Yeah, the First is such a great concept for a final-season villain — a character who can simultaneously embody the nastiest and most compelling qualities of all your previous Big Bads. But after promising something along those lines in the season premiere, it never really does anything of the sort. The First becomes a…

Yeah, it's not that they didn't know how to execute the storyline. It's that they had a very clear plan for executing it that they'd arguably been building toward for years and years, and then at the last possible second they chickened out, and veered off into a moronic fallback plan about how magic is crack.

This is often said in defense of season 6, but to me the problem is, it's true about every season of the show. The series' premise is "Growing up is hell," so it's always about the horrors of everyday life; it's just that usually those horrors were represented metaphorically as demons. The lover who never calls…

My understanding, if I'm remembering correctly, is that there's not actually a deep story there — that the parties just failed to agree on compensation or scheduling or some other business element rather than any creative issues.

The problem with Riley was the writing first and foremost. Here's how incoherent the character was: he's described at different points in season 4 as a college student, a graduate student, a civilian government "agent," a soldier, and a marine. On the most fundamental level, they had no fucking idea who this character…

Heh. This was always such an interesting eye-of-the-beholder divide in fandom. To me it was always obvious that Marsters was pushing forty, but lots of other fans legitimately thought he was in his twenties and were surprised to learn otherwise.

As Woody Mellow mentions, it's actually Joss that disses the director. And it's a political move, basically — the real problem with the original scene is that the writing was lame and overwrought, but Joss can't go around bad-mouthing his writers to his actors, so he has to put the blame on the hired help, which is…

I've got no complaints with the storyline they settled on, but there were other ways they could've put a stop to the Slayer parade, including going back to having another Slayer out there somewhere that we never have to see. Faith was pivotal to season 3's storyline not just because she was another Slayer but because…

And then, of course, he dies tragically after he gets "wielding an Uzi" mixed up with "trying to strangle the Slayer slowly with her own clothing when there's another Slayer a few feet away."

At the expense of poor Mr. Trick, the vampire with the can't-miss hook "is good at computers." :p

Back in the day, some wag on Usenet pointed out that he probably should've found the time to check off "Get Haircut" before becoming invulnerable.

Such a great villain. Harry Groener absolutely kills in the role, because he never plays the Mayor as anything but totally sincere in his wholesomeness. The confrontation between the Mayor and Giles in the library just before the Ascension is in my top ten scenes of the series:

The sense I get from what infosec guys are saying about the leak is, the hacking tools in question are not particularly sophisticated. And, of course, since they're now public knowledge, security folks can work on tools to defend against them. Thus, the leak is much more apt to damage the CIA's capabilities than…

I don't have any of the always-on smart TV shit in my house precisely because it's vulnerable to stuff like this, but it's important to note that these leaked documents are not about the remote hacking of devices. So basically, if the CIA can get into your house with a USB stick and install their eavesdropping…

I think that's a fantastic way of looking at it, actually — that Baldwin is doing a better impression and Atamaniuk is doing better satire. And I think they're both valuable in their own way: Atamaniuk spotlighting the malignant horribleness of Trump's whole administration, and Baldwin the infantile smallness of Trump…

Thanks! I agree about Minear; he wasn't just a fantastic writer, he basically seized ownership of the series and its main character in season 1, while everyone else was still stumbling around figuring out what kind of show they were doing. The moment he decided, without running it past Joss or the other top guys, to…

Yeah, it's pretty weirdly unmotivated as voiceover goes. In the aired version, it's not even clear which Angel is speaking, and when. And Boreanaz's delivery certainly doesn't help; the Angelus arc is when DB starts to come into his own as an actor, but he's clearly still working out the kinks.

Agreed. Some tweaks to "Passion" would've made the season work better, but only in the sense there would've been a logical reason expressed on screen for not living up to the fascinating personal stakes originally promised by "Innocence." Still not as good as actually living up to them.

Yeah, it is a bit of an awkward fit, in that "Passion" only really works if you assume that Angel is in some respects pretending to be an obsessed stalkery boyfriend because he knows it'll cause Buffy more pain — and conveniently enough what he's pretending to be is exactly the thing his character is already meant to…

That was always the word around the Internet, if I remember correctly — that the original draft of the script wasn't great, and Joss essentially rewrote the whole thing.