On season 4 of Buffy...should I be watching Angel?

[JirinPanthosa]

That was a nice send off for Cordy, though sad. Now, was she really there as a spirit or was that a temporary adjustment of realty only Angel remembers?

A little disappointed Lindsay didn't seem to have higher motives than hurting Angel.

 

[Ethros]

With the Lindsey stuff, like Season 4- I liked it, but it doesn't actually make any sense.

So he sent the amulet to Wolfram & Hart, how did he get it, did he go to the ruins of Sunnydale and just dig it up? And also did he plant it in W&H to begin with for Lilah to give to Angel in the Season 4 finale? If so you could say Lindsay McDonald actually saved the world in the last episode of Buffy? Or was it was always W&H who gave it to Angel and then Lindsey got the idea then...

So many unanswered questions I thought. And like Jasmine's whole "plan" it's beyond the realms of ridiculous and believability when you scrutinize it.


Like I said, still love the episodes, but just saying..

 

[JD]

How do vampires cross continents anyway? Air travel might be a problem. Besides lack of id, finding a period of time where travel happens in entirely night hours.

A sealed coffin in the cargo bay could work. Probably cheaper than a ticket, too.

And of course there's always sea travel. That's how Dracula got to England.

I'm pretty sure they did the coffin in the cargo hold in The Vampire Diaries/The Originals, and True Blood, but I can't remember if we ever saw it in the Buffyverse.

 

[RoJoHen]

That was a nice send off for Cordy, though sad. Now, was she really there as a spirit or was that a temporary adjustment of realty only Angel remembers?

After her treatment in Season 4, "You're Welcome" made me feel so much better about Cordelia. She deserved a proper send off, instead of just spending her last few episodes unconscious.

Fun Fact: Cordelia wasn't originally supposed to come back in that episode. That was Angel's 100th episode, and her role was going to be played by Buffy.

And yes, she was really there.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

With the Lindsey stuff, like Season 4- I liked it, but it doesn't actually make any sense.

So he sent the amulet to Wolfram & Hart, how did he get it, did he go to the ruins of Sunnydale and just dig it up? And also did he plant it in W&H to begin with for Lilah to give to Angel in the Season 4 finale? If so you could say Lindsay McDonald actually saved the world in the last episode of Buffy? Or was it was always W&H who gave it to Angel and then Lindsey got the idea then...

So many unanswered questions I thought. And like Jasmine's whole "plan" it's beyond the realms of ridiculous and believability when you scrutinize it.


Like I said, still love the episodes, but just saying..

I think Lindsay didn't think he could prevent the prophecy so he tried to redirect the prophecy to somebody else.

It was kind of looking like Lindsay felt betrayed that Angel ignored his advice to 'Don't play their game, make them play yours' and that's why he wanted to make the prophecy about Spike. But that never really came up in the episode.

 

[theenglish]

That was a nice send off for Cordy, though sad. Now, was she really there as a spirit or was that a temporary adjustment of realty only Angel remembers?

After her treatment in Season 4, "You're Welcome" made me feel so much better about Cordelia. She deserved a proper send off, instead of just spending her last few episodes unconscious.

Fun Fact: Cordelia wasn't originally supposed to come back in that episode. That was Angel's 100th episode, and her role was going to be played by Buffy.

And yes, she was really there.

I loved this episode as well. The real world interfered with the fictional story in this case. I loved how Cordelia progressed to become Angel's true soul mate and this episode provided much needed closure to that. It also does a nice job of resolving who, if any vampire with a soul, is deserving of Buffy--but there are complications there too.

 

[Evil Robert]

^ Well at first Sunnydale was just described as a "one-Starbucks town" then they just kept adding things and adding things (a university and an airport as the main offenders.)

They did the same thing in Smallville. It just kept becoming a bigger and bigger city, and even acquired its own university, which was separate from the U. of Metropolis, even though by this point it had been established that Smallville was just a couple of hours' drive from Metropolis at most (and by the end of the series it seemed to have migrated into being a suburb of Metropolis).

At least Sleepy Hollow had the sense to make its fictionalized version of Sleepy Hollow/Tarrytown much larger than the real one from the start, so that it'd have enough people and institutions to drive any needed stories.

In my head, I always took Sunnydale as a kinda of alternate universe stand-in for Santa Barbara, so with the university thing I didn't feel too obnoxiously out of place for me (since there is a UCSB). I wonder how many Starbucks Santa Barbara has though

But otherwise I agree, Sunnydale was expanded a lot from Cordelia's comment in the first episode of the bad part of town being only half a block from the good part

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

Didn't it have like 50 cemeteries?

Even taking into account Sunnydale's mortality rate, it can't be that small.

 

[Evil Robert]

Funnily enough I tried to watch 'Storyteller' on a streaming service last night and I turned it off after 10 minutes. Not because I dislike it (It actually was always one of my favourite Season 7 episodes), but mainly I realized I cannot watch many episodes as individual episodes (only 'Once More With Feeling' springs to mind in ability to me watching individually).

