I’ve now watched three whole seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I’ve also looked at various related websites. I usually don’t mind spoilers, but in retrospect the “panicking” scene would have been better somehow if I hadn’t known when to expect it. (I don’t read about specific unseen episodes, but I have read capsule biographies of most characters.)
Angel breaks it off with Buffy. Star-crossed love is touching, and my tear is jerked as readily as the next; but that story progressed hardly at all in this season, and I’ve read it before in any number of tales about interstellar time-dilation. That aside, I think better use could have been made of Angel (and was, i trust, in the spinoff); something is surely wrong if a unique character, ingeniously conceived, becomes more entertaining when he loses his uniqueness (latter part of season 2). And then in “Graduation Day” (third season finale), after Buffy risks all to save him, his role in the main event is trivial.
What makes a few vampires witty and colorful, most of the rest bovinely dull, and at least a few suicidally submissive? Does it depend more on the former human, or on the parent vampire, or on chance circumstances of the transition? (Later: a possible answer.)
And why so few female vampires?
After Willow worked the curse on Angel in “Becoming”, why not try it on other vampires? Perhaps because the obvious candidates – the only other (surviving) vampires known by name – had left the scene. Perhaps Drusilla is mad enough that even in Angel’s condition she’d be dangerous. (Oct 19: Is the orb of Thesulah destroyed in the process?)
Anyway I have an ethical problem with restoring Angel’s soul: doing so makes a human soul suffer for a demon’s actions in which it had no part. The stake is cleaner.
What did Faith’s last words mean?: “Should have been there, B. Quite a ride.”
The new human Anya is pretty funny (so far), and well played. It will be interesting to see where the writers go with her.
When Trick arrived in Sunnydale he commented on its overwhelmingly pallid population; so I was amused to see more dark faces at the Prom and Graduation than had been in the series previously.
Perhaps the number of female vampires is related to the number of female stunt players.
[This is spam, but accidentally appropriate, so I keep it but remove the link.]
EBeth, that’s a really innirestetg thought about Anya.I guess I had also lazily assumed she just got a soul when she became human at the end of The Wish. But in fact, as you point out, it’s not at all clear when Anya does or doesn’t have a soul, or whether her evil tendencies have anything to do with a soul or lack thereof.Here’s an off-the-cuff attempt to explain Anya’s soul and conscience or lack thereof. I think that, all along (beginning in her original life in Norway or wherever it was), Anya was pretty close to being unencumbered by a conscience. She had a soul — because she’s human, and humans have souls — and she never lost her soul or needed to regain it, which is why we never hear about it. I wouldn’t say she totally lacks a conscience, because if she did, then she wouldn’t need the idea of “vengeance” to justify her actions. She just has a weak conscience.But anyway, she gets noticed by the lower beings and becomes a vengeance demon, and from then on, she isn’t subject to the social pressures that push many ordinary people towards being law-abiding and peaceful and kind. On the contrary, her boss and colleagues (exemplified by Halfrek) encourage her to wield her awesome powers in clever and entertaining ways regardless of who gets hurt or whether the punishment fits the wrong for which vengeance is being done. At the same time, she doesn’t get totally disconnected from humanity, because she needs to connect with scorned women in order to use her powers. But she gets a pretty skewed view of humanity, which probably reinforces her underlying tendency not to care about humans very much.So she loses her powers and becomes human but she’s still basically the same person, and so in Doppelgangland it doesn’t occur to her that she should care that all the people in the Bronze are about to be be eaten by vampires. She still thinks of herself as a demon, not as a human who could be eaten.But the change from being a demon back to being a human is about more than just losing her powers. It’s a physical thing — she has the body and hormones and other brain-chemicals of a teenage girl. So, as we will begin to see in The Prom, she is now affected by desire and love. Her human body makes her become much more “human.”But she’s still not big with the conscience. After she has been human for a while, we start to see that she cares quite a lot about money. She also starts to care very much about Xander, but that’s based on a very personal kind of love (and also insecurity) and doesn’t make her care much about humanity in general. She cares surprisingly little for Xander’s close friends, who are nominally her friends too. And her ability to talk in a very frank and unfiltered way basically reflects the fact that she doesn’t care how others feel.I may be starting to sound rather critical of Anya here, and I don’t want to go too far in that direction. I think she’s a great and entertaining character, certainly. And she is so vulnerable, at times, that it’s easy to sympathize with her even though she’s not very morally good. I don’t necessarily agree with Joss’s decision to kill her in Chosen. But I guess I am glad that Xander didn’t end up marrying her.Anyway, thank you EBeth for getting me to think about this for the first time. Does anyone else have theories or observations about Anya?