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nekkyo_chanI've been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer lately. I'd seen some of it before - bits and pieces of episodes, some of the first season a while back when I first tried to get into it. But this winter I've been watching it and I really like it. I've not seen all the episodes yet - haven't seen a few scattered episodes in seasons 1-4, haven't seen most of season six and I've still to watch the last four episodes of season 7. I watched them partially out of order, because I couldn't really get into season 1 - the Willow-Xander-Buffy triangle bugged me and the high school is hell metaphor didn't resonate particularly well with me - so I skipped straight to season 4 originally and then, given that I'd been spoiled for most of the major plot developements in the series, took a fairly random approach to what order I watched the seasons, and occasionally the episodes, in. (4, 5 and 7 were mostly in order, except for the episodes in season 4 I skipped. 1, 2, 3 and the few episodes of 6 I watched were not.)
But now I've decided to go through the series from the beginning, now that I'm hooked enough to do so, and post my rewatch notes. I don't have much to say, and no deep insights, but it seems like a fun thing to do, and it'll keep me watching in order. And what is livejournal for, if not to hear yourself talk. Or watch yourself type, to be more accurate, though somewhat less idiomatic.
I will make no effort not to include spoilers for any part of the series, so if you haven't seen it be warned.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Rewatch – Welcome to the Hellmouth
- We begin with the irritating opening monologue. At what point does that go away? Also, it’s just some random voice made artificially deep here. I seem to remember it being Giles doing it later. Is that later this season, in season 2 or just a figment of my imagination?
- Everyone who had ever recapped this episode has commented on the reversal of having the cute schoolgirl be the vampire, so I will just comment that Darla’s hair is seriously unflattering here. Like, I didn’t even realize she was pretty until I saw her in the flashbacks in Fool For Love.
- It is a good twist, though. I like a twist that takes me by surprise and it did that the first time I saw it. And it does make for a lovely bit of tone-setting for the series.
- Buffy’s Slayer dreams here are just a random selection of mildly creepy images. Some of them seem relevant to the plot...and some of them are just creepy hands and gothic architecture that will only ever be seen again in the opening credits. Which sounds complain-ier than I meant it to. These dreams are more tone setting ‘this is the kind of things she dreams about’ than plot relevant, and as this is the first episode, that is okay.
- I’m interested that despite her desire to get away from the Slaying Buffy is still carrying around a stake. She’s not quite so sure as she’d like to be that there are no vampires in Sunnydale.
- It’s weird, the first time I saw this episode I think I’d just been watching some movie with the least subtle or realistic depiction of high school cliques ever and so when I saw this I was kind of impressed that they seemed to be going a little less stereotypical...and then I watched it again and wonder how I came to that conclusion. I think the first time Xander and Jesse read a lot like the ‘popular’ guys in my class (they still do to an extent, but now I know they're meant to be losers) and Cordelia’s brushing off Jesse seemed a lot less dismissive (and he seemed less actually flirting and more joking with her in the way the people in my class joke-flirted with each other all the time). I guess I was pasting on the dynamics of the people I went to high school with, because the extreme focus on popularity is kind of nonsense to me. At my highschool – though I will admit I was not the most hooked into the social network of my school, so I may have missed some stuff – there didn’t seem to be any sort of division of popular people and losers. There were cliques, sure, as there will always be, people associate with the same people and some people are part of more groups than others, but...Basically, how people divided up, as far as I noticed, was sort of on two scales: involvement in school stuff (clubs, sports, student council, etc.) and focus on academics. So you have people who are really involved and try really hard at academics, and the people who were really involved but not so much with the school work, and the people who were really focused on the academic parts of school and not so involved in clubs,etc., and the people who were completely uninvolved with all school stuff and didn’t focus on academics either. And of course, more typically, people who fell somewhere in between those four extremes. And people mostly seemed to hang out with the people close to where they fell on that scale, with the involvement in school social stuff being more important than the academics part, though it’s not like it was an exact thing. And people also tended to divide along race lines, and pre-existing friendships from middle school, and a lot of other factors. But I could not have sat down and pointed out to you the ‘popular’ people who everyone wanted to be friends with and the people who you would become a social outcast if you talked to, because there was nothing that clear cut or extreme. (Let me be clear, I’m talking in terms of the school wide social landscape, not specific groups of friends. Plenty of people disliked each other and would have objected to their friends hanging out with a person they hated.) Is this sort of extreme and transparent social hierarchy that you see on tv a common thing or was my high school more the norm?
- I didn’t actually mean to write 500 words on the social dynamics of my high school, just now, but I suspect that a lot of these recaps will contain some attempts to work out my high school experience in comparison with the Buffy one, and why I find so much of the high school metaphor of the show so unsatisfactory.
