What did the FE want?

It did say that once it defeated Buffy and took over, it would become corporeal.

First, thanks for the Salon article!

I said last night at Deb's, "You know, the show really could have ended at S5 and I'd have been satisfied."

Not only would I not be satisfied, I quite possibly never would have seen it (since it was OMWF that made me a Buffy watcher).

To me it seemed like the Kennedy character was brought in for a little ratings hike (two hot babes kissing - OK, we get it already!!), and for annoying us because of her unrelenting criticism of Buffy.

I like Kennedy-even before she admitted she was a brat. Which she is-but that was exactly what Willow needed (someone pushy who wouldn't take no) and I liked her for Willow's sake first (and at the end for her own sake).

Very hard for me to rank the seasons. 1 is by a wide margin the weakest for me, 2,3 and 6 get an A overall and 4,5, and 7 get a solid B. But half of all the episodes get a B+ or better from me, and about one third get an A- to an A+. In the entire 144 episodes there isn't one that doesn't have at least 10 minutes I like, and just 5 that ONLY have 10 minutes I like (Reptile Boy, Bad Eggs, Weight of the World, Wrecked, DMP).

Easier for me to list, say, my 27 favorite episodes (in chronological order): Welcome to the Hellmouth, Passion, Phases, Becoming, Lovers Walk, The Wish, Dopplegangland, Earshot, The Prom, Graduation, Pangs, Something Blue, Hush, Restless, Fool For Love, The Body, The Gift, Bargaining, OMWF, Tabula Rasa, Dead Things, Two To Go, Grave, Beneath You, Selfless, CWDP, Chosen.

Also, didn't Spike say that the time he spent cuddling with Buffy was the best night of his life?

The difference between their interactions in S6 and S7 (and yeah, Buffy was using Spike in S6) is that in S7 they were honest - with each other, with the rest of the Scoobies, and with themselves. Yes, Buffy and Spike needed/wanted different things. But that's true of virtually all relationships.

Incidentally, am I the only one who saw parallels between the early stages of Spike/Buffy and the early stages of Xander/Cordelia?

I am going to buck the trend and say I liked Season 5 the best. Because it was my first, and I remember it the most.

I have what I think is an idiotic question, but here goes. What did the FE want? I'm really having a hard time figuring out what the goal was for the FE. To wipe out the slayer line? Because after seeing the baseball girl etc, it just seems like it wouldn't have ever worked.

Ok, I might try a leetle fanwank. One thing I occasionally pondered, in that idle, lazy sunny day kind of way, was: when do potentials become potentials? We know when we get a new Slayer; now apparently there were a stack of girls from whom to choose.

To put it another way, the FE seemed for most of the season to be pretty insistent on the order in which they had to die: SiTs first, then Faith, then Buffy. What if it'd killed nearly all the SiTs, but then Faith has an unfortunate accident with an electric toenail clipper and a new one got called. Would that also spark a fresh crop of potentials, so the FE has to start all over again, or do they build up again only gradually?

So my FW is that, when Willow cast the spell, she triggered the next Slayer, and in so doing, created some new Potentials too - that is, the accession of a new Slayer is the trigger for Potentials to potentify. Thanks to the spell, however, they went straight to Slayerdom.

The only problem is that I don't yet have a decent mechanism in place to stop that process at one crop. But then, now the rules have changed, the way the line(s) of succession works needs to be rethought anyway.

The scene in the high school, which starts with the Slayer and her herd and then thins down to just the core four, then Buffy, Willow and Xander walking down the hallway, with Willow peeling off, then Xander, leaving Buffy alone for a moment--that was nice.

The core four departed in reverse order of their introduction in WTTH: Buffy waking up from her slayer dreams, Xander on his skateboard running into Willow, and Giles in the library.

Yeah, I know it's utterly meaningless, and may not have been done on purpose, but with Joss you can never tell.

3, 2, 4, 1, 5, 6, 7. Six beating seven basically on the strength of OMWF.

Connie, as a woman who has never felt disempowered either, I though the premise lovely because, dammit, not all women are as pigheadedlucky as I've been, and it's just one of those moments that will always get me, no specific gender required, where from either inside or symbolically from outside, one finds the strength to do what one couldn't before.

It's funny - I never had any trouble identifying with and claiming the power of Slayerhood when it was just Buffy, or when it was Buffy and Faith. The montage of the Chosen Few made me think "I'm not one of those girls," though. Which was obviously not their intent.

That's interesting billytea. I hadn't thought of it like that.

yeah, Buffy was using Spike in S6

Yeah, and vice versa. And on the catwalk at the Bronze, more vice than versa.

Hmm. Katie, I never felt it was for me to claim any of the slayerhood. It was (and still is) other.

Now it's just other to fewer, and more power to them.

So to speak.