Buffy S5 disc review
Jan. 6th, 2004 12:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynI’d planned to do a review of the Buffy season 5 DVDs before, but then time kind of got away from me, and I wasn’t sure it was worth it. But after all the fic writin’ of the past few weeks, I ran out of things to say! So I figured I’d at least put it down on electronic paper just to get it off my mind, plus, I’m stuck home on a snow day, so what else to do?
My comments about the season 4 discs ended up turning into an essay about how Mutant Enemy really missed the boat on such a multifaceted character as Spike, and while I’d like to think I have a little more focus this time, Spike’s character still plays a big part in my feelings about this season. I waffle about which season I like best on Buffy -- 2 or 5. It’s kind of a toss-up: 2 has some of the most intense and powerful episodes of the series, it has the incredible, operatic Passion and Becoming 1&2, and it has the romances of Willow and Oz, Giles and Jenny, and Spike and Dru. The latter’s appearance pushed the series into something completely different than it would have been without them -- it gave an entirely different side to the vampire world than we’d otherwise have known, helped provide a history for Angel that made him a more fascinating character than he’d have been allowed as a lone wolf, and was truly the best of the villain big bad fakeouts they’ve ever had. It gave the show a juice that it almost couldn’t recover from in season 3, even with Faith and the hilarious Mayor.
And so in that respect, season 5 almost couldn’t compete, because Riley had become a lame duck in the first episode, Giles was untethered until further into the season, and Glory’s appearance so early as the big bad ended up making her something of a joke, with the constant “where’s my key, give me my key.” Other elements of the Buffyverse became, then, what made the season so powerful and on a par with 2. The mystery and development of the Dawn story, and its resonance in Buffy’s life; the development of a more mature Xander; Willow and Tara’s groundbreaking romance; and of course, Joyce’s death and its aftereffects. When you watch these all in order, intact, it’s like a perfect ending chapter to a wonderful story; while there were wonderful things that came after this, seasons 6 and 7 never had the solidity, the character depth, nor the sheer enjoyment that 5 provided; it’s clear that this team was at their peak, and Joss’s involvement was still a key to its quality.
If you’re a Spike hater, it’s probably best to turn back now, because a lot of what I valued in season 5 was related to Spike and his ostensibly unrequited love for Buffy. As much as I’d loved him in 2, and his appearance in the best ep of 3 (I thought), Lovers Walk, by the time he’d joined the cast in 4 I wasn’t sure what he was there for. I wasn’t complaining, because I loved him, but he wasn’t a threat, and the wacky neighbor routine is tiresome, so his role felt nebulous. In hindsight, S4 is a better year than I realized, but it’s as a collection of disparate high points that it achieves its quality. At the time I was watching it, though, I couldn’t quite see what was achieved by Giles’s lack of status, by Spike’s wacky neighbor thing, by much of that at all. In 5, though, it started to jell, and with Buffy’s new desire to grow better as a slayer, it brought back Giles as a central character; Spike’s feelings also pushed him into a more significant role, which was cemented through his friendship with Dawn and his role in helping to fight Glory at the end. Everyone became a valuable player, and this is a really important distinction for S5.
The discs themselves are pretty much the same as others, though I’m glad that they chose not to release them in letterbox format. The framing and the film planes are pretty much standard square screen, so nothing is enhanced by doing that, and I’m hoping it stays that way through the next two seasons because I don’t really want to be forced to look at Xander’s tighty whiteys or Spike’s sock because of the additional screen space (as we’ve seen from the R2 caps) that wasn’t accommodated for in shooting. Extras aren’t especially insightful or wonderful; the most useful one discusses the choice for a natural death for Joyce, and the overall arc of the season. As much as I loved seeing Danny Strong, the monster featurette wasn’t that great, and some of the commentaries, what few there are, are a little lackluster and too similar to previous disc set features.
