The Angel-a-Thon: Season 5, the grand finale

OK, it was actually a few months ago now I finished my noble goal of watching all of Joss Whedon’s “Angel” and “Buffy” series, a whopping total of 254 episodes of vampire-stabbin’ good television. I wrapped it up with the final episode of the fifth season of “Angel,” “Not Fade Away.”

After the stumble that was the confused Season 4, the final season shakes up everything and goes in several new directions. At the end of the fourth season, Angel and his friends were put in charge of their longtime enemies, evil law firm Wolfram and Hart. The entire season is basically a meaty moral dilemma for Angel and co. – if you join the bad guys, work for the bad guys, doesn’t that make you a bad guy yourself? Angel, Wesley, Fred and the rest are determined to try and turn Wolfram and Hart into a force for good, but easier said than done.

For me, much of the enjoyment of Season 5 comes from totally changing the status quo. No more dank hotel and “vampire detective,” hello heavily funded mysterious corporation and deals with the devil. Some longtime “Angel” fans squawked about this season, but it’s a natural progression for Angel’s ever-shifting moral compass. It’s also a pleasure to see Buffy’s Spike, played by snarky James Marsters, join the cast. His cocky cockney schtick may be getting a wee bit tired after so long, but it adds a nice jolt of energy to the cast.

The pathos of Season 5 echo the show’s best year, Season 3 – there’s a ton of tragedy here, from the fate of poor Fred and Wesley to Gunn’s metamorphosis from street tough to silver-tongued lawyer. A real appeal for “Angel” is how everyone constantly changes, and you honestly feel that characters can die at any time – and often do. The show did get its legs cut out from under it a bit with the open-ended finale cliffhanger (which has been followed up in an OK fashion in comic books). Yet “Not Fade Away” ends in a spectacular, damn-the-torpedoes fashion, with the final battle to top all the final battles to date and some shocking turns.

Best episode: Several to choose from, including “Not Fade Away” and Cordelia’s bittersweet swan song on “You’re Welcome” – but for sheer quirkiness and a welcome blast of humour on a dark season, you can’t go wrong with “Smile Time,” the one where Angel is transformed into a deranged vampire Muppet. Awesome.

The Angel-a-Thon: Season 4

It’s hard to top a peak. The third series of “Angel” was such a taut, exciting ride that season four had a lot to live up to. And while it’s rarely rotten, Angel’s penultimate series falls a bit short.

There’s great momentum at the start of this season, as the cliffhangers of Series 3 are wrapped up and the apocalyptic Beast comes to town, raining fire on the streets and blocking out the sun. There’s a real sense of danger and drama in these early episodes – the Beast is by far the most inhuman villain the series has had, and it really seems nothing can stop him. The various psychodramas continue as Angel bonds and brawls with his bad-boy, instantly teenaged son Connor, Wesley works his way back from his dark exile into redemption (it’s amazing what a bad-ass Alexis Denisof has become as Wesley, especially when you view his first few appearances way back in “Buffy”’s third season), while Fred and Gunn wind down their increasingly annoying relationship.

But then it all kind of turns to custard. The writers apparently feel they have to keep one-upping the threat level, and so the Beast turns out to be a pawn of a now-evil Cordelia, who turns out to be yet ANOTHER pawn of the smiling goddess Jasmine. Really, the Beast could’ve been a solid enough protagonist to fuel the entire season, and the ridiculously labyrinthine plot by Jasmine is insulting to viewers (apparently pretty much everything that ever happened since episode one has been a part of the plan). But the worst misstep is how the writers abuse poor Cordelia, who’d shown the most fascinating growth as a character over the first 3 years, moving from selfish diva to selfless heroine. Her “ascension” at the end of the third season was tearjerking and yet very right.

But it’s all dumped on this year, as Cordy’s forced into an icky affair with Connor, gotten pregnant, turns evil, then is clumsily just written out of the series entirely. It’s a real shame that poor Charisma Carpenter goes out on such an awkward note (although fortunately, she has a better swan song in Season 5). Jasmine, played by “Firefly” star Gina Torres, is a character with potential – an ancient god who is bringing enforced world peace – but she never quite comes across right.

