Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Headscratchers/Season 8

Headscratchers for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Spoilers abound.

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Clashing with Season 4

• In Season 4, Parker exploits Buffy's emotions for a quick lay and then leaves her. Parker is seen is a dirtbag piece of shit. In Season 8, Buffy exploits Satsu's emotions for a quick lay and then leaves her. Satsu is given shit about it while they continue to try to shill Kennedy. What the fuck?
  • Perspective. In The Parker Show, Parker's buddies probably spent an episode agreeing with him that Women Be Crazy after that Freshman he slept with one time got herself turned into a cavegirl and beat him up.
  • Buffy was honest with Satsu, Parker wasn't honest with Buffy. Big difference, in my opinion.

Warren & The First

• According to the season 8 comic Warren survived his flaying. So how could the First take his shape?
  • Quoting Joss Whedon when asked that exact question: "I forgot, OK?" He also went to say that Warren was dead "for like, a second" before Amy resuscitated him, resulting in a technical death that was enough for the First Evil to impersonate him. Which has legitimate precedent, since the First was also able to impersonate Buffy on account of her flatlining briefly and being resuscitated back in Season 1.

When is the Buffyverse Unmasqued?

• Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that the Buffyverse is now The Unmasqued World, it did take Sunnydale Syndrome to ridiculous levels and it makes for an interesting direction for the franchise. What bugs me is that we don't know what caused it. Has it been since the destruction of Sunnydale? It seems unlikely given that Angel season five is set after that. Was it LA going to hell? Probably the most likely option but it really bugs me that we're never given an answer or actually shown it.
  • I think Wolfram & Hart's reality-rewrite of Conner's life also removed most of season 5's public fallout, since their success depends on The Masquerade and Jasmine blew the lid on everything. I don't think Sunnydale by itself got much attention (it did from the government, but they already knew about the hellmouth and presumably invented a cover story, such as a freak earthquake and sinkhole, to explain it). The Fall of Los Angeles at least killed the masquerade for the city itself, and the stories coming out of L.A. were probably pushing the rest of the world into collective uncertainty... and then Harmony came along and nudged public opinion right over the edge into "holy crap, there really are vampires and they're awesome!" territory.
    • There is at least one man who isn't in the "They're Awesome!" category and is well known. As seen in a tie-in online comic, Stephen Colbert points out Harmony's hypocrisy.
      • I thought he was just staying in character as the paranoid right wing nutjob.
        • He was siding with Harmony (while stealthy pointing out her stupidity). Siding with her = against her.

Season Eight, After the Fall, and Timeline

• After the Fall is presumably set just after Angel Season Five, which means that it's a year after Buffy Season Seven ended. Buffy Season Eight however is just given as "some years later." Is there actually a canonical figure for how far ahead in time, Season Eight is to After the Fall?
  • S8 is 1 1/2 years after S7 and therefor 1/2 a year after ATF.

Ethan Rayne

• Ethan was shown to be a fairly powerful sorcerer on many occasions, and yet he wasn’t able to escape from The Initiative? The Initiative had no idea what it was doing, since it was approaching the supernatural from a science perspective, not a magical one. The idea that they could deal with a Chaos Mage is laughable, so the fact that they were able to haul Ethan to Nevada and keep him for all those years makes no sense whatsoever.
  • The military in the comics is not The Initiative. They are a much larger organization with better resources, and presumably far better equipt to deal with the supernatural than the Initiative due to having Twilight and Amy as consultants.
    • The problem is the Initiative specialized in magic and monsters and should have been better prepared than the military as a whole. It's literally their speciality. The two consultants mentioned didn't show up until at the very earliest roughly three years later. Since Twilight was either good, working for Wolfram and Hart or in Hell at the time, and Amy was a rat for two years after this event and doesn't seem to be consulting anything but a bunch of just out of bake sales witches in season seven. The below guess that he simply can't gather any of the tools necessary seems to be the most likely answer. Though you'd think he'd be able to figure out something simple with just common tools. He was quite clever.
  • Neither Giles nor Ethan is Willow; at no point have either of them demonstrated the ability to create magic from nothing, with the exception of when Giles was buffed up on True Magic. They've always needed physical components and incantations. Giles, at least, has his Watcher's combat training to fall back on, though that certainly would not have been sufficient to get him out of prison had he been in Ethan's place. Ethan, without his magic, is just a frail, helpless old man.
    • They might also have been keeping Ethan drugged or restrained.

