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shadowkatToday was a better day than yesterday for various and sundry reasons. It was sunny for one thing, with blue skies. The sun sparkled on the speckled and frozen snow drifts. Well, not entirely speckled, some look pristine - surprisingly for NYC. It was also warmer - warm enough at any rate for a fifteen minute walk to the bank, Whole Foods, Insominac Cookies and back to work - in short a trip around the block. I managed to pick up Worlds Best Beecher's Mac & Cheese Gluten Free - which is to die for. (And I've been craving.) Also Sweet Lorens Chocolate Chunk Cookie Dough and Low in Sugar Chocolate Chunk (both gluten free of course). Printemps frustratingly no longer carries gluten free cookies.
Me: Are the Carribbean Chocolate Chip cookies still gluten free?
Printemps: No, we decided to change things up a bit.
Me: That's not what I'd call it.
That's okay, Insomiac's are better, bigger, warmer and cheaper, not to mention closer to my workplace.
Also accomplished a few tasks at work, wasn't bored, talked to Jay, and helped folks. And the commute went smoothly, no delays, got seats on the trains - got home and to work within thirty-five minutes.
And I made it through all my knee exercises.
***
I finished the Angelica Huston Memoir - "Watch Me" - which isn't that memorable, outside of a bittersweet ending, wherein she makes the point that of everything she's done, it's her connections with family, friends, and others that meant the most. Also how people seem to move in and out of your life, and are temporary. She has a lyrical writing style. And is a good narrator. I'm not sure I'd recommend it though? I got something out of it, but not sure others would. (Note her commentary on famous folks is limited at best, and anecdotal. She doesn't gossip at all. Nor condemn. Even the people she doesn't like - she barely mentions. Ryan O'Neal got probably the longest diatribe - he'd abused her.) It's also a memoir - so like most memoir's? Take it with a hefty grain of salt.
Currently listening to Twelve Months by Jim Butcher - narrated by James Marsters. Not Marsters best voice work but still rather good.
And still reading The Botanist's Assistant by Peggy Townsend- which is basically a mystery with an autistic sleuth, whose six foot tall, and middle-aged. It's okay - I got it as a Xmas present. But it's slow moving.
[Note to self- stop picking up books rec'd by Smart Bitches. This one was - looked great and I asked for it for Xmas.]
***
Buffy S7 Rewatch - Get it Done, Ep. 15
Doug Petrie, God Bless Him, is not a good script writer. His dialogue, ugh. Cringe. Yes, I know he was credited for writing both Beneath Me and Fool for Love, but I also know both those episodes were heavily edited and rewritten by the show-runners and executive producers (Marti Noxon and Joss Whedon). Whedon and Noxon wrote all of the Spike and Buffy scenes in Fool for Love, taking turns. While Petrie wrote the Riley scenes. (He states this in the commentary for the episode, that's how I know. Petrie told us.) Whedon also rewrote and refilmed, and directed himself the second half of Beneath Me. Petrie's script was so awful, Whedon rewrote it, and directed it, and brought everyone back to film it over the weekend. And you can tell the difference. The dialogue in the first half of Beneath Me is cringe inducing in places.
Petrie wrote As You Were and Get it Done, and they have the same problems. He doesn't know how to write for Spike, Willow, Anya, or Dawn. Buffy is okay for the most part. Also he sucks at plotting, there are plot holes in this episode that you can drive a truck through. You can tell they didn't plan it out.
The other difficulty with Get it Done is...the writers want to be color blind? But they are also heavily referencing African Culture and not in a good way.If you want to do color blind casting - don't heavily reference African Culture and misappropriate it? (What am I referring to? Principal Wood (the hot black principal from Beverly Hills) gives Buffy his mother, Nikki Wood (see Foxy Brown from the 1970s Black Exploitation Flicks - they deliberately referenced that with both her costume and hair style), box. Which has never been opened. It's a break open only in case of emergency sort of gig. We find out why. Apparently while doing it - Buffy must jump through the portal that magically opens, while something else (an ancient demon) leaps out in her place. Then the portal closes - with no instructions on how to open it again. She ends up in ...Africa in ancient times with African Shamans. Or she's in Australia. Or Ancient Sunnydale - which in this verse doubles for Africa. Hard to know. At any rate - they filmed it at Joshua Tree Park - that much is obvious.