There’s still a lot to like in series 4 – we get the return of Angel’s evil alter ego Angelus, who’s sinister fun, and a guest appearance by Faith (Eliza Dushku) always provides a lot of energy. There's lots of great moments, but the meandering of the overall season storyline and the egregious waste of Cordelia do spoil it all a bit.

Best episode: In a season filled with dark twists and turns, it’s the lighthearted change of pace episode “Spin The Bottle” that provides some much-needed levity, and a chance for the cast to show how much the characters have grown. While the “everyone gets amnesia” plot is beyond cliché, it’s played out in a very fun fashion as we witness the return of bitchy high-school Cordelia, foppish Wesley and medieval young Angel and everyone bounces off each other in a nice locked-room mystery. It's a good showcase for the actors and just nice to get a break from the never-ending apocalypses. Runner-up: “Home,” the energetic season finale, which delivers a much-needed change of setting and mission for Season 5 and gives the entire mauldin, overlong Connor storyline a fitting, bittersweet sendoff.

The Angel-A-Thon: Season 3

In “Angel” Season 3, the vampire-detective show manages to get even darker, if that’s possible. You could measure the torment and angst on screen in some of these episodes by the gallon. Yet at the same time, this is the season “Angel” really gels and the characters form a real “family” of outcasts and freaks – which makes it all the more painful when bad things keep happening to them.
 
This season Angel Investigations continue to grow – the nervous Fred joins the team, while Gunn and the demon Lorne both also become full-time cast members. Fred’s a strange addition at first, and I felt Amy Acker overplays the whole “naïve country girl with an accent” schtick. But she becomes an enjoyable cast member, although I couldn't ever buy into the idea that her and Gunn would have a relationship – they never make a plausible couple.  I also really loved the changes Wesley went through this year, completing the transformation from tweedy geek in his early “Buffy” appearances into a grim, haunted and authoritative figure. (Alexis Denisof proves himself a pretty solid actor this season.)
 
But the big ongoing story this season is the tale of Darla, Angel’s evil ex, and her pregnancy and the surprise child she delivers.  It’s a great tragic soap opera storyline, complete with a resurrected ancient foe of Angel’s, Holtz. Holtz, wonderfully played by Keith Szarabajka, was a vampire hunter 200 years ago whose entire family was slaughtered by the evil Angelus. Brought back to life to continue his hunt for Angel, Holtz is a fascinating character – seething with righteous rage over Angel’s past deeds. The whole Darla/Holtz plot comes to a great conclusion as Angel’s son is born – then through one of those magic/timey-wimey things, ends up a few episodes later as a scowling Pete from “Mad Men.” The grown Connor and his fractious relationship with his father give “Angel” another surge of energy as the third season comes to a close.

This season is the best yet, as it tangles fatherhood, guilt, love, and vengeance into one boiling mass of emotions and twists. I’d have to say this year is when the spinoff becomes as good as the parent show “Buffy” was at its peak. It’s a tribute to the skill of the actors and writers that the show doesn’t drown in its own bleak plotlines. Just enough humour and action are used to break up the gloomy bits.
 
Best episode: There’s several great ones this year, but I have to go with “Sleep Tight,” about as tense an episode “Angel” has produced, with Angel’s baby son becoming a football passed between a variety of players. Wesley’s betrayal of the team is startling, but what’s even more gripping is how horribly his behaviour damages the bond between the friends of Angel Investigations – the easy camaraderie between the gang is broken, and the fallout from this episode lingers through the rest of this season and into Season 4. The shocking finale of this episode, where Angel loses Connor and Holtz, seemingly forever, is a gut-blow to the viewer. (Runner-up status to the season finale "Tomorrow" which has a great cliff-hanger ending -- one character sinking into the sea, one ascending to higher realms.)

The Angel-A-Thon: Season 2

Here we go again, as I slowly continue my bloody plunge through all seven seasons of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" and now into the five seasons of the spin-off "Angel."
 
As we enter season 2, Los Angeles' vampire detective Angel and his allies in the fight against darkness battle evil on a variety of fronts -- most notably the resurrected Darla, Angel's former lover and his vampire "maker," a plot line that drives throughout the season.

