We’re excited to be back from hiatus! We may be even slower than we were in the past… but we will be continuing our posts regularly from now on! We missed this blog and our readers and are always happy to hear from you.
Now… on with my now very belated recaps of the last season of Homeland.
Continue reading →
Janes (a True Stan) and Nerdy Spice (a New Fan) are watching all of Buffy together and comparing notes.
It’s Halloween in Sunnydale, which means it’s time for Giles to insist that nothing ever happens on Halloween, only for something to happen on Halloween. In this case, Buffy and friends attend a haunted house at a frat (always a terrible idea) which, thanks to some ill-placed decorative occult symbols, becomes an actual haunted house. It’s pretty similar to season two’s “Halloween,” where everyone transforms into their costumes–in a great way. Continue reading →
Janes (a True Stan) and Nerdy Spice (a New Fan) are watching all of Buffy together and comparing notes.
Buffy’s off to college–and she has a roommate, Kathy, from whom she has to keep her secret identity secret, which as we all know she’s GREAT at. She’s extremely nervous, in contrast to Willow who’s excited for every class and every protest. And things don’t go super great for her: she gets yelled at by a professor for whispering in class, she can’t get into the one class she kind of wants, and the first cute guy she meets can’t remember her name because he’s more interested in talking shop with Willow about Psych 105, while the second cute guy gets turned into a vampire by a ring of goth stoner vamps that like to eat college freshmen and then just pack up their rooms and take their stuff and leave a good-bye note so that no one realizes they died. (I guess the parents never bother calling the school to find out what happened when their kids don’t come home for Thanksgiving. Just roll with it.)
OK, sooo, I fell behind on this! But this season of Homeland was so great I can’t resist recapping it, so here we go, just a couple months late…
Note to our readers: The following post is trivial in comparison to what’s going on in the world, and we recognize that. We stand with the Black Lives Matter movement, with George Floyd, with the protesters and with all who are standing up against racism and police violence. Black lives matter!
Janes (a True Stan) and Nerdy Spice (a New Fan) are watching all of Buffy together and comparing notes.
So, Graduation Day is finally (almost) here. As far as we know, Buffy and Angel are still broken up, but… come on. It’s a tossup. Everyone’s nostalgic, including a blonde popular girl who was always mean to Willow, and Percy, Willow’s dumb, muscular tutee, who thanks her for not beating him up again like that time she was Evil Vamp Willow. Except for Xander, who’s convinced he’s going to die, because as we know, Graduation Day is also Ascension Day. The Mayor is going to be the graduation speaker, on the very day his plan is to turn into a demon and “snack on populace.” Not a good sign for the seniors.
Janes (a True Stan) and Nerdy Spice (a New Fan) are watching all of Buffy together and comparing notes.
We’re getting closer to finding out what the Mayor’s endgame is. It involves a package shipped to him from Central America, which he informs us of while creepily feeding Faith homemade cookies. He also gives Faith a shiny new knife to play with. She promptly uses it to kill the courier who’s delivering the Mayor’s package.
All the other kids have the future on the brain, since graduation is fast approaching: Willow got into Oxford, Xander is planning a big Kerouac-style backpacking trip (insert massive eyroll here), and Buffy got into Northwestern but can’t go because Faith is no longer a very good backup Slayer. Oh, and Cordelia appears to spend the episode shopping for fancy prom dresses–but we find out at the end that she’s actually working at the fancy prom dress shop, throwing her college plans into question even though she got into good schools. Meanwhile, Buffy and Angel have gotten back together, and are patrolling for vampires every night together. But Buffy’s also a little worried about their future together if every date night is gonna just take place in the cemetery.
Well, that kinda sucked.
My reaction to prestige HBO series’ final seasons keeps being “Why did that have to get packed into one season?”, which bothers me for a number of reasons. First, do I really want more Game of Thrones, if the Game of Thrones I got made me so miserable? Why would I trust someone who made me watch Westworld Season 3 to instead make me watch Westworld seasons 3a, 3b, and 3c? Short answer, because I’m a masochist. Second, why can’t I just say that a season is bad, instead of trying to imagine a world where it was better?
Also, yes, this was the final season of Westworld, because I’m done watching it. As should you be.
Let’s try to recap this series in 3 sentences.
Instead, let me try to list all of the atomic plot concepts that were introduced and then discarded in this season:
I got to ten massive ideas without even trying, and without discussing any of the relationships between pairs or sets of those ideas, like the hosts’ decisions about their morality with respect to these various actors. Can’t you imagine spending a compelling season of television on just one or two of those ideas? How about the first two: Westworld season 3 is about Dolores getting her footing in the human world, and her selves deciding who or what they are. Doesn’t that sound better than what we got? It’s crazy to realize that we actually… skipped that. By the time we see Dolores in season 3 she already knows that there’s an omniscient AI that rules human affairs and has decided to destroy it. Hale-Dolores has her subplot about self-harming into discovering love for her family, but all the other Doloreis are… fine. Wouldn’t it have been worthwhile to follow her/them in those discoveries and decisions?
One reason why I think I take this critical approach is that it lets me skip so much else – characterization, cinematography, soundtrack…
Some of those might have been good, some were definitely bad, but you can just look at a storyboard for this season—not even a storyboard, a bulleted outline—and realize that it could not possibly work inside 10 hour-long episodes, no matter how good or bad those executional choices ended up being.
As I said: that kinda sucked.
Janes (a True Stan) and Nerdy Spice (a New Fan) are watching all of Buffy together and comparing notes.
A Willow-centric episode! Sort of like Willow’s The Zeppo, but far more interesting. Willow is starting to get a complex about being the “good girl” all the time. Snyder basically forces her to tutor a dumb jock, who expects her to just do his homework for him. Giles asks her to drop everything to do research at the drop of a hat, and Buffy hits a nerve by calling her “Old Reliable.” Plus, her fashion choices have become 1000% more questionable since the previous episode, just in case you forgot she was nerdy:
Janes (a True Stan) and Nerdy Spice (a New Fan) are watching all of Buffy together and comparing notes.
So basically, the theme of this episode is that Xander is useless. Obviously, I am HERE FOR IT.
Previously on Homeland: Carrie got a tip to pursue Samira Noori, and that helped her secure peace with the Taliban by blackmailing G’ulom; Saul made a ceasefire deal with Haqqani; a brash young soldier whose name I still don’t know thought Max was a lucky charm; Beau Bridges realized that his Republican VP was probably running against him in the next election; Jenna and Mike let Carrie meet with Yevgeny to incriminate herself, and when Carrie met with him she discovered to her horror that she and Yevgeny had apparently been rather intimate in the asylum; and she lied to Mike about the meeting, knowing he hadn’t been able to hear her. Continue reading →