I get what they are trying to do and the power metaphors are interesting on a certain level. And Buffy's refusal of the power at whatever cost - is interesting as well, and direct demonstration of how she is different from the First's take on her or Caleb. But, the execution is clumsy at best, and it doesn't totally make sense? The old guys or first Watcher's circle, with their sticks, drums, and chains - tell Buffy she's the last guardian of the hellmouth. (Except as far as I can tell - she's been the only guard of the hellmouth? Faith, Kendra, and other slayers have been called elsewhere. Nikki lived in NYC. The Chinese Slayer was in China. So...what slayer was the guardian prior?)
Buffy says the latest guardian - and I'm thinking, so was their a slayer who was prior - because not seeing it? Plot hole. Or world building hole. One or the other.
And why hasn't anyone else opened the box? Why didn't the council know about it? What the heck was Nikki's Watcher doing - and why didn't the council call him?
It reminds me of the damn demon eggs in As You Were. If you want to create a magical mcmuffin - at least find a way to make it real to the characters and not something that pops in out of the blue. The difficulty with the Robin Wood arc - is they didn't figure out who Robin Wood was until First Date. Which means - we didn't get the proper build-up for the bag, or anything else in Get it Done.
It doesn't make a lot of sense that Buffy trusts Wood as much as she does at this point? He's given her a lot of reasons not to? And I'm not sure what happens in First Date is enough to shake that. Also she's had horrible luck with authority figures?
And Wood's bag kind of pops in out of the blue. Because the writers invested so strongly in making me distrust Wood early on - I find it hard to like him now? And he clearly is abusing his power in regards to Buffy.
He's using her to get close to the action - for his own agenda. He doesn't really care about the hellmouth, stopping the first, or the potentials - he's in it for well "Mommy Issues". And it makes his relationship with Buffy kind of cringe inducing.
**
This is more about S7 as a whole, not just this episode - when Buffy moved over to UPN, UPN let the show-runners and producers know that they had to fulfill a diversity quota. Back in the early 00s, the NAACP won a lawsuit against the US broadcast networks - that basically required them to diversify their programming. They felt, and they weren't wrong, that network television was too white for its own good. UPN, a relatively new network, owned by Paramount (UPN = United Paramount Network), decided to make a nitch for itself with diversified and POC centric programming. (This is ironic if you know anything about what is happening with Paramount and CBS now - post Skydance Media.) So, they optioned the Jamie Fox hour - that appeared in reruns prior to Buffy. And advised Buffy's producers to add more POC characters - hence the additions of Wood, the POC slayers, Xander's POC demon girlfriend in First Date - I'm not certain that's what UPN had in mind? But they did inform the producers that future seasons or spin-offs should include Wood as a character. It's kind of hard to diversify Buffy all that much at this late date, without killing off a few characters? Honestly, they probably could have replaced Giles (Head was half-way gone anyhow) or Xander (Brendan was having issues) or given Willow a Black girlfriend. I mean we did have POC characters over the years, but the central cast remained alarmingly white, and often it was just the villains minions who were black.
At any rate one of the reasons S7 is so controversial - is it handled racially diverse casting with mixed results. It tried to be color blind when it came to Wood and the potentials, yet it often wasn't and often made, well off-color jokes. There's sections in this season that don't entirely date well - even though this season is by far the most diverse due to UPN's dictates.
Get It Done - unfortunately didn't have a strong enough writer to handle the world building, the cultural stuff, and the large cast. That said, there's a few isolated moments in there that work however. Spike's fight with the demon does. I spent some time trying to figure out why soulful Spike would have issues fighting demons or taking a demon life? I decided finally that he was afraid of using his power to take any life - because, unlike Angel, Spike fell in love with the violence, the power to fight and to kill things. He didn't really care if it was good or evil - he just liked killing things, fighting, and having a bit of violence. So with a soul - he associated Violence or Killing Anything with Evil. When he was a man - he was against violence and pulled back from it, he was restrained, and controlled - he was a Victorian - they tended to control their emotions, and violence was beneath his class, beneath him, he was a poet, and for loftier pursuits. So there's that as well. William - the soul - is critical of the violence. The power comes from the demon, the vampire - to do it. It's why he holds back.
