u/CourageApart

Season 5, episode 16 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer explores one of the scariest enemies of the show and it’s one that is entirely unrelated to the paranormal. The rapid, unexpected, brutal, and unstoppable breakdown of our natural bodies especially in relation to those closest to us.

To offer such a visceral display of grief and for it to be featured in the episode which contains (barely) any actual action is perfect. Sound design is excellent and the skewed and more artistic cinematography represented in this episode is a serious gift.

I love how the Scooby gang all have different reactions to the death. They all represent different aspects of grief: Who to blame, how to try and understand, how to console, how to operate, and how will anything ever be the same.

As a first time Buffy/Angel viewer, I am extremely impressed and surprised at how cogent and blunt Whedon and the writing team managed to be. The Body was able to elicit past feelings I thought that I’d buried as well as (unfortunately) create new fears about a very, very sad moment in my potential future. This is a one-of-a-kind piece of art and one of the greatest hours of tv I’ve ever seen.

I’m only halfway through season 2 at the moment so avoid spoilers if you can.

Does anybody find it really weird that Angel is romantically pursuing a 16 year old girl when he’s 240 years old? I know there’s already some moral complications with him being a mass murdering vampire and all that, but the show has yet to seriously comment on the idea that he’s pretty much a pedophile. It’s treated almost like he’s just a few years older than she is. Though that may be true because he was turned when he was younger and has kept his youthful physical appearance, he’s still centuries older than her mentally.

Even though I’m still in the “rough” era of the show when it’s deciding exactly what type of story it wants to be and that there are some not so great (bad even) episodes mixed in the first two seasons, I am really enjoying the show. It manages to balance the high school shenanigans with the more mature drama nicely and I can see the progress of the show occurring with every new episode I watch. I can’t wait to get to the real good stuff. I’ll be watching Angel alongside it as well.