Jill_Valentine
Sacred and Profane
I keep mentioning my various problems with S7, and one of it's biggest crimes was continuity. A few people asked what continuity glitches I meant. Now, I'm a bit dumb. I have the memory span you'd expect of a PS2 owner, and it's been a while since I've actually sat through it, but here's what I can think of off the top of my head. Feel free to correct any errors, in my defence I've just had half a bottle of bad wine.
*Character Continuity.
I can forgive minor plot continuity problems, but Buffy has always leaned on it's characters, and rightly so. It's characters were great. So why did they all turn into different people altogether in S7? Giles is not only positively adept at using the internet, he's also a bit of a bollocks. Not just in the old stern father figure, formerly known as Ripper sense, just in the general cold b*stard sense. Buffy turned into a cow. From the ranting, and the appalling treatment of her own best friends, and her threats to Wood, and her treatment of Faith, and her pigheaded unwillingness to take useful suggestions...she's a b!tch... anyway... Somewhere between LA and Sunnydale, presumably when they stopped off to change clothes and get Faith's hair done, Faith transformed from a working class rock chick Slayer to ...erm... Eliza Dushku doing an excellent impression of Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas. Seriously. Count how many times she says the word "Yo" in S7 Buffy. Now count how many times she ever used the word before. You should get a ratio in or around 1,500,000:0, or in laymans terms, going from 0 to a hundred Yo's per second (YP/s) in the space of a week. Xander makes a joke about the brutal death of his ex fiance. The worst character continuity was, without a doubt, Buffy getting kicked out of her own house by people who, like an episode ago, were all giving their own rants about how great Buffy was.
*The Hellmouth/ Ubervamps.
So... It's a sort of vortex, located beneath the sunken ruins of the church, right? So the first things out of it should be the same thing we saw the last twice the Hellmouth was opened, right? Nope. See, old Head-Squid has graciously given up his front seat to the UberVamps (Ubervamps?) so that they can build some visitor friendly stairs (STAIRS!) into hell, which has been remodelled since Buffy bungee jumped into it. Luckily, there's a complex ritual for opening the Seal to let the... oh hold on, we got bored of that too. From now on they pop up whenever we get bored of some of the Potentials, and since we saw how effective that scene in Release was, we've been dying to mess Buffy up some. See, the Ubervamps are so strong that they can't be staked or beaten without somebody with superpowers getting the crap kicked out of them. Until we realised that the show would end on a much more downbeat note if we just saw the Scoobies get massacred by unstoppable monsters. From now on, thanks to Anya's unnamed source, they can be staked. By anybody. But back to the Hellmouth. See, though we haven't mentioned it at all before, people have been picking up on the vibes and have decided to leave town in droves, and also VW Beetles. Luckily, nobody's left the Bronze, which is packed, and there's enough cops left to get away with kicking the crap out of Faith. Also luckily, said cops forget their grudge completely (Just like they forgot that the same girl used to be surrogate daughter to their boss, the Mayor) and make no attempt to follow up on the girls who relieved them of their service weapons, and kicked them senseless.
*The Slayer Line/ Potentials.
I'm honestly not sure Mutant Enemy even knows how this works anymore. Assuming that Faith is carrying the line, the First should have tried to kill her last. If she's instead a dead end, why did they bother trying to kill her at all? The Potentials being identifiable before they're called was something suggested by Kendra's bio, but since we know from the old prologue speech that every girl in the world could "potentially" be a Slayer, that means the First has quite a bit of work to do... that's about 2 billion girls it has to knife in the time it takes to set up a pre-credit teaser sequence. Y'know what the Potential idea screams to me? Midichlorians. And if that's not nerdy enough, I don't know what is.
*The Scythe/ The Guardians.
The Guardians have been looking out for the Slayer. They've been looking out for her so well that we've never seen or heard of them before, despite the fact that we've seen three Slayers in Sunnydale. One of them is dead, and the other two nearly killed each other. And one of those has died three times, while the other was hooked to an ECG for 8 months. If I were that woman's boss, I would have visited a recruitment agency long ago. Was she watching Judge Judy while Buffy was stomping around the graveyard above her...? She's been helping and protecting the Slayer so well, in fact, that she doesn't know the girls name.
As for the Scythe: First if all, it's a freaking axe. I loved it in Fray. It worked in Fray. I could believe that it had been lost for so long, because of the home address of the guy who gave it to her. In Buffy, it made no sense. It had never been mentioned, and no solid excuse was ever offered as to why they'd overlooked it. They never mentioned exactly how they joined the dots between "It's meant for Slayers" and "It'll mass produce Slayers"
There's more, but I'll check through this again when I'm sober to see if it makes sense...
