Slaysome.
I am an avid viewer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (as you might have guessed). Sue me: I like a show that’s taut, well-written, funny, scary, emotionally true (even if a tad melodramatic at times), confident enough in its skewed storytelling to kick it around and have fun.
This may explain why the current season has been something of a disappointment.
Oh, it started strong. Started with a bang. Bobbled a little, but then there was the musical, which was the astonishing miracle of a elephant waddling up to the edge of a plank near the tippy-tippy-top of the Big Top itself, a black feather clutched in its trunk, and you know the thing’s all gonna be done with wires, they’re not gonna let an elephant plummet to its death or anything, but, I mean, come on. Fly? In forty-eight minutes plus an overture? Singing and dancing? Original songs? On a TV show? My God, doesn’t anyone remember Cop Rock? (Why, yes. Fondly, in fact. But that’s a kettle of fish of another color.) —Anyway, the elephant fuckin’ rocked.
And then the writing headed south (hear that giant sucking sound?), and Willow got “addicted” to magic, and we won’t even talk about the Doublemeat Palace fiasco.
There’s been glimmers to keep the true fan going, though even I have been tempted to just go shut it off, already. But the past few episodes—I mean, like, Xander and Anya’s wedding, which was a low farce that couldn’t pull itself off, you know? And the guy they got to play Uncle Rory: nice enough, but too familiar, and he was no Bruce Campbell. It all felt wrong (even if the whole bit with future Xander coming back to warn himself not to marry Anya was a nice touch)—until we got to the end, when it suddenly became clear that this episode had been written by someone who was sick unto death (much like myself) of the TV wedding convention, the iron-bound law which states that one party or another will, must, has to have “cold feet” and consider tossing the whole shooting match into the garbage (usually on the flimsiest of pretexts) only to have his or her love reaffirmed by some pious TV bullshit, much laughter, the best man forgot the ring, the bridesmaid’s snogging the brother-in-law, ha ha, I do. Gag. —So to see the farce on Buffy turn suddenly, sharply into ordinary yellow-bellied craw-sticking chickenshit everyday tragedy, as Xander walked, was—well, it was refreshing. Didn’t redeem the episode, but did manage to salvage it, give it that kick of something umf.
But last night’s—
Last night’s—
God damn. Last night’s was creepy nasty good in all the right ways. A beautiful job of deconstructing the show itself, stripping it down to bare essential parts and kicking them around and laughing even while you wince at some of the rough bits, and then put it back together again with a triumphant roar and a last lingering shiver—
Jesus.
(I’m being incoherent. I do apologize. Some of this is [one hopes] mitigated by the fact I just got done watching it; I was at the laundromat last night. We taped it. Watched it tonight, just now, over dinner [torta de papas, olive bread, a nice enough Primitivo] and sat there, grinning at each other, hey, this one isn’t gonna drop the ball. So this is fresh and hot off the press and raw and all of that.)
Remember DS9? (Hell. Remember when Trek didn’t actively suck rocks?) Anyway. There was that episode where the Orb or whatever was fucking with Sisko’s head and he was suddenly somehow back in the ’50s writing science fiction stories for a low-rent Golden Age two-bit Campbell knock-off ’zine. A nice enough episode actually dealing with race in a meaningful way (let’s not talk about the show’s uneasy relationship with race) and even if it had a Twilight Zone naïveté it was still something nice to say about the power of dreams (or, let’s be realistic, the power of two-bit Campbellesque pulpy genre fiction). —It was a graceful reminder of why exactly DS9 was doing what it was doing in the way it was doing it, and even if they cheesed it out a little over the next season or so with Sisko’s ’50s alter-ego occasionally popping up in a mental institution, scribbling scripts on the walls, it still helped galvanize the show. Plus, it was neat seeing all the various alien actors without their prostheses.
Anyway, point being: I’m sure that casting a bald black man with a neat little beard as the mental ward doctor in last night’s Buffy was a conscious nod; a tip of the proverbial hat.
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