Well, I'm about the same age as JM, and I can tell you that I went to high school with plenty of curly-headed boys who had hair-dos (hair-don'ts?) just like his. It was the Ugly Decade, after all.

Those yearbook pictures are priceless. And if I read the very small type correctly, JM played Thoreau in The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, a play I was in back in high school. (I was Ralph Waldo Emerson's wife, Lydian.) Loved that play to death. It makes me very weirdly happy to know that JM was in the same play.

I totally had hair like Marsters in high school - a few years earlier - completely natural. It can't be that uncommon among Jewish kids (me - not Marsters as far as I know) cause I've heard it called a "Jewfro".

Entertainment Weekly's Ken Tucker (a longtime Buffy fan) gives the last episode an A+ and says, "Here endeth a magnificent series, magnificently."

When I was in junior high school, which would have been about the same time JM was in high school, the Jewfro was a big ol' no-no. Then again, So Cal versus No Cal. No Cal held onto the 70s looks way longer than So Cal did.

And this is from the penultimate Buffy review at Scoopme. I admit it made my allergies act up:

How will we carry on without them?

Whatever happens. Whoever lives. Whoever dies. We lose them anyway.

It hurts. It hurts a lot, and it hurts already. I can’t watch now, without it being connected to this inevitable ending, this final bow. Every moment of beautiful joy extracted from clever, intelligent, hysterical, awesome, captivating writing wrecks me as it lifts me up.

Every line pricks, because I smile or cheer, and then remember that it is the last time that Anya and Andrew will ever get to wheelchair fight. It is the last time that Buffy and Faith reach across the void at each other. It is the last time that Willow doubts her magic, or Giles holds the family together.

Every thing is the last thing, and knowing it is coming makes me incapable of seeing just the moment.

It’s because we love them. We will lose them, and we will mourn them, and, in a way, that preemptive grief is all we have. Because when it ends, next week, there will be nothing left to hold on to. Nothing rational. It will just be gone, and each and everyone of us will clutch the empty spaces where our hearts used to be, and we will feel silly for mourning something so seemingly trivial and small as it were actually family.

It is almost easier to say goodbye now, but it really isn’t goodbye, as long as we know there is one tale left. We still have one week left to rationalize that these people aren’t really real. They aren’t really with us.

But we’re just fooling ourselves, or at least I am.

They are real, if only because they are the better natures we hope for in ourselves. Through thick and thin, these people have laid it all out on the line for each other because of friendship and loyalty over crisis that we could never hope to overcome. We all want friends like these.

We all want to be like them ourselves, and not because they have powers and gifts and a calling.

Anya summed up our allegiance to them best:

"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... they never quit. And so I guess, I’ll keep fighting too."

Amen.

Go.

Go be heroes.

One last time.

I actually had real work to do today, so I didn’t get a chance to respond to Cindy’s posts here and here from earlier. I’ve skipped and skimmed, and I sense that the conversation has moved on, but I really feel compelled to make a few points to clarify and defend my earlier position.

Please feel free to skip, starting here.

While I totally agree with Cindy’s points that vengeful actions are morally wrong in the Buffyverse, I take issue with the following statements

To justify something means to make prove something or somebody right (righteous); to make it/them free from blame; to absolve (from) guilt.

The desire is understandable, sympathetic; it's not justified.

Which is why I feel that, in the Buffyverse, a desire for vengeance is often, though not always, justified. Sometimes, a person who desires vengeance is “free from blame” for that desire.

In Season 1, “Nightmares”, Buffy’s desire to exact vengeance on Billy’s behalf is presented as morally right. We don’t know in what form or if vengeance was taken on the coach. The fact that Xander and Giles prevent the coach from leaving the hospital suggests that they were preparing to take further action, possibly taking him to the authorities.

In Season 2, no one questions Giles’ moral correctness for wanting to take vengeance on Angelus for Jenny’s murder. Buffy stops him, but only for his own safety, not because he is wrong. In fact, most members of the group have a desire for vengeance that is never questioned as being morally justified.

In Season 3, Cordelia’s feelings are acknowledged by Willow as justified. From “The Wish”:

XANDER: Excuse me? I need to be both giving and receiving mirth. Is it too much to ask for a little back up?

BUFFY: I don't know, Xand. I'm here for you. I'm supporto gal. But I feel kind of funny doing the "us against Cordelia" thing. She's had a rough time.

