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tori_reviewsBuffy the Vampire Slayer: 3x05 – Homecoming
I don’t know that I have a lot to say on the plot of this episode. There are definitely things worth talking about, but the plot is…not much of one. It does weird things with the world-building that I’m not sure I’m on board with, it’s pretty slight in general, and just kind of okay. In some ways this is the kind of episode I can sometimes praise, because it’s just fine enough little episode, but I guess I wasn’t in the mood for a fine enough little episode this time.
I think I like Trick as a concept, because it is interesting to see ideas of how vampire society would be changing in the modern (or then-modern) day. But that very concept necessitates a lot of thought going into it that I don’t think we’ve seen from him so far. And I feel like the show is almost more interested in him as a presence and in that…he’s just kind of okay. In some ways I think he needed to be a Big Bad, to fully explore what he could represent in the supernatural world, but I think he would have worn out his welcome pretty quickly (he still might).
On the flip side, we’re getting movement on the Mayor as Big Bad and I can’t decide if I like that or not either. The first scene is very overt in how it’s making him scary by not necessarily seeming scary. They couldn’t really play it another way, as there have been enough hints dropped that the Mayor is in on something big, I kind of wish we hadn’t met him until Trick got there, but it’s hard to say how that hypothetical might have played.
On a broader level, and I suspect this will apply to coming seasons as well, introducing a slow-burn Big Bad is a tricky task. Especially one who is operating from a position of power, as villains often do. It takes us away from the heroes’ point of view, because we know who’s pulling the strings. It may or may not get frustrating that the heroes aren’t seeing what seem like tells to the audience who is in the know. But we don’t necessarily want to feel like the heroes are little shrimp in the bad guys’ plans and don’t matter, especially if they’re being distracted by so much small stuff. It also necessitates a fair amount of plot armor and obfuscation to explain why the villains don’t make a direct move on the heroes or why the heroes don’t notice what’s going on.
I’m not saying I could do better, especially on a weekly semi-serialized story in the late 90s; I mean, I’m not JMS.
This episode overall has kind of a weird vibe to it, that I’m worried is going to continue. Because the Scooby/high school plot is so separate from the Hellmouthy plot going on. Obviously they intersect, but the high school plot is so high school that it only kind of feels like it goes on this show. The Xander/Willow sections could be on Gilmore Girls at the same time as this; it’s specific enough to be these characters, but the main drama could be anywhere.
And even Buffy’s drama feels…scattered. Most of it makes sense, there are both stated and unstated reasons why she dives so hard into the Homecoming stuff, but I don’t quite feel like we’re in her head as much as we could be, and so the pieces of her issues lay there, making sense to go together but not put together.
In some ways it doesn’t make sense that she would be bothered by her social situation now. She’s been in Sunnydale for a year and a half…going on two years, and she’s always been at the bottom of the high school social food chain (well after a couple hours once she got on Cordy’s bad side). In other ways it makes sense that it would be bothering her now, but half the reasons why it makes sense to be now are unstated. It makes sense to be connected with her running away and difficulty coming back, but it’s not addressed as being all that connected to that arc. It makes sense for someone who has rarely thought about her life outside of how it fits into high school, would be bothered by her legacy in high school being so easily forgotten.
But taking that any further is not really explored. Reasserting her identity as more than the Slayer, when she had been rejecting so much of who she is. That when she thinks back on her junior year, all she sees is the mess with Angel, and she wants her high school story to be more than that. And while rarely stated, it remains true that she always stands a good chance of not making it out of high school alive, and she’d like there to be some record that she was alive and a person. Not that *she* can look back on in later years that she might not have, but to know that she hasn’t been erased from history. Which then connects back to her recently kind of trying to erase herself from existence, and now trying to get herself back. The pieces are there (by and large) but the story doesn’t put them together.
Also I kept having questions about the logistics of this mess of high school drama. If anyone can just run for Homecoming queen, I think there would be more than four candidates. In my high school, we had a round of nominations, then the top 5-6 would be in the pool to be voted on the take the crown. And campaigning was…very little as I recall, certainly nothing like we see here. Of course I never went to homecoming and only remember who the homecoming queen was my senior year because she was also the kicker on the football team and everybody pooled together to have the homecoming queen in a football jersey. Also at my high school, seniors got to use a picture of their choice (within reason) in the yearbook rather than your basic school portrait; and even if one did use a generic school picture, pictures/retakes were taken more than once a year (for the whole school, not just seniors). I also did yearbook one year, and not a lot of the yearbook was finalized in October.