It’s interesting that they chose not to provide a commentary track for The Gift. And kind of annoying, too -- for my money, there was never an episode (their 100th, their last one on that network, the death of the title character) that screamed more for a commentary track, so its absence was incredibly disappointing. It’s hard enough to lose the “previously on Buffy” intro where they showed clips from every past episode (why couldn’t they provide that on a special feature segment?), but not to hear Joss’s thoughts, or anyone else involved with the show’s, is criminal. And it also emphasizes Sarah Michelle Gellar’s lack of participation in these discs -- the fact that she never even speaks in the interviews, let alone does commentary on an ep as significant as The Gift, kind of rubs me the wrong way as a fan. I don’t begrudge her leaving or not being on Angel or any of the other things fans seem so cranky about, but after five seasons of disc releases, would it have killed her to give commentary or be interviewed about such an important ep?
I suppose the commentary track by Joss for The Body is the tradeoff, but I’ll be honest (and go ahead, I can hear the clicking to defriend me right now as I write this) -- I don’t think The Body is the great shakes that everyone else thinks it is. I admire it, I understand from a dramatic point of view how excellent it is, I know that it’s groundbreaking, but I just don’t like it. For me, the episode came off as stagy and overly constructed, but most of all, what bothers me is the way it stops dead (sorry, no pun intended) the entire narrative structure of the season, and then is quickly run over on their way back to the narrative, as if it didn’t happen. Everyone I know warned it would wreck me because it was about a mom dying, but strangely, it only affected me when Tara says that line about how her mother’s death wasn’t sudden, but was sudden at the same time. It was the only thing that felt real to me, the only thing that reached past the staging to touch me. It was the subsequent episode, Forever, that made me cry, made me realize the significance of Joyce’s death, in Dawn’s agonized loss of something she’d only begun to really have. And while I appreciated Joss’s comments on it, and he helped me see where he was going with the episode, The Body still just brings the whole season to a crashing halt, but not in a good way. It’s all “back to normal” almost by Intervention, which feels wrong to me, no matter how often I watch these discs, and I’ve never completely grasped the purpose of what happened, when. If I had to pick Joss-groundbreaking episodes, I’d go for Hush any day, or Once More With Feeling; and if I could trade commentary tracks, I’d gladly trade this for The Gift.
As villains go, Glory is a mixed bag, and Ben even more so. I did like the fakeout with Dawn early on, when we don’t know who or what she is. But as fun as Clare Kramer is with the role (I still especially love her delivery in I Was Made to Love You, when she hears the answering machine message from Buffy, of “WHATthehell?”), they did her a disservice by getting her in too early, so that she spends a lot of time looking stupider than a hell god should, really. Where the season really excelled was in that sense of family -- of the extended family of the Scoobies, of Buffy coming to terms with what it means to have to deal with real life issues of family rather than only with the supernatural, and so on. Checkpoint is a brilliant emphasis of these qualities of what a true family means, even more so than, well, Family. The characters grow so much over the course of the year, and learn a lot more from their mistakes, than they’ve ever been allowed to. And both the comedy and the drama are heightened throughout this season, providing some of the series’ highest points ever: Intervention, Fool for Love, Out of My Mind, Into the Woods, Triangle and Checkpoint, Crush, The Gift... there’s just a wealth of disparate tones and qualities that make this such a powerhouse of a season.
For me, though, they don’t get any better than Fool for Love. It’s not just that we finally get a background and a deeper understanding of a character, nor the brilliance of the crossover with Angel, but we get some of the tightest writing and directing the show’s ever had. And some of the finest acting. The quiet scene between Giles and Buffy when he says that it would be too painful to write down the details of a slayer’s death, the porch scene at the end, the money scene in the alley -- these are some of the most sublime bits of acting from an incredible ensemble ever. I’m still left breathless every time I watch the subway fight crosscut with Spike’s dialog to Buffy. It’s brilliant, it’s perfectly executed, and it’s an astonishing bit of characterization for both him and Buffy. I’m so thrilled that I have this and Angel’s Darla on DVD together, and can watch them back to back again in such pristine condition.
