Buffy S4 and Angel S1 Rewatch
Nov. 18th, 2025 07:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Someone decided to "Monopolize" to be read or TBR reading lists. Basically they created a Monopoly version of a game to figure out what to read next from their home libraries.
Welcome to the internet - where you get everyone's opinions on things, and find out about weird game ideas that never occurred to you.
I don't know, sounds time consuming. Some people have a lot of free time on their hands, or don't watch as much television as I do. Granted television is pretty much all that my Vertigo will allow at the moment. Reading just aggravates it. This (DW) isn't as taxing - I can skim.
2. Buffy S4 and Angel S1 Rewatch - eh, Where the Wild Things Are is actually, gasp, better than War Zone. Both shows are attempting to be more diverse and failing miserably. Buffy S4 has Forrest, who well...just no? On a good day he's a chauvinist, on a bad day, a misogynist. War Zone picked the wrong family member to join up with Angel, it should have been Gunn's sister. Who was more interesting, and less obvious. I mean, they called him "Gunn" - how stereotypical can they be? I can't quite decide if they meant it ironically - it's possible? Except he kind of works as the proverbial "gun" on the show. Also Angel desperately needs more badass female characters. These are both weak episodes but for very different reasons. Gunn's sister didn't have an obvious name, and had character.
The difficulty with Angel s1 War Zone - outside of the fact that it does not date well, and emphasizes the issues 1990s-early 00s broadcast television shows had with racial diversity, is it's so cliche - I've seen it done one too many times. Weirdly, Angel S1's arc episodes are better than the stand-a-lone, the opposite of Buffy. Whenever WRH are involved the story is a touch better. When they aren't the writing isn't as good. The other difficulty with War Zone is Angel, Wes, and Cordelia keep stating Gunn and his gang are just kids. Angel describes them as between 16 and 20, if that. Uhm. No. They are in their mid to late 20s, some maybe thirty. They have facial hair? Lots of it? It's kind of obvious? I get Angel calling them kids, but Wes and Cordelia? This is another thing that does not date well? Now in most series - kids look like kids. But in the 20th century to early 21st (yes, I feel old too), they often hired people in their twenties and thirties to play teens. It was jarring. Everyone on Glee was in their twenties playing high school students.
War Zone exists to set up Gunn as a recurring character and future cast member. (Also, the network was mandated to add non-white or POC characters to all their series. I've found this out ages ago from a commentary to the TV Set). The predominantly all white casts on Buffy and Angel are problematic. It's not the writers or actors or even the producers fault - it's the studio and network, they had final say - and pushed for non-diverse casting originally. Then the networks got sued by the NAACP, and started telling everyone to insert POC characters in there willy nilly. If you had an all male cast? Insert a female character (whether she belonged in it or not), if you had an all white cast? Insert a Black character somewhere in there. So you have an existing show, with a full cast, which is "network approved" and all of a sudden you are informed to add a character that is definitely Black or Female but not as a lead, and not too prominent. Depending on how creative you are in regards to characters, will depend on how well that goes? It didn't go well for about 90% of the series on television at the time. It's better now. Veronica Mars did a better job, not great, but better. As did Smallville. Shows that aired after Buffy did, fared better, because the edict was already in place. [Judd Apatow informed me of this practice - during the commentary to the flick "the TV Set" about Freaks and Geeks, and pretty much everything that aired in the 1990s to early 00s).
As a result? Gunn is a walking stereotype. Making the character rather grating. He's a tough black ex-gang leader/street kid from the LA hood, who wears a hoodie. They did eventually strip some of that from him, and by the fifth season he was no longer a cliche or stereotype. He isn't really by the fourth season. But I still think if they'd gone with the sister instead, it would have worked better. They could have subverted the trope a bit. That's the other issue with the episode, it's not subversive? It's very much about class, and rich vs. poor, and how people who really don't do much of anything become insanely wealthy, and those who scrap and fight to get by, don't. The billionaire is a software engineer, nerdy upper middle class dude who played D&D on the side. (Again with the popular television/film trope of the nerdy guy who plays D&D becomes billionaire. It was a very 1980s/90s trope. I don't see it as much now. It was overdone. Buffy makes fun of it with Superstar.) He hires Angel et crew to help him with a blackmailer (sliding more and more towards noir, even the dialogue is typical noir). Cordelia loves the smell of money, and considers prostituting herself to the billionaire for security and money - Wes arches an eyebrow, as she talks herself out of it. The blackmailer is blackmailing the billionaire for frequenting a demon brothel and doing all sorts of nasty things there. And he turns out to be the local muscle in Gunn's area. So Angel happens upon Gunn - and proceeds to attempt to rescue them (without much success, he spends most of his time fighting Gunn and Gunn's gang).