I also wondered why he needed to get the coat to be able to do it? And realized finally that it's clarified in Sleeper or the song, Pavlov's Bell - "trading coats and ringing Pavlov's Bell is how I nearly fell" - that's what Spike has been doing all along. He changes his clothes to meet the expectations of whomever he is with. Buffy wants a nice guy who fights demons, but is more man than monster - he's going to dress like Riley. And he does. I think he actually managed to snag some clothing like Riley's. There's a lot of khaki, loose shirts, and army jackets. No eyeliner. No black nails. Buffy wants a bad boy fighter? He gets the leather duster he pulled off of Nikki Wood - his slayer killer jacket. The vampire she was afraid of - that she first met - was the slayer killer. In this jacket he moves like a panther. Emotes danger. The coat itself is meaningless - it's a costume. The writer's got the idea from a noir comic book by Frank Miller that I forget the name of. Petrie read it and pitched it to Whedon, and they put it in Fool for Love as the origin story. The story is about a hit man who fights his way through an organization, killing various people, and taking their coats. It was turned into a film at some point in the early 00s. (Basically a male romance novel with an insane amount of violence.)
Angel the Series - actually comments on the coat from another perspective - Angel's - which is - that's just a coat. You can replace it. And when it is replaced - Spike is actually happy with the replacement.
This where it gets clumsy as a metaphor? I think they wanted it to be Spike needs the coat - to take the power from the slain slayer metaphorically speaking. But this doesn't quite work? He had power prior to that. And he fights without it at various points in the series. Also he's lost with it on. Also, the coat symbolizes he's bad, slayer killing self - it's his costume. He even refers to it as a costume. He plays roles per the costume. Sometimes they work, sometimes not (see the blue shirt in Beneath Me).
So I could figure that out. And the parallel with Willow certainly works. She takes power from Dawn and Kennedy. Two people she cares about. She is saved by Xander, who pulls her out of the circle. And much like Spike she embraces the darkness inside to help Buffy. That's the other reason he gets the coat - the whole episode is about taking power from something else. Not sharing it. Or having power possess you with a price. Buffy. Willow. And Spike. Buffy - refuses the power. Willow takes the power to save Buffy. Spike grabs the Slayer's coat - to get the power and confidence to kill the demon to save Buffy. So while Buffy turns it down, they embrace it in a way. Interesting corollary, although I'm on the fence on whether it really works with Spike or is a bit forced.
Overall - an interesting but deeply flawed episode. S7 like all the seasons has some clunky episodes in the middle. This is one of them.
Make of that what you will...just my own mutterings for my own amusement.
Off to bed.
Me: Are the Carribbean Chocolate Chip cookies still gluten free?
Printemps: No, we decided to change things up a bit.
Me: That's not what I'd call it.
That's okay, Insomiac's are better, bigger, warmer and cheaper, not to mention closer to my workplace.
Also accomplished a few tasks at work, wasn't bored, talked to Jay, and helped folks. And the commute went smoothly, no delays, got seats on the trains - got home and to work within thirty-five minutes.
And I made it through all my knee exercises.
***
I finished the Angelica Huston Memoir - "Watch Me" - which isn't that memorable, outside of a bittersweet ending, wherein she makes the point that of everything she's done, it's her connections with family, friends, and others that meant the most. Also how people seem to move in and out of your life, and are temporary. She has a lyrical writing style. And is a good narrator. I'm not sure I'd recommend it though? I got something out of it, but not sure others would. (Note her commentary on famous folks is limited at best, and anecdotal. She doesn't gossip at all. Nor condemn. Even the people she doesn't like - she barely mentions. Ryan O'Neal got probably the longest diatribe - he'd abused her.) It's also a memoir - so like most memoir's? Take it with a hefty grain of salt.
Currently listening to Twelve Months by Jim Butcher - narrated by James Marsters. Not Marsters best voice work but still rather good.
And still reading The Botanist's Assistant by Peggy Townsend- which is basically a mystery with an autistic sleuth, whose six foot tall, and middle-aged. It's okay - I got it as a Xmas present. But it's slow moving.
[Note to self- stop picking up books rec'd by Smart Bitches. This one was - looked great and I asked for it for Xmas.]
