gets what’s coming to him. So…yay?
13. Grave – This, for me, is by far the weakest of the season finales. Even though I’m not a big fan of Restless (too many metaphors), about 90% of this was pure contrivance. The highlights were Giggling Giles and Sword Fighting Dawn. Everything else was pretty meh-tastic.
14. Older and Far Away – Not terrible, but definitely a long way from great. Thank God for Tara, Queen of Sass.
15. All the Way – By far the worst of the Halloween episodes. At least we found out why Giles cleans his glasses so much?
16. Gone – Messing with other people’s mental health and the most awkward scene in the whole 144 episodes? Pass.
17. Wrecked – Magic addition, Rack and Dawnie feels.
18. Smashed – Deratting Amy was a really terrible decision. Add in the Trio and some really violent sex, and I’m on the nope train.
19. Doublemeat Palace – Penis monster. That’s all you need to know.
20. Flooded – It wasn’t that this episode was bad so much as it was really really boring. Plus, we meet the Trio.
21. Dead Things – There is nothing about this episode that is okay.
22. Seeing Red – NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE.