nixsight

Buffy season 05: 01-04

We didn’t take much of a break between seasons on this, I’m afraid.

What I’m finding interesting about this season so far, watching it now for what is probably my first time since the series ended, is that once you know that Joss Whedon ultimately pulled it off – finishing seven years of a great show with continuity and character development that stayed pretty consistent throughout the run (even if the quality of individual episodes didn’t always) – this season feels a lot stronger than it did when it was first aired. For me, this is going to be the test by which continuity-heavy shows like “Lost” and “Battlestar Galactica” are judged – when BSG ends this year, and “Lost” finishes the year after, it won’t matter to me if either show has dissapointed me a bit along the way, as long as on balance they hold together and they end well.

Part of the reason this season always felt so lacklustre first time out is part of the reason it feels so strong this time around. Back when, and especially after the slightly duff long-plot of season 4, I would get pretty fidgetty if the show strayed too far from self-contained or episodic stories week on week.

Season 5, though having a crack at some fun weekly stories, was almost all about overarching story and themes. This was hard to take when superficially what these episodes looked like were enclosed stories with flat or pat endings.

Of course, what I was missing was that Whedon was totally focussed on the long story and exploring his chosen themes for the season, and by this point he had learned his craft to the extent that he could do it, and with style.

Buffy’s story for this season ran along two rails. Spurred on by her experiences at the close of the previous season and at the beginning of this one, Buffy has a new personal mission, to learn more about her Slayer nature and become better in the role. At the same time, Buffy finds herself having to deal with, and soon protect, her younger sister Dawn – a girl who didn’t exist before, but who everybody seems to remember always being around.

The latter is where the season gets it’s real strength from, because what keeps these episodes interesting is the themes that Whedon is playing with this time out. The surface themes of this season are self-discovery, growth and finding your role in a family, but Whedon doesn’t stop at exploring these, opting to run another theme through at a structural level. Though this show has always featured a lot of smart subversion of expectation, season 5 seems to have narrative sleight-of-hand encoded in it at an almost genetic level.

This should have been obvious from the first episode of the season, 0501 – Buffy Vs. Dracula, when the show takes the most famous vampire of all time, builds him up in the series’ mythos throughout the episode, but by the end not only disposes of the vampire unceremoniously, but also deposes him as notional king of vampires. In the end, the episode works well as a expositional key for the show and each character’s preoccupations as the season starts – with Dracula’s only real contribution to the ongoing arc is his suggestion to Buffy that her Slayer heritage is more primal and present than she had realised, which reiterated points made at the close of season 4 – and a great springboard for the appearance of Dawn.

0502 – Real Me takes the whole pretense of Dawn’s life one stage further, as she narrates the whole episode – a tricksy move on Whedon’s part, because it acts to concrete her place on the cast. Although there are a couple of sly references to Dawn’s otherness, having her relate the episode as being apparently oblivious to the oddness of her existence puts the audience in an odd position – it’s obvious that something is going on, but the fact that it’s something that she isn’t apparently in on immediately makes it a slightly more complex affair.

This is the first time that the text of the show hints that there’s something awry going on with Dawn, with an almost throwaway but disturbing moment when a crazy street person accosts her, and there is a hint at the end of the episode that the girl herself has some sinister secrets – a theme that is played up repeatedly in later episode 0505 – No Place Like Home, wherein Doug Petrie’s script plays up the “evil child” trope.

However, this is another piece of trickery on the show’s part. It seems, in fact, that Dawn is only manipulative and evil in the way that all younger siblings are. One can only assume that like me, Whedon had sisters.

0503 – The Replacement is another episode that didn’t really phase me on broadcast, despite some funny moments – it is, after all, another Xander-centric episode – because the conflict in the episode is dealt with a little neatly.

Now, it’s obvious that this is another episode that is saturated with the season’s themes, and is centered around another narrative trick – the neat ending I mentioned occurs because what we are lead to believe is an “evil impostor” story actually really isn’t, which in itself is a deceit within a deceit, storywise.

The episode isn’t just suspended on these themes, though, although they do do a lot of the heavy lifting. It also serves as the anchor story for Xander’s season, and he’s having a much better time of it, role-wise, since being largely incidental last season. He’s getting some good lines, and his role is being examined again. There are things that happen in this episode that make him – far from the loser who lamented always getting the “funny syphilis” in 0501 – a viable member of society, as well as an important member of the team.

This – and to a lesser extent the last episode, is also where Anya really became the character that I would start to love a little bit. Although her slightly odd quirks have gone into overdrive, her vulnerabilities and appeal are shining through, and she’s finally becoming the sort of partner to Xander who isn’t just a punchline to the joke of his odd taste in women…

In 0504 – Out Of My Mind, very little of what the characters intend to happen isn’t affected by either the writer’s or another character’s trickery, and this extends to the story itself. The episode begins with Joyce’s headache and collapse, that within the structure of the episode seems designed simply as a conceit to get the team into hospital, where a Riley story can be kicked off.

