Buffy Season Six: The flawed season

Season Six of Buffy The Vampire Slayer has a fairly unique status for me. Not only does it mark the time of my life when I fell in love and met my wife (yes, I did mean to say it that way around) but it was the first season of Buffy that I actually watched on a week-by-week basis.

I came late to the Buffy party, joining in the fun sometime between season 5 and 6, and caught up with most of the earlier seasons on DVD. Hence, right from the outset, my viewing experience of Season Six was different.

While DVD gives you the luxury of cramming in an entire season as quickly as time and your own fervent fandom allows, it's a different story with TV broadcasts. For starters you're stuck with just the one episode each week, which really changes the way you digest the season as a whole. You need each of those single episodes to deliver your complete fix for the week; if the story doesn't progress in a major way you feel a bit cheated; if that week's episode sucks you can't move straight onto the next potentially great episode to wash the bad taste out of your mouth.

So, on my first painfully drawn out viewing back in 2002, Season Six undoubtedly had its highlights but overall I found it significantly lacking. I was never sure whether this was just down to watching it one episode per week, or whether the season was a genuinely lesser affair. Reading through the fan commentary of the time didn't really offer much illumination: you'd find that every season was the worst since the last according to at least some people, and this spanned all the way back to Season Two.

As with all the Buffy DVD sets I got hold of the Complete Season Six pretty much as soon as it first came out, but I'd never mustered sufficient interest in watching it all over again. The main stumbling block was down to me thinking it would just end up being painful, that there were too many low points of the season to endure all over again. On the other hand I've always been curious to see how it holds up in retrospect and particularly when viewed in a compressed period, over a single week or so.

The turning point came when we couldn't find anything interesting to watch in the House of Cawthorne one night, so we turned to Season Five of Buffy, specifically the final clutch of episodes where the Glory storyline (Gloryline?) really starts hammering towards a rip-roaring finale. We enjoyed that sufficiently to launch immediately into Season Six (and we're now ploughing through Season Seven too, but more on that another time).

So, second time around, viewed in quick succession, how did Season Six fare? Well, more details below, but the short answer is that it was a lot better than I remembered, but still had exactly the same flaws that I remembered from 8 years ago. Dramatically the season works well, each character develops in some way from start to finish, but some of the development is so ham-fisted you'd perhaps rather they hadn't tried. Watching the season through, and knowing where it's going to end up, you get to see all the signposts and see how carefully a lot of the season-long themes and through-lines were planned out. Unfortunately, while that may make the full season hang together better than it might have done so on first viewing, it also exposes the possibility that many of the obvious mistakes were always part of the plan.

Let's go through some of the key themes, plot points and noteworthy moments of the season.

Highlights

Before I go any further I want to acknowledge that there are some episodes of Season Six that are at least as good as anything that the Buffy team has ever produced. Firstly, Once More With Feeling: an awesome achievement which probably deserves its own blog post, so I'll say nothing more on that one (except to mention that it's probably one of my favourite episodes of anything ever).

As it happens the following episode, Tabula Rasa, is also a firm favourite. I'm a big sucker for episodes of any show where you get to see the characters acting against their usual nature, or are placed in a different scenario (usually alternative universes or memory loss does the job). It's something of a light-hearted episode that nevertheless manages to end up at an absolutely crushing, heart-rending place. Quite possibly the most heartbreaking closing moments of the season.

Finally, while many episodes throughout the season contain their own highlights, there's really only one other episode that fully stands on its own merits and that's Normal Again. While this does broach the 'alternate reality' scenario to a degree, it's really the bold self-referential nature of this story (dare I say 'postmodernism'?) that really impresses me. Not only does it intelligently question the entire logic of the Buffy universe, but it even dares to suggest at the end that the whole series might, after all, be nothing more than the imaginings of a disturbed young girl.

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Dawn

No discussion of Season Six can really go by without at least a mention of Dawn. Through no fault of Michelle Trachtenberg's it has to be said that Dawn was definitely one of the low points of the season. Having spun an elaborate and intriguing backplot in order to bring Buffy's sister into existence at the start of Season Five, the writers quite clearly found themselves with little idea of what to do with her once that initial storyline had concluded.

