Stuff about this I like:
Giles
Magic fight with Giles!
giggly Giles!
I do love it when he hears Buffy's list of woes and just giggles.
He says he should never have left, Buffy says he was right all along. I read a lot of people being annoyed at Giles because they agree with him and not Buffy. But they agree because they like Buffy. Clearly they do not like her for the accuracy of her self assessment.
I don't know, really. For his own sake he should go do things he wants to do. He was Buffy's teacher. The thing about teachers is they teach you what you need to know and then you graduate. Buffy reckoned several times she'd done that. So as her teacher he could leave.
But as her friend she could have done with some support.
Except she was hiding behind him, not being friends, treating him like a parent. Which he never was.
I think there's a point where helping people hide isn't any helpful.
I don't know if that was the case at that point.
The timing of his return was impeccable.
His plan though... everyone notices Buffy was suicidal. But Giles signed up to get killed in order to give Willow a chance of being saved. He thought he was dying, when Willow took his energy, and that was the plan. This to me does not sound like a very good plan. This to me sounds like the kind of plan to yell at him about later.
Even if it did work.
So, Giles: heroic, but joining in with the theme of the season with the ending it all thing.
Willow... deciding the whole world hurts so lets just kill them = really big suicide = really big stupid.
I can't really feel the story though cause I can't get out of my head the gendered aspects.
It's that evil-insane-dead lesbian story. That turns up a lot. I have a book that reckons it's the only lesbian story ever got told in movies before a certain date. So one dies, one goes evil-insane-suicidal. If Joss was going to do something new with it that would still be bad. Too many that story.
But then what happens is she's saved by a man loving her.
... I know it's supposed to be saved by her friends loving her, but, well, girls sidelined in a hole, men save the day, man loves her, lesbian stops being evil.
The only redeeming thing is where they're still not having sex.
It's really hard to look past that reading, for me.
Also, the symbol of evil being a woman with a snake then gets really Freudian and embarrassing.
The story it's trying to tell: saved by the love of a carpenter. Now that's old school.
And saving people with love and hugs is a plenty good ending.
And Giles not being there to fight but rather to give her the benefit of his love and the love of the coven, via magic, that's plenty good ending too. Magic is made of good. Fixes the addiction thing a teensy.
Buffy's realisation with Dawn is a great bit. Can't protect from the world, can share it. Very good.
Also, cool swords. Shiny.
And then Spike gets his soul back.
... it's still really hard to see 'on purpose' in there...
... but it is very cool, going searching for a soul to redeem himself.
Love fixes things, even things that hurt real bad, or made people do bad things.
Yaay love.
This season went some complicated places and didn't generally turn them into a demon and kill them. Mostly it was the characters we already knew, a whole bunch of humans, screwing up on a grand scale. And the only fix was to just stop doing that. And hug.
Can live with that.