***
Buffy S7 Rewatch - Get it Done, Ep. 15
Doug Petrie, God Bless Him, is not a good script writer. His dialogue, ugh. Cringe. Yes, I know he was credited for writing both Beneath Me and Fool for Love, but I also know both those episodes were heavily edited and rewritten by the show-runners and executive producers (Marti Noxon and Joss Whedon). Whedon and Noxon wrote all of the Spike and Buffy scenes in Fool for Love, taking turns. While Petrie wrote the Riley scenes. (He states this in the commentary for the episode, that's how I know. Petrie told us.) Whedon also rewrote and refilmed, and directed himself the second half of Beneath Me. Petrie's script was so awful, Whedon rewrote it, and directed it, and brought everyone back to film it over the weekend. And you can tell the difference. The dialogue in the first half of Beneath Me is cringe inducing in places.
Petrie wrote As You Were and Get it Done, and they have the same problems. He doesn't know how to write for Spike, Willow, Anya, or Dawn. Buffy is okay for the most part. Also he sucks at plotting, there are plot holes in this episode that you can drive a truck through. You can tell they didn't plan it out.
The other difficulty with Get it Done is...the writers want to be color blind? But they are also heavily referencing African Culture and not in a good way.If you want to do color blind casting - don't heavily reference African Culture and misappropriate it? (What am I referring to? Principal Wood (the hot black principal from Beverly Hills) gives Buffy his mother, Nikki Wood (see Foxy Brown from the 1970s Black Exploitation Flicks - they deliberately referenced that with both her costume and hair style), box. Which has never been opened. It's a break open only in case of emergency sort of gig. We find out why. Apparently while doing it - Buffy must jump through the portal that magically opens, while something else (an ancient demon) leaps out in her place. Then the portal closes - with no instructions on how to open it again. She ends up in ...Africa in ancient times with African Shamans. Or she's in Australia. Or Ancient Sunnydale - which in this verse doubles for Africa. Hard to know. At any rate - they filmed it at Joshua Tree Park - that much is obvious.
I get what they are trying to do and the power metaphors are interesting on a certain level. And Buffy's refusal of the power at whatever cost - is interesting as well, and direct demonstration of how she is different from the First's take on her or Caleb. But, the execution is clumsy at best, and it doesn't totally make sense? The old guys or first Watcher's circle, with their sticks, drums, and chains - tell Buffy she's the last guardian of the hellmouth. (Except as far as I can tell - she's been the only guard of the hellmouth? Faith, Kendra, and other slayers have been called elsewhere. Nikki lived in NYC. The Chinese Slayer was in China. So...what slayer was the guardian prior?)
Buffy says the latest guardian - and I'm thinking, so was their a slayer who was prior - because not seeing it? Plot hole. Or world building hole. One or the other.
And why hasn't anyone else opened the box? Why didn't the council know about it? What the heck was Nikki's Watcher doing - and why didn't the council call him?
It reminds me of the damn demon eggs in As You Were. If you want to create a magical mcmuffin - at least find a way to make it real to the characters and not something that pops in out of the blue. The difficulty with the Robin Wood arc - is they didn't figure out who Robin Wood was until First Date. Which means - we didn't get the proper build-up for the bag, or anything else in Get it Done.
It doesn't make a lot of sense that Buffy trusts Wood as much as she does at this point? He's given her a lot of reasons not to? And I'm not sure what happens in First Date is enough to shake that. Also she's had horrible luck with authority figures?
And Wood's bag kind of pops in out of the blue. Because the writers invested so strongly in making me distrust Wood early on - I find it hard to like him now? And he clearly is abusing his power in regards to Buffy.
He's using her to get close to the action - for his own agenda. He doesn't really care about the hellmouth, stopping the first, or the potentials - he's in it for well "Mommy Issues". And it makes his relationship with Buffy kind of cringe inducing.
**
This is more about S7 as a whole, not just this episode - when Buffy moved over to UPN, UPN let the show-runners and producers know that they had to fulfill a diversity quota. Back in the early 00s, the NAACP won a lawsuit against the US broadcast networks - that basically required them to diversify their programming. They felt, and they weren't wrong, that network television was too white for its own good. UPN, a relatively new network, owned by Paramount (UPN = United Paramount Network), decided to make a nitch for itself with diversified and POC centric programming. (This is ironic if you know anything about what is happening with Paramount and CBS now - post Skydance Media.) So, they optioned the Jamie Fox hour - that appeared in reruns prior to Buffy. And advised Buffy's producers to add more POC characters - hence the additions of Wood, the POC slayers, Xander's POC demon girlfriend in First Date - I'm not certain that's what UPN had in mind? But they did inform the producers that future seasons or spin-offs should include Wood as a character. It's kind of hard to diversify Buffy all that much at this late date, without killing off a few characters? Honestly, they probably could have replaced Giles (Head was half-way gone anyhow) or Xander (Brendan was having issues) or given Willow a Black girlfriend. I mean we did have POC characters over the years, but the central cast remained alarmingly white, and often it was just the villains minions who were black.
