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Comment on The View from the Street – A Dollhouse Essay by Smart Pop Books — The Dollhouse contest entries you can read now

Smart Pop Books — The Dollhouse contest entries you can read now — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 19:11:50 +0000

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Comment on Becoming/Innocence is not the most significant Buffy moment. by William B

William B — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 04:24:27 +0000

Nice to meet you too

3 and 7 also has the nice effect that having season 4 as a transitional season breaks the rest of the 7 into two sets of 3 as well. Season 5 of Angel has some rough parallels with season 5 of Buffy (prominent role for Spike, memory erasure paralleling creation of Dawn, some similarities in the finales) suggesting 5-7, in a world where it wasn’t cancelled, would have been the complete plan for that too. Oh well.

At some point I’ll comment on your Dollhouse essay, but have lots of work to do tonight.

Comment on Becoming/Innocence is not the most significant Buffy moment. by rocknjosie

rocknjosie — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 16:50:27 +0000

I had not realized it was the midpoint, but I love that it fits nicely into my thesis.
I think many show runners think of terms of seven season arcs, just cause Westerners like the numbers 3 and 7. They work well. So the notion that Joss saw season 4 as the midway point, the time to mix everything up at the expense of narrative makes a lot of sense to me.

I have more to say but must off to class. Hi! Lovely to meet you and thanks for commenting : )

Comment on Becoming/Innocence is not the most significant Buffy moment. by William B

William B — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 08:58:05 +0000

Do you realize that “Who Are You” is the 72nd episode out of 144? The end of the first half.

The episode immediately following WAY is “Superstar,” where Buffy’s position is again usurped, this time more benignly, by Jonathan, and Riley takes the leap of faith that Buffy is who she thinks she is, healing the wounds from inability to recognize the difference between Buffy and Faith the week before. Is it Faith’s acceptance of Buffy’s calling that allows Buffy the symbolic strength to recognize it herself? Would Buffy have been able to recognize that she should be the slayer earlier in the series?

Season four…I have no words. Joss makes “Hush,” “Who Are You,” and “Restless,” none of which are tied to the series’ dead-obvious emotional arcs, all of which are highly experimental, but all of them are so fundamental to the series.

And Tara–this episode sets up Tara as understanding Buffy when no one else does, a role she is put into again in “Restless” (dream), “The Body,” “Dead Things”. And she’s Willow’s anchor literally here, holding her to the ground, so that when she dies Willow goes free, no morals, no ethics, no belief in the world being good and controllable holding her down. Until she finds Giles, her other mentor and steals everything she ever wanted from him–all that magic, all the power that’s locked in his head–and gets forcibly reconnected to the Earth, can’t ignore what she can’t control, including the part of her that drew with a yellow crayon (Tara = blonde, yellow?) and cried when it couldn’t be fixed.

(Found you through Whedonesque, you linked to the Dollhouse essay there, I browsed your profile. Hi )