Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

Please Note: Although this review is tagged for spoilers, it makes reference to major plot points from Buffy The Vampire Slayer – Season Six.

Introduction

Oh dear. After the sixth season of “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” proved an unmitigated disaster in almost every way, the show’s writing team promised that its seventh (and final) year would go ‘back to the beginning’. I personally hoped that this would imply a return to the programme’s witty and intelligent roots, but the legitimate criticisms of plotting and pacing by fans like myself were unfortunately ignored in favour of vague promises about the show ‘not being dark any more’. Of course, this ignored the main problem with season six – namely that it wasn’t dark, but settled for being shallow, melodramatic and whiny. The end result of the writers’ pandering is a year that proves little more than a bland hodgepodge of directionless mush, with a few tokenistic gestures thrown in a weak attempt to placate long-time fans. Needless to say, it didn’t work.

Episode List
(Highlights in bold, lowlights in italics)

1) Lessons; 2) Beneath You; 3) Same Time, Same Place; 4) Help; 5) Selfless; 6) Him; 7) Conversations With Dead People; 8) Sleeper; 9) Never Leave Me; 10) Bring On The Night; 11) Showtime; 12) Potential; 13) The Killer In Me; 14) First Date; 15) Get It Done; 16) Storyteller; 17) Lies My Parents Told Me; 18) Dirty Girls; 19)Empty Places; 20) Touched; 21) End of Days; 22) Chosen

Brief Discussion

Season Seven is the one and only year of “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” where I fail to find a standout episode, which is a truly sad thing from a show that used to have the majority of its output as ‘standout’. In truth, I have a hard time deciding whether season six or seven is the nadir of the show. The sixth year was pretty atrocious, but I ‘respect’ (note the inverted commas) it for having the guts to be bravely, gloriously over-the-top awful, whereas season seven is just insipid, boring incompetence. The year starts weakly, feebly attempting to extricate itself from the mess of its predecessor, but is badly bogged down by the previous bad storytelling and bad character ‘development’. After a run of average-at-best episodes, the main plot begins in episode ten, with a whole new set of characters being introduced. Buffy and her friends must protect a group of girls known as ‘potentials’ from an entity known as the First, which seeks to eradicate the Slayer line. The story drags on and on with nothing interesting to say, thematic anvils abusing the viewer’s intelligence, and screen time wasted on irritating newbies that could have been used to develop the characters the audience actually cares about. In the final few episodes, a whole pile of deus ex machina plot devices pop up, rendering most of the year obsolete and allowing Buffy to win the big fight. Unfortunately, the season itself loses horribly, being little more than a hastily cobbled together mess not fit to bear the “Buffy” name. Not worth your cash, or the 22 hours of your life it will irretrievably suck away.

Detailed Discussion

After the train-wreck of Season Six saw Tara (Amber Benson) receiving a bullet through the heart and her soul mate Willow (Alyson Hannigan) going on a murderous rampage as a result, season seven is left with a lot to clean up. Likewise, a plot with Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and the vampire Spike (James Marsters) failed horribly in trying to explore the dynamics of a ‘good girl, bad boy’ relationship, and led to a truly nasty scene of Spike attempting to rape Buffy before leaving town and going in search of his soul. As the year opens, Buffy is educating her sister Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg) how to be self-sufficient when it comes to dealing with monsters. Bigger problems soon arise as Dawn begins at the newly rebuilt Sunnydale High School, now presided over by Principal Wood (DB Woodside). Buffy is stunned when she encounters the newly insane Spike, while Willow recuperates from her black magic freak-out in England under the watchful eye of Giles (Anthony Stewart Head).

After the serviceable opener “Lessons”, things bog down hard in “Beneath You”, which couples a stupid plot with lazy moralising. In a lame attempt to cope with the fallout from Buffy and Spike’s relationship, the episode beats us over the head with a ‘Spike is bad’ baseball bat, ignoring the fact that Buffy was horrifically abusive to him. Not even the quietly moving final scene can save the episode, which ranks among the worst plotted in the show. “Help” is even worse, boasting weak acting from all, an important guest star incapable of displaying anything resembling emotion, and a truly baffling theme. It concludes with the gang wondering what to do if you can’t help someone, bizarrely ignoring the fact that they’ve already lost friends, family members – and for Buffy and Willow, their greatest loves – to tragic and unpreventable circumstances. Truly stupid.

