Concluding my run of Buffy reviews, it’s finally time to get around to season seven. Denisa and I finished this a few weeks ago, actually, but my comments on it had to go on the back burner as I had other things (book deals, agents, etc.) to blog about. We’re in a lull in that news right now, so I can return to Ms. Summers and the series finale. What did I think?
Season six was better.
But that’s okay. This wasn’t a bad season by any means. There were things I liked quite a bit–Spike’s character arc, Buffy’s progression. It was still fun stuff and interesting to see it all play out, but my biggest complaint is that it got a tad too soap opera-ish for me. (Some spoilers ahead)
There’s only so long that a show like this can run before it starts reusing plot lines one time too many. All the Slayers showing up? Got kind of annoying. Mutiny against Buffy? Lameville. There were episodes where it felt like they were spinning their wheels again, drawing out the series to fill their quota of episodes, and that’s never a good thing. Even worse, there were times when the characters seemed forced into actions that served the plot first, rather than their character. Xander and Willow turning on Buffy, for example. It makes 0 sense that after all those three have been through, they let the Slayerettes come between them. That was stupid and irritating. It was also irritating to see how arbitrary some of the damage was. Xander getting his eye gouged out? If the Big Bad had time to sit there and gouge out an eyeball at leisure, he had time to kill the kid. Why didn’t he? It bugs me when one of the main reasons the bad guys don’t kill everyone when they have a chance is that “they’re just toying with them,” and that was used too often in the Buffyverse. She’d killed how many ginormous evil things, and yet more evil things continued to decide to toy with her?
Talk about stupid evil things.
In any case, we still enjoyed it, and I’m very pleased I finally stuck with the show long enough to get hooked. It turns out that a slew of my friends, tons of fans and scholars were right, after all. Buffy’s a good show.
Thanks for the recommendation, all. 🙂 And a very special thanks to Raisinfish, who gave me the final shove necessary to start watching. It was appreciated.
I couldn’t agree with you more. Buffy is one of my favorite shows of all time however season 7 just irritated the heck out of me. It irritates me still. The only thing that helped me through were the sequences with Spike and Buffy plus the end of course. The season should not be missed it just simply isn’t the best.
Yeah–it was worth it just to see closure to the series’ storyline. Really cool finish.