Season 2, I thought, was a lot more consistent and enjoyable than the sometimes stumbling first season was. We feel that Angel Investigations has become more of a family, and that makes the ups and downs the "team" has this year feel more effective.
 
It's also good to see the characters grow and change -- Cordelia becomes far more responsible than the conceited teen she was on "Buffy," while Wesley shows new inner strength as he becomes the leader of Angel investigations. A couple of newcomers join the cast too -- former anti-vampire gang leader Gunn and the delightful Andy Hallett as Lorne the Host, who tends to steal pretty much every scene he's in.

I also really enjoy Julia Benz' nasty, scheming take on Darla, a far cry from her sweet and charming wife on "Dexter." Angel's tug of war with Darla continues throughout most of the season, although some of the episodes get a bit repetitive with the whole cat-and-mouse game.
 
While there's a lot of darkness in this series of "Angel" it's leavened by some goofy humour as well. The season finale series of episodes set in Lorne's home dimension of Pylea are an often-silly treat, kind of "Angel" goes "Army of Darkness.".
 
Best episode: There's a lot to pick from this season, but "Reunion" takes the Darla/Angel/Wolfram and Hart triangle to a new height, climaxing with the stunning scene where Angel basically lets Darla and fellow vamp Drusilla kill off most of the law firm. It's a good showcase for Angel's dark side (which is talked about a lot, but sometimes doesn't seem very convincing), and takes the story in genuinely surprising new directions.
 

The Angel-A-Thon: Season 1, And So It Begins

So a while back, over the course of a couple years, the wife and I whipped through all seven seasons, 144 episodes of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" , which I regularly blogged about in progress reports. How on earth to follow all that vampire-staking action up? With the spin-off showcase "Angel," which ran from 1999-2004 featuring everyone's favorite antihero vampire-with-a-soul.

I was actually rather hesitant to dive into the whole five seasons of "Angel," because spin-off shows rarely reach the heights of their parent. And for about the first half of this series, "Angel" kind of felt like a show trying to figure out what it wants to be. After having left Sunnydale and a broken-hearted Buffy, Angel heads to Los Angeles and sets up shop as a kind of supernatural private detective -- basically, he's vampire Batman. Whiny "Buffy" castmate Cordelia comes aboard as his secretary/damsel in distress, and a mysterious wisecracking guy named Doyle joins the show as they amble about various supernatural adventures.

While entertaining, the early episodes kind of fall into a rut and too often the show doesn't really seem sure where it's going. The gothic rock'n'roll video slash-cut editing style sometimes gets annoying, too. I also have one pet peeve -- wayyyyy too much of Angel strutting about in broad daylight, which spoils the whole vampire mystique thing. I don't care if he's not in direct sunlight, if he's in a brightly lit office, it just ain't... vampirey.

Soon, though, dreary Doyle is killed off (a good move, as the whole dark brooding guy with a secret role was already filled by Angel) and ex-Watcher Wesley (a very solid Alexis Denisof) joins the team. The show needed a "Giles" sort of character, the know-it-all geek with courage, and Wesley and Cordelia provide much-needed comic relief to the show's generally dark demon doings. I also enjoyed the cynical policewoman character Kate, although she starts to move into the background after a couple of appearances. By the end of season one and a few really entertaining episodes featuring the demonic law firm Wolfram and Hart, "Angel" seems a much more focused show than it started off as.

Best episode: Is it a bit of a cheat that my favorite episodes of this series featured guest appearances by "Buffy" characters? Well, either way, episode 8, "I Will Remember You," is a great piece of romantic melodrama when Angel is "cured" of his vampirism, Buffy shows up for a little romantic tango, and in the end Angel has to make a rather tragic decision. The Buffy/Angel thing has been run into the ground, but this episode still packs a nice sting. Honorable mention: the two-parter featuring another "Buffy" character, Eliza Dushku's rogue slayer Faith.

The Buffy-A-Thon: Season 7, the grand finale

Enough with the grim reality, how about a little vampire action? In recent weeks, the wife and I finally wrapped up our silly goal of watching every single episode of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer." Now, the final report on the final season!

