Re: [anti_buffyspike] Re: My review of "Help" (BtVS, ep 7.04)

[danspector@xxxxxxxxx]

Adia wrote:

>I heard the girl who played Cassie was pretty good. Didn't you like
her?

I don't know. I normally love Azura Skye; I certainly dug her on "Zoe,
Duncan, Jack & Jane" and in "28 Days". But here I think she made a bad
acting choice--Cassie never seemed that wigged by her impending death,
which made it impossible for **me** to be.

I grant you that a lot of the problem was in the writing. Far too
often, getting information out of Cassie is like pulling teeth--it
takes three scenes and a vehement plea from Buffy before Cassie
volunteers the basic details (she's going to die on Friday, she's
psychic, and she doesn't know how it happens). That's not involving,
that's annoying. (It's also Rebecca Rand Kirshner stalling, in lieu of
a plot. But, OTOH, she got to have not ONE, but TWO of her adolescent
poems read on network television, **in their entirety**, and really,
isn't that what writing for television is all about?? [[rolls eyes]])

Plus, how does she know that what she's seeing is her death? If she
feels pain and sees blackness, couldn't she simply be being knocked
unconscious?

By the time we got to the LOOOONG speech she gives about all the thing
she wants to do but never will, I was SO bored with Cassie. (Plus, as
mentioned in the review, they put the speech out there BEFORE Cassie
tells Buffy everything, so I was too annoyed at her to feel for
her--"if you want to live so much, honey, then why don't you TELL Buffy
what's going to happen??"--and then when we found out that Cassie
didn't know anything more, it was an awful anti-climax.)

**That** speech is supposed to make me think of the "I quit" scene in
"Prophecy Girl" (arguably the greatest scene in the history of the
show)??? Puh-lease! Aside from the vastly superior quality of the
acting and the writing in "Prophecy Girl", I can think of three things
that immediately make it better.

1) "PG" isn't a speech, it's a scene. We get to see interaction, Buffy
isn't emoting in a vacuum. Long speeches are, by and large, kind of
dull.

2) We've gotten to know Buffy over the course of 12 episodes and she's
the star of the show. Cassie is a one-ep guest star whose had five
minutes of screen time previously. And **she's** delivering a
minute-long speech? Shut.Up.Please.

3) Buffy had simple, direct emotion ("Giles, I'm sixteen. I don't want
to die.") Cassie drones on and on about her laundry list of wishes.
She wants to ice skate at Rockefeller Center?? I really don't give a
fuck. That's not an emotional moment, it's a list of trivia answers.


With all that said, though, I still thought Azura played the part wrong.
Tortured, I might have felt for Cassie, and understood why she couldn't
tell Buffy the things she wanted to know. But with the sort of blithe
acceptance Azura projected, I did not care at all.

And word to all those who pointed out how annoying it was to see Dawn
all weepy over some one-shot character she's known for less than a week,
when we never got to see the gang grieve for Tara, who was allegedly
"Family". Indeed, even though we got a whole five seconds of Willow at
Tara's grave this ep, we're four episodes in and **no one** has even
***said her name***.

God, I actively disliked Tara, and even I think that's just shabby.

So, no, no Cassie-love from me.

Dan