At any rate one of the reasons S7 is so controversial - is it handled racially diverse casting with mixed results. It tried to be color blind when it came to Wood and the potentials, yet it often wasn't and often made, well off-color jokes. There's sections in this season that don't entirely date well - even though this season is by far the most diverse due to UPN's dictates.
Get It Done - unfortunately didn't have a strong enough writer to handle the world building, the cultural stuff, and the large cast. That said, there's a few isolated moments in there that work however. Spike's fight with the demon does. I spent some time trying to figure out why soulful Spike would have issues fighting demons or taking a demon life? I decided finally that he was afraid of using his power to take any life - because, unlike Angel, Spike fell in love with the violence, the power to fight and to kill things. He didn't really care if it was good or evil - he just liked killing things, fighting, and having a bit of violence. So with a soul - he associated Violence or Killing Anything with Evil. When he was a man - he was against violence and pulled back from it, he was restrained, and controlled - he was a Victorian - they tended to control their emotions, and violence was beneath his class, beneath him, he was a poet, and for loftier pursuits. So there's that as well. William - the soul - is critical of the violence. The power comes from the demon, the vampire - to do it. It's why he holds back.
I also wondered why he needed to get the coat to be able to do it? And realized finally that it's clarified in Sleeper or the song, Pavlov's Bell - "trading coats and ringing Pavlov's Bell is how I nearly fell" - that's what Spike has been doing all along. He changes his clothes to meet the expectations of whomever he is with. Buffy wants a nice guy who fights demons, but is more man than monster - he's going to dress like Riley. And he does. I think he actually managed to snag some clothing like Riley's. There's a lot of khaki, loose shirts, and army jackets. No eyeliner. No black nails. Buffy wants a bad boy fighter? He gets the leather duster he pulled off of Nikki Wood - his slayer killer jacket. The vampire she was afraid of - that she first met - was the slayer killer. In this jacket he moves like a panther. Emotes danger. The coat itself is meaningless - it's a costume. The writer's got the idea from a noir comic book by Frank Miller that I forget the name of. Petrie read it and pitched it to Whedon, and they put it in Fool for Love as the origin story. The story is about a hit man who fights his way through an organization, killing various people, and taking their coats. It was turned into a film at some point in the early 00s. (Basically a male romance novel with an insane amount of violence.)
Angel the Series - actually comments on the coat from another perspective - Angel's - which is - that's just a coat. You can replace it. And when it is replaced - Spike is actually happy with the replacement.
This where it gets clumsy as a metaphor? I think they wanted it to be Spike needs the coat - to take the power from the slain slayer metaphorically speaking. But this doesn't quite work? He had power prior to that. And he fights without it at various points in the series. Also he's lost with it on. Also, the coat symbolizes he's bad, slayer killing self - it's his costume. He even refers to it as a costume. He plays roles per the costume. Sometimes they work, sometimes not (see the blue shirt in Beneath Me).
So I could figure that out. And the parallel with Willow certainly works. She takes power from Dawn and Kennedy. Two people she cares about. She is saved by Xander, who pulls her out of the circle. And much like Spike she embraces the darkness inside to help Buffy. That's the other reason he gets the coat - the whole episode is about taking power from something else. Not sharing it. Or having power possess you with a price. Buffy. Willow. And Spike. Buffy - refuses the power. Willow takes the power to save Buffy. Spike grabs the Slayer's coat - to get the power and confidence to kill the demon to save Buffy. So while Buffy turns it down, they embrace it in a way. Interesting corollary, although I'm on the fence on whether it really works with Spike or is a bit forced.
Overall - an interesting but deeply flawed episode. S7 like all the seasons has some clunky episodes in the middle. This is one of them.
Make of that what you will...just my own mutterings for my own amusement.
Off to bed.