Empty Places

[thebratqueen]

Hate to say it but count me in with the crowd who found the ep sub-standard. Lots of good concepts but IMO poor execution. Caleb continues to be the villan that scares us only because the tertiary characters say so (and we all know how much I love plot points that only exist because tertiary characters tell me they do - right third season Angel/Cordy?) and poor Faith is once again back to season 3 Buffy where she's not allowed to be cool because she is but because we're hit over the head with how much we're supposed to think so. Sigh. Even in the crappiest of her 3 eps on Angel she still had more depth than this!

And while I agree with the plot point of the mutiny, I found it fell flat in the actual doing. Too much tell, not enough show. Esp since, frankly, yeah Buffy's made decisions like this before. I forget who it was but somebody out there on my friends list made the wise point that Buffy's all about her intuition - how she has that ability to see point A and B and from there make the leap to C. It's one of her strengths. So if the gang is going to mutiny, why do it when she's doing what she's supposed to do?

Call me picky but I would have much rather seen Buffy do the opposite. Argue for the Hellmouth. Because then her judgement is actually clouded as everyone accused it of being. Either that or give us more of her one point of actual clouded judgement - Spike. Have her sit there and refuse to do anything until Spike comes home. Because you can't have everybody bitching that she's not using the SiTs (as Faith did outside of the Bronze) and then stage a revolt when she wants to, you know, use the SiTs.

Still, some moments were good. Anya was very in-character. The Faith/Wood scene was well done, and needs to be contrasted with the anvil-fest that was Faith/Spike as an example of how you should let chemistry happen 'cause look - Faith and Wood managed to have it and Faith never once grabbed her boobs like she had no idea where they came from and therefore needed to touch them at every opportunity.

Giles was good. Drew Greenberg apparently hates Andrew though since while I love the boy many of his lines were clunky (this is possibly a fault of the director though b/c I suspect some of the problems with Andrew were due to pacing more than the lines themselves) although I may forgive him for that because he had Kennedy say the line about some of them being pointless and, well, yeah.