Leverage, Season 3 & Buffy, Season 5 (Reconsidered)

Last night was the Season Premiere of "Leverage", which I think can be solidly identified as "guilty pleasure" viewing material. I quite enjoyed seeing the gang back together, and in their usual good bickering form. The villains, though, felt like real paper tigers, which was a little disappointing. (I expected North to deliver lines like, "Well, fire them! What good are non-union workers if you can't fire them whenever you feel like it?!" while twirling his evil, evil mustache and planning to tie someone to the railroad tracks.) The overarching meta-plot sounds like it has great potential, but it's going to be tricky to pull off if the target is as bad as everyone thinks he is, and pull off in an episodic fashion.

In other TV-related notes, yebisu9 and I finished our re-watching of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" Season 5. We didn't see it when it aired, at least not in the proper order; we arrived home from Japan the July after it finished. orichalcum entreated me to watch: "It's a great show! You're going to love it!" Unfortunately, seeing "The Gift" before any other episodes left me rather dizzied and confused. I was lucky that CTV reran all of Season 5 throughout the year before I went to grad school and I had the chance to catch up on most of the episodes and the plot. Still, seeing them out of order was strange, particularly knowing what was to come. (Seeing Joyce alive in early episodes, for example, is especially poignant; watching the full evolution of Spike's crush/obsession turning to stalker-ish "love" is especially creepy.) So, with all seasons available on Netflix instant play, and having caught up with the other seasons (1 has some very ham-handed episodes, and weird lighting; the series hits its stride with 2 and 3; while 4 has some stomach-churningly bad lows, but some wonderful highs), we settled into watching a few every few days to see if we had similar reactions to the times when we first watched it.

Right away, the thing that strikes me about Season 5 is how likable Buffy is, almost all of the time. (Her interactions with Dawn sometimes seem a bit forcedly mean, although Michelle Trachtenburg does play her role to the hilt. More on that later.) There are some wonderfully human moments that Buffy has, like the one where she's brought the very ill Joyce back from the hospital, and turns up the music while she washes the dishes so she can cry undisturbed, or her interaction with Warren's robot girlfriend as it sits on the swing, running out of battery power. I like this Buffy, I feel sorry for the burdens that life and fate are placing upon her, and I genuinely want her to succeed.

This brings me to the strongest, and hardest to watch, episode of the Season: "The Body". I couldn't bring myself to watch it again this time, despite the knowledge of why it's important to the overall storyline or why it's so technically and artistically good. I just cannot handle weeping like a baby at this point in time. "The Body" makes its audience confront the most basic fears, the fears that vampires, monsters, and demons represent: the fear of the death of those close to you and the fear of finally, inexorably having to grow up and assume adult responsibility. SMG's delivery of Buffy's lines as she discovers her mother's body in the episode directly previous are heartbreakingly good: "Mom? Mom? ... Mommy?" Being a Slayer has nothing on being a Mom, and super-human physical strength may save her from the monsters, but it won't help her answer Dawn's tragically simple question: "She's not here. Where did she go?" (This episode also has Anya's wonderfully bittersweet rant about death: "But I don't understand! I don't understand how this all happens. How we go through this. I mean, I knew her, and then she's, there's just a body, and I don't understand why she just can't get back in it and not be dead anymore! It's stupid! It's mortal and stupid!") The final scene will always stick in my memory: Buffy can kill a vampire, but against true death (and just like any other mortal), she's powerless.

I know that many fans loathed Dawn and the role her character played in the story, but I don't agree. For one thing, narratively speaking, the move to introduce a new character, and in this particular way, is a gutsy one, and watching the episodes in close succession, it pays off. (I can understand that waiting from week to week might make this more frustrating.) Watching all the characters suddenly reorganize their minds to believe that Dawn's always been around is just wonderful. (In fact, memory magic is a recurrent plot element in this season, with Dawn's introduction and the Ben-Glory secret identity plot, and even the subplot with Tara's evil family.) And Michelle Trachtenburg has a good sense of what would be too over-the-top. Her teenager is an almost normal girl, just on the cusp of discovering the truth about herself, and she plays all the uncomfortable moments that accompany that discovery very nicely.

And then we have the final three episodes, which are great, and contain this pitch perfect combination of big drama and small moments of revelation. I feel for Willow when she realizes that the last (ever, potentially) conversation she had with Tara was a fight over something stupid, and she struggles to keep her feelings under control and fix the situation; I feel for her even more when she's able to pull off all kinds of crazy magic under pressure (which is the underpinning of the Season 6 conflict, I know.) I love the revelation that a seemingly harmless, minor character is, in fact, quite dangerous, and the consequences of ignoring him until this point are almost disastrous. But I love the ending of this episode, and I often feel like the series should have ended here, with the First Slayer's pronouncement echoing over the credits: "Death is your gift." Because when you come right down to it, this is what a Slayer is supposed to do: sacrifice herself for the good of others. You can argue whether this is a good thing (or not), or whether the First Slayer was herself a victim (or not), or whether the Watcher's Council is a patriarchal institution that doesn't allow for any kind of progress (or not). But in the end, in the belief system this show has presented us with, Buffy does the only and best thing she can do, and in the process, frees herself from the oppressive responsibility that being a Slayer (and a Mom, and a sister, and a friend, and a human being) entails, and does so in a way that allows the greatest number of others to benefit. RIP, Buffy: you did the save the world a lot. And I love this show for it.

Of course, the question I have now is: should I re-watch Seasons 6/7? I remember feelings of loathing for many of the plot developments, and with the exception of "Once More, With Feeling" and the final episode, I don't feel anything particularly good for any of the episodes. With "Leverage" back on TV, and other Netflix beckoning us, I may just let these slip and pretend that the show ended with Season 5 and all is well with the world.