oh dammit.

I forgot about the end of the episode!

Yeah, I just watched through season 5 and was ready to gird my loins for "The Body" and forgot about the end of "I Was Made to Love You". Total gut punch.

"Mom?" "Mom?"..."Mommy?"

TOTAL fucking gut punch.

He is going to love Anya even more than he does already for her speech, though.

I know everyone and their brother gets wibbly over the Fruit Punch speech, but it never did anything for me. On the other hand, her speech to Andrew in the deserted hospital made while they're scrounging for supplies ("Well...I guess I was...kinda new to bein' around humans before. But now I've... seen a lot more, gotten to know people... seen what they're capable of, and... (shrugs) I guess I just realized...how amazingly screwed-up they all are. I mean really, really screwed-up in a monumental fashion....And they have no purpose that unites them, so they just drift around, blundering through life until they die...which they...they know is coming, yet every single one of them is surprised when it happens to them. They're incapable of thinking about what they want beyond the moment. They kill each other, which is clearly insane. And yet, here's the thing. When it's something that really matters, they fight. I mean, they're lame morons for fighting, but they do. They never... never quit. So I guess I will keep fighting, too.") always moved me more.

her speech to Andrew in the deserted hospital made while they're scrounging for supplies

The fruit punch line, for me, is the easier way to convey all of this. Anya is very flawed, but at the end she's also very human. More human than many of the people.

Well, I just went and reread the Fruit Punch speech and they're two different speeches. The Punch speech is a "I don't understand mortality and why people have to die" speech. The People Are Screwed Up speech is several years down the line, and she's had a few years to grow and change and decide that while she's still befuddled by humanity she's decided to throw her lot in with us. So, two different purposes, and I guess it's a YMMV thing.

Robin Sachs gets props in the NYT for his work in audiobooks:

I feel the same way about Robin Sachs, a classically trained British actor. Sachs shines darkly in his reading of the Norwegian crime novelist Jo Nesbo’s smart and gritty Harry Hole books. On television, Sachs has had recurring roles as Ethan Rayne in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and as Adam Carrington on “Dynasty: The Reunion.” Which isn’t bad — a gig’s a gig, after all — but it isn’t living the Gielgud life either. As a reader, however, Sachs is subtle and sly: he has a way of saying the word “boss” just as the troubled cop Harry probably would, inflected dozens of ways to get across his attitude toward the particular superior he is speaking with, whether grudgingly respectful, nearly affectionate or oozing scorn. His command of expletives is explosive and sublime. By contrast, Thor Knai, the other actor to narrate a Harry Hole mystery (“Nemesis”), is actually Norwegian and his accent is flawless. Yet his delivery lacked Sachs’ gravelly weariness and what to me felt like a deep grasp of the characters.

I've been watching through Angel again. Tasering him has, like, a 100% success rate, doesn't it?

Mark's review of I Was Made to Love You is up, and I'm just going to set aside his big emotional whammy at the ending, because, well, I do feel bad for him.

But he made this comment about the rest of the episode:

Warren isn’t going to be a single-episode character

Because of Spike's commission of the Buffybot. But also S6, which Mark doesn't know! And then I wondered if, when Warren was introduced in S5, his role in S6 was already planned.

I just watched "Spiral" with Mark, and he was saying that after Joyce, he felt that all bets were off, that anyone could die. Anyone but Buffy.

Ahahahahaha.