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Date Posted: 01:03:22 05/21/03 Wed
Author: BadPenguin
Author Host/IP: 172.172.48.92
Subject: Missed Opportunities (spoilers for Chosen) (long)

This was an emotional episode, being the last. If you went along for the ride it was even edge-of-your-seat enjoyable. In context with the franchise, though, it was an OK episode, not great. It’s certainly not “Hush” or “The Gift” or “The Body” or even in the top 20. This SHOULD have been the best episode out of all 144, they had a whole season to prepare for it. It should have made “Once More With Feeling” look second-rate.

A season finale for Buffy, being the great story that BtVS has been for these many years, should be the climax of the season, and wrap up the season. For the finale to fail to wrap up dangling questions is unfortunate. It is not adequate to say that everything left unanswered throughout the season could not be wrapped up in one episode. The writers weren’t limited to one episode, they could have started wrapping them up earlier or not left them dangling in the first place. Mutant Enemy knew all along they had exactly 22 episodes to tell the story. Which items are unresolved have been the subject of several long polls on this very board, instead of listing them again, which would be redundant, I’ll move on. Let’s just state that ME chose to ignore them, pretends they don’t exist, and hopes noone mentions them again. None are addressed in the finale.

The fight scenes were incredible. I mean that both in a good action-oriented way and in a not-credible way. One Ubervamp kicked Buffy’s butt up and down the streeets of Sunnydale earlier in the season. When staked with slayer strength, the UV shrugged it off. Now this is the Buffy who has been The Vampire Slayer for seven years. Not only has she that much experience of fighting some very nasty fighters, but also seven full years of Giles teaching her the accumulated knowledge of centuries of Slayers and Watchers in how to fight and pushing the envelope of what she can do. Yes, they had a Slayer boot camp for the SiTs, but you simply do not come out of boot camp a seasoned veteran equally as good as someone who has essentially been in constant combat for seven years. I will stack my military experience against everyone else here and put my stompy foot down that it just isn’t possible. Yet these girls, when embued with the same strength and speed as Buffy but without the reflexes and experience, suddenly they fight better than Buffy ever did. With bare fists and simple weapons they are killing Ubervamps left and right, even when jumped by several at once. I refer you to when Buffy finally killed the UberVamp in the Cage-O-Death scene. She barely, barely, won that fight and everyone universally said she won much too easily. It is safe to say if there had been two UverVamps there, Buffy would have lost. Yet suddenly, now, UverVamps are wimpy fighters, easily killed by novices. Pfaah, Bah! *spit, spit*

To play the Amulet of We Couldn’t Think of Anything Else card is inexcusable. If they had mentioned it earlier in the season and a good effort had been made to find it throughout the year had been made, I could have accepted it. Even if, with all of their searching, it turns out Wolfram & Hart had it all the time, they should have foreshadowed the presence and power of this world saving device. The way they played it left the impression they wrote themselves into a corner and didn’t know how to get out of it. Plus it seems they came up with the idea late in the game purely and simply to give Spike a noble death.

The deaths of Caleb and Anya were cartoonish. By this I mean the blades and bodies defied laws of physics during the cuts and there was an antiseptic lack of blood and guts. I’m not a big fan of gore, but there must be some attempt to seem somewhat realistic. The blow that cleaved Anya from shoulder to navel was done one-handed with a dagger (yeah, right) yet her body showed no impact from the blade. I could go deeply into the facts of blades meeting bones, but I’d bore you all. My brother-in-law, a butcher, summed it up during those scenes with, “Oh, please!” Let me summarize by saying the cuts looked as if Caleb & Anya’s bodies were made of soft cheese instead of flesh and bone and as if Caleb’s blood wouldn’t have splattered all over Buffy (instead she is just-out-of-the drycleaner unbloody). Perhaps you are unfamiliar with what happens when coiled intestines are released. Suffice to say it is not pretty anywhere in the vicinity.

In addition, as others have already mentioned, the death of Anya was treated as a cast-off event, with hardly any effect on the emotions of the Scoobies. How quickly she is forgotten. Sure, Xander asks after her, but gave no more reaction than he would have for one of the SiTs or a stranger. Bah! This is the Anya who agonized over the wounded Giles just two years previous, but Giles doesn’t even seem to remember her name.

Buffy’s “miraculous” healing made no sense. One moment she can’t stand, the next she is outrunning a bus and bounding from roof top to roof top. Slayers heal fast, not that fast.