The best bits - which make worth watching - are Gunn killing his sister - who got kidnapped by vampires and turned into one. She talks about what it is like being a vampire. Underlining that the main difference is the guilt.
Vampires have the personality, and all the loves, wants, dreams, desires, and fears of the human, but the soul of a demon inside and it's compass powering things. "I still feel everything I did as a human, except I'm free of the guilt," she tells Gunn. "I can do whatever I want without any worries." Her death - kind of changes Gunn - he no longer wants to fight vamps in a gang, or seek revenge, and he is more willing to work with Angel.
It also furthers the world building - in that shows, Vampires are bad, but there's a lot of wiggle room in there.
Also the Wes/Cordelia relationship is being further developed. They spend a lot of time together in this episode. Bonding. They also save Angel, who is none too pleased by it. Their scenes are actually among the best in the episode as is their by-play. I'd forgotten how well the platonic friendship of Wes/Cordelia worked.
Where the Wild Things Are - is written by Tracey Forbes, who also wrote Beer Bad, (& I think Something Blue) and possibly owned the kitten that Willow and Tara adopt, and we never see again. It's a mixed bag. The whole thing flops, but there are separate bits that work - actually everything that is not connected to the Initiative, Riley, Adam, or Buffy works in this episode. Xander/Anya are further developed, and the writers appear to notice their relationship is too much about sex, and in a nice twist have Anya upset with Xander for not wanting more of it. In previous seasons - Xander was dying for it, but once Faith takes advantage of him, he calms down. (I don't think he and Cordy ever slept together. It's pretty clear Faith was his first from their comments on it.) Also, more development of Giles - we get to see Head sing finally. But the skeevy sweaters have got to go? And the best scenes in the whole episode are actually between Spike and Anya, and Spike and well everybody. He's stealing every scene he's in. He's on for about ten minutes and steals all of them.
Riley and Buffy really don't work. And they need to for the episode to work. There needs to be a lot of chemistry between them for the gist of the episode to make sense - which is lust. Mainly because the writers did a piss-poor job of building the character of Riley, which isn't really the episode writers fault. If Gunn is a walking stereotype in Angel, Riley is in Buffy. And that's the problem. It's hard to care? He's just there. Wholesome. And Buffy seems to be with him because she thinks she's supposed to want to be with him? He's the writer's poster child for the ideal somehow? But we know very little about him, and less about what motivates him. I know more about Adam than I do about Riley. There's no real chemistry - because they didn't tell us who Riley is. You can't do shadowy tall dark brooding mystery guy with Riley. We know he's military, and human, and a frat boy from Iowa. How cliche can you get?
Also, is it just me, or are a lot of television writers obsessed with sex? This show talks about "sex" a lot. This episode is all about sex, as a drug, to the point in which it starts to grate. There's several poltergiests caused by the repressed sexuality and abuse of children by an old demented lady. It's a recurring theme throughout the series - children, sex, and dirty women and old time religion. We get it in S3 with Gingerbread, S4 with Where the Wild Things Are, S5 with Family, and S7 with Caleb. It's a flaw in the series - not necessarily a fatal one, since I've been able to ignore it for the most part, but one all the same. You can do this theme of course? But it's been a tad overdone, and I think they did it best with Gingerbread? And should have left it at that. Although I might change my mind about Family.
It's watchable for the Xander/Anya bits (although their constant bickering over their relationship does grate after a bit - and I can see why they don't make it), Spike/Anya (Caulfield is right they had chemistry - but the writers for some reason or other never really went all that far with it), and Giles singing. Willow/Tara is built on - and we get a bit more on Tara, who appears to be more empathetic and sensitive to things than Willow, and secretive - she's ashamed of something, and isn't telling Willow what it is. She also, in a nice twist, is the one who feels uncool and unworthy of Willow's attention.
There's the somewhat troubling plot bit about how Demons and Vampires are working together, and usually those two races want nothing to do with each other, so Adam is doing a kind of Martin Luther King thing and bringing them all together?
