Something to Sing About (The Spell We Cast With Buffy)

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards
-Kierkegaard

Willow Rosenberg promo photo, Trekkie Gal

Whenever I watch a film trilogy or a tv series boxset, I reach the end and want to start over again. A good test of the quality of the material would be whether it could stand up to an immediate repeat viewing. I've never done that - when I've finished watching Back to the Future, for example, I always leave at least a few weeks before watching it again. It is possible to ruin a good thing and I hate to spoil BTTF like Jurassic Park. Considering most films have a runtime of roughly 100 minutes, you'd need to set aside close to five hours to revisit a trilogy on DVD, easy enough. Now consider revisiting a long-running tv show on disc: nearly forty-five minutes for American network productions with twenty or so episodes a season comes to fifteen hours. Now you need to justify watching all the way through an old series.

I want to watch through Buffy The Vampire Slayer again, and I've been meaning to for two years now. I only bought the first four seasons. That means when I get to the end of S4 and feel nostalgic for the early seasons I don't have to watch through another three so-so years of the show before I can go back. Maybe I never bought the final three seasons because BBC2 would repeat the previous seasons after the current series ended, thus canonising the early ones in my mind. I did like the growing inclusion of Spike and his character arc, and Once More With Feeling is the high point of S6 which started with the entertaining troika and ended with a paper-thin drugs allegory that killed off Willow's character for me (Wallflowers with hats are cute, dammit). When the S5 premier aired I thought having an episode about Dracula was borderline jumping the shark, but the sudden cliffhanger introduction of Dawn really made me believe it had nuked the fridge. I understand the narrative justifications behind the character and her introduction, but I still feel it was messing with the formula of the core cast and their circumstances. S4 was good despite the Scooby Gang leaving school - the setting since the beginning of the show, a bridge they well and truly burned.

Out of a desire for completeness I'm going to get the final three seasons despite my misgivings. But I still want to avoid spending weeks to get to the final episode only to want to go back to the start. Remembering the quote at the top from the liner notes of The Manic's Forever Delayed, I thought about the possibility of watching the whole of Buffy from the end to the beginning. Or at least watch the last three that way, getting them out the way and enjoying the first four again. An interesting way to mark 11 years and four and three quarter months since I first saw it on BBC2, also a good enough excuse to revisit those episode reviews I did seven years ago.

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