Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 5, Episode 13: Blood Ties
Written by Steven S. DeKnight; Directed by Michael Gershman"Get out, get out, get out!"
Shut up, shut up, shut up! This is the first episode written by Steven S. DeKnight, who is not a popular individual in certain areas of fandom. DeKnight, who wrote this episode as a freelance gig before being offered a more permanent position on the staff, had a pretty thankless role as a Buffy writer, in that he not only wrote what Sarah Michelle Gellar considers her most degrading scene in the entire series (where Spike sodomises her on the balcony of the Bronze in Dead Things), but was also saddled with penning the episode in which Tara is killed (Seeing Dead), which led to many fans demanding his head on a pike. He eventually won himself some credibility by being the first writer to publicly apologise for his part in the Tara debacle (on a message board whose members were baying for his and Joss Whedon's blood, no less), and for requesting that the various homophobes cheering that "the dyke" was dead stop watching Buffy and any future shows he might work on, but he and Drew Greenberg (who penned some truly abysmal episodes in the sixth and seventh seasons) both remain unpopular writers for a variety of reasons.
Anyway, for a Dawn-centric episode, and an unusually whiny one at that, even by her whinyrific standards, I like it. I like that Dawn is smart enough to work out for herself that she's the Key, I like the "adopted child" metaphors in use, and I like the overall dialogue and interaction of the gang. On a side note, I notice that no episode, so far, has received a rating of less than 7/10. As such, I strongly suspect that this one will come away with the highest overall rating when I get to the end of it. It's funny, because although I'm seeing many of the aspects that made Season 6 so downright unenjoyable - such as the increased soap-operafication of the show and the introduction of major plot holes (if Glory knows all along that she has to bleed the Key to open her portal, how come she hasn't yet worked out that the Key is a person rather than an inanimate object) - but I don't particularly mind them here, because everything else is of such a high standard.
Overall rating: 8/10.
Next time: Crush.
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