TV show decisions that are just WRONG - I'll start with the West Wing.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

There must be loads of these. I'm sure ER is not in fact a Bible to medical correctness (say it isn't so!).

The one that bugs me is the bit the West Wing where the President breaks out into Latin. It makes me cringe. It's bad, bad Latin (IMHO).

And also - of course - the fact Toby never gets a chance to clear his name. I love Richard Schiff for explaining he played it assuming Toby was covering for someone, which is great explanation of a frustrating storyline. But I never believed Bartlett (who seems to me so good at accepting people's different points of view) would have judged him so quickly.

Is there anything that bugs you massively? Either for being factually wrong or just not fitting your sense of the characters.

I think the way they wrote Bones' pregnancy in was a little rushed & original! They obviously needed to, but they took the most obvious route to it.

I am glad they got together, but it had the sense of being rushed & ill thought out.

Giles on a horse was shot at ASH's country home - I think he suggested the episode could be shot in England because by that point he was sick of going back and forth to LA.

I think Marti Noxon gets a lot of unfair flak for seasons 6 and 7 - yes she was showrunner because JW was making Firefly at that point, but she wasn't new to Buffy - she'd been producing and writing since season 2 and wrote some of its best episodes. And JW was part of the creative team for those seasons - it's not like he totally abandoned the show. I just think there's a temptation in the fandoms of male auteur types like JW to look to pin the shortcomings of a show on anyone but them, when JW has shown that he is just as capable of coming up with a pile of incoherent shite as the next man (hello Dollhouse!).

I think that making Spike's attempted rape because he's like EVIL is a bloody copout TBF. There are far too many guys who end up doing such things- and if only it could be put down to them having no soul

I thought that the weasly Parker was much more interesting development- in that guys who seem really 'nice' can be the worse when you are in your early 20s. (yes, this is coming from personal experience....)

It's because they had no safeword. There was not a huge amount of difference between "attempted rape" and "how they normally interact". Apart from the very key point that she didn't want to play. That's why not everyone watching (especially the edited evening versions) got that that's what just happened.

If you include violence in your sex play, you need a safeword. Or to be doing it with someone who can tell the difference between real and fake. But even then, a safeword is a good idea.

Their whole "relationship" was fucked up. It was always going to end badly. I preferred it when he was just lurking and being sulky (because his lurking and sulking was more amusing than Angel's)

Are we gathering up Buffy-inspired-advice for teenagers here?

Advice like, "Never Kill a Boy on the First Date"?

I was thinking more specifically about the "I lurve Spike how could the nasty program makers make him do something bad?" reaction to the rape attempt - um, because he IS bad - it shouldn't have come as a big surprise.

But do you think it's a cop-out when Spike kills or tortures people for kicks? After all, there's a depressing amount of evidence from war zones around the world that that's something a surprisingly large number of regular people will do under the right circumstances - but equally it would be odd to say that when Spike does it isn't because he's a vampire (although there's an ongoing examination in Buffy of how much of a vampires personality is the
he demon and how much is the original humans (see the alternative universe Vampire Willow, for example)). So are we back to rape being a special kind of violence?

Safe words aside, and simplifying, a rapist rapes because he has a sense of entitlement with a side-order of misogyny. And that applies whether those character flaws are a result of being a vampire like Spike or of whatever it was that made Parker the way he is (not that he rapes anyone within the confines of the series, but I wouldn't be surprised to see him ending up that way).

You see, Spike never came across as a misogynist- quite the opposite in fact. And I think that rather sadly, later series of Buffy missed the opportunity to examine much greyer moral issues- if all demons are bad and this is because they don't have a soul- why are most of the murders and rapes and genocide committed by ordinary human beings in war?
Clem for example is seen as a 'good' demon. And do we ever find out if Anya had a soul- or when she get it- as that means she murders the whole frat house when she has a soul.
Thinking that it's only the EVIL ones who hurt you and turn against you is NOT a good lesson for young women.

Yes, but if you are making a show about evil bloodsucking vampires and demons I don't think you can avoid a certain implication that they are doing bad stuff mostly because they are evil bloodsucking vampires and demons, even if you explore round the edges of that.

I don't think there was ever an "all demons are bad" message (although there did seem to be an "all vampirey demons are bad" message) or that there was a suggestion that they were bad because they didn't have a soul - the human soul only comes in wrt Angel and Spike in that when they have their souls they have a human conscience rather than just a vampire- demony one so can override what the demon wants to do. And there's plenty of badness done by regular people in the Buffyverse - Tara is killed, after all, not by anything supernatural but by Warren with a gun, and Buffy is hurt deeply by Parker and by Riley. And "good" people do bad or morally dubious things (Willow, Giles, Riley - in fact most people at some point). Anyone who could come out of Buffy thinking that it was ONLY the evil ones who hurt you or turned against you really wasn't paying attention.

I'm never sure about Spike and misogyny - look at the way he treated Harmony, for example (but that could just be because she was Really Annoying) and the thing with the Buffybot (which didn't really work for him, but he still tried it). He's not a massive screaming misogynist, but there may be a current running underneath, and he's enough of a misanthropist in general that how woukd you tell? If you're dealing with vampire-human relations, anyway, misanthropy can potentially stand in for misogyny in the motivation stakes.

It's difficult to unpick all this stuff because vampirism is used both as a literal thing in its own right and as a metaphor for a whole bunch of other things at various points over the course of the show. So Spike may do something "because he's a vampire" but that doesn't get you much further on. Except, I still maintain, in the "shouldn't have been a huge surprise to the audience" respect.

Yes, I'm with casey - both on the moral ambiguity of souls, which I thought increased hugely over the series, and on Spike's misogyny (which was ambiguous). TBH I think he's one of those 'nice guy but ...' types.

I love Clem. He is such a brilliant character.

I suppose it might be telling that JW only really seems concerned about the souls of male characters - he doesn't worry about Anya, and Willow/Faith can both be 'evil' without being soulless.

But again, I think this probably has to do with what you're saying about the metaphory-ness of it all, casey.

Whew.

Overthinking, me?

Nooo!

Btw, trills, if you were gathering up Buffy-related teen advice I think you'd have a bestseller on your hands!

Did willow consider giving herself up for warren's murder? I vaguely recall she did but was talked out of it/was needed to fight the Big Bad.

Right I've just started rewatching Buffy. I hope you're all proud of yourselves