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2maggie2
07 July 2009 @ 02:58 pm
Three pages sure generated a lot of discussion, didn't they?  I was offline last week, but read a lot of the discussion.  [info]angearia and [info]stormwreath offered particularly interesting analysis.  I really loved it -- mostly because it was a classic comedy-overlaying-darkness deal that Joss does so well.  I also loved it because I finally got something of what I've wanted for Spike -- namely clear evidence that he's a big deal to Buffy (however she actually feels about him).   A few comments about that and some other random observations below the cut.


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2maggie2
I've not been posting or even commenting much lately.  Lots of trips hither and yon.  Alas, my whole life is going on hiatus for a while because my mother is very ill and I'm going home to do the daughter-thing.  There is internet chez my parents, but not wireless, and it's hard to get time on their computer.  I have no idea when I'll be back.  But I will be back!!  Have a great summer.
 
 
2maggie2
03 June 2009 @ 04:50 pm

The topic of the day is immortality and whether or not it's a good thing.  I tend to think it is not -- at least not if it's the sort that Spike or Angel has to look forward to, i.e. an unlimited number of days.

 

Ramblings on immortality and life and all that stuff. And a whole paragraph about Spike! )
 
 
2maggie2
20 May 2009 @ 01:59 pm
I have two.  Message me if you want one. 
 
 
2maggie2
15 May 2009 @ 03:10 pm
ETA:  IT'S BEEN RENEWED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


I don't know why news like this makes me all tingly and happy, but it does:  Prospects for Dollhouse are looking good.

"Fox's official decision could go down to the wire before Monday; will post updates this weekend if the winds shift, but as of Friday morning ... the rough draft plan of Fox's fall includes Joss Whedon's show. "

http://www.thrfeed.com/2009/05/dollhouse-second-season.html

Link courtesy of Whedonesque
 

 
 
2maggie2
12 May 2009 @ 05:15 pm
I just saw that Dollhouse is going to start airing across the pond next week.  Meanwhile on this side of the pond there is (improbably) a real hope that the show could be renewed.  I'm a huge fan of the show; and was elated to see that its cancellation is not a done deal.  That said, it's a strange show, and my love for it comes from a different place than does my love for Buffy and Angel.  Some spoiler-free thoughts on Dollhouse below the cut.

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2maggie2

I'll leave the reviews to others.  What I have is some speculation. 

A Theory about Season 8 -- Full of Spoilers from #25 )
 
 
2maggie2
02 April 2009 @ 01:50 am

Maybe someone else will write a review that makes me appreciate "Safe" more.  But I'm sort of let down.  Review with spoilers under the cut.

 

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2maggie2
20 March 2009 @ 10:21 pm

And tonight we learn, *finally*, that Dollhouse really *is* a Whedon show.   The whole Whedon package.  Plot twists, layers, challenging the audience's expectations, and raising hard questions about just about everything. 

I still have no idea why it took five episodes of some remarkably dull televsion to get here.  But whatever.  We have ourselves a show.
 

 
 
2maggie2

Predators and Prey came out today.  A brief summary and some not-so brief reflections.

 

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2maggie2
28 February 2009 @ 04:11 pm
So I made a point of watching Dollhouse last night, having forgotten last week and having to catch it on the web.  Like the first episode, this one was labor to watch.  As in, if it were anything but a Joss show, I'd not have bothered.  That's not to say that I think it lacks promise.  There's lots that is intriguing.  But huge stretches of last night just seemed like the ordinary TV you only watch when you are babysitting and bored out of your mind.  (My days of doing that are some distance in the past, but I still remember them well).  It doesn't spark interesting thoughts in me, and there's nothing about it that makes me want to dive in and find interesting thoughts to think about it.

I'm not planning on giving it up, though.  And no, it's not because I'm going to squint and turn my head sideways and convince myself that it's great because all Jossian things are great.  It's because if I hadn't had a friend I really respected swearing to me on a stack of Bibles that it was worth slogging through 1.5 seasons of Buffy to get to the good  stuff, I'd have stopped with BtVS after episode 4.  Because season 1 of Buffy, for me?  Pure labor.  The metaphors seemed obvious.  The characters too obviously crafted to appeal in certain ways.  And I'm not all about the girl power so that wasn't a motivating factor.  And much as I've come to love Buffy, season one is still mostly labor.  It's even not a great source of interesting meta because the show was obviously still finding its ways and some things really did get shifted around -- so, for example, Darla isn't hardly Darla, and there's no point in doing meta to try to pretend that she is.  Not that you can't find good stuff in season one.  But if that's all there ever was of BtVS, well, it weren't much to write home about.

