The pressure got let off and the smoke and mirrors fell away. There's good elements in most of 'em ("Potential"'s Dawn-as-wannabe and Xander's speech; "TKIM"'s use of Amy, whose power-up from before is a "was that a First thing?" question that draws "STSP" back into question; "GID" has the return of badass!Spike and Willow using and confronting the problems with using magick; "Storyteller" was funny) but we lost the paranoid dreamlike quality that made 7.2 work, as well as specifically invalidating so much of 7.2. Six straight non-BigBad episodes made the threat go away, and when Buffy becomes more difficult because of the "increasing" threat when we see a decreasing threat, the audience goes WTF.
"Chosen" doesn't do it for me because between the lingering strength of 7.2 and the lameness of much of the later stuff (for example, you can't convince me that "The Guardian" wasn't the First in disguise, offering Buffy more perspective-altering bulldada), I can't help but believe that opening the Hellmouth and using the Scythe to expand the Slayerdom is the First's plan all along. The First gets it's way, Anya dies and a good chunk of California real estate falls into a hole and we're supposed to consider this a win?
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branchandroot
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Date: 2005-05-25 04:46 pm (UTC)"Chosen" doesn't do it for me because between the lingering strength of 7.2 and the lameness of much of the later stuff (for example, you can't convince me that "The Guardian" wasn't the First in disguise, offering Buffy more perspective-altering bulldada), I can't help but believe that opening the Hellmouth and using the Scythe to expand the Slayerdom is the First's plan all along. The First gets it's way, Anya dies and a good chunk of California real estate falls into a hole and we're supposed to consider this a win?