I didn’t even KNOW there was a reboot–I thought the story had been continued, with Whedon’s approval, in comic book form, but no way was I gonna read any of that.

I never saw Brendon in any films. Ditto for Charisma Carpenter, David Boreanaz, James Marsters, Anthony Stewart Head, Emma Caulfield…a lot of ‘em. Brendon’s death seems weirdly similar to Matthew Perry’s, they were even the same age.

As with The X-Files, the fanbase still exists, but it’s getting older and dwindling, which is going to be even worse for Buffy than X-Files because Buffy is so teen-oriented. Seasons 2 and 3, where the cast is still in high school, were when the show became famous and are still the most beloved seasons by the fanbase, as far as I could tell.

When I watched the show for the first time, it was 2014 and I was 31-32 years old. That’s about seven or eight years too old to be watching the show in the first place. When I went back to it for a tenth anniversary (something I had always been planning to do, to see if I really hadn’t liked the high school years of the show, because the first time I watched it, I was pretty unimpressed) I was now in my early forties, which is WAY too old to be watching the show, and while the season 2 and season 3 episodes did play a little better, seasons 4-7, which I thought had been better than the high school years, didn’t seem as good as I’d previously thought. So it all averaged out to pretty neutral, not really much better or worse than the first time. There’s no chance of me ever watching the show all the way through a third time.

Xander was an annoying character to me the first time I watched the show and I often wondered why he was even on it. I know a lot of people hate the character, there’s some Youtube video called “THE WORST CHARACTER IN TELEVISION HISTORY” or something like that. I didn’t hate him as much on rewatch. I will agree that they did make him a somewhat complex character and that Brendon wasn’t a bad actor so much as one whose character is easy to dislike (this is something I’ve learned, over the years, to be more merciful about regarding a lot of actors, especially with television.) I had forgotten, among other things, that he loses an eye, gets in a relationship with the annoying Anya character, dumps her at the altar in one episode, and gives one of the least effective reactions in film/TV history when he finds out in the final episode that she got killed in the high school (I think I may have forgotten this as well.)

Sixth season - I didn’t get squat out of the musical episode, a huge fan favorite where I guess the cast performed their hearts out, but I was only technically impressed. The Dark Willow thing was handled well by Allyson Hannigan, if you ask me, up until the part at the end where she starts crying and threatening to destroy the world, at which point Xander shows up to give her a big brother speech and stop the madness. The nerds were a mixed bag–I didn’t like how they veered between being extremely dangerous and extremely incompetent, and the one played by Danny Strong seemed weirdly likeable. The other two weren’t; the gay one in particular would probably be handled quite a bit differently in 2026. You’re right about the prediction of misogyny, though nerds have probably always been misogynistic, and I didn’t like the way the writers stacked the deck by having Warren accidentally kill Tara with a stray bullet.

One big stinkeroo regarding the rewatch of the show was that I no longer loved “The Body,” the fifth season episode (the one where Buffy’s mother dies) which is cited most often as the show’s best. This echoes my lukewarm response to “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’” when I rewatched The X-Files. I can’t really explain why–it just didn’t seem anywhere near as powerful in my 40s. It was interesting to think the show’s most beloved episode involves realism instead of vampires and shit, but the spark wasn’t there. I dunnae, brae.

There’s no greater testament to Joss Whedon’s talent (a subject on which I could never make up my mind anyway) than the fact that the Buffy-Spike stuff wasn’t a complete disaster. Maybe it’s the actors’ skills, I don’t know, but I remember Alpha Hammer saying Jesse Pinkman was the most inconsistently written character in TV history and that Aaron Paul just did such a great job selling all the character’s inconsistent turns to make you forget about that…but I guess A. H. didn’t watch Buffy, because Spike is SPECTACULARLY inconsistent. Vampire, buffoon, rapist, schemer, victim, creep....good Lord! Did they fix this when he showed up on Angel? I’m never gonna watch, so I wouldn’t know. It was generally interesting to watch, but how in God’s name they pulled it off isn’t something I can explain.

The Nathan Fillion evil priest character that turned up in the final season was easily the show’s best villain; aside from that, I only really liked the Mayor. Maybe the Master, too, but that’s because he’s played by Neidermeyer from Animal House and it’s fun to watch him cackle. Characters that I didn’t care for at all include Anya, Drusilla (Dick Van Dyke-level bad British accent), Oz, Cordelia, Tara, Glory, Adam, Kennedy (probably the most hated by fans), Angel (most overrated character in TV history) and, by the end of the show, Buffy herself, who gets so boring and preachy that I found myself missing the bubbleheaded girl from not just the TV show, but the piece of shit 1992 movie.