WILLOW: (stricken) It's true. Cordy belongs to the "justified" camp. She should make us pay. And pay and pay and pay and pay... In fact, there's really not enough "pay" to make up for-

In Season 3, we also have Buffy’s desire for vengeance against Faith for trying to kill Angel (among other things). In Season 4, we are presented with another instance of Buffy wanting vengeance on Faith for Faith’s body stealing. Only Angel, in the Angel episode “Sanctuary”, stops Buffy for taking vengeance, but he doesn’t tell her she’s wrong for wanting it.

(Continued in next post)

(Edited to add omitted quote)

(I can’t thing of any examples for Season 5.)

In Season 6, Dawn’s feelings of abandonment are strong enough to summon a vengeance demon. Although Dawn herself may not have been wanting or seeking vengeance, nobody questions Hallie’s characterization of Dawn’s feelings and seem to accept them as justified. Nor does anyone question Anya’s feelings leading to her decision to return to her life as a vengeance demon.

And in Season 7, Buffy does not condemn Wood’s desire to kill Spike. Of course, she doesn’t know nor care to know what those feelings are, so she cannot judge them as justified or unjustified. We know, Giles knows, Spike knows. Giles does question Wood’s plan to kill Spike:

GILES: And this has nothing to do with personal vengeance.

WOOD: Does it matter? (pause) He's an instrument of evil. He's going to prove to be our undoing in this fight. Buffy's undoing. And she's never gonna see it coming.

PUSH IN as WOOD brings home his case.

WOOD (cont'd): I'm talking about what needs to be done. For the greater good. You know I'm right.

While Giles does question the desire leading to action, he does not question the desire itself. Even Spike doesn’t question Wood’s moral right to be vengeful.

What I am trying to say in all of this is that in the Buffyverse, the desire for vengeance is often understandable and occasionally justified. Not all instances are justified. Marcie’s weren’t; Professor Walsh’s weren’t; Faith’s weren’t (at least initially). I don’t believe it is true that desire for vengeance is never justified. I feel we have been told and shown otherwise.

Quickly, because I'm literally off to catch a train:

WILLOW: (stricken) It's true. Cordy belongs to the "justified" camp. She should make us pay. And pay and pay and pay and pay... In fact, there's

But Willow, since pretty much Episode 1, has been presented, as the nice Jewish smart girl who is All About The Guilt. Hannigan has always portrayed her that way. In fact, we get echoes of it at the beginning of Season 7, in her big-eyed line post bad-behaviour line to Giles, about expecting punishment. And he reads her very astutely indeed, does Giles: "Do you want to be punished?" I know we're all tempted to crack about the porn, but there was nothing porny in that scene to me. In the way a teacher might, with his most promising student ever, Giles is taking the piss out of Willow for wallowing. I see that as him calling her on her crap. And I've always read her tendency to wallow as not only part of her personal insecurities, but as a very very good way to ensure forgiveness for the next time. (she is, in fact, a damned clone for my cousin Jill.) It's not insincere; I think it's just Willow.

As for the presentation of a few of the other examples: I can't imagine anything in Halfrek's behaviour as justified. Understandable? Certainly. But justification? She locked the wishmaker in with the targets, for one thing, which no matter how adolescent-angsty Dawn might have been was almost certainly not part of her wish. IOW, the vengeance taken is an extreme, with the potential for unwanted and/or undesirable consequences equal to or possibly outweighing the justice entailed.

I'd have to say that, as presented to me and understood in my world since the show's inception, vengeance and the desire therefore in the Buffiverse is almost always understandable. Where I veer away in opinion is that I can't recall one time it came free, and therefor I don't believe it is ever presented as justified. And that goes for those times when I've wanted to wreak a little vengeance myself, so my bloodthirstiness doesn't come into the equation here.

Because what I've always seen them offering as the belief structure here is the old line about "when you go off seeking vengeance, dig two graves."

Hey, has this been linked here yet? Spoiler-free except for a completely non-revealing shot from the finale.

As for the presentation of a few of the other examples: I can't imagine anything in Halfrek's behaviour as justified. Understandable? Certainly. But justification? She locked the wishmaker in with the targets, for one thing, which no matter how adolescent-angsty Dawn might have been was almost certainly not part of her wish. IOW, the vengeance taken is an extreme, with the potential for unwanted and/or undesirable consequences equal to or possibly outweighing the justice entailed.

Deb, you misunderstand, or I was unclear, which is likely. I do not feel Hallie's behavior was justified. Dawn's feelings of rejection, which Hallie introduced to the rest of the crowd, may or may not have been justified to your point of view, but none of the group questioned Hallie's interpretation of Dawn's feelings as justified. They do not tell Dawn she is wrong for feeling abandoned enough to inadvertently summon a vengeance demon or make a wish.