Buffy

After all of the noise around Buffy yesterday, I finally sat down and watched something from the original Whedonverse. The episode happened to be Destiny which is the eighth one in season five. After completing it, I'm a mere 14 episodes away from completing my second viewing of the BtVS/Angel arc, and it happened to be a particularly good episode for thinking about the series holistically.

Episode 96 of Angel, titled Destiny, is some pretty serious business. In many ways it's about the girl who isn't there . . . while, two girls actually. From very early in BtVS, Joss & Co. utilize flashbacks to reveal deep narrative elements tying characters to their pasts. In this episode Angel and Spike clash in the present and the topic of Buffy emerges, while key interactions from their shared past with Drusilla are revealed.

I really can't do the episode justice trying to write about it, and I don't want to create a spoiler laden post anyway. Basically, if you've seen it all before go watch Destiny on Netflix or something, and if you haven't . . . while, let's just say that you'll want to take it from the top (at least Buffy Season 2). The point being that the entire series (both actually) are tightly and coherently written. To put it another way, Buffy is not a one off. Rebooting Buffy really is like rebooting Star Trek, except that with Buffy the camp was always intentional in the original.

At any rate, the first thought I had while watching last night was that if there was going to be a new Buffy project without Joss, it better involve either Marti Noxon or Ben Edlund. Edlund is of course better known for The Tick among most geek circles, but in the process of putting this post together I discovered that he was in fact also the originator of the concept of Bad Horse. Trivia aside, after I thought about it some more I realized that maybe I should give this thing a chance and see what comes of it. As long as it isn't killed by committee, there's actually a lot of potential for a Buffy reboot. Joss made a fantastic world, and a talented writer could do a lot with it.

Yeah, death by committee looks pretty likely =(