The Arcane
Scooby
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2005
- Messages
- 1,686
There was a thread at Whedonesque recently discussing the worst episodes of Buffy and whilst there were many obvious suggestions that came up again and again (Doublemeat Palace, Go Fish, Teacher's Pet and so on) it seemed like the only episode that I felt was truly bad went unmentioned (except by me anyway, hehe).
Life Serial, in my opinion, was a mess. What makes it worse is that it was written by two of the best writers at Mutant Enemy, David Fury and Jane Espenson. It was disjointed, flowed very badly and the dialogue and acting in certain scenes were quite frankly poor. There was a certain conversation between Buffy and Anya during the Magic Box scene that felt like it had been meant as a rehearsal rather than what was meant to end up within the episode itself.
Emma's delivery of her lines were incredibly forced and unnatural. It was like the irony of her statement was being forced down the viewer's throat in case they missed the joke. Something that Whedon shows are very rarely guilty of.
I do get that the episode was about how unfocused Buffy was and that it was intentional to try and create the sort of jumpy, discontinuous feeling that they were going for to try and get across how lost Buffy was but I tend to think that they may have succeeded a little too well.
Then there was the intense lack of logic in two of the tests. The evil lint thing probably being the worst. What exactly was it doing to Buffy? Slowing her down? removing her from normal time? Either way there was one point where Buffy would have frozen or disappeared right in front of Tara's eyes and all Tara did was walk away as if nothing had happened.
The mummy hand lack of logic is slightly less annoying but given that we can assume that several hours passed at least in the real world whilst the loop was going on then it begs the question of why no other customers attempted to get in to the shop in all that time and why nobody on the outside noticed a problem.
Basically I thought that this episode was beyond poor the first time I watched it and my opinion hasn't improved in later viewings so it amazes me that more people don't mention this one when talking about the less brilliant episodes of Buffy.
Anyone else agree?
Life Serial, in my opinion, was a mess. What makes it worse is that it was written by two of the best writers at Mutant Enemy, David Fury and Jane Espenson. It was disjointed, flowed very badly and the dialogue and acting in certain scenes were quite frankly poor. There was a certain conversation between Buffy and Anya during the Magic Box scene that felt like it had been meant as a rehearsal rather than what was meant to end up within the episode itself.
Emma's delivery of her lines were incredibly forced and unnatural. It was like the irony of her statement was being forced down the viewer's throat in case they missed the joke. Something that Whedon shows are very rarely guilty of.
I do get that the episode was about how unfocused Buffy was and that it was intentional to try and create the sort of jumpy, discontinuous feeling that they were going for to try and get across how lost Buffy was but I tend to think that they may have succeeded a little too well.
Then there was the intense lack of logic in two of the tests. The evil lint thing probably being the worst. What exactly was it doing to Buffy? Slowing her down? removing her from normal time? Either way there was one point where Buffy would have frozen or disappeared right in front of Tara's eyes and all Tara did was walk away as if nothing had happened.
The mummy hand lack of logic is slightly less annoying but given that we can assume that several hours passed at least in the real world whilst the loop was going on then it begs the question of why no other customers attempted to get in to the shop in all that time and why nobody on the outside noticed a problem.
Basically I thought that this episode was beyond poor the first time I watched it and my opinion hasn't improved in later viewings so it amazes me that more people don't mention this one when talking about the less brilliant episodes of Buffy.
Anyone else agree?