*Character Continuity.
I can forgive minor plot continuity problems, but Buffy has always leaned on it's characters, and rightly so. It's characters were great. So why did they all turn into different people altogether in S7? Giles is not only positively adept at using the internet, he's also a bit of a bollocks. Not just in the old stern father figure, formerly known as Ripper sense, just in the general cold b*stard sense. Buffy turned into a cow. From the ranting, and the appalling treatment of her own best friends, and her threats to Wood, and her treatment of Faith, and her pigheaded unwillingness to take useful suggestions...she's a b!tch... anyway... Somewhere between LA and Sunnydale, presumably when they stopped off to change clothes and get Faith's hair done, Faith transformed from a working class rock chick Slayer to ...erm... Eliza Dushku doing an excellent impression of Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas. Seriously. Count how many times she says the word "Yo" in S7 Buffy. Now count how many times she ever used the word before. You should get a ratio in or around 1,500,000:0, or in laymans terms, going from 0 to a hundred Yo's per second (YP/s) in the space of a week. Xander makes a joke about the brutal death of his ex fiance. The worst character continuity was, without a doubt, Buffy getting kicked out of her own house by people who, like an episode ago, were all giving their own rants about how great Buffy was.
*The Hellmouth/ Ubervamps.
So... It's a sort of vortex, located beneath the sunken ruins of the church, right? So the first things out of it should be the same thing we saw the last twice the Hellmouth was opened, right? Nope. See, old Head-Squid has graciously given up his front seat to the UberVamps (Ubervamps?) so that they can build some visitor friendly stairs (STAIRS!) into hell, which has been remodelled since Buffy bungee jumped into it. Luckily, there's a complex ritual for opening the Seal to let the... oh hold on, we got bored of that too. From now on they pop up whenever we get bored of some of the Potentials, and since we saw how effective that scene in Release was, we've been dying to mess Buffy up some. See, the Ubervamps are so strong that they can't be staked or beaten without somebody with superpowers getting the crap kicked out of them. Until we realised that the show would end on a much more downbeat note if we just saw the Scoobies get massacred by unstoppable monsters. From now on, thanks to Anya's unnamed source, they can be staked. By anybody. But back to the Hellmouth. See, though we haven't mentioned it at all before, people have been picking up on the vibes and have decided to leave town in droves, and also VW Beetles. Luckily, nobody's left the Bronze, which is packed, and there's enough cops left to get away with kicking the crap out of Faith. Also luckily, said cops forget their grudge completely (Just like they forgot that the same girl used to be surrogate daughter to their boss, the Mayor) and make no attempt to follow up on the girls who relieved them of their service weapons, and kicked them senseless.
*The Slayer Line/ Potentials.
I'm honestly not sure Mutant Enemy even knows how this works anymore. Assuming that Faith is carrying the line, the First should have tried to kill her last. If she's instead a dead end, why did they bother trying to kill her at all? The Potentials being identifiable before they're called was something suggested by Kendra's bio, but since we know from the old prologue speech that every girl in the world could "potentially" be a Slayer, that means the First has quite a bit of work to do... that's about 2 billion girls it has to knife in the time it takes to set up a pre-credit teaser sequence. Y'know what the Potential idea screams to me? Midichlorians. And if that's not nerdy enough, I don't know what is.
*The Scythe/ The Guardians.
The Guardians have been looking out for the Slayer. They've been looking out for her so well that we've never seen or heard of them before, despite the fact that we've seen three Slayers in Sunnydale. One of them is dead, and the other two nearly killed each other. And one of those has died three times, while the other was hooked to an ECG for 8 months. If I were that woman's boss, I would have visited a recruitment agency long ago. Was she watching Judge Judy while Buffy was stomping around the graveyard above her...? She's been helping and protecting the Slayer so well, in fact, that she doesn't know the girls name.
As for the Scythe: First if all, it's a freaking axe. I loved it in Fray. It worked in Fray. I could believe that it had been lost for so long, because of the home address of the guy who gave it to her. In Buffy, it made no sense. It had never been mentioned, and no solid excuse was ever offered as to why they'd overlooked it. They never mentioned exactly how they joined the dots between "It's meant for Slayers" and "It'll mass produce Slayers"
There's more, but I'll check through this again when I'm sober to see if it makes sense...