- I like Buffy breaking the door to get into the locked locker room. I always like little demonstrations of her Slayer powers in her day-to-day life (though this is in the process of investigating a dead body and thus not quite day-to-day), and it’s a good way to show the audience that she has super strength without waving it in our faces or waiting until a fight scene where it might not be immediately obvious that it’s not just bad fight choreography.
- Giles is creepily enthusiastic while telling Buffy about all the creepy things that Sunnydale attracts. I mostly find it endearing, but it is just a little on the weird side when talking about things that kill people.
- “What, you like sent away for the Time Life series?” “uh..uha..yes...” “D’ya get the free phone?” “um, the calendar.” It’s cute, but it also emphasizes how new Giles is to the whole Watcher thing.
- “Prepares me for what? For getting kicked out of school? For losing all of my friends? For having to spend all of my time fighting for my life and never getting to tell anyone because I might endanger them? Go ahead. Prepare me.”
- “Oh come one, this is Sunnydale. How bad an evil can there be here?”
- The Master’s lair is right under the school, or at least the road outside it. This makes sense, but somehow I hadn’t noticed it before.
- Angel is not trying as hard to be helpful as he could be. Stalking and cryptic remarks and “I didn’t say I was your friend” are not good ways to get her to trust you, dude. And as we see from her subsequent conversation with Giles...she doesn’t trust him. Shocker.
- “When I’m with a boy I like, it’s hard for me to say anything cool or witty or at all. I can usually make a few vowel sounds, and then I have to go away.”
- “Well, my philosophy, do you want to hear my philosophy? Life is short, not original, I’ll grant you, but it’s true. Y’know, why waste time being all shy and worrying about some guy and if he’s going to laugh at you? Seize the moment, cause tomorrow you might be dead.”
- Oh Cordelia. “Excuse me, I have got to call everyone I have ever met, right now.” She has no depth at this point, but she has many of the best lines.
- And the Master rises up out of his pit of boiling...blood? It’s probably mean to be blood. All shiny and clean and not at all covered in said blood. How long is he supposed to have been in there? How does this plot work?
- I like how pleased Xander seems for Willow when Buffy says she left with a guy.
- “Oh, hey, I hope he’s not a vampire, because then you might have to slay him.”
- I also like the moment when you can see Xander realize that Buffy’s serious about the whole vampire thing.
- The part when Darla changes to game face in the middle of “You’re not going anywhere...until we’ve fed!” never fails to make me laugh, which I’m fairly certain was not the intended reaction.
- I suppose she’s trying to draw the vampires away from Willow and Jesse so they can escape, but Buffy’s quipping feels really awkward and inappropriate.
- Can you imagine later seasons Buffy having this much trouble with Luke? She’s still so new here.
But now I've decided to go through the series from the beginning, now that I'm hooked enough to do so, and post my rewatch notes. I don't have much to say, and no deep insights, but it seems like a fun thing to do, and it'll keep me watching in order. And what is livejournal for, if not to hear yourself talk. Or watch yourself type, to be more accurate, though somewhat less idiomatic.
I will make no effort not to include spoilers for any part of the series, so if you haven't seen it be warned.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Rewatch – Welcome to the Hellmouth
- We begin with the irritating opening monologue. At what point does that go away? Also, it’s just some random voice made artificially deep here. I seem to remember it being Giles doing it later. Is that later this season, in season 2 or just a figment of my imagination?
- Everyone who had ever recapped this episode has commented on the reversal of having the cute schoolgirl be the vampire, so I will just comment that Darla’s hair is seriously unflattering here. Like, I didn’t even realize she was pretty until I saw her in the flashbacks in Fool For Love.
- It is a good twist, though. I like a twist that takes me by surprise and it did that the first time I saw it. And it does make for a lovely bit of tone-setting for the series.
- Buffy’s Slayer dreams here are just a random selection of mildly creepy images. Some of them seem relevant to the plot...and some of them are just creepy hands and gothic architecture that will only ever be seen again in the opening credits. Which sounds complain-ier than I meant it to. These dreams are more tone setting ‘this is the kind of things she dreams about’ than plot relevant, and as this is the first episode, that is okay.
- I’m interested that despite her desire to get away from the Slaying Buffy is still carrying around a stake. She’s not quite so sure as she’d like to be that there are no vampires in Sunnydale.
