Also, let us not forget Mr. "Cordy's looking really good to me right now", which I think Buffy would find almost as bad as the Darla issue and its issue.

If Buffy has to find out all about that, then I hope she gets to find out that when he underwent the spell to lose his soul, it was her name he cried out, not Cordelia's.

Great Jesus with an eye patch

When I was a carpenter (no, really) our lead guy used a variety of Christ-based expletives. I liked to combine them all into one, like so:

Great suffering Jesus screaming Christ on crutches!!

I have no idea where the crutches thing comes from. Alliteration, I guess.

It was also kinda fun to tell my Southern Baptist grandpa when he asked me what kind of job I got that I was "doing the Lord's work."

Spot for me on the Special Hell Comfy Couch?

Please note that I have nothing against Jesus. I believe He has a sense of humor and doesn't mind the occasional joke. I'm an equal opportunity religion joker.

Heyo, bouncing in to query the Buffy-smart: Is the finale one hour or two?

one hour

One hour, but with a better show-to-commercial ratio than normal, thanks to all of that Acuvue sponsorship.

I'm skipping a lot, and I feel terrible about it, not because of the show, which left me very underwhelmed, but because I'm just going to have go back for all y'all's brilliance at another time.

There was good parts - Buffy and Faith's talk, Anya's drinking the sterilizer, the wheelchair fight. But there was also the Angel-Ex-Machina, the ending that seemed straight out of "Passions" except there's a monkey on "Passions", and that stupid fucking axe which I hope really really hurt when ME pulled it out of their collective ass. The only way to redeem it would be to have Faith steal the scythe and use it to take out Brannon Braga forcing Buffy to fight in some interesting way.

I did have another idea for a nice ending image. They show Andrew standing over some charred metal thing in earth that marks the sealed hellmouth and describing the battle. Then they show a guy played by Firefly's Simon holding a baby who says, "We're still not naming her Buffy."

that stupid fucking axe which I hope really really hurt when ME pulled it out of their collective ass.

I can agree with the rest, but not with this. The axe has been set up for so long in Fray that it was a TOTAL geek-out moment for me when I saw it.

That's the problem - they set it up in "Fray" alone. I like the idea of having something occurring in both, but this came as a sudden Excalibur kind of thing, even though the big thing about the slayer was that she herself was the greatest weapon. She didn't need no steenkin' axes. If they had incorporated the scythe from the beginning of the season, like maybe had that woman make a previous appearance, it would have worked better. As it was, it seemed as cohesive as Buffy suddenly pulling Vera out of the rock - yeah, nice shout out, but very disjointing.

that stupid fucking axe which I hope really really hurt when ME pulled it out of their collective ass.

I can agree with the rest, but not with this. The axe has been set up for so long in Fray that it was a TOTAL geek-out moment for me when I saw it.

Me, too. Because we first saw it in the Tales of the Slayers TPB, right? And then Fray #7, which I strongly suspect was delayed to be in synch with Buffy.

I agree Victor. Even if I didn't already know about AxeCalibre from Fray, I wouldn't have minded it just popping up. Just like I didn't mind Acathla coming out of nowhere in Becoming 1 or the prophecy about Buffy dying only showing up in Prophecy. Though I did wonder about that Troll Hammer that became a Troll God Hammer in The Gift. Where is it now?