For me, having Spike fall for Buffy was a brilliant development, and it made his character suddenly more viable than he’d been allowed in 4. It provided fodder for great humor as well as great tragedy, and gave Buffy a foil once Riley was gone, in her search for her own interests and sense of self without men. I was discussing this with a friend the other day in chat, about being interested in the protagonists of shows (something it seems most fans aren’t), and because Spike fell in love with Buffy, he quickly went from a character I loved to a character I was completely mad for. It changed him on screen, and changed him in my heart. And his feelings for her provided the catalyst for change that I always enjoyed so much more than the idea of soulled Spike -- he was failing miserably and making constantly wrong decisions in trying to do it, but he was trying to change and do the right thing, and this made him twice as fascinating to me. Nothing illustrates this better than Intervention, the only episode that ever really provided the guy with any dignity until the very end. He’s willing to make a sacrifice for someone he loves, and because he gets that it’s the right thing to do (even if he doesn’t get why), I find Buffy’s kiss for him, and his understanding of what it means, to be incredibly poignant and affecting. That it comes at the end of such an incredibly funny and emotionally dense episode (the contrasts between the wonderful depravity of Buffybot and Spike, and the deeper stuff with Giles and Buffy in the desert are exquisite) adds to its dramatic value considerably.
The Gift didn’t really hit me the first time I watched it. It wasn’t until later that I realized its value, particularly in the ugliness and misery and haphazard writing of late season 6. While I would have had far less to write or vid about, there are times I almost wish the show had ended there, with its sense of peace for Buffy at last. But once it gets over its expository lump at the beginning, this is really one of the most tightly crafted and dynamic episodes they did. Each step builds and builds, and there’s both humor and drama consistently throughout, rather than building only at the end. The music is exceptional throughout, culminating in that haunting theme at the end. It was a fitting end to a wonderful season, a high point to a series, and a great example of the craft of television when it’s done by really good people. You could say that about all of season 5, I think, and this is one disc set I’ll be watching over and over, not just simply to have it for my collection.
My comments about the season 4 discs ended up turning into an essay about how Mutant Enemy really missed the boat on such a multifaceted character as Spike, and while I’d like to think I have a little more focus this time, Spike’s character still plays a big part in my feelings about this season. I waffle about which season I like best on Buffy -- 2 or 5. It’s kind of a toss-up: 2 has some of the most intense and powerful episodes of the series, it has the incredible, operatic Passion and Becoming 1&2, and it has the romances of Willow and Oz, Giles and Jenny, and Spike and Dru. The latter’s appearance pushed the series into something completely different than it would have been without them -- it gave an entirely different side to the vampire world than we’d otherwise have known, helped provide a history for Angel that made him a more fascinating character than he’d have been allowed as a lone wolf, and was truly the best of the villain big bad fakeouts they’ve ever had. It gave the show a juice that it almost couldn’t recover from in season 3, even with Faith and the hilarious Mayor.
And so in that respect, season 5 almost couldn’t compete, because Riley had become a lame duck in the first episode, Giles was untethered until further into the season, and Glory’s appearance so early as the big bad ended up making her something of a joke, with the constant “where’s my key, give me my key.” Other elements of the Buffyverse became, then, what made the season so powerful and on a par with 2. The mystery and development of the Dawn story, and its resonance in Buffy’s life; the development of a more mature Xander; Willow and Tara’s groundbreaking romance; and of course, Joyce’s death and its aftereffects. When you watch these all in order, intact, it’s like a perfect ending chapter to a wonderful story; while there were wonderful things that came after this, seasons 6 and 7 never had the solidity, the character depth, nor the sheer enjoyment that 5 provided; it’s clear that this team was at their peak, and Joss’s involvement was still a key to its quality.
