Episodes
Friday Aug 28, 2020
Episode 60 - Potential / The Killer in Me / First Date (feat. James Rocha)
Friday Aug 28, 2020
Friday Aug 28, 2020
“It’s almost like this sort of metaphor for womanhood, isn’t it? This sort of flowering that happens when a girl realizes that she’s part of a fertile heritage stretching back to Eve…”
Author and philosophy professor James Rocha is back in the graveyard with me again to discuss three more episodes of this, the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In “Potential,” Buffy (the character and maybe the show?) get the details of Slayer ascension wrong yet again, and Xander shows us how Speechifying(™) is supposed to work. “The Killer in Me” gives us a sadly truncated version of what, in my not-so-humble opinion, the entire season should have been about, and hey, I don’t hate Kennedy like the rest of y’all do. Who’s surprised? Lastly, “First Date” asks cutting edge questions like, “Why the hell doesn’t Principal Wood know who Spike is?” and “How does Wood stare at Spike in the rearview mirror of his car and not notice he’s a vampire?”
As a bonus, James schools me on the difference between Existentialism and Essentialism.
Next: You know her, you love her, Elizabeth Rambo is back again, this time to hold my hand as we try to make it through episodes 715, “Get It Done,” 716, “Storyteller,” and 717, “Lies My Parents Told Me.”
THE BREAKDOWN
Run Time: 01:59:30
00:00:55 - Intro / Guest
00:07:13 - Main Topic
01:54:50 - Outro / Next
THE LIBRARY
Joss Whedon, Anarchist? A Unified Theory of the Films and Television Series, by James Rocha and Mona Rocha
THE MUSIC
“Conversations (feat. Wesley Mead)” by Azura (2017)
“Killer” by Phoebe Bridgers, Stranger in the Alps (2017)
Monday Aug 17, 2020
Episode 59 - Bring On the Night / Showtime (feat. Vickie Navarra)
Monday Aug 17, 2020
Monday Aug 17, 2020
‘Verse-y author/editor Vickie Willis Navarra returns at long last (my bad, sorry) to try and help me over my growing Season 7 apathy as we begin our slow, tortured crawl to the finish line. Episode 710, “Bring On the Night” is the first appearance of Kennedy and the final appearance of Joyce. So yeah. It’s also the beginning of the interminable Buffy Speechifying(™). Sooo...yeeeeeeeah. And in 711, “Showtime,” Buffy welcomes Potential Slayer Rona to the Hellmouth, we get some charmingly awful rubber monster practical effects, and I defend the cool (and previously established) Willow-telepathically-links-the-Scoobies trick.
BONUS: I begin in earnest to dunk on The First as the most ridiculously inconsistent and ineffectual Big Bad of the entire series. Good times.
Next: author and Philosophy Professor James Rocha returns to help me make sense of episodes 712, “Potential,” 713, “The Killer In Me,” and 714, “First Date.”
THE BREAKDOWN
Run Time: 01:44:09
00:00:55 - Intro / Guest
00:10:04 - Main Topic
01:38:45 - Outro / Next
THE LIBRARY
Reading Joss Whedon (Television and Popular Culture), edited by Rhonda V. Wilcox, Tanya R. Cochran, Cynthea Masson, and David Lavery
At Home in the Whedonverse: Essays on Domestic Place, Space and Life, edited by Juliette C. Kitchens
Geek Rock: An Exploration of Music and Subculture, edited by Alex DiBlasi and Victoria Willis
Routledge Companion to Popular Music and Humor, edited by Thomas M. Kitts and Nick Baxter-Moore
THE MUSIC
“Conversations (feat. Wesley Mead)” by Azura (2017)
“Bring On the Night” by The Police, The Police (1979)