It's 1997. It's dinner time. She's wearing hoops. (Review: 'Buffy The Vampire Slayer' 2.9 and 2.10, "What's My Line?")

OK, what on Earth was Bianca Lawson doing with that accent? Jamaica? You should have stopped her!

Blog updates

I'm continuing to work my way through Star Trek: The Animated Series - I may end up releasing the reviews for the first half of Season 1 when I get through that. Make things a bit shorter and quicker in posts there.

Also, a review of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 2 episode is planned. I have yet to decide which one for certain.

She's having Stake (Review: 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' 1.12, "Prophecy Girl")

So, I've decided to do some reviews of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the show I didn't watch as a teenager and am now watching for the first time. Probably one a season.

Anyway, let's set the scene. For one thing, I've not covered this in previous post. Second, not everyone will have heard of this show. Thirdly, I'm neurodivergent and I find this sort of stuff amusing.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer #2

So, I just saw Buffy push Jayne Cobb  into a cremation oven ("Never Kill a Boy on the First Date", in case you're wondering) and it was a bit of weird feeling.

Buffy is one of those characters who manages to be annoying and endearing, sometimes in the same scene. She would try the patience of an awful lot of people who would still risk their lives for her and if she ever met the Doctor, they'd get on like a spaceship on fire. Having probably caused the fire in the first place.

(Ten would be the obvious choice based on mutual levels of banter, but it would be funnier to have her paired up with a more strait-laced incarnation like Five. Or someone socially awkward like Thirteen)

It's the sort of same reaction I got with Ellie from The Last of Us, who is basically Ellie the Zombie Slayer, only they don't call them that in that show.

She does seem to spend an awful lot of time in very short dresses, even at school. I can imagine her and Sydney Bristow snarking about each other's outfits in an Epic Rap Battles of History, but don't ask me to write that.

The times when stunt doubles are involved is fairly obvious, but perhaps I am just good at spotting those scenes.

I'm definitely having a lot of fun with this and the show stands up very well. Even if the Scoobies could do with mobile phones. Something that will need to be addressed in the new show with the "Scooby Twos" as I'm calling them.

Edit 2 August: That wasn't Adam Baldwin, even if it did look like him.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

So, with the revival currently working its way through the pilot stage, I have decided to watch the original series that is currently on Disney+ and ITVX here in the UK.

While I have seen the Kristy Swanson movie, Buffy was not something that I ever watched growing up. The fighting female of my formative years would be one Sydney Bristow of Alias as previously discussed on this blog... of course, when you realised their full names are Buffy Anne Summers and Sydney Anne Bristow, you can see that Abrams was clearly influenced by Joss Whedon in more than one regard.

I've watched the two-part series opener, "Welcome to the Hellmouth" and "Harvest". I'll definitely be watching some more, that's for certain.

At more than one point during this, I started wondering what show I was actually watching. In the climax of the first episode, Xander and Willow are in a mausoleum with a bunch of vampires closing in on them. Willow screams - a reasonable one, not the Full Victoria. Then Buffy enters with this line:

Well, this is nice. I-it's a little bare, but a dash of paint, a few throw pillows... call it home!

This is exactly the sort of line you can imagine one of the post-2005 Doctors from Doctor Who saying, maybe with some slight alterations. Now, I know that Russell T Davies was heavily inspired by Buffy when he brought back Doctor Who but I hadn't quite realised how much! There's even a bit at the end about how Sunnydale is going to rationalise a vampire attack at a nightclub or just forget it happened.

Also in terms of further comments:

• Cordelia is a shallow, mean woman. If I didn't know about her later development, I'd be comparing her to Libby from Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
• How young everyone looks! Sarah Michelle Gellar was just 19 when she started doing this.
• Also, some very 90s fashion - and computers. The Internet is something that Giles is not overly familiar with.
• You get to see a bunch of people in this that you've seen in other things. The first guy to get killed was in CSI: New York. Darla's actor would later be in Defiance. I could go on.
• Also, I don't think Julie Benz's prosthetic fangs quite fit.

Anyway, I might do some more posts on this.