Presenting her as a mirror for Buffy's neglect of her own life was a fair premise, but all we really ended up with was a spoilt and whiny teenage girl - quite possibly a very accurate presentation of one, but annoying to watch nonetheless. Furthermore, as seemed the case with a lot of the season, Dawn was inconsistent: whole episodes would go by where she seemed a perfectly normal person, only to become intolerable as soon as a script demanded a 'Dawn' moment ("Get out, get out, get OUUUTTTT!!!").

Big Bad: The Trio

So who's the Big Bad this season? We've had ancient vampires, snake demons, a Frankenstein monster type thing and a full-on god - now the only way is down. Actually, that's possibly a little unjust to the nerds who, at least on first assumption, seemed to be the big bads - or arch nemesises(?) - of Season Six.

To do another all-powerful supernatural villain would have been repeating the last five years (and how can you top having a god as the big bad?), so it makes sense to try something different. Buffy has always been big on the nerdcraft, and there's a central theme of 'real life' throughout Season Six, so having a group of ultra-nerds as the primary antagonists through the season seems a winning idea.

In truth you could argue that real life is the big bad of the season: all of the characters have more 'real life' problems than ever before, and for most of them it's winning the battle against those that becomes the real victory by the final episode. In this case you'd want a relatively small-scale villain to provide both a tangible threat and some comic relief. You'd also want a villain that doesn't distract too much from the 'real life issues' of the season.

For the most part it works. The nerds are funny and the nerds are also dangerous (some more than others). Unfortunately, Season Six tries to have its cake and eat it. The Trio - ostensibly comprising real people as opposed to gods, demons or vampires - never becomes a genuine threat until its members really start to dabble in the supernatural. Worse than that, The Trio is reduced to shotgun status by the time the actual season finale is upon us.

I think it's a fair point that Buffy is all about the demons and vampires, so we probably would feel a bit short-changed if the season finale ended up, for example, with Buffy foiling a gang of dastardly bank robbers. However, I also think it's a case of bait and switch to have one big bad predominant throughout the season, only to make the finale about a completely different villain. This is certainly one reason why I suspect 'The Trio as big bad' concept hadn't been given as much creative thought as it deserves.

Overall

It generally seems to be felt that blame for the failings of Season Six should be directed at writer and executive producer Marti Noxon. I have no evidence whether or not Noxon really was to blame, although Joss Whedon was famously forced to come to Noxon's defence on the matter.

What we do know that Whedon had his hands full with Firefly and Angel (Season 3) at the time, so he was more hands-off than he had been with previous seasons. For most previous seasons he had at least written and/or directed a handful of episodes. For Season Six he only directed one, the musical, which probably took up most of his time during the early production stages of the year. For the first time he didn't write the season finale (immediately suggesting he had less personal investment this time in where the season was heading), and it was one of only two seasons for which he didn't write the opener (the other was Season Five). However Whedon does claim he had full creative oversight of Season Six, so we have to assume all the storylines were developed with either his input or his approval.

Personally I think the season suffered simply because Whedon wasn't available to dot the i's and cross the t's. There's an anecdote concerning an early episode (The Pack, I think) which required a fat schoolkid as an extra for one scene. The director of the episode had sat the fat extra on a bench with a candy bar in his hand. Then Whedon comes along, takes the candy bar away and has the kid eating an apple instead: his reasoning being that just because the kid is fat it doesn't mean he stuffs himself with candy at every opportunity. It's a very simple change, but its avoidance of cliché and effort to do something a little different illustrates exactly the sort of detail that sets Buffy apart from other shows.

I believe Season Six lacked this off-the-cuff input because Whedon was simply not there to weed out the clichés and the literals, things that wouldn't have made it into the show previously slipped through this time around. In turn the year suffered from a severe lack of the sort of clever metaphor which is one of the show's most noteworthy strengths.

And for more on the 'death of metaphor' see my next post...

Update: for more worthwhile discussion on Season 6 check out this page on Whedonesque: http://whedonesque.com/comments/24137

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