“Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 2″
My husband and I bought the Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 2 dvd set when it came out, watched a few episodes, then put it away. We had no idea where we’d ended, so we went back to the beginning, starting with Season 1, episode 1. Buffy is a fun show with a dark sense of humor and a way with theme and metaphor. Season 1 was Buffy finding her bearings in Sunnydale and battling the Master, an ancient vampire bent on, what else, releasing hell on earth.
Season 2, though, digs deeper and even darker. The series moves away from some of the sillier “monster of the week” episodes, and spends more of its time on the bad guys: Spike, Drusilla, and a friend turned foe. It still finds time for the funny, though.
Oz: Yeah. Hey, did everybody see that guy just turn to dust?
Willow: Uh, well, uh… sort of.
Xander: Yep. Vampires are real. A lot of them live in Sunnydale. Willow will fill you in.
Willow: I know it’s hard to accept at first.
Oz: Actually, it explains a *lot*.
Nasty stuff happens to characters we’ve come to love, and we get to see how it affects them over time. I found the two-parter in the middle, “Surprise” and “Innocence”, along with the season finale, wrenching stuff. The Amazon reviewer sums it up well, I think: “This is some of the best TV ever made, period.”
While the media is abuzz over a silly rumor about Buffy that will likely never come to pass, do yourself a favor: ignore the gossip and revisit the original series. It’s a perfect show for the summer season of reruns.
June 3rd, 2009 at 3:21 pm
I was a hardcore Buffy fan back in the day, but my fiancé had never seen the show so when we started watching our way through the episodes a year or so ago. I think Season Two is some of the best television ever made - Surprise and Innocence are heartwrenchingly wonderful, but so is Passion, and Becoming Parts I & II. It has some clunkers, but overall, it’s one of the most emotionally satisfying (and devastating) tv shows. Even if Joss did some wicked and cruel things, I always respected that he and the writers earned the emotional payoffs (early on at least… at the end of the shows run, they were burning through a lot of good will rather quickly) and I fully believed him when he said he delivered the stories that fans needed to hear, even if they weren’t the ones we wanted.
I hope the rumor of a Buffy movie stays just that. Without Joss what’s the point?