Mike 2008-08-06
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
RELAX...the quote in my review title is straight from Season Five. No actual Bob Barker was harmed during the filming of this review.
As Season Five opens, this show had safely made the full transition from Sunnydale High to the college years, and instead of getting entrenched in "Buffy Hills 90210" petty collegiate fluff, it headed straight into death, loss, and gut-wrenching emotions.
As a season-long central villain, Glory mixes the every-hair-in-place diva obsession of Cordelia with the twisted and consistently disturbing psyche of Drusilla (who returns to find her ex-lover Spike "tired of playing" her kind of games). Glory's "minions" provide fawning comic relief in an otherwise heavy season (one of them is the source of the quote mentioned above). Think "Smithers" from "The Simpsons" in little ogre bodies.
The new "central hub" for meetings is Giles' new business venture, the magic shop. After witnessing the death of the store's umpteenth owner, he sees profit in his future, buys the store, and hires Anya as his cashier (more comic relief). Naturally, it also becomes a favorite visiting place of demons with heavy blunt objects, who inflict thousands of dollars worth of damage on the store and its merchandise as the season progresses.
There's some closure with the characters of Riley and Buffy's mom (hence much of the season's dire weight), as well as the show's writers filling in the blanks on the mystery / backstory of Buffy's little sister Dawn (and her link to Glory).
It would have been extremely easy for the show's creators to play it safe in Season Five by establishing a formula and cranking out tiresome episode after episode. They chose to do the opposite...to take some big risks, to pull out some major surprises, to defy expectations.
There's a significant emphasis on Spike in Season Five, culminating in a "spoiler moment" that comes at the end of Episode 18, "Intervention." As actor James Marsters has mentioned on a number of occasion, Whedon's original plan for the character was to kill him off after his initial appearance. Luckily for the series, they took a sharp left turn and decided to develop Spike into one of the show's most memorable characters.
In the Season Four box set, there's some discussion of the episode "Hush." Apparently someone told creator Joss Whedon that THE reason for the show's success...the SINGLE REASON...was the dialogue between Buffy and the other characters, the verbal interplay. It was shortly after receiving that feedback that Whedon decided to craft an episode that was completely silent after the first few minutes.
I've got to believe that a similar desire to defy expectations and "think outside of the box" went into the production of this season.
