Buffy! The second time

David is watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer with me. He should stop reading now to avoid spoilers.

We're up to Season 2 together, about halfway through--about one episode away from that one thing that happens, you know what I mean, that sets the whole tragic dramatic arc of the rest of the season into play? I'm all excited. If he weren't such a grown-up, we'd be sitting up watching until 5 in the morning, like I did a few years ago when I watched the series for the first time, instead of a stately two episodes per evening after the kids go to sleep.

One thing I'm enjoying the second time through is seeing how many things in the first two seasons get called back later on. Not just characters who show up in a small way and come back later to play a bigger part, but jokes that are set up two seasons before the punchline: A couple of episodes from now, for instance, Oz will be looking into the trophy case and observe that one trophy has eyes that seem to follow him. In an episode we watched last night, Xander did a funny offhand riff about his Uncle Rory, the drunken taxidermist, and I got all excited--last week I watched most of Season 6 on my own, including the Xander/Anya wedding episode. Uncle Rory was at the wedding! Drinking, and talking about taxidermy! Who in the writers' room, working on the wedding episode, said, "Hey, remember four years ago we had a line about Xander's Uncle Rory? Let's work him in!"

I've also spotted one or two continuity errors--in Season 2, Spike says Angel is his sire, but we who have watched the whole series know that Drusilla made him. (And what a great episode that is, when we see that--there's so much I just can't wait to get to with David.)

I also see how some of Joss Whedon's writerly tics can get kind of irritating. Ironically, it was from the blog of one of the Buffy writers--Jane Espenson, who also wrote for Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, and a whole bunch of other shows over the years--that I learned some of the vocabulary of comic writing, and thus learned to recognize certain kinds of jokes by name (I haven't read Espenson's blog in awhile, and don't remember everything). One tic Whedon has that has come to irritate me is shining a light on a joke or awkward moment. If I were inventing a Buffy drinking game, you'd take a shot every time a character said, "Did I say that out loud?" or "Let's pretend I didn't say that," or something similar. One example: Spike says to Buffy, "So, you just came here to pump me for information." Buffy says, "What else would I want to pump you for?" and then, after a beat, she says, "I can't believe I said that," or some such thing. I would argue that these kinds of awkward/funny moments--which Whedon and the Buffy writers' room love to pepper their scripts with--would be stronger and funnier if the awkward was just left to hang in the air a moment.

I can't remember the exact word, but Espenson calls this something like "lamplighting" a joke--some word that evokes an image of shining a spotlight on it, perhaps with a big illuminated sign flashing J-O-K-E JOKEJOKEJOKEJOKE. I reckon each Buffy episode would be about 30 seconds shorter if all of these moments were cut in favor of trusting the audience to notice the joke on their own.

So, David and I are in the middle of Season 2, the Greek Tragedy of the Buffy ouvre. But I just watched Season 6 for the second time on my own. I know fans are divided about Season 6, and the role Spike plays in it, but I'm a sucker for doomed romance, so I like it probably more than I should. I like Spike's striving. We who like cultish TV shows that spawn cosplay and attendance at conventions where people can pay as much as $75 to get a picture taken with a star (60 bucks for James Marsters!) are very used to the "non-human seeks humanity" trope: we've seen it with Data, Seven of Nine, Angel, Anya. If it weren't so late and my brain were at full power I could probably list another 10. We must like it or our favorite shows wouldn't keep giving it to us. I like Spike's version of it, I like how mixed-up his motivations are, I like how tragically wrong he keeps getting it, and yet how sincere he is. (And I like how ashamed Buffy eventually is about how she's been treating him.)

It's interesting to watch Season 2 right after Season 6. I found Buffy's constant abuse of Spike hard to take in Season 6, but you should hear her insulting Angel the first half of Season 2--seeing the two in juxtaposition made it clear how much of a character trait this is for Buffy, to be mean to men (OK, vampires--I'll have to see how she deals with Riley in Season 5) who are in love with her. It's of a piece with her constant whining. She's really not such a pleasant person, overall. David and I just watched the episode where Kendra appears for the first time , and I admit I couldn't help thinking that it might be kind of refreshing to watch Kendra's TV show for awhile, to just hang with a Slayer who is totally into being a Slayer and not so much about hanging around graveyards fondling Mr. Pointy and complaining about how she can't be a cheerleader and nobody understands her.

This is a lot of stuff about a TV show, and it's not all that coherent, but I'm going to let it stand because I haven't written anything in like three months and I have this huge backlog in my brain and in my notebooks, and everything I've tried to get down in order to break the bottleneck and get things flowing again has petered out after about 100 words. Perhaps this will do it.