Has Joss *ever* done a good first season?  Joss's greatness, judging by his one unadulterated success, is unfolding a story across a long period of time, in a way that shifts expectations and undermines assumptions, and develops characters who are nearly as messy and complicated as in real life.  Joss's particular talent, the one I care about, is that he knows what to do with a very big canvass.  And because it's such a big canvass, the first chapter in his story is small potatoes, because it's really just stage-setting for the big drama to come.  Firefly was much better than the first season of Buffy, but I couldn't get invested in it because it  had already been cancelled by the time I watched on DVD, and it was really too painful to see all that set-up knowing we were never going to get to the pay-off.   (And Serenity seemed to me to be what you'd get if you tried to breathlessly tell seasons 2-7 of Buffy in two hours).

Of course, all the tea leaves suggest that Dollhouse is going to get axed at the knees as well.  And even if it survives, the fact that Joss used his big canvass very well once, doesn't mean that his second big canvass project will be great as well.  But it would be nice if it turned out to be.

Oh, yes, about the comics -- I think they really are meant to be a new chapter rather than a simple continuation.  So there's the same demand for patience while the story sets up.  I think that having labelled it as season 8, Joss owes us more connection to BtVS than we've gotten so far.  But I also think he's starting to pay off the slow intro, so this is sort of like sliding into mid-season two of Buffy, where it became clear tha there was more potential there than you might have guessed at the start.   But it'll still be a while before I can decide whether Joss really is a one hit wonder, or a guy with a well of talent for big canvass story telling.
 
 
2maggie2
12 February 2009 @ 05:35 pm

This is not a wrap up of After the Fall.  Nor is it a continuation of the many rants I've ranted about After the Fall.  It's got a few criticisms in there (cause I just can't help myself), but mostly this is a meditation on why I have gotten so negative about a work that actually isn't the worst piece of fiction ever written.  It helped me to work this through and it might be of interest to some cause it has reflections on the status of an author tapped to continue a fictional universe created by someone else.

 

Thoughts below the cut )
 
 
2maggie2

The audio on this interview with Scott Allie is really not very good.  But it sounds to me (around the ten minute mark) that he's saying two things:

 

 

Below cut for spoilers )
 
 
2maggie2
07 February 2009 @ 07:04 pm
A recap of some exchanges about Scott Allie's answer about Buffy the Bank Robber, a few thoughts, and one conclusion
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2maggie2

Here's a line-by-line commentary on the opening scene of season 8.  I got the bug to do this from the conversation a while back about the relative merits of the comics and fanfiction. My claim was that while fanfiction has many thinks to recommend it, it doesn't make me think the way the comics do.  Of course, one person's fascinating read can be another person's lame crack fic.  But while I can't make the case that it should be fascinating to you, it did seem worthwhile to just show the thoughts that the comics spawn in me, i.e. just lay out why I find it fascinating.

As for the thoughts themselves, I think it can be summed up by saying that Joss really does mean this to be a break from the series.  The shift in medium and the narrative leap both serve to underscore that.  The specific break is that the metaphor of the slayer is now quite different for reasons I spell out below.  That's not to say that there's no continuity -- the shift in metaphor changes the themes of the show but it doesn't abandon them.  And there's still an onus on the storyteller to tell us enough about the characters to make us care for them, which I expect to happen as the unfolding of what's going on continues.

Detailed commentary below the cut )



 

 
 
2maggie2


In response to some comments on my previous post, here's a four-page essay on the role Spike's soul plays in Buffy's story. 

 

The essay is below the cut )
 
 
2maggie2
26 January 2009 @ 03:46 pm
Too many words in defense of the claim that people who say Spike never did any good deed  for good reasons are really stupid.

 

The actual argument below the cut )
 
 
2maggie2
12 January 2009 @ 05:27 pm
It's not so obvious to me that Spike isn't going to play a role in season 8

 

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2maggie2
A few thoughts about The Revelation: