Where do I start....
too many deus ex machinas... the toys r us axe, the amulet, etc. With Chosen, they could have gotten really creative in the destruction of the hellmouth, like how creative they were in The Gift and Graduation Day, part 2, but the whole plan seemed incredibly suicidal. I've always struggled to buy the concept that a slayer, means physically stronger than all the demons. I mean, I understand Buffy surviving it (just by a bit) but all the newly awakened Slayers, it doesn't make any sense.
Alot of the aspects I loved in season 7 seemed rushed, fitted into one episode. I thought there was enough material in Selfless to be stretched out and expanded on for a longer time. A 1000 year old character's past only gets one episode to shine. As opposed to on Angel, Darla, a character with just as a fascinating history, gets alot of space to shine in- Selfless could have been a two-parter or its own arc. It's kind of the same with Willow: her feelings of displacement, guilt and alienation among her friends are heavily focused on Same Time, Same Place and then ditched completely.
Too. Many. Speeches. They gave me headaches and made me feel tired. Thinking about them makes me want to go to sleep. Seriously, did any character have a conversation with any other character without it morphing into a speech?
Lack of suspense and danger. Only two episodes end on successful scary, suspenseful note: Dirty Girls and CWDP. It's a gross season: we see Willow's skin get eaten, but it's not really scary. All of these speeches *yawn* kind of take away the suspense. When I saw End Of Days for the first time, the ending with Buffy/ Angel kissing, Spike growling... considering its the second last episode of the series, it's kind of a bad note to end on. Think of other notes other second lasts episodes have ended on: Buffy finding Kendra's body, Faith falling onto the truck, stabbed, Buffy waking up from a catatonic state full of dread and despair, Giles walking into the magic shop... from Touched onwards, all the feel of despair and dread was all gone. By Bring On The Night, you could pretty much figure out that Buffy was going to win, to me, it was always about 'is my favourite character gonna make it'.
The feminist message doesn't work at all. In the season seven special feature, the potentials idea were pretty much ''people who needed saving''. By portraying said woman as merely damsels for a large chuck of the season, it takes away from the feminist integrity. Also, for about six seasons, we see the downsides of being a slayer: as Buffy says in Becoming Part 2, she talks about how lonely and dangerous it is. In Fool For love, she says she has an 'expiry date'. She gets ripped out of heaven. The mythology of it: Shadow men, watchers council... forcing it onto a girl. And Willow and Buffy does the same to thousands of girls. Even if they aren't 'alone' that doesn't mean much... they'll be removed from the world, thrown into a new one. Also: so, you've made a very misogynist character called Caleb. He's incredible powerful, and can 'render a slayer useless within one punch'. You can connect this to deus ex machinas: how he suddenly, over the course of a couple of episodes, become less and less powerful makes zero sense. So, a female can only be empowered if the plot says so? That's trash. Also, the Buffy and Spike relationship is a travesty on so many levels. Seeing Buffy cuddle and comfort the man who undermined her, verbally and physically abused her, attempted to sexually assault her is awful, insensitive on so many levels.
Xander. Poor, poor, Xander. Not coz of the eye, I mean, hey, there goes that nice construction career but he just stands there to make other characters look better. The two speeches by Xander people go on and on about: that speech to Dawn in Potential, and about Buffy's 'heart' in Dirty Girls, are all about Xander saying how great other characters are. But who is making speeches about Xander? You know, that guy who had the required heart to stop Willow in Grave. The one who told Angelus to back off in Killed By Death. And in End Of Days, Buffy says that Xander is the 'reason she got this far' 'her strength' which is all nice, but what does Buffy want Xander to do? To render Dawn unconscious and take her out of Sunnydale. Really, writers? Your attempts at connection between characters have never seemed more phoney.
Buffy is so unlikeable in this season, if she was like this in season one, no one would watch the show. Seriously, what was Whedon thinking? She has like one facial expression in the whole entire season. She makes fun of Chloe, a poor girl who killed herself (and btw, nice triggering of a very sensitive issue, idiot writers and directors). She tells Wood that she'd let her knight, Spike, kill him if he attempts to kill the man who killed his mother again. She holds poor Andrew over the hellmouth, gives him an incredibly self righteous lecture, says that his blood is the cure, and then psyche! it's tears. That is ethically wrong on so many levels.That's like trying to get a urine sample by forcing someone to chug a tonne of water. Why not just say, hey Andrew, could you please cry in front of a hellmouth? If not, just think: Stargate is cancelled. Would it kill the writers to give us a likeable main character?
More MOTW, please. Hush, Doppelgangland, OMWF, Halloween... fun episodes that did a great job at keeping the plot moving.
Okay I'll stop.
