Adventure On The LCD
I've spent the last three weeks or so marathoning my way through the entire Buffyverse: all seven seasons of Buffy and all five of Angel. That's...lessee here...70 DVDs' worth of vampire-stakin', demon-slaughterin', apocalypse-avertin' Whedon mania. And I haven't even seen any of the extras yet, so the fun...just...won't...stop.
And, it turns out, it won't stop after that, either. I have discovered Buffy Season Eight from Dark Horse Comics, and on Friday the 13th at Comic-Con (where I wasn't), Joss Whedon and Bryan Lynch were on an IDW Publishing panel talking about the comic continuation of Angel as a "Season 6" kind of thing. I think I've pretty much fallen into the dimly lit freaky world of fandom at this point, as I will be hunting down and acquiring issues forthwith due to my complete inability to let these stories end.
Cramming a total of 12 seasons of television into a matter of weeks gives you a real sense of the arc and scope of the projects, their successes and failures. Season 4 of Angel was weak, and it took me awhile to figure out what was wrong with it: the writing. It just wasn't popping in the way the the best of Whedon's stuff can, so the whole end-of-the-world season-long storyline became ponderous and overwrought. Not the good kind of ponderous and overwrought, which sort of comes along with the end-of-the-world thing, but the "when will this end" kind of ponderous and overwrought. Buffy took awhile to get going, with a smattering of gems in seasons one and two, before it really kicked into gear. Taken as a whole, though, both series create a marvelously woven world full of characters who make tremendous journeys. Not just the primaries--everybody changes, in pleasingly dramatic ways that are consistent with the way that real people in extraordinary situations might evolve.
That's an essential element of good storytelling, I think. How will this character be different at the end of this story? What will this character lose? Everybody loses something in the Buffyverse, and that's always more interesting than watching people get what they want.
Next: I've got my eye on Red Dwarf. All of it! In a couple of weeks, when I've got, y'know, money of some kind, or strings of beads and shells that can be accepted in trade.
UPDATE:
My laptop. It is shiny.
