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Post by Clare on Sept 26, 2008 11:03:16 GMT -5
6.09 Smashed - Episode #109
While a newly-restored Amy and Willow party with magic, Spike discovers he can hit Buffy without feeling any chip-induced pain.
Review (also post a score out of 10) and discuss this episode.
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Post by cyclica on May 30, 2009 12:00:50 GMT -5
Ugh. Smashed.
Let’s start with the willow storyline. Ok so she suddenly realised she can de-rat amy... by using a spell to create a spell? It’s good to see amy again after all these years, and her conversations with willow and buffy are great (plus a reference to larry, never thought he’d be mentioned again), but since when was amy just as powerful as willow? And those scenes in the bronze were painful to watch, as willow and amy wreck havoc on innocent people for their own amusement, people who will presumably *somehow* forget anything ever happened. And watching willow absorb the internet is just as bizzare as anya points out.
The nerds want a freeze ray. Why? No reason really, they just want one. So andrew goes into mission impossible mode. Why? No reason, and I have to wonder how and why he got all the gear and went to all the trouble if warren and jonathan are just going to walk up to the diamond. Did they not talk to each other when planning this out? Speaking of the nerds, in a later scene andrew says he has watched every episode of dr who, but not red dwarf as its not out on dvd. I know this is a minor nitpick, but not every dr who episode was on dvd then, and still isn’t. And there’s no way he could have seen every episode, considering all the lost episodes. The writers really didn’t do their research there.
As for the spike and buffy subplot (buffy the star of the show has the C-story) well I enjoyed seeing an old fashioned mugging at the start, it made a nice change from the regular patrol. And finding out spike can hurt buffy was interesting at first, though I never thought he would pose a threat to her now, considering his feelings for her. But where the story went for there was something I really didn’t want to see.
This wasn’t an episode without good scenes, but any episode that has buffy literally sleeping with the enemy, and willow getting high and messing with innocent people, is one I don’t ever want to see again. And the freeze ray plot was just pointless. I’m giving this ep a low 3.
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Post by partcynic on Nov 16, 2010 11:27:11 GMT -5
6x09 “Smashed”
Episode Rating = 1
Watching it again, I found that “Smashed” was just weird. If I shut off my brain and just enjoyed the moving pictures that flashed before my eyes, it was fairly easy to get through, but the slightest bit of informed critique would cause it to collapse like a house of cards. Eschewing the tight focus of “Once More, With Feeling” and “Tabula Rasa”, this ep returns to the unfortunate soap opera style S6 seems to adore, with very little story and only the most miniscule progressions for each of the ongoing plots. As such, it’s more of a connector than anything else, and this issue is compounded by the fact that the show’s main arcs are 1) slow and repetitive and 2) frequently requiring people to act out of character. It’s hard to find much value in a plot when the characters are being mishandled to accommodate it, and the lack of consistency means it’s hard to engage with. Still, “Smashed” at least has a few good scenes and some funny lines, and the mystery of Spike’s chip failing to recognise Buffy was fine on first viewing.
What I Liked about “Smashed”:
- The mugging that opened the episode was a novelty, and I was as surprised by it as Buffy. The ensuing dialogue between she and Spike was funny (“Yes. Because muggers deserve to be eaten”), which helped alleviate the annoyance of the cloned ‘but we kissed’ conversation.
- Tara and Dawn’s scenes were gratuitous, but they were still nice to watch. Tara continues to be the only character who’s consistently likeable, and Dawn was characterised well – not understanding the full story behind the Willow/Tara breakup, but still being sensitive and trying to make things better.
- It’s cool to see Amy again, even if her appearance is simply a plot device to lead Willow to Rack. Her dialogue in the first half of the ep was great, and the continuity references to Larry, the Mayor-snake and the blown-up school were excellent. I also loved the Buffy/Amy “Rat. Dead” exchange, which amused me more in one line than any of the comedy we’ve gotten from the nerds had.
- The scene outside the museum is decent – Buffy jumping up and down to try and see over the tall people was cute, and her chat with Spike resulted in the brilliant joke about her relationship with Giles.
- The sex scene was fine, and probably the best part of the ep (which is kind of sad when you think about it). Having spent so much time watching bland or nonsensical material, it was good to get something that was at least titillating, and while the pairing of sex and violence is both troublesome and old hat, it managed to be equally erotic and disturbing.
What I Disliked about “Smashed”:
- As is a commonplace S6 complaint, this ep has no proper plot. Instead of receiving a well-paced and meaningful narrative, we just watched the characters go about their lives for a bit, and that doesn’t make for particularly gripping television.
- Lots of character happenings occurred here, but there was zero character development. Paying more attention to the intersection of plot and player would be a huge boost (as we saw in the preceding two episodes), and might also have prevented the main characters from undergoing such drastic personality shifts. There’s some fascinating stuff that could be brought up with regard to Buffy’s perspective on life and Willow’s guilt over the resurrection spell, and it’s frustrating to have this sidelined for shallowness like ‘Buffy’s depressed and sleeping with Spike even though she hates him’ and ’oh, Willow’s totally addicted to magic’.
- Though some of the dialogue in this ep is great, there are an equal number of painful lines, which sound like regular statements forcibly translated into Buffyese (“Way to go with the keen observiness”). There are also some deathly dull instances of ‘awkward moment’ jokes that are more painful than funny (Jonathon and Andrew chatting with Spike; Buffy telling Xander and Anya about Spike’s phone call).
