Slashdot Mirror
Faith Returns to Buffy
duffbeer writes "According to an
article at Yahoo!, Eliza Dushku will be in the upcoming Buffy season
7! Five episodes are scheduled, along with three over on Angel. Now starting the oft-mentioned space-cowboy-thriller Firefly on Fox, I wonder if Joss have enough juice left
over to invent plots for Faith
as entertaining as those in the past?" Since the Slayer line has to continue through Faith, and since Gellar wants to leave the show after season 7, there is much interesting plot potential with Faith's return.
Find a show on TV today showing a better role model for the 'nerds' of the generation, even without getting into the whole gay/bisexual nerds can be important also subplot.
Take the quiet kid at school, bit of an outsider, not liked by anyone except an old male friend. In her spare time, she browses the town's computers systems, and has 'Accidentally' broken into pretty much every computer in the town [1]
Then a superhero turns up, saves her life and gives her some direction and a new sense of priorities. She begins spreading further and wider, meets up with another nerd crossing old tech and new tech, picks up on that and forges a valuable weapon in the defense of the world (althout she did accidentally releases a self-multiplying daemon onto the internet, a bit like Robert Morris, Jr did [2]). She even ends up teaching some classes in Highschool to people her own age[3].
She gets offered a job at the worlds largest software manufacturer [4], and pretty much every university in the world [5] but turns it down to fight evil instead. When the highschool is threatened, the athletic and the popular kids turn to her as one of the few people who can help [6].
Arriving in College, still the outsider, she still wanders around before finally discovering that there are other people like her, and when they get together there is practically nothing they cannot do [7] including giving her the power to attack a God [8], take over as the leader of the team that defends Earth from Hell for six months [9], and when her lover is killed she decides to destroy the entire world to save everyone from the pain of living[10]
If that's not a path to base your entire life on, I don't know what is. Also, she's the only person to ever have a iMac laptop upgraded with the telepathic optional kit, making it actually useful.
Personally, I hope that SMG does quit so they can have the Scooby Gang series : Willow, Xander, Giles and Dawn. Other people won't agree with me, but there's more stories to work with if they have to remake the Slayer out of her clone with Faith's Assistance, then by continuing with Buffy
(In case you were keeping count:
[1] Welcome to the Hellmouth
[2] I Robot, You Jane
[3] Passion
[4] What's My Line
[5] Choices
[6] Graduation Day
[7] Hush
[8] Tough Love
[9] Barganing
[10] Grave)
When I originally heard about buffy, I decided to pass on it. Although I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, I considered it 'bubble-gum'. I figured that, as a TV series, it would be pretty vacuous. When I finally got around to watching it, I found that it was hilarious. It is now one of only two TV series that I watch regularly (the other being Enterprise*).
In any case, I wrote up a defence of Buffy some time ago (which was printed in a local SF mag).
I also have Slashdot Journal entry about how Buffy's biggest problem in running for Emmys is that they're going for the drama prizes when they should competing in the comedy category.
*(for those of you just waiting for me to comit blasphemy, I've come to like the theme to Enterprise, and have gone to the trouble of transcribing and memorizing it... If you pay attention, it's basically a musical version of the 'where no-one has gone before' monologue.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Bite your friggin' tongue. The thing I like most about Buffy is that there IS continuity. They make one-line references to things that happened 3 seasons ago, and foreshadow things that will happen 4 episodes from now. That's what makes the show intelligent, plot arcs.
:)
I feel like I'm having the debate about which is better, Star Trek: TNG, or Deep Space Nine. For stand-alone episodes, TNG wins hands-down, "The Inner Light" and "Best of Both Worlds" clinch it alone. But, for plot lines, intrigue, and suspense sustained over an entire season, Deep Space Nine wins easily. I'm not going to claim that either series was better than the other, though I'll give ST:TNG credit for fueling a renewed interest in Star Trek in a younger generation.
It's all about what kind of TV you want to watch, if you like being able to watch TV episodes in any order, and having the characters live inside a bubble in which they never reference anything that happened in the past, that's fine, it's your choice. But for people who are really fans of a show, it's a much more rewarding viewing experience to know that each episode is only one part of a larger picture.
I also appreciate that (apart from Vampires, Demons, etc.) Buffy is one of the most realistic shows on TV when it comes to human intereactions. I'm not some hard core Buffy disciple either, I just started watching it this summer when a co-worker convinced me to sic my TiVo on it when FX started showing it from the beginning. For what I mean by realism, watch the episode where Buffy goes to college, and the little things that she and her roomie do to get back at each other.
And, Buffy scores one more point with me for making frequent references to movies and pop culture, especially when Xander does it. Roger Ebert wrote, in his review of Jay & Silent Bob, that it always feels so strange when you watch a movie or TV show in which the characters have apparently never seen a movie or TV show, and they never reference it. Next time you're out with your friends, see how many pop culture references you make to movies or TV shows, then notice how few movies or shows will ever include a reference to another show, it just feels weird. A good example of this was when Buffy and some college guys were turned into cave-people by some tainted beer, Xander said they were out "Questing for Fire", which got a good snicker out of me.
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
My lord, some of us don't want to know anything about the upcoming season. It's getting to where you can't read Slashdot anymore....
The death-trigger only works once. Buffy has already died at the end of the 1st season (thereby summoning Kendra), so nothing happened when she died again.
It's like how a Java object gets garbage collected; you can resurrect it in its finalize() method, but when it's garbage collected again later finalize() won't be called a second time.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Some of us were trying to avoid finding anything out about Buffy's upcoming season. Thanks a whole fucking lot for posting a spoiler right on the front page. God damn, you guys are fucking irresponsible some times. If it hadn't been for the Lone Gunmen thing, I might be willing to forgive it as a mistake, but you idiots should know better. Jesus fucking Christ.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased