ampullae of Lorenzini

Today was a better day than yesterday for various and sundry reasons. ( Read more... )

***

I finished the Angelica Huston Memoir - "Watch Me" - which isn't that memorable, outside of a bittersweet ending, wherein she makes the point that of everything she's done, it's her connections with family, friends, and others that meant the most. ( Read more... )

Currently listening to Twelve Months by Jim Butcher - narrated by James Marsters. Not Marsters best voice work but still rather good.
And still reading The Botanist's Assistant by Peggy Townsend- which is basically a mystery with an autistic sleuth, whose six foot tall, and middle-aged. It's okay - I got it as a Xmas present. But it's slow moving.
[Note to self- stop picking up books rec'd by Smart Bitches. This one was - looked great and I asked for it for Xmas.]

***

Buffy S7 Rewatch - Get it Done, Ep. 15

Doug Petrie, God Bless Him, is not a good script writer. His dialogue, ugh. Cringe. Yes, I know he was credited for writing both Beneath Me and Fool for Love, but I also know both those episodes were heavily edited and rewritten by the show-runners and executive producers (Marti Noxon and Joss Whedon). Whedon and Noxon wrote all of the Spike and Buffy scenes in Fool for Love, taking turns. While Petrie wrote the Riley scenes. (He states this in the commentary for the episode, that's how I know. Petrie told us.) Whedon also rewrote and refilmed, and directed himself the second half of Beneath Me. Petrie's script was so awful, Whedon rewrote it, and directed it, and brought everyone back to film it over the weekend. And you can tell the difference. The dialogue in the first half of Beneath Me is cringe inducing in places.

Petrie wrote As You Were and Get it Done, and they have the same problems. He doesn't know how to write for Spike, Willow, Anya, or Dawn. Buffy is okay for the most part. Also he sucks at plotting, there are plot holes in this episode that you can drive a truck through. You can tell they didn't plan it out.

The other difficulty with Get it Done is...the writers want to be color blind? ( Read more... )

I get what they are trying to do and the power metaphors are interesting on a certain level. And Buffy's refusal of the power at whatever cost - is interesting as well, and direct demonstration of how she is different from the First's take on her or Caleb. But, the execution is clumsy at best, and it doesn't totally make sense? ( Read more... )

**

This is more about S7 as a whole, not just this episode - when Buffy moved over to UPN, UPN let the show-runners and producers know that they had to fulfill a diversity quota. ( Read more... )

Get It Done - unfortunately didn't have a strong enough writer to handle the world building, the cultural stuff, and the large cast. That said, there's a few isolated moments in there that work however. Spike's fight with the demon does. I spent some time trying to figure out why soulful Spike would have issues fighting demons or taking a demon life? ( Read more... )

I also wondered why he needed to get the coat to be able to do it? And realized finally that it's clarified in Sleeper or the song, Pavlov's Bell - "trading coats and ringing Pavlov's Bell is how I nearly fell" - that's what Spike has been doing all along. ( Read more... )

Overall - an interesting but deeply flawed episode. S7 like all the seasons has some clunky episodes in the middle. This is one of them.

Make of that what you will...just my own mutterings for my own amusement.

Off to bed.