Somebody make me feel better about the end of season 7 Buffy. Why does Angel get to be the ensouled vampire we expect Buffy to live happily ever after with when Spike was the one who deliberately changed? What happened to Dawn being a mystical ball of energy and why was that not important once Glory was gone? How come Willow fixes the rigged system the big bad men made by empowering all the potential slayers, but doesn’t fix the inherent misogyny of slayers only being girls? In fact, what was with the random acts of “girls rule, boys drool!” going on there? Buffy is one of the first genuinely cool female super heroes, so why was it necessary to tie it down with elementary school finger pointing? And we come down on Faith for her one-night-stand predilection when she gets off on killing so much it turned her evil? Huh? Seriously, let’s have her focus that energy somewhere where silly boys who thing they’re special are the only ones who get hurt, and then it’s just their feelings. And why was the first’s inability to show up as Tara never explained? I was thinking it was a “Had to be evil at some point in their lives,” thing, but Tara wasn’t less bad than the sighted heart-attack girl, so that made no sense. And I’m fuzzy on the first’s motivations, too. We get a little inkling really late in the game that the first has some envy going on, but the bit about becoming corporeal after a point was extraordinarily 11th hour and made me go “Oh good, then Buffy can scythe you.” All the other bad guys had concrete motives; the master wanted power and to rule, Angel wanted his blood bath party (and boy does he get lame without Dru), the mayor wanted to become a demon in order to fight profanity and promote family values, plus the demoney bonuses, Adam wanted companions like himself, Glory wanted to go home, the trio wanted to fulfill their super-villain fantasies/Willow wanted revenge and then….I’ve got lots of intermediate goals, destroying the slayer line, making big army, but nothing else. Oh, and where was the third slayer that whole time? Buffy died twice, but they were only +1 slayer. What gives? I mean, somehow Buffy coming back made the slayer line fragile, but not so fragile that blond Willow couldn’t tinker and make jillions of slayers. Big unaddressed plot problem. So, yeah, somebody make it better.
So, yeah, finished the series. Season seven was, by far, the best, though really only because of Spike. Really could have done without the love potion episode and the actual finale though.
Anaea Lay 