Buffy Season 8
I just read the final volume of Season 8, the comic book continuation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Verdict: worst season ever, making Season 4 look coherent and tightly-plotted.
As usual, there were diamonds in the rough, especially moments of good dialogue in the issues Whedon was directly involved with. But there was a whole lot of rough.
Spoilers below...
Buffy's operation is funded by theft, a millions-times larger version of the rationalization Faith advanced way back in Season 3's "Bad Girls", the largest part of characterizing her as, um, a bad girl. This goes nearly unexamined. The good guys are fine with it.
The existence of vampires and slayers gets outed, and the whole world accepts it without blinking. We saw even the residents of Sunnydale manage to live in denial of the supernatural for seven years, and then suddenly, bam. Everyone knows it's part of how the world works.
It participated in the worst comic book traditions of no villain ever really being dead, no matter how contrived the villain's survival is.
The over-arching plot made no damn sense at all. The big bad is Angel! But he's secretly good! But he's responsible for who knows how many deaths! But that's ok; his sins are forgiven, because this is the Buffyverse and we're extraordinarily capricious about whose sins are forgiven.
Super-Buffy having super-sex with super-Angel just read like the most indulgent of fan-fiction.
As to the climax... really? Back to Sunnydale and the Hellmouth and the Master? Did the authors recently take a correspondence course from the Return of the Jedi school of creativity in which you recapitulate a previous climax but it's bigger this time?
The climax of Season 7 worked as well as it did (though, admittedly, mine seems to be a minority opinion in considering it to have worked so well) because of its finality. After 7 long years, they'd destroyed the Hellmouth, the fundamental Big Bad lurking beneath all the others. But, no, wait, Sunnydale's important again; there was a Bigger Bad beneath that Big Bad, and, who knows? If we ever run out of other ideas, maybe we'll reveal the top secret Biggerer Bad beneath that one!
The killing off of a major character played as badly as it usually does in comics, like a plot point being ticked off to Demonstrate the High Stakes and provide angst for the hero. But At What Cost! Was It a Pyrrhic Victory! The character deserved better (I've no quarrel with killing off a character, mind you -- my objection is that this was a Women in Refrigerators killing, even if it wasn't a woman this time.)
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