Revisiting the Buffyverse

This summer I rewatched Buffy the Vampire Slayer in its entirety. I’m going to write about it a little today, but first things first: I hate Willow.

The Willow Challenge

I despise Alyson Hannigan's acting; her mouth-agape portrayal of the character Willow as a mumbling semi-literate retard almost make this series unwatchable to me. If you like, take the Willow challenge, which I am going to do right now: Pick an episode of Buffy at random. It doesn't matter which one; any episode will work. Now, click through until you get a scene with Willow and pause it. Take a screenshot. There's a better than 90% chance her mouth will be agape because Hannigan almost never closes it. I'm not talking about line delivery, either. I'm talking about when she isn't delivering lines, about when she is listening. I picked the episode "Amends" from season 3, and this is the result:

The main thing that strikes me about this show upon rewatching it is how much I despise watching and listening to Alyson Hannigan act. You could take a bum right off the street insert him into the role of Willow and there's a really good chance he'd give a more watchable, less I-want-to-stab-myself performance than Hannigan.

The character Willow herself is one of most despicable characters I've encountered on Television. I'd let Walter White babysit for me before I'd let Willow. In so many ways, she was the canary in the coalmine, a proto-woke generation X precursor to today's gen Z tiktok woketards. She's semi-retarded, has narcissistic personality disorder, flips her sexuality on a dime, and is absolutely convinced that she's a moral superior to everyone she encounters despite the fact that she's an absolute piece of shit. Holy god, there's an episode in season 4 I think in which a bunch of disgruntled Indian ghosts are trying to kill the Scooby gang and Willow pontificates about how these poor noble savages are just misunderstood and that Thanksgiving itself is the white man's celebration of smallpox blankets.

Willow is insufferable, I hate her, and she almost single-handedly makes me hate this entire show.

Sarah Michelle Gellar sucks too

Upon rewatch, at no point can I suspend my disbelief and accept that itty bitty Sarah Michelle Gellar is a bad-ass vampire slayer. Interestingly, at no time do I accept that she is a former vapid cheerleader, either. Even further, at no point do I buy she's a 16-year-old. She is miscast, pure and simple. She lacks the gravitas to headline a show. Her line delivery sucks, too, frequently competing with Willow to see which character survived being dropped as a baby to go on to live a mostly normal life, but a lot of that is the Joss Wheden's dialogue writing, which I am going to call retard-chic. Hate much? But paired with Hannigan, Gellar's acting looks like Cate Blanchett, but I want to be really clear that Gellar really sucks, too, she just sucks a lot less than Alyson Hannigan. It is hard not to wonder, though, how a better actor cast as Buffy would have improved this show, specifically Charisma Carpenter.

Charisma's Charisma

I love Charisma Carpenter. Let's put aside that for my money she's one of the sexiest and most beautiful women I've ever rubbed with my eyeballs. By the end of season two, Charisma's character Cordelia Chase has solidified herself as the heart of the show. I'd read somewhere that Carpenter had tried out for the role of Buffy, but she was passed over for Gellar. If that is the case, it is impossible for me to not to mention that Whedon really must have been smoking crack cocaine that day. Her quality is made all the more apparent when Cordelia is sent to the anchor the spin-off show Angel, effectivley jerking the beating heart of Buffy right out of its chest. Angel benefits, but Buffy never recovers. That is why seasons 1-3 of Buffy are pretty good, fun, and have a certain charm, but seasons 4-7 all of that is just gone. I think the character Dawn, who came in during season 5 if memory serves me, was a deliberate attempt to re-instert a heart into the show, but Michelle Trachtenberg is no Charisma Carpenter. Trachtenberg is okay, and a world better than Alyson Hannigan, but she never fills the void left by the departure of Carpenter. Nothing does. Season 4 forward, in every episode at some point it hits my conscious awareness that I miss Cordy.

Speaking of Angel . . .

Angel is a much better show. It has a rough start in season 1, but during season 2 it starts to find itself, and by season 3, BOOM, it is very good. Every episode of season three has a self-assured confidence that you never get in Buffy. It looks better, the acting is head and shoulders better, and the writing is better with very little Wheden retard-chic dialogue. Even though David Boreanaz's acting kind of sucks at first, sucks being really relative next to Hannigan, he finds his acting legs in Angel and frequently delivers some really spectacular moments in that show, and of course, Charisma reprises Cordelia there, and in Angel she quickly becomes the heart of that show, too.

Ham-fisted much?

I used to work with a woman, Rhonda Wilcox, who styled herself a buffy scholar, which at the time I thought was kind of neat, but today is just gives me an interior chuckle because it is funny that this is where were are in the American academy, that these throw-away cultural products get treated as serious works. If you ever do decide to devote serious schlarly attention to Buffy, heavin forbid, you will inevitably run into an article written by Wilcox. That said, in the first three seasons the show does offer some somewhat interesting metaphors, the very premise of the show that high school is hell. But this shit ain't deep, either. The high school is built on top of a "hellmouth", a portal to actual Hell. So, you can spend an afternoon exploring those metaphors, and if you're an English professor, you can get tenure writing articles about them, but by season 6, which is admittedly the absolute worst season of the show, in the episode "Seeing Red" we get Warren of the Trio killing a demon so he can claim the demon's magic balls. They are red balls, seemingly made of glass, etched with some squiggles. These two balls give Warren super strength and amplify his toxic masculinity. He keeps the balls in a leather pouch on his belt. Buffy defeats Warren when she crushes his magic balls. I've studied this episode extensively, and I still can't for the life of me make out what it means.

Suffice it to say, Buffy didn't stand up all that well to a second viewing, and my overall impression of it is that it's a pretty silly and often poorly written and poorly acted (Hannigan) show, but it does have its moments, it's charms, and almost all of them are centered on either Carpenter, then James Marsters as Spike, or Emma Caulfield as Anya. I love Caulfield, too, and for what it's worth, she was criminally underutilized. She could have, I have no doubts, replaced Carpenter almost beat for heartbeat as the heart of Buffy. It was a missed opportunity. Angel, on the other hand, really holds up well to a second viewing and is much more enjoyable than Buffy.