To me, Buffy is a show that I need to watch straight through, or at least in big chunks.

Now I think I'll need to marathon it from the beginning again myself!

 

[JirinPanthosa]

I feel the same way about Parks & Recreation. It's so much more enjoyable in a sequence than watching individual episodes.

I'm sure I'll marathon Buffy again eventually. Just not for a year or two.

I never noticed that about Sunnydale but it's totally true. At the beginning there's only one nightclub in the entire city. But being a large town makes more sense. With all the deaths we see it wouldn't make sense for it to be a small town and people not to flee in terror.

Like, if Buffy's class is the lowest mortality rate in school history you'd think parents would be terrified to enroll their students there. As other people have said in the threat, Wheadon is great at character building, bad at world building.

Edit: The episode with the WW2 vampire was dumb.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

It's kind of sad, after 12 seasons of Buffy/Angel, knowing there exist only 8 episodes you haven't seen.

 

[RoJoHen]

To me, Buffy is a show that I need to watch straight through, or at least in big chunks.

I totally agree, which is why anytime I end up watching a random episode, I inevitably keep watching the show all the way through to the end.

I've had so many unintentional marathons.

Edit: The episode with the WW2 vampire was dumb.

Yes, HOWEVER, it's the last dumb episode. The show is nothing but awesome from here until the end.

 

[SAndrews10]

Just sitting around here waiting for the talk to begin on those final 8 episodes when it all hits the fan!!

 

[CorporalClegg]

I totally agree, which is why anytime I end up watching a random episode, I inevitably keep watching the show all the way through to the end.

I've had so many unintentional marathons.

I'm not quite as bad, but I certainly end up watching three or four in succession.

 

[gblews]

Not control. Enlightenment and penance.;

No, control, or at ;east what he thought was control.

As a vampire, he didn't understand what he had done wrong, or why she stopped acting like she loved him, stopped the sex or why she wouldn't forgive him,
Spike knew exactly what he attempted to do. That is the reason he left Sunnydale right after in order to change is life.

It took him a while to leave. Spike even tried to have another consensual sex date and wondered "what was wrong with her" when she told him to bugger off.
It took him weeks/episodes(?) to reason out with logic that what he did was wrong, rather than for a soul to tell him instantly. Logic is a shitty replacement for a soul.

(continued from the "Strong Female Character" thread in TV and Media)

As I recall, Spike left Sunnydale at the end of the same episode in which he attempted to sexually assault Buffy. He knew how badly he had screwed up and was desperate to change himself.

This is another example of why Spike was so much more deserving of Buffy's love than Angel was. As Spike pointed out, as others in this thread have pointed out, the only thing that stood between the world and the viciousness of Angelus was the soul which had been forced upon him. Whenever Angelus was brought forth, one of his main things was preventing Angel's soul from being re-inserted.

Because of his love for Buffy and Buffy's basic "goodness", Spike had begun to change even before the re-ensouling and despite the huge mistake he made in attacking Buffy. In fact that was when he knew he had hit rock bottom with regard to the conflict between his evil self and the part of him that loved the Slayer. So Spike goes off and fights to regain his soul. Classic example of a woman making a man want to be a better person.

And, on the topic at hand, Buffy may have lacked self control when it came to Spike, she lacked control of Spike himself, but she was firmly in control of the relationship. It went only as far as she allowed it, and ended finally, when she wanted it ended. Buffy being a strong female character wasn't compromised at all by Spike attacking her.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

It was pretty clear before Spike got his soul that if it weren't for the chip he'd have gone right back to murdering. When he realized he could hit Buffy, he immediately went out and tried to murder someone.

With or without the soul, Spike was a romantic who fixated on strong women. The chip gave him an opportunity to get close enough to Buffy to turn that fixation into something more concrete. He wanted to have a soul because Buffy kept bringing it up as the reason their love could never be real.

Having vulnerable moments does not make Buffy less of a strong character. It makes her more of a three dimensional one.

As for who 'Deserves' her love, nobody does. Spike may be more noble a vampire but he's an emotional parasite. She can meet his emotional needs but he can't meet hers. Maybe after more emotional maturation, with a soul, he can grow to somebody who can make Buffy happy.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Fred! Nooooo!

Am I a bad person for thinking she's hot in her evil God makeup?

 

[DonIago]

^Yes. Yes you are. You're a bad person and you should feel bad.

That was all pretty gut-wrenching.

 

[.:: TSN ::.]

Fred! Nooooo!

Am I a bad person for thinking she's hot in her evil God makeup?

Definately not a bad person.. Illyria

 

[JirinPanthosa]

It's interesting how they went out of their way to say her soul was destroyed. That's a worse fate than any other character has faced as she doesn't even get a nice afterlife. I don't know why they threw that in, unless they thought it was the only way the heroes would ever start giving up. Or, they're planning on some surprise opportunity later. The only other explanation is that they wanted the shock value.