If you’re a Spike hater, it’s probably best to turn back now, because a lot of what I valued in season 5 was related to Spike and his ostensibly unrequited love for Buffy. As much as I’d loved him in 2, and his appearance in the best ep of 3 (I thought), Lovers Walk, by the time he’d joined the cast in 4 I wasn’t sure what he was there for. I wasn’t complaining, because I loved him, but he wasn’t a threat, and the wacky neighbor routine is tiresome, so his role felt nebulous. In hindsight, S4 is a better year than I realized, but it’s as a collection of disparate high points that it achieves its quality. At the time I was watching it, though, I couldn’t quite see what was achieved by Giles’s lack of status, by Spike’s wacky neighbor thing, by much of that at all. In 5, though, it started to jell, and with Buffy’s new desire to grow better as a slayer, it brought back Giles as a central character; Spike’s feelings also pushed him into a more significant role, which was cemented through his friendship with Dawn and his role in helping to fight Glory at the end. Everyone became a valuable player, and this is a really important distinction for S5.
The discs themselves are pretty much the same as others, though I’m glad that they chose not to release them in letterbox format. The framing and the film planes are pretty much standard square screen, so nothing is enhanced by doing that, and I’m hoping it stays that way through the next two seasons because I don’t really want to be forced to look at Xander’s tighty whiteys or Spike’s sock because of the additional screen space (as we’ve seen from the R2 caps) that wasn’t accommodated for in shooting. Extras aren’t especially insightful or wonderful; the most useful one discusses the choice for a natural death for Joyce, and the overall arc of the season. As much as I loved seeing Danny Strong, the monster featurette wasn’t that great, and some of the commentaries, what few there are, are a little lackluster and too similar to previous disc set features.
It’s interesting that they chose not to provide a commentary track for The Gift. And kind of annoying, too -- for my money, there was never an episode (their 100th, their last one on that network, the death of the title character) that screamed more for a commentary track, so its absence was incredibly disappointing. It’s hard enough to lose the “previously on Buffy” intro where they showed clips from every past episode (why couldn’t they provide that on a special feature segment?), but not to hear Joss’s thoughts, or anyone else involved with the show’s, is criminal. And it also emphasizes Sarah Michelle Gellar’s lack of participation in these discs -- the fact that she never even speaks in the interviews, let alone does commentary on an ep as significant as The Gift, kind of rubs me the wrong way as a fan. I don’t begrudge her leaving or not being on Angel or any of the other things fans seem so cranky about, but after five seasons of disc releases, would it have killed her to give commentary or be interviewed about such an important ep?
I suppose the commentary track by Joss for The Body is the tradeoff, but I’ll be honest (and go ahead, I can hear the clicking to defriend me right now as I write this) -- I don’t think The Body is the great shakes that everyone else thinks it is. I admire it, I understand from a dramatic point of view how excellent it is, I know that it’s groundbreaking, but I just don’t like it. For me, the episode came off as stagy and overly constructed, but most of all, what bothers me is the way it stops dead (sorry, no pun intended) the entire narrative structure of the season, and then is quickly run over on their way back to the narrative, as if it didn’t happen. Everyone I know warned it would wreck me because it was about a mom dying, but strangely, it only affected me when Tara says that line about how her mother’s death wasn’t sudden, but was sudden at the same time. It was the only thing that felt real to me, the only thing that reached past the staging to touch me. It was the subsequent episode, Forever, that made me cry, made me realize the significance of Joyce’s death, in Dawn’s agonized loss of something she’d only begun to really have. And while I appreciated Joss’s comments on it, and he helped me see where he was going with the episode, The Body still just brings the whole season to a crashing halt, but not in a good way. It’s all “back to normal” almost by Intervention, which feels wrong to me, no matter how often I watch these discs, and I’ve never completely grasped the purpose of what happened, when. If I had to pick Joss-groundbreaking episodes, I’d go for Hush any day, or Once More With Feeling; and if I could trade commentary tracks, I’d gladly trade this for The Gift.
