calimac | Final Angel

(not by David del Tredici - never mind, obscure music joke)

As a dedicated Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan I followed its spinoff, Angel, for a while, but it was never as good as the original, and I stopped watching altogether when the vampire sometime-detective signed up to work for his nemesis, Wolfram & Hart, and the writers dredged up the discarded BTVS characters of Spike and Harmony for no better reason than that they could.

However, I got home from class last night in time to catch the last half-hour of the final episode, already being watched by

wild_patience and, with somewhat less interest, two cats.

Jumping back in after a gap caused me to note the reappearance on Angel of a couple of beloved Buffy tropes:

1. There will be an extra-special super villain, preferably played by a surplussed actor from Firefly, identified by his ability to pick up the hero by the neck and throw him or her across the room. (Actually there was a whole series of extra-special villains on Buffy with that penchant.)

2. There will be a not-exactly-human female character whose robotic voice will express puzzlement at the discovery that strange things called emotions are coursing through her system. (In Buffy, Anya; in Angel, She-who-is-no-longer-Fred - and yes, I am making an Edward Eager reference there.)

I'm to be on a panel at Baycon on "Grieving for Lost TV Shows," simultaneously with

cynthia1960 being on an identical panel at Wiscon. Our panel is asking the question, "Did they die prematurely?", and in the case of Joss Whedon's 3 sfnal shows, I would say no. I liked these shows - they're the only tv series that had commanded my allegiance in the last 30 years; not even TNG or B5 could get me to watch consistently - but Buffy and Angel both went on too long, and I suspect the surprisingly outstanding Firefly may have died just in time to preserve its sterling reputation.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

As they said about Elvis's death: good career move.

I suspect that Firefly could have gone on quite a bit longer before jumping the shark. I say this because the episodes were still (in my opinion) getting better as the series progressed. I feel that Firefly died too young: I didn't find the first few episodes terribly inspiring, while the later episodes fascinated me; I felt that it was only beginning to get really interesting when it was cancelled. I think it could have made it another season or two before running out of steam. As it is, I feel that it's rather as if Buffy had been cancelled in the middle of the first season: the show was fun and all, but the best was yet to come.

Agreed about Angel and Buffy, though. I gave up on Angel a few seasons ago, and from the bits and pieces I've heard here and there, I'm not regretting having done so one bit. And I almost wish that I'd never season S6 Buffy.

Firefly was cancelled so suddenly there were three episodes left in the can, which appeared on the DVD. Those three were eligible for the Hugo Award this year, and two of them are finalists. I realized with a shock that they were the two poorest of the whole series. (One whore-with-a-heart-of-gold is OK, but a whole houseful for the heroes to act all aw-shucks around was a bit much.)

There's a huge difference between beginning to fade from excellence and jumping the shark - about two years in Buffy's case. There might have been many great Fireflys to come (there was even one great Buffy, "Conversations with Dead People", after it jumped the shark), but I think the evidence is strong that if Firefly had lasted, it would soon have become affected with a bald patch.

Yeah, the "entire brothel with a heart of gold" thing was a bit OTT, I agree, and "Trash," while enjoyable enough, was pret-ty darned fluffy (and more than a little plot-hole laden, as well). So you may very well be right. I thought that "The Message" was superb, though.

I've been totally out of the SF loop: which two are up for the Hugo?

There might have been many great Fireflys to come (there was even one great Buffy, "Conversations with Dead People", after it jumped the shark), but I think the evidence is strong that if Firefly had lasted, it would soon have become affected with a bald patch.

Oh, it might have, it might have (especially if the whole Captain/Companion romance continued on the rather icky path it had started down).

I do think that overall it would have improved, though, because it seemed to me that the show's particular strengths lay far less in its episodic qualities than in its world-building, and in the broader plot-arcs that the early episodes kept hinting towards. Really, even a few of the episodes that I very much liked I thought were quite weak on the episodic plot level. I strongly suspect that the emergence of the longer-range plotline would have improved the show overall; as things stood, though, the seasonal plot-arc never really got off the ground.

Of course, it's all guess-work. And I may very well be biased: I tend to prefer the over-arching plot-arc aspect of such television shows to the more purely episodic stuff. So it could well be that Firefly just never got the chance to get into the types of episodes that I personally prefer -- which is less a question of quality per se than it is one of stylistic preference.

And naturally, the Big Plot Arcs in Whedon shows are by no means always a good thing! When they are good, they are very very good...but when they are bad, they are horrid.

I enjoyed "Trash", but "The Message" was the other episode nominated. I found it heavy-handed and preachy, and worst of all rather boring.

Having watched all the episodes more than once, and listened to others' criticisms, I think Firefly wa a hard show to get into: you had to get to know the characters before you could appreciate it, and that took several episodes, no matter where you started. Getting to know the characters, in my view, is what the show was really about - it wasn't the world-building (which was the hackneyed thing the show so astonishingly rose above), nor the broader plot arcs (which there weren't any of, except for getting to understanding the characters better), nor the plots of the individual episodes (though some were very good indeed).

My concern was that Firefly couldn't have gone on much longer without derailing the premise of the show (as Angel was derailed very early on, and never recovered), and that either revelations about the character mysteries were going to have to come out (one of them, "what did the government want with River?", was essentially answered by implication) or else Joss was going to have to divert us by throwing spanners into the works. And you know he would. The first one was already clearly in the works: Inara was about to leave.

Why do you refer to Spike as a "discarded BTVS character"? He was in the last several seasons constantly.

He was killed, or zapped, or something, in the last episode. Viewers were clearly supposed to take this as the end of him. Even the character himself was mystified, at least in the episodes of Angel I saw, as to why he came back.

Final Angel

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