NEW SEASON 2002! (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

Member Name: Babylion

Product:	Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Date:	16/01/02 (86 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great acting, Great scripts, Always varied

Disadvantages: Has already been going for a few years - I've included a plot summary though!

Have you watched Buffy before? It's never to late to start!

VERY brief summary: Buffy The Vampire Slayer is a young girl who has inherited a mystic, um, heritage with semi-superhuman powers to enable her to protect humanity from vampires (although she fights all sorts of monsters). Buffy is a modern gal and therefore enlists the help of her best buddies, also sometimes known as the Scooby Gang, spot the ironic reference.

If you really are new to the series, you could check out www.buffy.com for some character and plot summaries, but for now, read on!

Things were looking grim for the Scooby Gang at the end of the last series. Dawn bleeding all over, Buffy sacrificing her life to save the world, various people getting badly beaten up.

The newsgroups went wild - was Warner going to end the series? Maybe Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy) wasn't going to renew her contract? Rest assured, none of the above is true. Here's a brief summary of Ep 1, and a quick catch-up for the story since then:

NEW SEASON EPISODE ONE
Willow wants to try and raise Buffy from the dead, but the rest of the gang, particularly Xander, think it's a bad idea. They decide not to tell Dawn or Spike.

In the meantime, it turns out that Giles has decided to leave for England as he can no longer be a Watcher after Buffy's death. If you remember the Buffy-robot from an earlier programme, they have been using this duplicate to fool the local vampires that the Slayer is alive and well.

Willow insists that they must try to raise Buffy, and the gang carry out a ritual over Buffy's grave. The ritual is interrupted by a gang of biker demons who have discovered that The Slayer is actually a robot, and have run riot over Sunnydale. Willow is injured and weakened from the ritual, so she and Xander are forced to hide in the forest behind the graveyard. Tara and Anya make it back to the Magic Box.
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ossip - Anya and Xander are engaged! Comic relief for a quite heavy episode is provided by Anya trying to tell everyone the news at tactless moments, with Xander insisting they keep it quiet.

It turns out that the ritual had already worked before the Scooby gang were interrupted, but because they had to flee, Buffy was forced to dig herself out of her own grave and is hugely traumatised as a result and seems to have lost her memory. When the gang finally encounter Buffy while under attack from the demons, she is afraid of them and runs away when they try to talk to her.

Spike is babysitting Dawn while the gang carry out the raising ritual, but after the biker demons start rioting, he decides to run for it with Dawn in tow as the Slayer's house is an obvious target. They find the Buffy-bot destroyed by the bikers, but in time for her to wonder aloud where the 'other Buffy' went. Dawn realises her sister is alive after all, and tracks her down to the scene of the bloodbath at the end of the last season, where Buffy jumped from a very high tower to an unfortunate end.

Buffy is at the top, just about to jump off once more and end her torment, when Dawn persuades her that she is needed and the two are reunited.

I thought it was a good season-opening episode, although I expected a better plot device from Joss Whedon to bring Buffy back. A convenient justification of 'she didn't have a natural end and didn't die at the right time' for raising the dead is given, even though Willow and Tara have spent many episodes explaining why raising the dead is never, never, OK. Including in a recent episode from last season where Dawn raised her and Buffy's mother with horrendous results.

It will be interesting to see how the gang fare with the absence of Giles the Watcher. I read in SFX magazine that Anthony Head, who plays Giles, was unhappy at spending so much time away from his family when filmi
ng in the States, so as a result Joss Whedon offered him his own spin-off series to be filmed in the UK. This is currently in production although I don't know when it's likely to be shown.

OK, so here's the updated bit: Yep, there were consequences. The team discover that in the process of bringing Buffy back, they have accidentally created a demon, which is possessing them one by one and intends to kill Buffy. They find out that the only way the demon can grab a permanent existence is to kill Buffy, which is why it is so determined to attack her. Unfortunately the demon is made of mist, so Buffy can't attack it, although it can attack her. Just as it looks as if Buffy is going to lose, Willow and Tara manage to force it to solidify long enough for Buffy to behead it. One dead demon, one live Slayer!

The fourth episode: Giles has reappeared, having flown back to the US in a hurry on being told Buffy had come back from the dead. He waited till he was sure she was relatively OK, and then took time out to give Willow a serious roasting for messing around with such powerful magic. The bad news: it turns out Buffy is broke. The money her mother left has been eaten up by hospital bills and the paying of the mortgage on the house. And the basement has flooded. When she goes to the bank to apply for a loan she is turned down, even after defeating a demon intent on robbing the bank! It turns out the demon was sent by Jonathan and two of his friends (one of whom is the guy who built the Buffy-bot). They've decided to take over the world, starting with Sunnydale. Look out for these guys later in the season! At the end of the episode, the bank robbing demon turns up once again to kill the Slayer at home, but she drowns him in the flooded basement, clubbing him neatly to death with a severed pipe.

Don't forget the fantastic Angel spin-off series, on SKY it is shown immediately after Buffy, however on terrestria
l channels it tends to be on much later, as it contains stronger scenes of violence. It is a darker programme in many ways, however the last and current series of Buffy have also darkened considerably. Both programmes contain a strong element of humour, although I would venture to say that Angel is actually funnier.

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