Re: Re: "Seeing Red" (was re: Emmy nominations)

[danspector@xxxxxxxxx]

Yeah, the story mechanics on "SR" were mostly good. DeKnight's usually
okay with that stuff, except for "All The Way". Although as Jason Rune
pointed out, the A-plot is a couple of beats slow; when we break for
Act 2, Warren should already be causing havoc, not just walking into the
Bronze. I laid out a sketch where they intercut between Warren smacking
Xander around and Spike smacking Buffy around, and that's how we head
into the second half of the ep, and that seemed to work better.

Still, the way things have gone this year, having your ep be "a bit
slow" is almost a compliment. Compare "SR" to "Entropy", which preceded
it: halfway through that show, all we've got is "Anya's mad at Xander,
and thinks Spike might help her get revenge." Not only should you be
able to get **that** far by the end of Act 1, but if you work at it, you
could probably take care of it in the teaser...

But like I say, the ep mostly worked well, except for the two obvious
holes. And while my jaw hit the floor when Buffy's reaction to Spike
attempting to rape her was to HAVE A CHAT ABOUT THEIR RELATIONSHIP,
given that Marti was planning on following this up with "Buffy trusts,
defends, and misses her rapist", I don't know if we can really blame
DeKnight too much for that, no matter how weird it seemed.

But he certainly butchered Tara's death, though. Just shock value, no
sense of tragedy. And he knew that there wasn't going to be any time
spent on the death itself in the upcoming eps, so by making it so random
he reduced her to a prop and drained most of the impact out of the
event: Tara's death says nothing about her life, her choices, the arc
as a whole or life in general, it's merely "we need Willow to go nuts,
so..." And on top of this, the actual scene was full of holes, from the
angle of bullet to the question of why Warren was running away at all
when he should have been emptying his gun into Xander and Buffy's
lifeless bodies.

Too much trying to manipulate our emotions (all the W/T smooching) and
not enough done to give the event any impact. A big flub, but other
than that and the utter implausibility of the Spike plot, and the pacing
still not being entirely up to par (the post-rape Spike scenes were very
nearly filler, too; about 4 minutes spent to cover "I hate this! I'm
gonna make a change!"), it was still more competent than the majority of
the season. Reasonably enjoyable, IMO.

Dan