A Brief Essay on Season 5
By Shaun Wilson

I wasn't overly pleased with Season 5. True, it had some of the most incredible episodes we've ever seen (such as The Body and Fool for Love), but it also some of the worst. In this, my first attempt at a column, I'm going to go into the character and some of the plot elements of Season 5. In the future I might delve into its production values, themes, or discuss the plot a bit more.

I liked the introduction of Dawn, it's good having a younger member of the cast, the others are getting a little too grown up. Real Me was a great episode, using the diary as a plot device to introduce her and her relationships with everyone worked well. Her development over the series was interesting, character wise she seemed to become more and more like Buffy as the series progressed, this leading toward The Gift, where their connection was made plain.

Spike's development was up and down. The plot arc of his love for Buffy was funny at first, but it became annoying at its climax in Crush. The writers seemed to tackle it with Spike's shallower side, whereas I think they could have explored Spike's deeper side they have eluded to in episodes like Lovers Walk (see his Love's Bitch speech). Thankfully his over the top "love" settled down after Intervention. By The Gift it seemed to have become a more platonic and real love, as opposed to lust. The scene where Buffy invites him inside in The Gift was quite powerful. His love for Buffy seems to be instilling humanity in him, something that is a stark contrast to Angel's sudden and dramatic good/bad changes. I have a feeling Joss is building up to showing that even the most evil person is capable of becoming good, if they want to be redeemed. This idea was mentioned way back in early Season 3, when Angel had returned but was in a wild state, Giles saying to Buffy "In my experience, there are two types of monster. The first can be redeemed, or more importantly, wants to be redeemed. The second is void of humanity, cannot respond to reason... or love." Spike has shown he can respond to love, so this would assumedly put him in the first category.

Tara has always annoyed me as most of you probably know, as has the Willow & Tara relationship. The funny thing is that toward the end of the season, up until Tough Love, Willow started to annoy me more than Tara did. Willow's just become a little too, well, ditzy. As a friend of mine (who doesn't like Buffy at all) said, "She's all like 'Woah, I can't tie my own shoes!'" which I thought was a fair assessment. This seemed to be a contradiction to Willow's growing witch power, something I expect they will delve (Good Lord, that's twice I've used that word now) into a lot next season.

The subject of Willow & Tara leads me to one of the major problems of Season 5 - there simply wasn't enough balance between males and females in the cast. After Riley left, it felt like there was about four hundred girls and two guys. They'd taken both Riley and Oz and really hadn't found proper replacements. Tought Love was probably the episode where it was most apparent, the final scene felt like something straight out of Charmed. And no, that isn't a good thing.

Anya developed brilliantly in this season, peaking at her amazing scene in The Body. All the reactions of the characters were powerful, but there was something about Anya's utter confusement and innocence about Joyce's death that gave the scene incredible emotional punch. Unfortunately after that she lost it a bit, the writers were pushing the Anya Stating the Strange and Obvious thing too far and it began to get forced and annoying. She redeemed herself somewhat with the proposal scene in The Gift, which, as with a lot of the Xander/Anya scenes, made you feel all warm inside. I love those two.

Xander was living up to his No More Buttmonkey stance (announced in Buffy vs Dracula) quite well, his character was certainly moving into new, more In Control territory. The carpenter role was good, it showed that Xander wasn't hopeless at everything he did. However, Xander was fairly underused toward the end, and I think he certainly could have had a much larger role.

Glory was quite an original and interesting Big Bad, the developing link between Glory & Ben kept me guessing a bit. Ben finally giving into Glory was quite an intrieging plot twist, he seemed to be the antithesis of Spike. Glory minion's were fantastic, their constant praise was hilarious (Glory: "I bet you never bathe." Minion: "But we do, magnificent Glorificus, we bathe in your awesome presence!"), but I found the female one that appeared in Spiral quite annoying.

The season's underlying theme of death was something they had to do at some stage, and it was always going to be hard. Interesting that Joss chose to tackle both themes of death and family in the same series. It was done fairly well, but the season was still let down by some of the surrounding issues. I'm looking forward to Season 6, it should be interesting to see how Buffy is bought back, and where Joss takes our beloved Scoobies next.
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