We actually felt a little choked up, having come to the grand end run of 144 hours (egad!) of Buffy goodness, even since my idle plan nearly 3 years ago to start watching the entire series from beginning to end. It wasn't some enormous goal, but rather a mild dare -- I'd always been curious to check out "Buffy," most of the TV shows on the air are crap anyway, so why not?

Many times we wondered, how did we not watch this while it was on the air? Some of the time I was moving around country scraping by into new jobs, and TV watching wasn't really a priority; and for several years, we lived up in the mountains and didn't get UPN or WB where "Buffy" was aired. And finally at some point the "Buffy" mythology just seemed so daunting and elaborate to the uninitiated that it didn't seem worth trying to dive in mid-stream. But y'know, I'm glad we consumed the show on DVD season by season -- I can't imagine having to wait a whole week between episodes!

So, Season 7. This felt like a final season, in ways both good and bad. There was a constant sense of momentum, a sense of tying up loose ends; but there was also a bit of creative bankruptcy, a sense that the show was used up. Show creator Joss Whedon's absence after Season 5 is still felt; the dialogue lacks a bit of punch and the humour is played down in favour of more angst. While the army of new young slayer potentials is a pretty cool idea, it ends up with a huge slew of new characters added to the show and a bit of overcrowding. The battle against The First ends up being a big circle back to the series' very first year, and the struggle against the demon-creating Hellmouth. There were a couple points where I felt like, OK, enough with the build-up to a battle against impossible odds, we've seen this before. The season was very focused, but sometimes a bit predictable, too.

Still, I quite enjoyed the battle with the "Big Bad" this season, the incorporeal sum of all evil "The First." It's unusual for a Buffy villain as it has no physical form, instead appearing in a variety of guises as dead former cast members or as Buffy herself (who's died a few times of course herself). It all feels like quite a war, and there's casualties galore (many red-shirt 'potential' slayers, the wounding of Xander, the shocking death of a cast member in the finale, even poor Sunnydale itself). While Season 7 isn't the show's finest overall (I think I might go with Season 4), it's still got plenty to recommend it.

I'm glad to have finally seen "Buffy" and enjoyed the heck out of it. What next? At some point I might check in on the "Buffy Season 8" comic book followup which is quite groovy, but as for TV? The spin-off "Angel"? The highly acclaimed "Battlestar: Galactica" reboot maybe, which I still haven't seen? (I'm an absurd fan of the kitschy original I have to admit). "Veronica Mars" as Rob keeps telling me? Perhaps it's time to finally check out "Dancing With The Stars." Or not.

Best episode: "Dirty Girls," the first of the series of episodes winding up the series. Why? Because Nathan Fillion is thirty kinds of awesome, and his introduction as the southern-fried preacher/serial killer/super-demon Caleb juiced up the entire season. The First was a nifty psychological villain, but Caleb provided the slinky physical menace Buffy needs. Fillion is best known as a good guy in "Firefly" or "Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog," but here he's an out-and-out monster, and great at it. There's a real sense anything can happen when Caleb's on screen, and the episode that introduces him is a classic.

The Buffy-A-Thon: Season 6

In the home stretch now! Hard to believe when I started this way back when and the goal of watching every single episode of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" seemed yes, highly ambitious indeed. (Some people climb mountains, some people run marathons, some people watch a hell of a lot of TV shows about vampires.) Now there's just one season left to go – what will fill the aching hole in my life? I'll have to take up yoga again or something.

Anyhoo ...Season 6. There's something about this season that's a bit hard to put my finger on, but it's a little less confident than previous seasons. This was the first one without creator Joss Whedon running the show, and maybe that's it. While it's almost always entertaining, there's a sense sometimes that the characters aren't acting "realistic," such as with Anya and Xander's on-and-off wedding.

The unrelenting darkness of Season 6 is a theme, and it's nicely wrapped up in the entertaining final episodes. I mean, I thought Season 5 was grim, what with Buffy's mother dying and all, but boy, this one piles on the misery. Willow's journey this season from hero to villain is well foreshadowed (occasionally a bit ham-handedly) and ends in suitably apocalyptic fashion. The finally consummated relationship between Buffy and Spike, however, wallows a bit too much in a kind of sadomasochistic glee. Also, Anthony Stewart Head as the upright, paternal Giles is sorely missed for most of the season.