Though not forgotten, Joyce’s condition is quickly shifted to the periphery, as Buffy struggles to get Riley to a government doctor – something that he doesn’t want to do because he doesn’t trust the government not to lie.

(Although there’s the added undercurrent here that Riley would rather risk death than become useless to Buffy – something that comes up again and again with him and other characters this season.)

Buffy is forced to ask Spike for help… while Harmony cowers in a coffin nearby – in her reality, she is now Buffy’s arch-enemy, and Buffy is hunting her, which is an utterly false interpretation of what is going on – alternate versions of reality being a key theme of the season. Spike, of course, is pretending that he gives a damn about Harmony at this point, too.

And then Spike predictably decides to steal the doctor for himself, and once again an episode that we had thought was about Riley shifts, and becomes about Spike instead.

Spike gets the doctor to remove his chip, but the final trick – an actual act of sleight-of-hand on the part of a character – is that the doctor has only pretended to remove the chip, using a coin as a surrogate to fool Spike.

And in the next episode, things get more complicated again, but I didn’t watch those till this week, so they can wait!

CSI NY Season 05: 07-12

This continues to be the punchiest of the CSI’s, with the original iteration getting darker and harder each episode this season, and Miami being beyond ridiculous.

Not quite as science-fictioney this season as previously, mind, which isn’t a bad thing.

There are a couple of areas where the show falters. For example, this season has two or three subplots that aren’t really congealing or doing anything interesting at the moment, and I don’t know if they’re ramping up the redundant flashbacks to things that happened earlier in the episode – where a character says “the wife of the victim said that that morning he was wearing a hat” an event that we saw happening, and then we are shown a flashback of the wife of the victim saying “that morning he was wearing a hat” – or just that we’re getting a bit tired of them to the extent that we’re just noticing them more, but we could really live without them.

However, these characters – with the exception on some occassions of Stella – are likeable enough that it’s still fun to watch them solve the crimes, and there are still some nice flourishes, such as in 0510 – The Triangle, that is based around an urban myth or phenomenon that I hadn’t heard before, about the area immediately around the Empire State building since 2001.

Flack’s sister, and his relationship with Angel, continue to bubble under, and while they don’t necessarily do much more than Stella’s problems with the Greeks and their ancient coins, the fact that both Angel and Flack’s sister are scorching hot, and that the storylines don’t involve ancient coins, make them much more entertaining.

Though I’ve a worrying feeling that a scene where Flack and Angel are chasing a crook contained some worrying foreshadowing of something bad happening to Angel, which would suck.

The story of Lindsay’s pregnancy – and the way in which it brings her relationship with Danny to the forefront after a long time in limbo – is nicely handled by all concerned, and it’s nice that they’ve managed to find a way to make Anna Belknap’s pregnancy work for the show this time out, rather than having her conspiciously framed to avoid showing her bump like last time.

Actually, the episode where this comes out – 0509 – The Box – Does some nice things structurally, with Danny narrating the story, and also features a body found in a crushed car – a story element similarly explored in a current-season episode of Bones…

The L Word Season 1: 01-05

I just picked these up – Amazon have them remarkably cheap – after word of a particularly intriguing current season, and because, to be honest, it might be something that Girl One would like to watch while I spend stupid amounts of time on the PC.

However, I’ve ended up watching the first five episodes with her, quite despite myself, and will probably continue to do so.

It’s a complete soap-opera, of course. But it’s also a lot more sympathetically written than I was expecting. Gone are the broad caricatures of female characters of “Desperate Housewives”, and instead of opting to have a couple of nice, almost relatable characters in the shadows of more prominent and horrible attention seekers the way “Sex And The City” did, they’ve instead put together a large cast of Mirandas and Charlottes – by which I mean characters as likeable and textured as they are “quirky”, with only a couple of really self-absorbed, superficial nightmares.

It doesn’t hurt that two of the show’s cast are two of my favourite actresses of all time – at least from an attraction point of view – Jennifer Beals – who made an impact on me at a young age in “Flashdance”, and Mia Kirshner – perhaps best known as a recurring mercenary character in “24″, who I fell for in the first “The Crow” sequel and then fell in love with in “Exotica”.

Neither character is particularly charming in the first episode, but Beals as Bette shows considerable depth in subsequent episodes, while Kirshner’s Jenny is not nice, but is so convincingly bipolar and as such appealing roughly a third of the time, that she’s great to watch.

There aren’t really any weak links in the cast, and the stories are written consistently well. I’ll admit to normally finding screen and TV narratives about gay characters a little tedious, but thus far these women seem mostly women first, then lesbians, and I’m buying their characters.

Plus, you know, the show is a lot more explicit than I was expecting. There is absolutely no way in the world that I am going to look a gift horse like girl-on-girl action in the mouth.