Yay! Mutant Enemies on The OC! Can we have Espenson too?

Surely TC would lend her to OC?

Yay! Increased slash potential on The OC!

Espenson wrote at least one S1 OC. I remember it was an early one, because the Seth/Summer crosstalk was just exactly S2 Xander/Cordy in tone.

It was the one with the casino event, and Ryan's mother left him with the Cohens. It was beautiful. I want her back.

It was beautiful -- one of the best episodes.

Yes, she's wasting her gifts on TC.

Ah, how I love the OC. It's Buffy methadone.

I'm watching S7 at the moment, and I've just got to Selfless, which is the first shock of the season.

When I first watched this I remember thinking it was brilliant, the best episode of season 7. I was totally wrong. It's just a pastiche of Joss Whedon's style and is the first Buffy episode to be utterly without an emotional story ; it's got this idea that Anya doesn't know who she is with a man/job, but it just doesn't go anywhere or make any emotional sense. He's picked up on a bunch of Whedon tropes - the hard cut from a happy flashback to a silent tableau of horror is the most obvious one - but he just doesn't get it. Why go into the song when he does? Why come back to skewered anya in an echo of The Body when we know she can survive?

Plus it's a fucking dismal song in comparison to the OMWF tunes.

Up to this point I'd been enjoying the season a lot - the opener with the high school works well, the Willow-in-England bits are aces, and even the Spike stuff isn't grating.

Jim, I haven't seen "Selfless" lately, but it's one of my favorite S7 eps. But looking at it from the season as a whole, it suffers because there's no follow-up. I think the emotional core of the ep is Anya facing herself. Which could have kicked Anya's journey into high gear.

But it was just dropped until -- let's be generous -- her scene with Andrew in the hospital in the next to last ep. Contrast with Oz as werewolf, where a non-core-four character had his own, well-realized story.

Which is really the tragedy of S7. Not just letting the Potentials and the First drown out everything. But that the early eps laid a lot of groundwork for things that never paid off. Case in point -- even if you didn't like the "Scrappy Gang," there was a potential theme of grown-up Buffy bringing the school together to fight the Hellmouth. Think the flip side of S1-S3.

Yeah, at this point I'm thinking - as I was last time - that the show is right back in the groove. I'll be interested to see if it's as disappointing as it was.

I've watched all the seasons this year, for the first time since they aired in most cases, and it's been very different than I expected; seasons 5 and six hold up way better when watched very soon after the first 3, possibly because you don't have the nostalgia for the early episodes. S4 has dropped most in my estimation.

But that the early eps laid a lot of groundwork for things that never paid off.

I think season 7 Buffy was a lot like season 4 Farscape: a lot of good...err...potential in the storylines, but absolutely no follow through. At least season 6 followed through on what was set up, although, arguably, they followed up to the point of beating an idea into the ground (Buffy's depression, Spuffy), or followed up in a way that ruined the good idea (magic=crack). I definitely preferred that to just tossing things at the wall and seeing what stuck, though.

That said, I still preferred 6 & 7 to 5, and still like 4 a lot, mainly for the standalones.