The Great Experiment: Season Two

Posted by Maggie March 21st, 2006 at 10:00am In Buffy Vintage

We are truly flying through these episodes of Buffy, probably because I refuse to do anything but watch them. Season Two went down easily, a delightful cocktail of humor and tragedy and sassiness. I’m told this may be the best season. It’s a bit raw, and the bad guys are still surprising. Pretty much everyone found someone to smooch. A nice lady died. Many monsters met their match. And like all the best love stories, this one is DOOMED.

That doesn’t make any sense, you may be thinking — no one wants heartache and woe. But even though you think you want your favorite characters to get together, you really don’t. You’d rather see them tragically torn apart by situations outside of their control. Not even situations — you want to see them have to choose to leave each other or hurt each other or otherwise ruin everything because they have to. I am not making this up. Check your Romeo and Juliet. Or Brokeback Mountain. (Or Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass, YA people.) Tragically DOOMED lovers make us feel sad in that special I-cried-SO-hard-at-that-movie-it-was-awesome type of way.

Oh sure, I was rooting for Luke and Lorelai and Josh and Donna and Veronica and Logan and all those other struggling couples-to-be. And I deeply rooted for Buffy and Angel, even though I knew exactly what was going to happen. (They would do it and he would lose his soul. Which… is pretty harsh. It may even be worse than getting preggers, but conveniently vamps can’t have babies. They don’t mention STDs, and personally I’d rather not think about the disease possibilities in someone who’s been dead hundreds of years and has sex regularly with other dead people. Ew. Maybe it’s best he just lost a soul.)

Of course, not all lovers are DOOMED. And that’s part of the fun of the second season, watching Willow and Xander find people to make out with. Not each other, naturally. That pairing is DOOMED before it even starts.

The other fun part was spotting the Hey! It’s That Guy!. For example, Wentworth Miller, the Prison Break dude, was a swimmer-slash-fish-mutant. John Hawkes, the mustachioed fellow from Me and You and Everyone We Know, was a poltergeisted janitor who shoots a teacher. Bianca Lawson, who you might (maybe) remember from Save the Last Dance as the super-bitch skank who tries to mess with the hero’s head, was Kendra, the second slayer. And more, I’m sure. Spot any?

And now I’m barreling on to Season Three, which features the new “Buffy” font in the opening credits! I have been waiting a long time for that font to show up. The old font was a little too Comic Sans for me to take seriously. And I’m sure there will be other delightful (non-typographical) surprises as well.