But how about some trivia?
- Everyone's already handled anything related to Kelly Donovan (Brendon's twin), so I have nothing to add.

Underrated gems and, um, not
Opposite of Noel, I'm a bit more interested in _Angel_ this week. Quite fond of "The Replacement" as a feel good moment (and proof that the writers were actually going somewhere with the "no more butt-monkey" story, which I'd been very doubtful about). Not big on OOMM.

For a newbie, Noel has done an impressive job in knowing how to look around and notice some of the themes S5 is building. Some of the biggies haven't been introduced yet, but most of it's already there.

"No major spoilers" for someone who hasn't seen BTVS past S5? Really? That's the thing, people who're up to date don't notice the spoilers in the throwaway gags. Especially if someone' a totally naive viewer, and say, doesn't even want to know whether character A survives into S7.

That's very true. Back when Noel was doing S1, we were telling him he could just act like Whedon personally wrote almost every line. Even in the later years, Whedon did uncredited tweaks all the time, and so did the other top honchos. For instance, in the "Real Me" commentary, Fury says that Noxon pretty much wrote…

Good to be back, again
Can't mention how much I enjoy these columns, Noel; they're the only AVC posts I ever comment on, really. I won't be able to post in a timely manner all the time, or at all (oh noes! One of 300 commenters can't contribute regularly!), but hey, whatever.

(Oh, and although you didn't ask, unlike S4, ATS S5 *does* rely on BTVS knowledge.)

There are some bits and pieces that cross back and forth, enough so that I'd recommend getting somewhat caught up on _Buffy_. _Angel_ will make total sense without having followed BTVS. However, one episode in particular casually mentions a few major BTVS S6/S7 plot points.

Usenet/(what's left of it) can/(could) be a perfect venue for conversation. Even as the old ways slowly die, alt.tv.dollhouse is still my preferred venue for generating giant blobs of text. By contrast, this kinda feels like Noel's territory, you know? It's great for highlighting and preserving one person's…

True. Another idea I've seen expressed (more eloquently than I can) is that Adam accepts what he's programmed to do and what people expect. He's content to be - literally - the sum of his parts, and nothing more. Buffy, the student resisting the system, is always striving to redefine who and what she is.

I'm not going to rant pages in this box that no one's going to read. Maybe if it were an episode I really liked that was being misunderstood, I'd bother, but no long-winded complaints from me.

Untitled
The ending of S4 encapsulates how badly the main arc ends up fitting together (hey, I really really hate "The Yoko Factor"), but also how well many individual S4 episodes (i.e. "Restless") hold up. But no mention of Snyder or Darla in their cameos? Well, not everything needs to be mentioned, I guess.

Totally irrelevant side note to Annonymous - "Alive" by Pearl Jam is a song about being traumatized by incest.

Still not registering? Why is this forum different than any other forum devoted to the discussion of BTVS? Because it centers around reviews written by Noel Murray, someone who has never watched the whole series before and has specifically requested not to be spoiled. We are interested in seeing what Noel, as an…

I've heard the comment that it's enjoyable if you view it as a collection of amusing vignettes and character moments that are only loosely tied together by any sort of plot.

More or less agreed. The best rationalization I've heard it is that Willow is consistently shown as a person who's more comfortable thinking in absolutes. Good people and and bad people, etc. So she'd rather interpret the fact that she's more strongly attracted towards women than men as her being all-out gay…

I don't know whether the line about him inventing the Internet was written before or after the topic started coming up in the '00 presidential campaign. "Superstar" must have been written quite early in the calendar year, but I still like to pretend it's a reference.

I just don't see why some people have such a hard time grasping the concept of letting the new guy watch TV unspoiled. Thanks to proper use of the spoiler tag, someone like Noel - you know, the person facilitating this discussion in the first place on his portion of the TV Club blog - does not need to read through…

I don't know that it was ever a mandate like NO REPEAT LAWYERS EVAR!! But Whedon does mention on the "City Of" commentary that the original plan was to sort of build W&H into a "character" via a different sharply dressed young lawyer showing up each week. I guess they did that for half a season, then started delving.

In a separate post again
Trivia builds strong bones!