ivyfic | (no subject)

There's Murphy's Law; there's Godwin's Law; high time for a new law.

I propose Whedon's Law:
Any discussion of a genre TV show will inevitably invoke comparisons to Buffy.

Why? Because Buffy used and manipulated every genre convention there is. You name a standard plot line, Buffy did it. And what's more, the many creative minds behind Buffy always added something a little bit more, so that when you see that plot line again, you can't help but thinking of the Buffy episode and how much better done it was.

Case in point: the last episode of SGA, "The Real World." Now this was a perfectly serviceable episode. It followed the standard plot, had some creepy effects, gave Torri a chance to stretch a little bit and resolved just the way it should. The plotbabble could use a little work, but when doesn't it?

But watching it, I couldn't help but long for the season 6 episode of Buffy, "Normal Again." The set-ups the same: our heroine wakes up in a padded cell to a nice doctor telling her that the last however many years have been a hallucination, and she's just a normal girl in a normal world. But instead of going through the motions of trying to find a way back to the "real" world, as SGA did, this episode was about the emotional state of Buffy in the show at that time.

The SGA episode was just a puzzle: find the way out of the maze. The Buffy episode was a question: do you really want to find a way out of the maze?

At this point in Buffy, Buffy had lost her mother, been completely abandoned by her father, her mentor had declared he's leaving her as well; she's stuck with an abrasive and out-of-control sister that she has to parent, a best friend who's becoming addicted to drugs and a completely self-destructive relationship. She's in a dead end job that she hates and more than anything else is weary of the responsibility she shoulders, both as the slayer and as the emotional leader of her disintegrating social group. She wants to give up but knows she has no choice but to continue.

So, they use the standard mindfuck plot to give her a choice: believe in this world where she's miserable, or believe in a world where she has both her parents and no responsibility. All she has to do is choose to disbelieve the last six years. The plot underlines the fact that this character would rather believe that she is insane than continue with her life. Instead of making it about finding the key out of this place, since Buffy travels freely between the one reality and the other, it's about making Buffy accept that she cannot give up her responsibilities and must continue.

Since the whole season was about Buffy's inability to just take up her old position after having died and been relieved of her responsibility as a slayer, this episode made her accept that she could not go back to that state of rest.

That's why it was a good episode. Because the writer (Diego Gutierrez) did not just trot out the plot but used it to further the emotional arc of the show.

I love SGA -- in some ways I love it more because it is all surface -- but Buffy definitely did a better job.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

What I loved best about that episode of Buffy was the ambiguity. It's awfully convenient to imagine this is due to some drug in the Buffy-verse putting her into the asylum-verse, but there was no concrete proof that the asylum wasn't real. Buffy reacted to it as a standard heroine would, immediately rejecting it, then seeming to be fooled by it, but instead of coming around again and realizing it was fake (if it was), she decided just to choose a life, and she chose the one she knew, the one where she had, as you say, too many responsibilities to abandon it. Her saying goodbye to her parents is really sad at the end because there is that hint that she could have stayed there and it might have been a real happy ending. But, for her friends, and hell, for us, she went back to being the vampire slayer.

Sigh. I need to rewatch Buffy, I guess. It's been a while.

Sadly, all the thought-provoking episodes of Buffy were season 6, which was a season that broke my fucking heart every week. Not a show I just dip into, and one I honestly thought I'd never want to rewatch.

It's at the point where I should rewatch because I can only sorta remember all the seasons between like two and seven. I remember one, two, and seven fairly well, and the rest is blocked into "the college one," "the Glory season," and "evil Willow."

Damn it, other stuff happened!