- It’s weird, the first time I saw this episode I think I’d just been watching some movie with the least subtle or realistic depiction of high school cliques ever and so when I saw this I was kind of impressed that they seemed to be going a little less stereotypical...and then I watched it again and wonder how I came to that conclusion. I think the first time Xander and Jesse read a lot like the ‘popular’ guys in my class (they still do to an extent, but now I know they're meant to be losers) and Cordelia’s brushing off Jesse seemed a lot less dismissive (and he seemed less actually flirting and more joking with her in the way the people in my class joke-flirted with each other all the time). I guess I was pasting on the dynamics of the people I went to high school with, because the extreme focus on popularity is kind of nonsense to me. At my highschool – though I will admit I was not the most hooked into the social network of my school, so I may have missed some stuff – there didn’t seem to be any sort of division of popular people and losers. There were cliques, sure, as there will always be, people associate with the same people and some people are part of more groups than others, but...Basically, how people divided up, as far as I noticed, was sort of on two scales: involvement in school stuff (clubs, sports, student council, etc.) and focus on academics. So you have people who are really involved and try really hard at academics, and the people who were really involved but not so much with the school work, and the people who were really focused on the academic parts of school and not so involved in clubs,etc., and the people who were completely uninvolved with all school stuff and didn’t focus on academics either. And of course, more typically, people who fell somewhere in between those four extremes. And people mostly seemed to hang out with the people close to where they fell on that scale, with the involvement in school social stuff being more important than the academics part, though it’s not like it was an exact thing. And people also tended to divide along race lines, and pre-existing friendships from middle school, and a lot of other factors. But I could not have sat down and pointed out to you the ‘popular’ people who everyone wanted to be friends with and the people who you would become a social outcast if you talked to, because there was nothing that clear cut or extreme. (Let me be clear, I’m talking in terms of the school wide social landscape, not specific groups of friends. Plenty of people disliked each other and would have objected to their friends hanging out with a person they hated.) Is this sort of extreme and transparent social hierarchy that you see on tv a common thing or was my high school more the norm?
- I didn’t actually mean to write 500 words on the social dynamics of my high school, just now, but I suspect that a lot of these recaps will contain some attempts to work out my high school experience in comparison with the Buffy one, and why I find so much of the high school metaphor of the show so unsatisfactory.
- I like Buffy breaking the door to get into the locked locker room. I always like little demonstrations of her Slayer powers in her day-to-day life (though this is in the process of investigating a dead body and thus not quite day-to-day), and it’s a good way to show the audience that she has super strength without waving it in our faces or waiting until a fight scene where it might not be immediately obvious that it’s not just bad fight choreography.
- Giles is creepily enthusiastic while telling Buffy about all the creepy things that Sunnydale attracts. I mostly find it endearing, but it is just a little on the weird side when talking about things that kill people.
- “What, you like sent away for the Time Life series?” “uh..uha..yes...” “D’ya get the free phone?” “um, the calendar.” It’s cute, but it also emphasizes how new Giles is to the whole Watcher thing.
- “Prepares me for what? For getting kicked out of school? For losing all of my friends? For having to spend all of my time fighting for my life and never getting to tell anyone because I might endanger them? Go ahead. Prepare me.”
- “Oh come one, this is Sunnydale. How bad an evil can there be here?”
- The Master’s lair is right under the school, or at least the road outside it. This makes sense, but somehow I hadn’t noticed it before.
- Angel is not trying as hard to be helpful as he could be. Stalking and cryptic remarks and “I didn’t say I was your friend” are not good ways to get her to trust you, dude. And as we see from her subsequent conversation with Giles...she doesn’t trust him. Shocker.
- “When I’m with a boy I like, it’s hard for me to say anything cool or witty or at all. I can usually make a few vowel sounds, and then I have to go away.”
- “Well, my philosophy, do you want to hear my philosophy? Life is short, not original, I’ll grant you, but it’s true. Y’know, why waste time being all shy and worrying about some guy and if he’s going to laugh at you? Seize the moment, cause tomorrow you might be dead.”
- Oh Cordelia. “Excuse me, I have got to call everyone I have ever met, right now.” She has no depth at this point, but she has many of the best lines.
- And the Master rises up out of his pit of boiling...blood? It’s probably mean to be blood. All shiny and clean and not at all covered in said blood. How long is he supposed to have been in there? How does this plot work?
- I like how pleased Xander seems for Willow when Buffy says she left with a guy.
- “Oh, hey, I hope he’s not a vampire, because then you might have to slay him.”
- I also like the moment when you can see Xander realize that Buffy’s serious about the whole vampire thing.
- The part when Darla changes to game face in the middle of “You’re not going anywhere...until we’ve fed!” never fails to make me laugh, which I’m fairly certain was not the intended reaction.
- I suppose she’s trying to draw the vampires away from Willow and Jesse so they can escape, but Buffy’s quipping feels really awkward and inappropriate.
- Can you imagine later seasons Buffy having this much trouble with Luke? She’s still so new here.
