Late nights and late days

[tahnan]

My sleep schedule is...I don't think it's really fair to call it a schedule. On the other hand, being awake until 4am (by which I mean "until about 9:30am") has a few advantages. For one, Logo's been showing a couple of Buffy episodes a night, and tonight was Graduation Day (parts One and Two). Man, this show was great (until the apocryphal 6th and 7th seasons, when it was merely "often good, often annoying"), and I think Season 3 was the best of it.

For another, for the past two nights, Zooty has decided around 3:30am that it's time to get up from where she's been sleeping on the bed and start wandering around the house. And since she's just gotten up, she's still calm enough to be scooped up into my lap, where she has curled into a little purring ball of cute furriness. (Until around 4, when she gets restless again, but half an hour of this cat can last you quite a while; she's just that good.)

Looking for bright sides. Especially since I sleep through most of the literal ones.

Comments

[jydog1.livejournal.com]

Is he really going to do the whole speech? Just ascend, already.

I agree that season 3 was probably the best. The Mayor was a great, great villain. I always loved 'The Zeppo' myself.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

The Mayor is one of the best villains I know, and Harry Groener brought him to life so, so beautifully.

"The Zeppo" is a great illustration of the way in which some typically dramatic shows can take an episode off and go for near-slapstick humor and pull it off amazingly. Of course, even dark episodes of Buffy have funny moments, but the overall tone is drama; and then you get episodes like that one. (My favorite example is "Without a Trace", a show about missing persons—half of whom turn up dead, most of the other half having gone through some sort of trauma to cause them to go missing—which did an episode about an agoraphobe which is just incredibly funny. The scene with Masi Oka (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_CKyQ1tMDA), say. Or the line, "You live 15 miles from here! You gotta be the worlds worst agoraphobic!" OK, I've drifted off-topic.)

[jydog1.livejournal.com]

I agree with your assessment of "The Zeppo." I loved that it allowed Xander to be the hero for once, but not let him be able to tell anyone and just have it show in that final scene with Cordelia. Plus anything that references the 4th Marx Brother deserves accolades.

Lines from The Mayor are frequently flung around this house.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

I recall not especially liking "The Prom" when I saw it the first time around; I think I thought the whole "class protector" thing was a little too schmaltzy. This time, though, I thought it was a terrific episode, and the Xander/Cordelia interactions about her dress (him confronting her in the store; him covering for her when someone asks what they were doing at the story in the first place; her quietly thanking him at the prom) were fantastic. The more so because of how well they were played, and because they introduced a little subtlety into one of the less nuanced relationships on the show.

[bourbon-cowboy.livejournal.com]

One odd thing about Buffy: the first three seasons work beautifully as a set, lacking that awful "the show never ends" cliffhanger that so often makes TV shows a pain to own. I don't think this is a rogue opinion: most folks I know who loved the show love the first three seasons best.

Which brings me to the odd thing: Any list of the best episodes of Buffy tends to start with "Hush," "Once More With Feeling," and "The Body"...and NONE of them are in the first three seasons. So you have this odd situation where I own the best-loved seasons, yet I own very few of the best episodes.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Very true. I hate the existence of the sixth and seventh seasons—for one thing, I'm a member of Team Anya (I can't believe I actually just used the "Team X" construction). As it happens, I saw the Xander-and-Anya's-wedding episode just a few months before I got married, and it just rang really, really false to me. The friend who was gathering us together to show it on DVD (we started a little after the show ended, IIRC) was OK with the episode(*), saying that Xander's panic over marriage made sense considering how downright awful his parents' marriage was. I just couldn't buy it; Xander and Anya, while not the two people on the show I'd point to if I wanted to use the word "mature", had demonstrated that they were mature enough to understand that marriage is hard and it takes work and communication, so Xander going "I saw one possible future and it wasn't perfect so let's scrap the whole thing" just made me want to scream.

In general, the characterization in the sixth season really frustrates me. And the aforementioned friend; she hates how inconsistently Xander's written, and in much the same way I hate how inconsistently Anya's written. She points out, too, that "Once More, With Feeling" is a fantastic episode that hinges on the stupidest premise of the season: that Xander would summon a demon to try to ensure happiness. (Rewatching the first few seasons, I saw "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered", in which Xander tries a love spell to get Cordy back and it goes horribly awry, and I thought, "Wow, this episode alone makes the premise of the musical four years later make no sense.")

And yet: there really are Episodes of Brilliance in there. Very few, if any, episodes of Buffy are 100% unwatchable; irritating as the characterization might be, there's always something in there to redeem it. (Then again, I haven't rewatched the middle of sixth season recently, with Willow's "no really this isn't just a metaphor for drug use" descent into magic, so a few of those episodes might qualify.)

Er, all of which is to say: yep, you're right.

(*) At least on internal consistency. The meta-problem that Joss's idea of relationship plot development is "have them go through rocky times, and then just as they're starting to get over it, shatter it entirely" is still there. (cf Jenny losing Giles's trust and then finally starting to get it back in the episode where Angelus finds her; Willow losing Tara's trust and Tara finally being willing to talk things through when Warren shows up; and, hm, more or less every other relationship on the show.)

[elainetyger.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you've already adjusted your sleep "schedule" to make the most of NPL Con.