The pain continues with the lame Anya (Emma Caulfield) flashback episode “Selfless”, which aims to mix tragic drama with hilarious comedy but fails at both, hammering the final nail into the coffin of a character that should have been dispensed with a long time ago. Meanwhile, “Him” is a vastly inferior rewrite of the second season’s stellar “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”, while the plot-free “Conversations With Dead People” has an excellent Buffy segment marred by truly stupid pieces with Willow and Dawn. The annoying Andrew (Tom Lenk) unfortunately makes a reappearance here, and goes on to suck away screen-time for the rest of the year by repeating the same endless geeks-like-Star-Wars jokes that were tired back at the start of season six. Yawn.

After a couple of tedious episodes focusing on Spike, “Bring On The Night” sees the main yearlong plot begin. Giles returns to Sunnydale with three potential slayers, each more annoying than the last. Kennedy (Iyari Limon) proves the most irritating, being an obnoxious brat who is quickly forced into an incredibly unconvincing relationship with Willow that lacks any of the romance or realism the Willow/Tara pairing had (“The Killer In Me”). The season’s villain is then revealed as ‘the First’, an immaterial entity that can do nothing but talk. And talk. And talk some more. The gang sit around for ten or so episodes worrying about how to fight something that’s far less threatening than many one-episode-only creatures they dispatched in the first few seasons, leaving the viewer in a bored stupor. It doesn’t help that the awful “Lies My Parents Told Me” completely trashes three crucial characters, using trite Freudian psychology in an attempt to absolve Spike of his past crimes (and demolishing the show’s vampire canon in the process), and writing Buffy and Giles in a manner that has no connection to the previous six years of the show. “Empty Places” is even worse, being a slow and plot-free mess with no emotional content and every single character written as a ridiculous caricature of themselves – making it easily the worst episode of the entire show.

Episode eighteen sees the return of the Slayer Faith (Eliza Dushku), but her presence does little to salvage the series. New villain Caleb (Nathan Fillion) is also brought in, but ends up being a stupid misogynist stereotype who does nothing but repeat the same ‘I hate women’ bile. The year closes with silly twists, as Buffy discovers a secret feminist weapon (“Touched”) made by a secret group of feminist earth mothers (“End of Days”) that can conveniently solve all of her problems. She consequently empowers all of the women in the world (“Chosen”), and destroys the evil woman-hater by axing him between the legs. Hmm… I wonder if this message is too subtle?

Honestly, I’m all for stamping out prejudice against women, but making things as embarrassingly overwrought and cliched as this does a disservice to the entire women’s movement. With friends like the “Buffy” writers, feminism doesn’t need enemies.

DVD Extras

The box set’s six discs have a number of commentaries, most of which prove to be little more interesting than the episodes themselves – and hilariously, some see the writers trying to provide explanations for all of the bad scripts. They’re fake and unconvincing, and really do suggest that at this point, the show was about making money instead of a quality product. The featurettes are a little better, but strike me as being thrown together, with a couple of cute moments (such as show creator Joss Whedon’s countdown of his ten favourite episodes) mired in a sea of tedium. If you didn’t like the season, I can’t see any of these features impressing you – they certainly don’t do anything for me.

Conclusion

I will always be grateful to the cast and crew of “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” for the first five seasons of the show, which are (for me) some of the most consistently emotional, humorous and intelligent television ever produced. However, I fail to see how anyone aside from a hardcore obsessive could really be able to say what’s in season seven is good – because it isn’t. It’s slow, boring and witless, with a plot that feels like it’s being made up as it goes along, no worthwhile character development and a whole heap of uninspired moralising. It’s a true tragedy that the show had to end in such a manner, and as such I would suggest you avoid this box set unless you’re a collector. A sad end to a once great show. RIP, “Buffy The Vampire Slayer”.

More “Buffy”:
Season One
Season Two
Season Three
Season Four
Season Five
Season Six

Recommended: No

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age