Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 3, Episode 10: Amends
Written and Directed by Joss WhedonThis has seriously got to qualify as a "what the fuck?" episode, and not in a good way. I have no idea what Whedon was aiming for here, but the end result is so hokey and so clearly designed as a stereotypical "Christmas miracle" episode that I spent most of its running time scratching my head.
It's also the episode that introduces the First Evil and the Bringers, who would turn out to be the woeful villains of the even more woeful Season 7. As such, it's hard to stay positive about it, but I'm going to refrain from marking it down just because of this. Besides, there's enough wrong with it anyway without looking to pick holes in it. It's the worst episode of the entire series to be written and/or directed by Whedon, that's for sure.
Oh yeah - in this episode, Angel apparently finds out the reason for his being "brought back". Shame he decided not to share it with us because, four more seasons of Buffy and five of Angel down the line, I'm still none the wiser.
Overall rating: 4/10.
Next time: Gingerbread.
4 Comments:
As far as I'm aware, he was brought back by the First Evil to kill Buffy. Which doesn't seem like the most watertight or cost-effective plan in existence, but there you go.
I'm just amazed that snow is able to delay dawn and daylight indefinitely.
By Baron Scarpia, at 08:36
Yeah, I'd buy into that if I thought the First Evil was even remotely capable of doing anything like that. Having seen Season 7, though, I know that its greatest claim to fame is its ability to infuriate people by taunting them from the sidelines. The closest the First Evil actually comes to controlling life and death is in almost convincing Willow to commit suicide in one of the few decent episodes of that season, Conversations with Dead People. But no, I don't buy it being able to extract Angel from a Hell dimension.
Perhaps it would have been more convincing had Joss Whedon appeared in the show and said, "Angel, you must return to Earth so that I can fulfill my contract to Fox and deliver a spin-off featuring you in 12 months' time."
By Whiggles, at 11:17
You mean all it can do is talk to people? Yikes, what a wimpy villain. Its PR men have been getting a lot of mileage out of very little, obviously...
By Baron Scarpia, at 13:33
I don't want to "spoil" (in a manner of speaking) Season 7 too much for you, but, basically... yeah. It's an idea that could actually have worked if they had managed to consistently present it as a persuasive force (the example I cited where is taunts Willow into believing that she should kill herself so she can be with Tara is pretty effective), but, eventually, it ends up being so useless that the characters even begin making jokes about how useless it is. Then, in the last couple of episodes, it turns out that the First Evil wants to become corporeal, and by that stage I've lost all interest and have given up trying to work out why it could possibly want to do that.
By Whiggles, at 13:37
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