No. Just no. That's cringe. At least Buffy cringes with me when she says it.
Welcome to the internet - where you get everyone's opinions on things, and find out about weird game ideas that never occurred to you.
I don't know, sounds time consuming. Some people have a lot of free time on their hands, or don't watch as much television as I do. Granted television is pretty much all that my Vertigo will allow at the moment. Reading just aggravates it. This (DW) isn't as taxing - I can skim.
2. Buffy S4 and Angel S1 Rewatch - eh, Where the Wild Things Are is actually, gasp, better than War Zone. Both shows are attempting to be more diverse and failing miserably. Buffy S4 has Forrest, who well...just no? On a good day he's a chauvinist, on a bad day, a misogynist. War Zone picked the wrong family member to join up with Angel, it should have been Gunn's sister. Who was more interesting, and less obvious. I mean, they called him "Gunn" - how stereotypical can they be? I can't quite decide if they meant it ironically - it's possible? Except he kind of works as the proverbial "gun" on the show. Also Angel desperately needs more badass female characters. These are both weak episodes but for very different reasons. Gunn's sister didn't have an obvious name, and had character.
The difficulty with Angel s1 War Zone - outside of the fact that it does not date well, and emphasizes the issues 1990s-early 00s broadcast television shows had with racial diversity, is it's so cliche - I've seen it done one too many times. Weirdly, Angel S1's arc episodes are better than the stand-a-lone, the opposite of Buffy. Whenever WRH are involved the story is a touch better. When they aren't the writing isn't as good. The other difficulty with War Zone is Angel, Wes, and Cordelia keep stating Gunn and his gang are just kids. Angel describes them as between 16 and 20, if that. Uhm. No. They are in their mid to late 20s, some maybe thirty. They have facial hair? Lots of it? It's kind of obvious? I get Angel calling them kids, but Wes and Cordelia? This is another thing that does not date well? Now in most series - kids look like kids. But in the 20th century to early 21st (yes, I feel old too), they often hired people in their twenties and thirties to play teens. It was jarring. Everyone on Glee was in their twenties playing high school students.
War Zone exists to set up Gunn as a recurring character and future cast member. (Also, the network was mandated to add non-white or POC characters to all their series. I've found this out ages ago from a commentary to the TV Set). The predominantly all white casts on Buffy and Angel are problematic. It's not the writers or actors or even the producers fault - it's the studio and network, they had final say - and pushed for non-diverse casting originally. Then the networks got sued by the NAACP, and started telling everyone to insert POC characters in there willy nilly. If you had an all male cast? Insert a female character (whether she belonged in it or not), if you had an all white cast? Insert a Black character somewhere in there. So you have an existing show, with a full cast, which is "network approved" and all of a sudden you are informed to add a character that is definitely Black or Female but not as a lead, and not too prominent. Depending on how creative you are in regards to characters, will depend on how well that goes? It didn't go well for about 90% of the series on television at the time. It's better now. Veronica Mars did a better job, not great, but better. As did Smallville. Shows that aired after Buffy did, fared better, because the edict was already in place. [Judd Apatow informed me of this practice - during the commentary to the flick "the TV Set" about Freaks and Geeks, and pretty much everything that aired in the 1990s to early 00s).
As a result? Gunn is a walking stereotype. Making the character rather grating. He's a tough black ex-gang leader/street kid from the LA hood, who wears a hoodie. They did eventually strip some of that from him, and by the fifth season he was no longer a cliche or stereotype. He isn't really by the fourth season. But I still think if they'd gone with the sister instead, it would have worked better. They could have subverted the trope a bit. That's the other issue with the episode, it's not subversive? It's very much about class, and rich vs. poor, and how people who really don't do much of anything become insanely wealthy, and those who scrap and fight to get by, don't. The billionaire is a software engineer, nerdy upper middle class dude who played D&D on the side. (Again with the popular television/film trope of the nerdy guy who plays D&D becomes billionaire. It was a very 1980s/90s trope. I don't see it as much now. It was overdone. Buffy makes fun of it with Superstar.) He hires Angel et crew to help him with a blackmailer (sliding more and more towards noir, even the dialogue is typical noir). Cordelia loves the smell of money, and considers prostituting herself to the billionaire for security and money - Wes arches an eyebrow, as she talks herself out of it. The blackmailer is blackmailing the billionaire for frequenting a demon brothel and doing all sorts of nasty things there. And he turns out to be the local muscle in Gunn's area. So Angel happens upon Gunn - and proceeds to attempt to rescue them (without much success, he spends most of his time fighting Gunn and Gunn's gang).