Giles' Will

• Giles leaving all his wealth and house to Faith. I know people find it a nice scene of Giles taking care of Faith, but why couldn't he had taken care of both Faith and Buffy? It's not like savings can't be split in half for crying out loud. It's bad enough that Buffy had sacrificed half her life and future (remember her SAT scores?) in the name of duty while Giles apparently grew rich on double paychecks, he could at least have provided for her a little instead of, you know, leaving her flat out broke. I mean, Buffy shouldn't have to be waiting tables by day and patrolling at night at the age of 30, while her ungrateful sister (who she died for...) chases her from their couch with fake sex sound. Ok, that might have been unfair on Dawn, but I think Buffy deserves a little better, after all she had been through and all the sacrifices she had made over the years. Giles could have at least left her a home of her own. It's not like she isn't starting to get old.
  • They own a castle and fund an army. She ain't poor by any definition of the word.
    • They funded an army by breaking into banks and other things that depended on having a Slayer army, and those Slayers don't exactly back her up anymore. It wouldn't have hurt Giles to give her something.
      • It's unlikely that Giles knew what Buffy's financial status would look like at the most recent time he updated his living will. Before the series of events that ultimately killed him, at the last chance he would have had to update his will, Buffy was living pretty in a castle with a Slayer Army that honestly didn't look like it was going to up and turn on her any time soon, while Faith had nothing but Giles to support her.

Lack of Magic considered bad

• Why is the sucking away of all magic, demons and all the other potential apocalypses considered a bad thing? Think about it, all that's left are vampires and slayers, and maybe whatever is on their level. Sure, witches don't get to do crap anymore, but that for the price of preventing what has to be the daily massacres of demons feeding on humans, the level of fighting humans were having to do against demonic opponents, and the prevention of some hormonal teenager from ending the world because they lost a loved one on some Tuesday, I'd say the world is better off. So why is everyone bitching about it?
  • Take away all technology beyond, let's say, Medieval levels. No one's being shot, blown up, napalmed, etc, no one can develop biological weapons, pollution has dropped massively. Sure, people in the first world and sufficiently rich people in the third world don't get to do crap anymore, but hey!
    • Except that there's no record of magic ever giving the world the same benefits that technology and learning has. Where with a removal of technology, billions of people would die, with the removal of magic, more people would live. Technology brought the world an increase in the quality of life of the entire world, whereas magic has done nothing of the kind.
  • The Slayer line ended. That's a big deal. There is a finite number of Slayers now who are mortal, whereas vampires still have means of making more of their kind. So a day will come when there will still be vamps, but no Slayer to fight them. A valid reason to get pissed off.
    • OP posting here: Except that the Masquerade is over, and EVERYONE is aware of vampires. This includes governments and police forces, which now knowing what the problem is, can't blame the deaths of thousands of people with two holes on their neck on PCP and gangs anymore or accidents with barbeque forks. Meaning that you don't need an army of crusading teenagers who think they're above the law.
    • I think part of the problem lies in how demons (who I understand are not inherently bad, even though they were generally a pain), wiccans and the like had this forced on them. It would be similar if negros or sexual orientation; if you believe that's by birth rather than by choice, were forced to be white and straight.
  • I wouldn't say lack of magic is bad, but it does seem like far too easy of a solution and a complete disappointment as far as plot resolution goes.
  • It is and it isn't. The death of magic is a complicated issue that can be considered both good and bad, depending on how you look at it. The end of the Slayer line is a potential concern, though the larger problems that the Slayer is needed to handle, such as the constant apocalypses, have also ended. To the every day person, the end of magic doesn't really affect them one way or the other. To the witches, the end of magic is the most horrible thing anyone could ever have done to them. To the vampires, the idea that a day will come when the Slayer no longer exists in any form is a happy ending in and of itself. It's all really a matter of perspective.
    • OP Again, while it might suck that the Slayer line will dwindle out eventually, this comes with the benefit of those yearly demon slaughters will no longer continue, that you won't have teenagers with the powers of a god going on killing sprees and no one able to stop them, and eventually no super powered slayers who think they're above the law and can take what they want because they were chosen by a spell. Yes, there are still vampires, but the world knows about them now. While admittedly, there's some sort of bizaree Jersey Shore thing going on with Harmony and reality shows, but something like a legitimate form of the Initiative could police the streets and ensure that vampires aren't a problem. Buffy and company just became redundant, they can live their normal lives now. As for any witches complaining that they lost their really cool powers, we haven't been shown many witches who have used those with maturity, let alone sanity, so an entitled group losing their unequal advantage to the rest of the world isn't that bad a thing.

Why wasn't Faith identified?

• Genevieve Savidge sought to assassinate Buffy, right? She had gathered every scrap of information, every image she could to do so, right? So when Faith goes undercover wouldn't Genevieve Savidge identify her?
  • Faith and Buffy haven't been tight since they were in high school, and even then, they only hung out on rare occasions, most of which were slaying. Unless they were taking photos of their kills for posterity, it's unlikely that Faith appears in any picture of Buffy.
    • The problem is that Savidge was working with/for one of Twilight's warlocks, and Twilight definitely knows who Faith is. Seeing as how he's Angel. Between that and the part where Faith is one of the likeliest picks for the NWC to send up against Savidge, you'd think her partner's boss would have given her a copy of the file.