Tuesday, December 12, 2023

Willow the Almighty

I finished watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer season six last night, with the finale episode "Grave". Now Willow, driven initially by vengeance and fury, essentially becomes another of Joss Whedon's godlike characters (though the episode was written by David Fury). It's a decent episode though, in a season filled with several strong episodes, it's not among the best.

Willow gains the ability to sense the pain of everyone in the world and decides to end it by killing them all. Next, on Angel, we'll get Gina Torres as a godlike entity who wants to take away humanity's free will, a motivation Whedon will transfer to Loki in The Avengers and which was Loki's motivation once again in the recently concluded second season of his Disney+ series. Maybe this is the inevitable outcome of a series of stories that began as a supernatural teen dramedy. The recurring problem the characters face could be boiled down to, "How do you deal with a world filled with unpredictable pain?"

Buffy herself is kind of benched throughout the episode, stuck in a sinkhole with Dawn at the graveyard. And, of course, Giles returns after leaving earlier in the season.

No more tweeds for him. I feel like Anthony Head really disliked Giles' initial look.

This was an interesting story for Willow and, overall, I'd say the show is better by this point than it was in the earlier seasons, but for some reason I feel like there was something more fundamentally attractive about her in season three. I'm not sure what happened, maybe Alyson Hannigan and Whedon became too conscious of how charming she was?

Buffy the Vampie Slayer is available on Disney+.

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