The best bits - which make worth watching - are Gunn killing his sister - who got kidnapped by vampires and turned into one. She talks about what it is like being a vampire. Underlining that the main difference is the guilt.
Vampires have the personality, and all the loves, wants, dreams, desires, and fears of the human, but the soul of a demon inside and it's compass powering things. "I still feel everything I did as a human, except I'm free of the guilt," she tells Gunn. "I can do whatever I want without any worries." Her death - kind of changes Gunn - he no longer wants to fight vamps in a gang, or seek revenge, and he is more willing to work with Angel.
It also furthers the world building - in that shows, Vampires are bad, but there's a lot of wiggle room in there.
Also the Wes/Cordelia relationship is being further developed. They spend a lot of time together in this episode. Bonding. They also save Angel, who is none too pleased by it. Their scenes are actually among the best in the episode as is their by-play. I'd forgotten how well the platonic friendship of Wes/Cordelia worked.
Where the Wild Things Are - is written by Tracey Forbes, who also wrote Beer Bad, (& I think Something Blue) and possibly owned the kitten that Willow and Tara adopt, and we never see again. It's a mixed bag. The whole thing flops, but there are separate bits that work - actually everything that is not connected to the Initiative, Riley, Adam, or Buffy works in this episode. Xander/Anya are further developed, and the writers appear to notice their relationship is too much about sex, and in a nice twist have Anya upset with Xander for not wanting more of it. In previous seasons - Xander was dying for it, but once Faith takes advantage of him, he calms down. (I don't think he and Cordy ever slept together. It's pretty clear Faith was his first from their comments on it.) Also, more development of Giles - we get to see Head sing finally. But the skeevy sweaters have got to go? And the best scenes in the whole episode are actually between Spike and Anya, and Spike and well everybody. He's stealing every scene he's in. He's on for about ten minutes and steals all of them.
Riley and Buffy really don't work. And they need to for the episode to work. There needs to be a lot of chemistry between them for the gist of the episode to make sense - which is lust. Mainly because the writers did a piss-poor job of building the character of Riley, which isn't really the episode writers fault. If Gunn is a walking stereotype in Angel, Riley is in Buffy. And that's the problem. It's hard to care? He's just there. Wholesome. And Buffy seems to be with him because she thinks she's supposed to want to be with him? He's the writer's poster child for the ideal somehow? But we know very little about him, and less about what motivates him. I know more about Adam than I do about Riley. There's no real chemistry - because they didn't tell us who Riley is. You can't do shadowy tall dark brooding mystery guy with Riley. We know he's military, and human, and a frat boy from Iowa. How cliche can you get?
Also, is it just me, or are a lot of television writers obsessed with sex? This show talks about "sex" a lot. This episode is all about sex, as a drug, to the point in which it starts to grate. There's several poltergiests caused by the repressed sexuality and abuse of children by an old demented lady. It's a recurring theme throughout the series - children, sex, and dirty women and old time religion. We get it in S3 with Gingerbread, S4 with Where the Wild Things Are, S5 with Family, and S7 with Caleb. It's a flaw in the series - not necessarily a fatal one, since I've been able to ignore it for the most part, but one all the same. You can do this theme of course? But it's been a tad overdone, and I think they did it best with Gingerbread? And should have left it at that. Although I might change my mind about Family.
It's watchable for the Xander/Anya bits (although their constant bickering over their relationship does grate after a bit - and I can see why they don't make it), Spike/Anya (Caulfield is right they had chemistry - but the writers for some reason or other never really went all that far with it), and Giles singing. Willow/Tara is built on - and we get a bit more on Tara, who appears to be more empathetic and sensitive to things than Willow, and secretive - she's ashamed of something, and isn't telling Willow what it is. She also, in a nice twist, is the one who feels uncool and unworthy of Willow's attention.
There's the somewhat troubling plot bit about how Demons and Vampires are working together, and usually those two races want nothing to do with each other, so Adam is doing a kind of Martin Luther King thing and bringing them all together?
No. Just no. That's cringe. At least Buffy cringes with me when she says it.