Some of the dialogue was witty, much of it was childish. There were some moments that were surprisingly funny (Giles playing D&D was silly but funny nonetheless). The drawing on the punching bag and Buffy’s reaction to it was quite enjoyable. I laughed out loud with Willow tipping over after the spell, “That was nifty.” So Willow-ish. When the core four peeled off before the fight, that was probably among the most touching scenes ever. (Ranking behind The Death of Joyce, Buffy Killing Angel, Death of Jenny Calender, Death of Buffy in The Gift, and the end of the yellowcrayon scene, not necessarily in that order). There were a few good scenes, but they didn’t add up to a great episode. You know those sites that accumulate great quotes from episodes? They’re not going to find many good ones to include from this episode.

There are intelligent, articulate ladies on the board who have already addressed whether the supposed female empowerment theme of this episode really is female empowerment or a paternalistic version of it. I will not trespass in this territory and defer to their wisdom. I will simply note there are considerable and vehement feelings on this issue.

For Buffy, Willow & Xander, before the fight, to joke about what they’re going to do the next day was, for me believable. It ties in to the normal attempt by troops about to go into battle to pretend they are not worried, to put on a brave face, to downplay the danger about to be encountered. It also neatly tied in to the friendships of these individuals. However, to return to that at the end of the episode instead of grieving was uncharacteristic not only for these people but for any people. Remember the miners that were trapped underground last year? Imagine if a couple had died and, immediately after being rescued, reporters had interviewed the survivors. Do you think there would have been anything other than honest grief in the hearts of these miners or that they would have been able to keep from expressing it? Bah, again! Survivor’s grief is real and crippling. Only when a veteran has lost a LOT of buddies, over an extended period of time, do they get so calloused they appear to shrug off another loss as no big deal. Even then, this seeming lack of impact is really only on the outside. The Scoobs have not nearly gone through enough losses to be so blase as to take the “Bah. Another trooper” route.

If this were the first episode I had ever seen, I wouldn’t be disappointed in it at all. The sad part for me is that the Buffy staff has done better in the past, had plenty of opportunity to do it again, and chose not to. Instead of a deeply crafted story, this seemed like “Die Hard” which was an enjoyable movie, but not intellectual fare. I wanted more.

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Replies:

[> Some good points, but I liked it -- Quills, 10:43:55 05/21/03 Wed (64.254.192.243)

Let me just start by seeing that there really is a lot I liked about Chosen. In fact, in a post below, I listed 20 things that I specifically liked about it.

That said, I think you make some good points BadPenguin. I feel a bit ungrateful about acknowledging some of these things, but nonetheless, I do think it could have been a bit stronger in a few areas:

* Buffy's "mortal" wound? It really wasn't mortal, I guess? Just the First trying to scare her?

* Lack of Gravitas part I:
More gravitas, please: I guess I wanted to see the Scoobies feeling more scared . . . feeling more in general. I didn't mind their light-hearted conversation before they parted in the high school about shopping and such, but I guess I wanted to see that their attempt at a light-hearted conversation was just that — an attempt. Through their jokes about going to the mall, I wanted to feel, in their voices, in the looks on their faces, that they were really scared and loved each other very much. Instead, it felt a bit glib to me, like a scene from Seinfeld, or something (and I love Seinfeld, but I don't think the tone from that show necessarily works on BtVS).

Similarly, when they parted, I didn't like the way they just left Giles standing there. I realize it was supposed to be an homage to their high school days when Buffy & Xander & Willow would walk away talking about something superficial and Giles would roll his eyes and say the world was doomed, but it didn't work for me. Would someone hug this guy already? And, I know that things have been tense between Buffy and Giles, but wouldn't they have made up, at least a little bit? Things between these two remained cold, cold, cold all the way through the end, and that saddens me.

Buffy did show a little special warmth with Xander when the two of them briefly held hands before parting, but, from what I recall, there wasn't a special moment between Buffy and Willow either.

* Lack of Gravitas part II:
After they all survive (except Anya and Amanda and a few other SITs?), it all seemed a bit too breezy and light, again, to me in tone. Wasn't anyone else sad about Anya's death? Or Amanda's? Or anyone else's? And, as you mention BadPenguin, had the entire town evacuated? If not, wouldn't there be some sadness at the potentially extreme loss of human life? I choose to believe that the town had been evacuated, but I wish we had been explicitly told.

These rumblings aside, I did like the episode quite well. The feelings I mentioned above are what make it a B+ for me rather than an A.

Still, I'm happy that it was a good episode . . . there was a lot of pressure on this one, and I think it would have been easy, under the pressure, to buckle and write an episode that . . . wasn't so good.


P.S. I had no problem with the amulet — thought it was kind of nifty — but I can see your point about how it might have been nice if it had been mentionedon AtVS before.


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