Re: OT: My Season 6 review

["tvs_wanderer" <tvs_wanderer@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- In buffywantswillow@y..., "debvii" <debvii@y...> wrote:


> The opening scene of Bargaining featured the Scoobs, the Buffybot, and 
> Spike out on patrol. That was no "poof, you're dust!" fight, and that 
> was AFTER several months of working together. Indeed, the difficulty 
> they had with slayage was what led, at least partially, to the chorus 
> of "We need Buffy". Now, in all honesty, I think their slaying 
> inefficiency was a mite implausible and too obviously driven by the 
> needs of the plot, but the fact remains that they weren't exceptionally 
> good at it, Willow's presence notwithstanding.

An excellent point, that, and if I'd seen "Bargaining," I might've 
thought of that myself. (I was sitting in a friend's dorm room that 
night, looking for the UPN carrier on campus, and realized around 7:05 
that there *was* no UPN carrier. I was... unthrilled.)

I suppose you could just chalk that up to the same maddening 
inconsistency factor. Yes, consistency is the hobgoblin of little 
minds, but this really isn't fanboy stuff here, where you'd have to 
remember something from S1 combined with something on the Bronze beta 
and an anecdote of Whedon's; this is the difference between Willow the 
bad-ass and Willow the strangely subdued. There's no particular reason 
for the whole group to be out there in the cemetery for two vamps, not 
when Willow could've gone out there with a pair of #2 pencils and 
gotten it done much, much faster, other than to establish a group 
sequence for the new season.

My original point still stands, though, in that any fight Buffy's had 
in S6 so far, Willow's presence would've been either a quick end to the 
fight (if she's used correctly), or a needless distraction (if she's 
not). She has to be powered down. I'd even be happy if she got powered 
down to Buffyverse S1/2 levels, where magic seemed to mostly be a 
little bit of telekinesis and a lot of high ritual, unless you were 
distinctly A Very Bad Person.

Thomas Wilde
a.k.a. Wanderer