Were there any plans to use the First Evil beyond its appearance in "Amends"?
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NotASlayer
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I very much doubt it. It looks like they picked one of the very few surviving Monsters of the Week due to a lack of original ideas.
AlphaFoxtrot
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I don't know of any interviews or other material that explains the writers' motives for bringing back the First.
I assume so, Amends basically introduced the Powers That Be, and the First is basically Satan, So I assume the episode was intended to be a bare bones introduction of the Angel The Series Mythology, and they intended to return to the character at some point.
However, I doubt anyone had a master plan that included season seven as we know it. If Buffy was a novel, yes, definitely. But as a TV show? No.
I assume so, Amends basically introduced the Powers That Be, and the First is basically Satan, So I assume the episode was intended to be a bare bones introduction of the Angel The Series Mythology, and they intended to return to the character at some point.
However, I doubt anyone had a master plan that included season seven as we know it. If Buffy was a novel, yes, definitely. But as a TV show? No.
If you are talking about going forward from Amends..... there were no 'plans'. Several ideas for episodes were pitched involving The First Evil but they never made it out of the writers room.
@AlphaFoxtrot is correct. Amends is the backdoor pilot for Angel the Series.
If you are talking about s7..... the First became the big bad because the concept of fighting the original accept no substitute one and only Biggest Baddest was too epic to ignore in Buffy's final season. But..... the totally awesome writers room concept did not translate to television so well. Lots of issues with how to depower the originalest evilest ever so he couldn't just kill the Scoobies with a flick of his incorporeal wrist while maintaining the gut wrenching fear were not worked out. The whole incorporeality thing made the First kind of a joke. And the writers never figured out where the happy medium was.
So..... the assumptions about the First as a TV Big Bad worked out the way assumptions do & the writers scrambled to figure out how to make the concept work.
Luckily, Firefly was cancelled & Nathan Fillion became available. So Buffy got a corporeal bad guy to fight.
In the end..... the final battle & destruction of Sunnyhell (I love the crater) made an awesome finale & empowering the potentials a wonderful endpoint for our favorite Slayer and her friends (who were never mentioned in the brochure).
@AlphaFoxtrot is correct. Amends is the backdoor pilot for Angel the Series.
If you are talking about s7..... the First became the big bad because the concept of fighting the original accept no substitute one and only Biggest Baddest was too epic to ignore in Buffy's final season. But..... the totally awesome writers room concept did not translate to television so well. Lots of issues with how to depower the originalest evilest ever so he couldn't just kill the Scoobies with a flick of his incorporeal wrist while maintaining the gut wrenching fear were not worked out. The whole incorporeality thing made the First kind of a joke. And the writers never figured out where the happy medium was.
So..... the assumptions about the First as a TV Big Bad worked out the way assumptions do & the writers scrambled to figure out how to make the concept work.
Luckily, Firefly was cancelled & Nathan Fillion became available. So Buffy got a corporeal bad guy to fight.
In the end..... the final battle & destruction of Sunnyhell (I love the crater) made an awesome finale & empowering the potentials a wonderful endpoint for our favorite Slayer and her friends (who were never mentioned in the brochure).
I think it was setup…for Angel, as others have mentioned. Then Wolfram & Hart proved successful and became its own thing, so the First Evil wasn’t needed and was abandoned as a series’ overarching villain.
When it came to the final season, I think the most likely explanation is “let’s have it be some demonic ‘ghost’ so that way it isn’t always CG, we can use real actors, doesn’t require insane prosthetics like Adam did, and it’s something Buffy can’t just punch or stab to death for the 7th time.” They likely used the First Evil from S3 because it filled the criteria and was more cost effective than anything else.
AlphaFoxtrot
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On paper, the first is fine, but the execution is deeply flawed. Like they only had eight episodes of ideas for the first 4/5 of season 7, then had 14 episodes of ideas to fit in the last five.
Well, the fact that The First/Jenny admits that all it really wanted was to get rid of Angel (by turning him into Angelus or killing him) implies to me that it's a villain that was initially supposed to be connected to Angel not Buffy. Like Plasma said, they might have thought about using it as an overarching Big Bad in the spinoff, but eventually changed their minds.
Considering its title as The First Evil, it makes sense that they would use it as the 'final' Big Bad of BtVS, though. Like others, I think it had promise but went mostly unused. The possibilities seemed endless when they had it take the forms of all the previous major villains in 'Lessons', but I guess they couldn't pay all those actors to come back and act throughout the season. It's a shame.
Considering its title as The First Evil, it makes sense that they would use it as the 'final' Big Bad of BtVS, though. Like others, I think it had promise but went mostly unused. The possibilities seemed endless when they had it take the forms of all the previous major villains in 'Lessons', but I guess they couldn't pay all those actors to come back and act throughout the season. It's a shame.