I really enjoyed the recurring geeky villainy of "The Trio," three put-upon super-brains who gradually become a real threat for the slayer and her friends. It's kind of refreshing to see non-demonic enemies and the writers cannily make you underestimate the Trio until it's too late. Warren Mears, in particular, is a nasty portrait of the evil that can fester in an unloved, spiteful nerd. What ultimately happens to Warren pushes the envelope about as far as this series has ever gone.

Best episode: While it's a grim season, it also boasts one of the best and wittiest "Buffy" episodes ever, the all-musical extravaganza "Once More With Feeling." The idea of a musical episode isn't totally unique, but what's impressive about this one is Joss Whedon (who returned to write and direct this gem) uses the gimmick to create some real emotion and revelation about the characters. Conflicts that have been bubbling under come to the forefront, and it doesn't hurt that the melange of musical styles is excellent fun. (And it turns out Anthony Stewart Head and Amber Benson as Tara are actually quite good singers.) A funny, heartfelt and gripping romp on the stage. (And go check out the also quite excellent new Joss Whedon production "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" to see how kooky is it to see musical theater grafted onto the superhero epic.)

The Buffy-A-Thon: Season 5

And so life -- or rather, death -- goes on. In my ongoing project to watch the entire seven seasons of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer," I've wrapped up season 5 and started season 6 – and now I'm getting sad for the inevitable end of the series. But heck, I'm enjoying the ride, and it's a show that's still better than 90% of what's on TV these days.

Season 5 is the transition point from young cool kids to hard adulthood for the Buffy gang. After dabbling in college last year, there's very little of that shown here – by the time Buffy officially drops out, you figure she'd already stopped going months ago.

For Buffy, it's a season of loss – her mother, her boyfriend, and in the end, even her life. But she also gains a mystical sister, whose addition is an odd but ultimately successful moment for the series (while I still have to question a spell so powerful it can magic up a person and her memories for the entire world, heck, it's a show about a vampire slayer, so I let that go).

The theme of this season is family, and what it means for someone whose job is to deal death to demons. Michelle Trachtenberg as Buffy's "sister" Dawn takes a few episodes to get the right vibe, but by season's end I found her believably annoying-slash-vulnerable as a little sister can be. James Marsters' Spike continues to be the most charismatic of the characters, and livens up every scene he's in. He takes the quite implausible notion of a vampire crushing on the Slayer and makes it work.

The tone of this season is hard to get used to, though, as there's less light-heartedness (besides a very amusing battle with Dracula himself in the season opener, and the enjoyably bitchy portrayal of goddess-gone-mad Glorificus, the series' main villain). But it's also, I would argue, the best season in terms of sheer skill – the writing, acting and themes are all at top strength. Perhaps the only drawback is that it's just all so darned dire for Buffy throughout, culminating in her self-sacrifice to save her new sister's life at season's end. A little bit of the goofy pulpy joy to be found in the previous few seasons is gone, but admittedly it's replaced by the confident posture of a series trying to combine horror, kung-fu action, drama and humour in a way few television series have ever done.

Best episode: Speaking of dark – "The Body," where Buffy's mother's sudden death is handled with a shocking, matter-of-fact realism that hits you like a body blow. No sappy sentimental music, just a sense of shock and harrowing loss that's as hard to view as any gory vampire battle might be. In a series where critters die pretty much every 20 minutes, this episode yanks bank the veil to show how shattering one death can truly be. It's easily one of the top "Buffy" episodes ever.

The Buffy-a-thon: Season 4

My god, I'm past the halfway point. As some might recall, since 2006 I've been on a project to watch all seven seasons of the legendary "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" TV series by Joss Whedon, which I foolishly missed out on while it was on the air. I've just wrapped up Season 4, more than halfway through the 144 episodes.

