I always enjoy hearing what people think of the non-Buffy shows they're watching, so I thought I'd do some occasional postings on "other" TV.  But first I thought it was time to do a bit of a squee about how great the new way of watching TV is.


( Just a few paragraphs on how great it is to be a TV fan these days. )

Whedonesque offered up this lovely link:

http://www.thrfeed.com/2009/10/fox-we-will-air-all-13-dollhouse-episodes.html

Dollhouse pulled in good DVR numbers.  I had thought it made sense to put a DVR intensive show on Fridays and am glad to hear that's exactly how the executives are thinking.  

I have my reservations, but it's great to be able to kick back and enjoy the series in the knowledge that the season isn't going to just get chopped off at the knees. 

I'll put up thoughts at some point, but my flist is lighting up like a tree on last night's episode.  Compared to the absolute dead silence after Instinct.

Flist rankings:  Belle Chose, Vows, Instinct
My rankings:  Vows, Belle Chose, Instinct

Meanwhile, check out the lyrics to the Bowie Song:

( Lyrics to Oh You Pretty Things )


The more immediate reference of the title?

belle chose:
Beautiful thing , a French borrowing and literary euphemism used by Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) and his contemporaries for the vagina . See vagina for synonyms.

gabrielleabellehas an interesting post up talking about the writers' intent to portray Xanders' speech to Buffy in Into the Woods as being The Take on Buffy's relationship with Riley.  Most people think that the writers want the audience to think it was good that Buffy ran after Riley and tragic that she didn't get there on time.  And if I recall from the script, there are cues in the Buffy/Xander scene (most notably "he's getting through to her") which sure sound like Xander has an important truth that Buffy needs to hear.

The subject of writers' intent comes up a lot in the context of critiques of the show.  I very often here the complaint that the writers tell us they were writing something different from the way it came across -- especially when people are complaining about season 6.  We were supposed to see Spike as just the bad boyfriend dragging Buffy down, but that's at odds with the far more complex relationship that ended up on the screen.

We could debate all day and all night about what the writers intended.   But I keep finding myself puzzled at why.  Joss is an existentialist.  That means there is no meaning "out there".  We are the ones who make meaning.  Insofar as Joss is the creator of the Buffyverse, he gets to tell  us what happened and what the rules are.  But he doesn't get to tell us what it means.  If he really is an existentialist, he shouldn't want to tell us what it means.  The writers can show us Xander making a speech to Buffy about why she should run after Riley.  That's in the text.  What's not in the text is any evaluation about whether he's right.  That's a judgment call that WE get to make. 

Well, does it matter that they comment on Xanders' speech by giving us the big Hollywood running after the helicopter scene with the big music and the dramatic editting?  Is that a way of telling us that it is just TRUE that Buffy should have run after Riley?  I don't think so.  Stuff like that is meant to reflect the characters' POV.  Buffy's tragic inability to catch up to Riley is how BUFFY is constructing that event.  There's no doubt that Buffy ends up concluding that Xander was right.  She constructs the end of B/R as being due to her failure. But that's how Buffy constructs the end of *all* her relationships.  Back in season one we were told that Buffy's deepest fear is that Hank left because of her.  She's going to see every other leaving through that lens.  And that's what the writers are showing us.  In Buffy's mind she just played out a tragic, dramatic scene to end her relationship wth Riley.  That's all the writers get to tell us.

The evaluation?  That's up to the audience.  I think Xander was full of crap, mostly talking about his own issues.  I think it's a bit sad that Buffy's emotional make-up is such that she was going to buy Xander's crap.  I can't work up a hatred of ITW on the grounds that the writers want me to feel something that I don't feel, because I don't think the writers get to tell me how to feel, and I don't think these writers want to dictate to me how I should feel.  Marty Noxon might think it's sad that Buffy let Riley get away, but all she gets to write is *that* Riley got away and how Buffy felt about it.   I quite like the episode.  It gives us a good portrait of the hows and whys of the B/R break-up.  It gives us some interesting insight into Riley's character.  Spike's role in the episode reminds us just how far Spike is from understanding what love is about, while also suggesting something about his character that grounds the subsequent growth in Spike's understanding of what love is. Best of all, ITW gets Riley gone.  And happily the writers don't drag it out in subsequent episodes.  Riley doesn't get moped over nearly as much as Parker got moped over, let alone the major epic endless mopage over Angel.  That's a portrait of where Buffy is emotionally.  We get to make of it what we will.

Pretty darned good.  Not sure why I'm not quite to squee.   Last year my heart sank every Saturday morning when I saw that the ratings were bad.  The ratings were bad again today, and my heart did not sink.  I have no idea what's behind my emotional distance.  There was an awful lot to like about Vows.  Spoilery thoughts follow below the cut:

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The buzz is quite good.  I'm looking forward to it.   But over the summer, my reservations about the show increased rather than decreased. Thoughts on Epitaph One below the cut.

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Three pages sure generated a lot of discussion, didn't they?  I was offline last week, but read a lot of the discussion.  angearia and 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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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.

I have two.  Message me if you want one. 

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
 

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

 

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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.

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 )