As villains go, Glory is a mixed bag, and Ben even more so. I did like the fakeout with Dawn early on, when we don’t know who or what she is. But as fun as Clare Kramer is with the role (I still especially love her delivery in I Was Made to Love You, when she hears the answering machine message from Buffy, of “WHATthehell?”), they did her a disservice by getting her in too early, so that she spends a lot of time looking stupider than a hell god should, really. Where the season really excelled was in that sense of family -- of the extended family of the Scoobies, of Buffy coming to terms with what it means to have to deal with real life issues of family rather than only with the supernatural, and so on. Checkpoint is a brilliant emphasis of these qualities of what a true family means, even more so than, well, Family. The characters grow so much over the course of the year, and learn a lot more from their mistakes, than they’ve ever been allowed to. And both the comedy and the drama are heightened throughout this season, providing some of the series’ highest points ever: Intervention, Fool for Love, Out of My Mind, Into the Woods, Triangle and Checkpoint, Crush, The Gift... there’s just a wealth of disparate tones and qualities that make this such a powerhouse of a season.
For me, though, they don’t get any better than Fool for Love. It’s not just that we finally get a background and a deeper understanding of a character, nor the brilliance of the crossover with Angel, but we get some of the tightest writing and directing the show’s ever had. And some of the finest acting. The quiet scene between Giles and Buffy when he says that it would be too painful to write down the details of a slayer’s death, the porch scene at the end, the money scene in the alley -- these are some of the most sublime bits of acting from an incredible ensemble ever. I’m still left breathless every time I watch the subway fight crosscut with Spike’s dialog to Buffy. It’s brilliant, it’s perfectly executed, and it’s an astonishing bit of characterization for both him and Buffy. I’m so thrilled that I have this and Angel’s Darla on DVD together, and can watch them back to back again in such pristine condition.
For me, having Spike fall for Buffy was a brilliant development, and it made his character suddenly more viable than he’d been allowed in 4. It provided fodder for great humor as well as great tragedy, and gave Buffy a foil once Riley was gone, in her search for her own interests and sense of self without men. I was discussing this with a friend the other day in chat, about being interested in the protagonists of shows (something it seems most fans aren’t), and because Spike fell in love with Buffy, he quickly went from a character I loved to a character I was completely mad for. It changed him on screen, and changed him in my heart. And his feelings for her provided the catalyst for change that I always enjoyed so much more than the idea of soulled Spike -- he was failing miserably and making constantly wrong decisions in trying to do it, but he was trying to change and do the right thing, and this made him twice as fascinating to me. Nothing illustrates this better than Intervention, the only episode that ever really provided the guy with any dignity until the very end. He’s willing to make a sacrifice for someone he loves, and because he gets that it’s the right thing to do (even if he doesn’t get why), I find Buffy’s kiss for him, and his understanding of what it means, to be incredibly poignant and affecting. That it comes at the end of such an incredibly funny and emotionally dense episode (the contrasts between the wonderful depravity of Buffybot and Spike, and the deeper stuff with Giles and Buffy in the desert are exquisite) adds to its dramatic value considerably.
The Gift didn’t really hit me the first time I watched it. It wasn’t until later that I realized its value, particularly in the ugliness and misery and haphazard writing of late season 6. While I would have had far less to write or vid about, there are times I almost wish the show had ended there, with its sense of peace for Buffy at last. But once it gets over its expository lump at the beginning, this is really one of the most tightly crafted and dynamic episodes they did. Each step builds and builds, and there’s both humor and drama consistently throughout, rather than building only at the end. The music is exceptional throughout, culminating in that haunting theme at the end. It was a fitting end to a wonderful season, a high point to a series, and a great example of the craft of television when it’s done by really good people. You could say that about all of season 5, I think, and this is one disc set I’ll be watching over and over, not just simply to have it for my collection.