I have to admit, it's a close call, but I think this is the best Buffy season yet, narrowly topping Season 3's swell duels with the Mayor and Faith. It's tight, sexy and funny, with an engaging ongoing storyline that consistently goes in unexpected directions. We get less of the sometimes-forced "monster of the week" episodes that run out of steam.

This season has big changes - Buffy and the gang go to college, Angel's gone, and at long last, the U.S. military apparently notices all the demons and vampires haunting Sunnydale, California, and decides to do something about it – namely, a top-secret Initiative that's capturing demons for some mysterious plan. The Initiative storyline, and Buffy's affair with its lieutenant Riley, drives the season and is a lot of fun. The military's got nothing on the slayer. The grotesque cyborg-demon creation Adam is another excellent "Big Bad" villain for the series, with a laconic cool presence.

To top it all off, Spike joins the cast on a regular basis, with a great plotline about him losing his vampire preying skills (read: impotence) and becoming a begrudging "good guy" (sort of). James Marster's snide and sarcastic Spike is a great addition to a crew that was getting a little too touchy-feely. There's good conflict with the trio of Buffy, Willow and Xander this season, and each character gets a moment to shine. Willow's break-up with Oz and surprising affair with Tara are nicely handled. Only former watcher Giles gets a bit lost this year, not given much to do.

I'd long heard about how good "Buffy" was when it was on, but life and the like got in the way of catching its spell. But it's even better to watch it on DVD in huge gulps, having mostly avoided spoilers. Season 4 shows Joss Whedon and co. at the peak of their powers, and it's a heck of a lot better than most stuff on the tube today.

Best episode: "Hush," the classic "silent" episode where some ultra-creepy demons steal Sunnydale's voices, and Buffy and Riley have to stop things – without saying a word. Lots of plot movement, tremendously freaky foes, and a lot of humour without a line of dialogue.

Solace in the sickness

...Urgh, I say, urgh. Stumbling back to normalcy after a wicked case of the dreaded lurgy that I caught from the boy, leaving me a fetal mess for several days. I didn't leave the house for about 60 hours, so I guess I got a mini vacation. Fortunately I had some things to keep me company in the illness. Nice things to have around when you're sick:

• Cat Power's sultry new disc of covers and et cetera, Jukebox. If there's a sexier singer going these days, I don't wanna hear it. Cat Power's mint juleps-and-summer sweat voice has developed into a powerhouse of song, and right from the get-go, Jukebox envelops you in a warm mood as she takes covers by Hank Williams, Joni Mitchell and more and makes them her own. It gets off on the right foot with a delicious take on Frank Sinatra's "New York" and is fine company on a rainy night.

• The "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" DVD marathon continued merrily into Season 4, and so I'm nearly at the halfway point of my goal to watch the entire series. May I just say, who rocks harder than Spike? No one rocks harder than Spike, that's who. And the all-silent episode "Hush" may just be in the contention for the single best (and creepiest) episode of "Buffy" by the time I finish the whole friggin' series, in 2011...

• Nothing better than reading old comic books when you're sick, and digging out my copies of the classic 1950s EC Comics collections is the way to go. Specifically, I spent much time re-reading the short-lived series "Piracy," which pretty much mined the genre for all it's worth and is a heck of a lot better than Johnny Depp running around fighting squids. Fantastic art by Wally Wood and company, and plentiful use of keelhauling as a plot device. Yarrrrr!

• Why can't you buy a decent canned chicken soup in New Zealand, anyways?

Of newspapers, vampires and the Tardis

Random thoughts:

• Work, work, work, work. It's been good but extraordinarily busy these last couple of weeks as we constantly add new publications and magazines to the roster of those we're dealing with, which means learning whole new styles and designs pretty much every week. At some point by the end of the year it will settle down into more of a routine but until then, very hectic but mostly enjoyable. I've been busily designing many of the pages and sections in the NZ Herald, which is pretty nifty – a year ago I'd worried what I would do once I left my job in Oregon, but I've ended up working with the country's biggest newspaper and seeing my fingerprints in there daily. ("Whole lotta love for Zeppelin fans" – oh yeah, that's my headline, baby!). And next month it looks like I'll get to do a little traveling around NZ to some of the smaller regional newspapers we're also adding to the roster.