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Date: 2025-11-20 10:51 pm (UTC)I disliked most of their POC characters, not because they were POC, but because of how poorly they were developed and how much they fell into stereotypes. You're correct in that Charles Gunn actually gets better by the later seasons, and in S5, Angel does a better job with POC than it had previously (by no means perfect - it was 2004? But better?) I'd say Angel did better later than Buffy did, possibly because it ended a year later than Buffy - so there were rules in place that hadn't been with Buffy. (See Veronica Mars which aired not long after Buffy on UPN, and it was far more diverse.)
Buffy S7's POC characters are better for the most part than the previous ones, with a few exceptions. Wood kind of fell into cliche at times - but at least he was a Principal and a Rogue Demon Hunter as opposed to a vampire, or a requisite bad guy (like Trick - who was an underutilized character or worse Forrest, who was out and out offensive and annoying (I honestly would have flipped Forrest and Graham, but I get why they didn't - the actor playing Forrest is a lot better) and the slayerettes did as well. (They weren't great? But they were an improvement over Kendra). I kind of wish they hadn't linked Wood to Spike, mainly because Spike is in the hero/champion role, and Wood isn't - story thread wise? (Despite personal opinion - that's what the storyline dictated, and it was admittedly problematic to say the least - we've both discussed and flogged that horse to death by now.) Which isn't the best look by a long shot. (And pissed off quite a few people, understandably so.). I wish they'd made him a Watcher instead - that would have been more interesting? (They didn't know who he was until about the fourth or fifth episode - so that was admittedly a problem, and were flirting with a romance between him and Buffy (Gellar campaigned heavily against it - because she didn't want him killed off, which they'd have done). I'm glad they didn't do that - they had no chemistry and seriously, the series was ending.)
You are right - the use of demons as a metaphor for racism and bigotry doesn't work any better than the use of aliens and/or mutants for that metaphor does. Although aliens and mutants works slightly better - because you know, they are typically not considered "Evil"?
I handwaved a lot of it - partly because it is a television series made at the speed of light in the late 20th Century/early 21st Century, and the network kind of hammered down on casting choices. I know what American networks did in regards to diverse casting in the 90s and early 00s. I seriously doubt Britain was all that much better in this regard? I vaguely remember that the NAACP sued them somewhere around 2000, or there abouts, for not creating diverse programming choices. NAACP was not wrong. American television was for the most part "white" or non-POC in the 20th Century and early 21st, with a few exceptions. Even the commercials were. It didn't start to really shift until the 1980s. Prior to that the stereotypes were far worse, with a few exceptions here in there. But the 1980s - introduced St. Elsewhere, LA Law, Hill Street Blues, and then Homicide Life on the Streets. Also, like it or not, the Cosby Show, In Living Color, and the Jamie Fox Show (which ironically aired before Buffy) in reruns in the US.
NAACP got upset with The West Wing - which had a token black character. Buffy, Angel, Charmed, Dawson's Creek, et all were just as bad. This was wide-spread actually. Try watching Northen Exposure sometime? That show does not date well. Or Friends? Gilmore Girls. Buffy and Angel being supernatural series actually date better than those shows did, believe it or not? Doctor Who wasn't great in this department either - until roughly now. So it was a widespread issue and more systematic than individual in scope.
I remember Judd Apatow explaining in the commentary to the TV Set how hard it was to insert a female cast member into Freaks and Geeks - the show was supposed to be about teenage boys. And he didn't know how to do it - and it was like at the last minute with all these rules. Meanwhile, to be fair to Whedon et company, Whedon wanted the actress who played Kendra to play Buffy or Cordelia, and got nixed by the higher ups. Gellar wasn't his first choice. He was aiming for Bianca Lawson as Buffy and Gellar as Cordelia, actually. But was told no, and to make Buffy a blond. So the writer's hands were partly tied.
Television is not an easy gig. That doesn't excuse it of course? But it does, I think to some extent, explain the issues involved? Also it is important to look at it in the context of the time period and not by today's standards? Notably, the new series is attempting to make Buffy more diverse. What needs to be battled here is systematic racism - not individual racism, so I'm not sure critiquing Buffy in a vacuum works in that regard? You kind of have to look at the landscape and realize, damn, network television was racist? And then determine, has it changed, did it get better in spite of itself, and because of folks like the NAACP who sued them?