Okay, at least for a bit, let’s talk about Angel, and Buffy with Angel. Because I’m still stuck on ew, especially after everything I got focused on last time. While Scott is rather a jerk for dumping Buffy so quickly after they agreed to go to the dance together, his comment that she seemed to have more life in her earlier kind of rings true. She clearly wasn’t that into him, but as soon as Angel was back, the life starts getting sucked out of her.
And when you put that up there with the somewhat unspoken issues underpinning the Homecoming plot…it’s another not good look. Buffy wants to be more than the Slayer, wants to matter in the world as a person…and she’s not going to be that with Angel. And when she’s with Angel he immediately pulls her away from trying to have more to her life. Without Angel, it kind of looks like Buffy had the rest of her things working together; add in Angel and everything starts to fall apart.
There is a generous reading of my point there, that he is enough for her to not worry so much about what is kind of distracting things; but I didn’t mean it that way. I mean he pulls her away from and chains her into his box rather than him finding a way to be in her world (I do think he was trying at times in s2, but that was a different time).
What am I shipping?
I’m not saying I’m shipping it exactly, but there is a very easy queer reading of Buffy and Faith here. Like Faith knows she’s bisexual and testing the waters with Buffy, who isn’t quite aware that she can be into girls. That Buffy is flustered that Faith would be asking her out, but…is she asking her out? Buffy doesn’t know. Weirdly, I’m not sure Faith is into Buffy as much as I kind of think Buffy might be into Faith, but Faith is a lot more comfortable with test driving a date than Buffy is.
I think Angel might be a little caught up on Giles. Now, Angel well should feel guilty for what he did to Giles, but there’s something a little weird about him singling Giles out.
Giles/plot armor? He’s definitely using it.
I am so easily persuaded into Willow/Xander. Even if I did spend a chunk of their scenes wondering why Willow’s room didn’t appear to have a big glass outside door anymore. If it wasn’t so girly looking, I’d say it could make sense to be Xander’s room as it looks very different from when we saw Willow’s before.
I don’t know that I have a lot to say on the plot of this episode. There are definitely things worth talking about, but the plot is…not much of one. It does weird things with the world-building that I’m not sure I’m on board with, it’s pretty slight in general, and just kind of okay. In some ways this is the kind of episode I can sometimes praise, because it’s just fine enough little episode, but I guess I wasn’t in the mood for a fine enough little episode this time.
I think I like Trick as a concept, because it is interesting to see ideas of how vampire society would be changing in the modern (or then-modern) day. But that very concept necessitates a lot of thought going into it that I don’t think we’ve seen from him so far. And I feel like the show is almost more interested in him as a presence and in that…he’s just kind of okay. In some ways I think he needed to be a Big Bad, to fully explore what he could represent in the supernatural world, but I think he would have worn out his welcome pretty quickly (he still might).
On the flip side, we’re getting movement on the Mayor as Big Bad and I can’t decide if I like that or not either. The first scene is very overt in how it’s making him scary by not necessarily seeming scary. They couldn’t really play it another way, as there have been enough hints dropped that the Mayor is in on something big, I kind of wish we hadn’t met him until Trick got there, but it’s hard to say how that hypothetical might have played.
On a broader level, and I suspect this will apply to coming seasons as well, introducing a slow-burn Big Bad is a tricky task. Especially one who is operating from a position of power, as villains often do. It takes us away from the heroes’ point of view, because we know who’s pulling the strings. It may or may not get frustrating that the heroes aren’t seeing what seem like tells to the audience who is in the know. But we don’t necessarily want to feel like the heroes are little shrimp in the bad guys’ plans and don’t matter, especially if they’re being distracted by so much small stuff. It also necessitates a fair amount of plot armor and obfuscation to explain why the villains don’t make a direct move on the heroes or why the heroes don’t notice what’s going on.
I’m not saying I could do better, especially on a weekly semi-serialized story in the late 90s; I mean, I’m not JMS.
This episode overall has kind of a weird vibe to it, that I’m worried is going to continue. Because the Scooby/high school plot is so separate from the Hellmouthy plot going on. Obviously they intersect, but the high school plot is so high school that it only kind of feels like it goes on this show. The Xander/Willow sections could be on Gilmore Girls at the same time as this; it’s specific enough to be these characters, but the main drama could be anywhere.
