6.16 - Hell's Bells

It's Xander and Anya's wedding day.


***

How do I hate thee, episode? Let me count the ways.

A) Fake old Xander. I want to punch you in the face. We've known Xander for 6 years now. He's not the type to beat a woman with a skillet. Puh-lease.

B) Spike and Buffy seem to immediately be circling each other again. Spike should not have been seen for a couple of episodes after the events of last week. Well, Marsters is an actor with a contract, he probably had to be here. But I don't have to like it.

C) Xander leaving Anya at the alter? Yeah, right. How selfish can you get? first off, like I just said, we've known Xander for 6 years now. The greatest character trait he has is his loyalty. Once he's said he'd do something, he'd do it. I just don't buy him doing this. He would have said something earlier. I see this as sloppy soap opera writing that betrays the character development we've come to know over the last 6 seasons. I've watched this stuff in less than a month, and the Xander I've seen would not do this.

It's just lazy to me. If you really want to shock your audience, have them actually go through with the wedding. Everyone and their brother had to have expected that this wedding would not succeed (they never do on genre shows), so throw a monkey wrench in the works and have it really go on. But no, we have to put our characters through hoops so that we can extend angst for a few more episodes and have more pain and misery for the rest of the season. I've said before that this show doesn't feel like a TV show. It feels like people's lives. Well, for me, this didn't. This felt like an episode of Smallville. It felt like a story line, and I saw it coming, and I am not used to feeling like this show is predictable, because it rarely is.

This is symptomatic of what I've seen since Giles left the show. Pain pain pain and more pain, but it's not teaching anyone anything and it doesn't seem to be building to anything. It's just angst for the sake of it with no greater goal. I've never been bored with this show until a few episodes ago, but now I really am struggling to keep my mind on what is going on.

Rating: 5/10