• But when I haven't been working, I've been slaying. Vampire slaying, that is. One or two of you may recall way back before we emigrated I mentioned that I had never watched the famed "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" TV show before, and having sampled it, was determined to catch the entire 7 seasons worth of DVDs from start to finish. So how's that ambitious project going? Well, the wife and I have been zipping along renting DVDs in Buffy-land lately, due largely to the fact NZ Television's five or six channels have next to nothing to watch. We're about midway through Season 3, and it's been some of the best TV I've watched in eons. I missed "Buffy" first time 'round as by the time I noticed it the mythology seemed too daunting – and the main character was named Buffy, so I figured it was Beverly Hills 90210 with fangs. But really, as a zillion others have pointed out before me, "Buffy" has a rich subtext using horror as a metaphor for high school and life in general. The second season found the show settling into a wonderful groove combining angst, romance and monster-of-the-week kung fu with flair, and the great tragic Buffy/Angel love affair packs a real sting. Joss Whedon's characters are so great that I sometimes find the marquee violence and kung fu distracting to the quieter scenes. I can't wait to see what happens next (Spike came back in the latest one we watched – hurray!), and it's cool to know I've got 3 1/2 seasons to go. (The hard part is avoiding spoilers on the Internets about the future of Buffy.)

• And did I mention I've never ever watched "Dr. Who" before either? Well, not until last weekend... Yep, I'm a failure as a geek. The next obsession lurks ahead in the Tardis, I guess!

ETC.: Wake me up before I go-go

ETC.: Wake me up before I go-go

Woke up at 4:30 a.m. or so this morning absolutely alert, and that was that. Eurgghhhggg. It's going to be a long long day. Did manage to read some more of "The Golden Compass" before stumbling out of bed to shower, quite an interesting book. I'd heard it was fantasy in the lines of "Harry Potter"/"Narnia" type stuff, Avril read them a few years ago and liked them, but it's actually quite a few shades darker, and quite inventive stuff so far. Be interested in seeing where it goes and if I'm up for reading the rest of Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy...

Anyway, sleep deprivation means random unfocused posting*!
(*As long as freakin' Blogger cooperates and lets me post this sometime today; I only wrote it six hours ago...)

ITEM! At one point in one of my geekier moods I was planning on posting a huge dissection of the awful recent storyline in the Spider-Man comics, "The Other." This story is shocking in its sheer badness, ineptness and failure to succeed on almost any level (not to mention extraordinarily bad editing, such as a character breaking an arm one issue and being totally fine the next). It had potential, but wow, was it dribbled away. Anyway, I'm saved from having to write this because one of my favorite Spidey bloggers, MadGoblin, is back in action and delivers an excellent analysis of this inept story that echoes my feelings exactly. One of my favorite comic reviewers is spot-on as always; check out his Web site (under re-construction still a bit).

ITEM! I missed the boat on the whole "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" thing way back when, because while it was really critically acclaimed it was one of those shows it looked like you had to get in on the ground floor to appreciate, and because to an outsider's eyes the vampire makeup looked a little dorky. But now that I am Joss Whedon's bitch thanks to "Firefly," I decided that I should take advantage of Netflix to catch up on "Buffy" and see what all the fuss is about. So my ambitious (likely TOO ambitious) goal is to watch all seven seasons gradually in coming months. We watched the first three episodes recently and quite dug it; it's clear now the plastic-vampire look is part of the show's mojo, and while in the early episodes it's still a little clunky, there's already a lot to like - it's all like "Beverly Hills 90210" meets "X-Files." Watch this space as I become a "Buffy"-braniac in coming months...

ITEM! Finally, piss away some time today (er, sorry) with Urinals.Net, perhaps the most fascinating Web site of our time. Ever wanted to know what the johns look like in Berlin, Sudan or Chicago? I find this site mysteriously addictive. Best of all, one of Roseburg's proud establishments is featured on this page – and I might add, this urinal is freakin' gigantic. It dwarves moral men and makes us all feel inadequate. And that's a fitting note to leave for the weekend on...

Man, my brain feels fuzzy.