And even Buffy’s drama feels…scattered. Most of it makes sense, there are both stated and unstated reasons why she dives so hard into the Homecoming stuff, but I don’t quite feel like we’re in her head as much as we could be, and so the pieces of her issues lay there, making sense to go together but not put together.
In some ways it doesn’t make sense that she would be bothered by her social situation now. She’s been in Sunnydale for a year and a half…going on two years, and she’s always been at the bottom of the high school social food chain (well after a couple hours once she got on Cordy’s bad side). In other ways it makes sense that it would be bothering her now, but half the reasons why it makes sense to be now are unstated. It makes sense to be connected with her running away and difficulty coming back, but it’s not addressed as being all that connected to that arc. It makes sense for someone who has rarely thought about her life outside of how it fits into high school, would be bothered by her legacy in high school being so easily forgotten.
But taking that any further is not really explored. Reasserting her identity as more than the Slayer, when she had been rejecting so much of who she is. That when she thinks back on her junior year, all she sees is the mess with Angel, and she wants her high school story to be more than that. And while rarely stated, it remains true that she always stands a good chance of not making it out of high school alive, and she’d like there to be some record that she was alive and a person. Not that *she* can look back on in later years that she might not have, but to know that she hasn’t been erased from history. Which then connects back to her recently kind of trying to erase herself from existence, and now trying to get herself back. The pieces are there (by and large) but the story doesn’t put them together.
Also I kept having questions about the logistics of this mess of high school drama. If anyone can just run for Homecoming queen, I think there would be more than four candidates. In my high school, we had a round of nominations, then the top 5-6 would be in the pool to be voted on the take the crown. And campaigning was…very little as I recall, certainly nothing like we see here. Of course I never went to homecoming and only remember who the homecoming queen was my senior year because she was also the kicker on the football team and everybody pooled together to have the homecoming queen in a football jersey. Also at my high school, seniors got to use a picture of their choice (within reason) in the yearbook rather than your basic school portrait; and even if one did use a generic school picture, pictures/retakes were taken more than once a year (for the whole school, not just seniors). I also did yearbook one year, and not a lot of the yearbook was finalized in October.
Okay, at least for a bit, let’s talk about Angel, and Buffy with Angel. Because I’m still stuck on ew, especially after everything I got focused on last time. While Scott is rather a jerk for dumping Buffy so quickly after they agreed to go to the dance together, his comment that she seemed to have more life in her earlier kind of rings true. She clearly wasn’t that into him, but as soon as Angel was back, the life starts getting sucked out of her.
And when you put that up there with the somewhat unspoken issues underpinning the Homecoming plot…it’s another not good look. Buffy wants to be more than the Slayer, wants to matter in the world as a person…and she’s not going to be that with Angel. And when she’s with Angel he immediately pulls her away from trying to have more to her life. Without Angel, it kind of looks like Buffy had the rest of her things working together; add in Angel and everything starts to fall apart.
There is a generous reading of my point there, that he is enough for her to not worry so much about what is kind of distracting things; but I didn’t mean it that way. I mean he pulls her away from and chains her into his box rather than him finding a way to be in her world (I do think he was trying at times in s2, but that was a different time).
What am I shipping?
I’m not saying I’m shipping it exactly, but there is a very easy queer reading of Buffy and Faith here. Like Faith knows she’s bisexual and testing the waters with Buffy, who isn’t quite aware that she can be into girls. That Buffy is flustered that Faith would be asking her out, but…is she asking her out? Buffy doesn’t know. Weirdly, I’m not sure Faith is into Buffy as much as I kind of think Buffy might be into Faith, but Faith is a lot more comfortable with test driving a date than Buffy is.
I think Angel might be a little caught up on Giles. Now, Angel well should feel guilty for what he did to Giles, but there’s something a little weird about him singling Giles out.
Giles/plot armor? He’s definitely using it.
I am so easily persuaded into Willow/Xander. Even if I did spend a chunk of their scenes wondering why Willow’s room didn’t appear to have a big glass outside door anymore. If it wasn’t so girly looking, I’d say it could make sense to be Xander’s room as it looks very different from when we saw Willow’s before.
