antipopper

After a few months of Gnutella issues, this weekend I got myself mlMac, went on an eDonkey filesharing spree, and caught up with the final few episodes of Buffy. {Sigh} Let’s just say that while I can intellectually appreciate Buffy‘s descent over the past few years into a steely meditation on the pain of alienation, I need to enjoy my television. Sure, it was really interesting for the Big Bad of Season Six to be a trio of lame geeks, but did it play well? And if the final season needed the ultimate apocalypse for it to mean anything, it was masterful to make The First such an incorporeal menace. But in the end I was bored by everyone getting “taunted to death” — The First was kinda “done” after the fabulous “Conversations With Dead People”.

Team Joss really did try some different stuff out over the years, which is noble, but how flexible were the parameters of the show, really? The high school years remain my favourite Buffy years because the basic metaphor of the show — “being a teenager is hell” — was situated so flawlessly: it was all about an in-between girl, pulled between all sorts of desires and duties, going to school on the Hellmouth. It was like a golden goose, able to effortlessly dispense all these different kinds of stories and spawn all kinds of wonderfully monstrous ideas, but once that situation necessarily ran out, Team Joss really had to work it to come up with the goods. And work it they did, producing wonderful stuff like “The Body” and “Once More With Feeling”. Even a lot of the “dumb” episodes, like “Beer Bad” and “Doublemeat Palace”, were really enjoyable. But had time run out for Buffy? Season Seven was a welcome return to a more engaging kind of storytelling after the “mundanity-of-evil is, um, mundane” trap of the previous year, but it felt like a valiant attempt to reinflate a burst balloon.

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Meanwhile, Angel has become the most manipulative of shows lately, full of bad faith and button-pushing… and jaw-droppingly entertaining plot ideas. In a lot of ways, Angel reminds me of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which started as a daggy but charming spinoff, only to ditch the somewhat boring integrity of its premise in favour of a what-will-they-do-next unpredictability. Which, for better or worse, made the show much more of a rush. Similarly, these last few seasons of Angel feel as if the producers got together in a room and said, “Wouldn’t it rock if we did this to them? How fucked up would that be?” — playing a distant God, rather than being embedded in some kind of molecular creative process.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either; while Buffy usually had a fundamental sense of play to save itself from over-earnestness, Angel needed saving from its own “integrity”, a way to acknowledge its own artifice. But that this has come from an arbitrarily wrathful God, moving players about on a huge chessboard, is a mixed blessing. (They’ve even had the cheeky nerve to write this metaphor directly into the final arc of Season Four, in which they realise that most of the series has been part of a huge setup by a manipulative deity.) But hell, it certainly is gripping. I’m still gaping over the Season Four finale. They did what??