Ha ha, not so sure myself. I just find it so funny . . . and love how Parker gets his comeupance . . . and love how they basically undercut the "don't drink, kiddos" message by having Willow get drunk one or two eps later.

I can actually live with most of this. The season does look bad, and for a lot of reasons.

I'd never really go to bat for "As You Were" - it's a bad episode. But it works a bit better if you think of it as some sort of fantasy/wish fulfilment on Buffy's part. So much of the story's actual plot is ridiculous and cliche that it almost seems impossible. That's most likely just bad writing, I know.

That's a really great moment for both eps (and TV in general, I'd say). And man, "Fool for Love" is just an all-around fantastic hour of TV.

I always had this sort of fan-wanky idea that as any particular Slayer survived and grew stronger, she attracted bigger and bigger bads. Sort of a "balance" thing - and part of the reasons Slayers died so young. Some of them probably just got offed in the first couple years, but those who survived the transition into…

It's a point worth thinking about. Certainly Gellar developed her chops on daytime soaps, and one could argue that Matthew Fox's (who, like him or not, help set a template for the current spate of sensitive man-boys) work on Party of Five was soap-like. There's definitely a case to be made that this era of TV acting…

Yes, true. Soaps often get a bad rap, but their influence on today's TV narrative is hard to overstate. I think it's especially true of prime-time soaps that showed how you could tell long-form stories with only one ep a week.

cookie dough

If you have the time, watch it all. Even the "bad" eps bring something in the form of character development or a really clever joke. S1 doesn't look so great these days, the monsters are pretty jokey, but it establishes so much in terms of tone, character, mythology, etc, that you quickly move beyond the low budget…

The cauldron of late '80s/early '90s "quality" TV predecessors makes it hard to land on one predecessor. Hill St. Blues is a different sort of genre show, but it did a lot of arc-based story telling - definitely carried over plotpoints from ep to ep without resetting.

Except that many of the showrunners have come right out and said they're inspired by Buffy . . . and many of Buffy's writers work on those shows now.

Well, he's in the running for best Big Bad final fight . . . I could go that far!

I think you could watch Angel and PG from S1, School Hard and Lie to Me from S2, and then jump to the back half of S2 (from Surprise/Innocence) and make a go of it. Yes, you'd miss a lot of fun stuff, and Innocence might not hit so hard without the hours of investment, but for somebody who was warily interested it…

Yes, the first 1/3 of S7 is pretty near perfect . . . the way they have no clue about the BB, and each ep is almost stand alone (except all totally influenced by the BB in ways the make sense in retrospect).

Yup, I've just always figured it was the thing a street-smart cop would do . . .

Still is. And I'd put Chinatown on a list of top five films ever made in Hollywood without any reservation.

Yeah, he didn't go full "I only listen to Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac," but he came close enough to show me how cool he is.

I really loved it, too . . . also just saw it over the weekend. Found the music pretty heavy-handed and oppressive in spots (when I think it was meant to be soaring), but otherwise it pretty much blew me away.

I think he's fantastic in the first Avengers movie - the fight/chase with Loki at the beginning, his speech about Coulson. Also, as others have said, he's a key part of Winter Soldier. Part of why his role in those two films works so well is because his smaller, almost cameo roles in the other films established him as…

It's not really "judging" - trying to better understand the past can provide some stark clarity for the present.