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Date Posted: 14:12:36 08/13/05 Sat
Author: Rosalind
Author Host/IP: 154.20.231.210
Subject: Re: Rewatched "Freshman" and "Living Conditions"...
In reply to: DawnsMan 's message, "Rewatched "Freshman" and "Living Conditions"..." on 22:42:52 08/12/05 Fri

Season 4 has always been my favorite season. Chani's too, if my memory is correct. Too many TV shows have come to grief when it is time to make the characters' transition from one stage of life to another. The characters stay in high school to the point it becomes ridiculous or the writers attempt to keep everything the same even though the characters' life circumstances have changed completely. "Oh look, gang, it's Mr. Giles and he's our librarian at UCSunnydale, too!"

BtVS handled this brilliantly. The characters were allowed to grow in ways that perfectly fit their new lives. Both Giles and Joyce are empty-nesters with mid-life crises and there is a real possibility that Xander, Willow and Buffy will never regain the closeness they had in high school. By the end of the Season all these issues are resolved and it is exciting to watch this unfold. Plus the absolute brilliance of Spike and his behavior modification chip thus giving Buffy a new vampire without going the Angel route. The Freshman set this new tone beautifully. It raised issues that were not fully resolved until the end of the season with The Yoko Factor and Primevil.

Living Conditions was a very exciting episode for me personally in that it began to answer at a few questions I had about demons. Kathy is in every way a normal girl, except she's a millennia's old demon of course. She wants an education, she wants the full college living in a dorm being a freshman experience. She has a mother and a father who love her and don't think she's quite old enough to leave home. Her father is a bit of an old school patriarch type and her mother is worried sick. Kathy doesn't quite "get" it but she's willing to try.

Also it seems, from Giles's remarks, that some demons are souled. And, most exciting to me, demons have a way of looking just like us to get the good things our world can give them. In Living Conditions, we never learn exactly how Kathy gets her human covering -- this isn't explained until Season 5, episode 2 of Ats -- but it opens up the possiblity that almost any character we see as human could potentially be a demon encased in human flesh. As I say, exciting and unfortunately never fully addressed as a plot point, probably because of the sudden cancellation of Angel.

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[> Re: Rewatched "Freshman" and "Living Conditions"... -- TheDeb40, 15:00:40 08/13/05 Sat [1] (172.155.196.136)

Season 4 is the season I started watching Buffy on FX in reruns. I like most of the Season 4 epis - even Beer Bad. Of all the seasons, Season 4 brought the most laughs.

So I can overlook the sucky "Big Bad" of Adam.


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