Personally, I intensely disliked the way all of the characters were written in Season 7, to the point where one of my major objectives in signing up for this board was to whine about it. All of them read to me like cardboard cutouts of themselves.
Buffy: "My idea of an inspirational speech is telling everybody they're going to die, a speech which I will repeat approximately five hundred times or until everyone's ears have started to bleed. Also, everyone should follow my instructions in spite of the fact that they are transcendentally retarded, because I am the main character and the screenwriters will not allow me to fail (see below."
Spike: "I used to be a likable bad boy. Now, with a soul, I am apparently still a bad boy but have ceased to be likable. It is a bitter testimony to the horribleness of this season that I nonetheless manage to be one of its highlights."
Xander (pre-eye-pokage): "RA, RA, RA! GO TEAM BUFFY!"
Xander (post-eye-pokage): "I am disillusioned by the fall of my idol, and can never have the same confidence in her again. Hang on a sec, I need to betray Dawn's trust because Buffy told me to."
Anya: "It's so hard making up my mind whether I want to be a serial killer or not."
Willow: "I cannot be on screen for five consecutive seconds without someone worrying about my ability to do magic. After faffing about to no particular purpose for 21 episodes, I will suddenly and for no obvious reason conquer my Inner Demon, a fact that you will have to extrapolate from my hair colour because the screenwriters ran out of time for actual dialogue."
Kennedy: "Hi! I'm a lesbian, you're a lesbian, I just skipped out on my duties with a bogus excuse, wanna screw?"
Kennedy (alternative version): "The only reason for my existence is to reassure the gay lobby that Willow is indeed gay, thereby invalidating everything she did during the first three and a half seasons."
Giles: "I am inexplicably the only person concerned about the fact that we have a superpowered serial killer in the basement who may at any moment turn into the Manchurian Candidate and slaughter us all. Everyone hates me because of this."
The Potentials: "Joss Whedon is an atheist. This is obvious because the only logical reason for our presence would be to disprove the existence of a beneficent God."
Robin Wood: "This show has hitherto successfully avoided using ethnic stereotypes, so let's add a wisecracking black sidekick."
Faith: "Hello, I like sex and parties!"
Caleb: "The screenwriters thought about how they wanted to wrap things up, took a careful look at the message of the last six seasons, and decided that the series could basically be summed up as a feminist diatribe."
Dawn: Words fail me.
...
With that out of the way, allow me to complain a little more specifically about what passes for Buffy's planning during this season.
The show always tried to present Buffy's leadership skills as more impressive than they actually were, but that's another rant for another time. During the seventh season, the writers apparently decided to emphasize her qualities as a general, and this is a problem because she doesn't have any. Not only do her endless harangues prove her utterly inadequate as a charismatic leader, but she repeatedly makes plans which are presented as brilliant in spite of the fact that they make no sense. Here I am referring not only to the original assault on the Vineyard, which the show itself quasi-acknowledges to have been stupid, but to her planning thereafter, which is ridiculously bad yet is presented as brilliant.
Given how long this post already is, I'll limit myself to pointing out three flaws in her plans for the Final Battle:
1. She has a superweapon in the form of Spike's amulet, but no idea of what it does. Instead of trying to ascertain this, she promptly commits Spike to the front lines. For all she knew, the amulet could have acted as a suicide bomb which would have killed everyone standing near Spike.
2. She has a very powerful witch on her side, who is about to perform a spell that will greatly empower her army. She promptly commits said army to combat while the spell is in progress, removing Willow from the battle and risking having the Potentials killed before the spell is even complete. What was wrong with coming back the next day with empowered Potentials and a rested Willow?
3. She's worried about the enemy escaping the school, a minimal concern since it's daylight. In order to stop dozens of desperate super-vampires, a single one of which nearly killed her earlier in the season, she guards the exits with such terrifying forces as the Anya and Andrew Death Battalion. Of all her bad decisions, this one really takes the cake. There is no logical reason for it and it is a blatantly obvious effort on the part of the screenwriters to give beloved characters something to do, however pointless. Showing a crippled Xander joining forces with Dawn to slaughter the Turok-Han en masse does nothing to give those characters a decent send-off; it merely confirms that the once-terrifying enemy is now apparently made of papier-mache.