- There’s a lot of ropey acting. Almost all of the minor characters (the mugged couple; the girl Spike tries to bite; the guys at the Bronze) are wooden and unconvincing, and both Sarah Michelle Gellar and Alyson Hannigan are sub-par. Knowing that those two are usually solid performers, I think that the director might be to blame, as the guy who led this episode had never worked on the show before.
- The material with the nerds was sub-par, and took too much time considering that it was just set-up for “Gone”. Parts were really stupid (Andrew descending in the “Mission: Impossible” garb), and the characters could be portrayed as being humorously incompetent without being as dense and ineffective as they are here. Like Warren’s time manipulator in “Life Serial”, the freeze ray was a comic book device that didn’t sit well in the Buffyverse, and concepts like it hurt the series’ verisimilitude. Finally, I continue to be wholly unimpressed by their dialogue – the constant sci fi references aren’t funny or clever, yet the writers insist on putting them in every single Trio scene.
- “Buffy” has always had a pick and choose approach when it came to magic, but it also had a vague sense of internal consistency, and typically stuck to the rule that ‘spell = ritual ingredients + ritual words’. This season – and especially this episode – has tossed that away, and Willow/Tara/Amy’s powers are now ridiculous. I hate that characters can suddenly cast extremely powerful and complex spells just by waving their hands, and the scenes at the Bronze made no sense. The patrons should have been massively freaked out by all of the bizarre things that were occurring around them, yet they act as though coloured bolts shooting through the air and people transforming into sheep are a big nothing. Did Amy and Willow make everyone forget what they’d seen when they were done messing with them?
- What exactly happened with Willow’s de-ratting spell at the start? Did she just pull it out of nowhere, or suddenly remember seeing it in the past and somehow summon it? If she’d read it before, did she try to cast it then? If not, why?
- Willow’s magic abuse could probably be portrayed through things less silly than connecting to the Internet with her hands and refusing to use a pool cue. I don’t know what the show was trying to convey with those scenes – I didn’t find them funny, unsettling or creepy, just strange.
- Anya’s speech about ‘good people getting a taste of bad things’ was taken directly from an after school special, and although the sentiment has some truth to it, it could have been expressed in a less clichéd way.
- Multiple characters are portrayed inconsistently, and I’ll go through the three worst offenders in separate paragraphs. Firstly (and least significantly), Amy is fine at the start, but her sudden desire to go out partying didn’t make sense for someone who was terrified of an ambulance siren less than a day earlier. It felt like a deliberate fudge to facilitate the magic crack stuff, and that was a letdown after her great lines earlier in the episode.
- It seems that Willow got replaced by a robot or a pod-person in “All the Way”, as she now exists only to do bad things with magic. As I’ve said before, I don’t buy the addiction plotline, and having her actions make sense requires you to make large assumptions about her mental state that aren’t shown onscreen. It’s a classic case of characterisation being dismissed to tell a specific story, and I see very little of the actual Willow in the figure who’s currently going by her name. It was particularly disconcerting to watch her toy with innocent people for fun – there’s nothing in her personality suggesting it’s something she’d do (getting back at people who upset her – yes. Harming strangers? No). There are plenty of ways she could have misbehaved without becoming one-dimensional and OOC, and it’s even harder to tolerate this stuff when you know it’s essentially filler.
- Spike’s actions during this ep were also strange. The script acted as though what he did (both on his own, and with Buffy) between “Forever” and “OMWF” hadn’t happened – instead portraying him as a generic bad boyfriend who suddenly became super-nasty. The events of “Intervention”, “The Gift”, “Bargaining” and “After Life” demonstrated that he does truly love Buffy, but that was ignored in favour of randomly toughening him up – and while that was okay to watch, it didn’t flow naturally from his prior development. Sure, his learning that he could hit Buffy changed their power dynamic, but we know he’s still a ‘fool for love’, and I doubt he would really treat her as he did here.
Do I like this episode more or less than the last time I watched it?
Immediately after seeing it, I felt a little more positive, but when I paused and actually thought about what I’d just seen, that quickly went away. Although there’s some respectable dialogue here (and I found this far easier to sit through than the identically scored “All the Way”), it doesn’t change the fact that it’s typical S6 aimlessness with a large number of clunky scenes and two crucial characters having apparently gotten personality transplants. While I am tempted to hand this a two, other eps in that range (“Ted”; “Blood Ties”; “Flooded”) at least have people acting like themselves, so all I can give to “Smashed” is a high one out of ten.
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Post by cyclica on Jan 5, 2011 17:01:12 GMT -5
Episode Rating = 1 Watching it again, I found that “Smashed” was just weird. If I shut off my brain and just enjoyed the moving pictures that flashed before my eyes, it was fairly easy to get through, but the slightest bit of informed critique would cause it to collapse like a house of cards. Considering you found it at least easy to get through, and gave five positives, I'm surprised you gave this ep the lowest possible score. Doesn't the little good you saw count for at least another point? - The mugging that opened the episode was a novelty, and I was as surprised by it as Buffy. The ensuing dialogue between she and Spike was funny (“Yes. Because muggers deserve to be eaten”), which helped alleviate the annoyance of the cloned ‘but we kissed’ conversation. Agreed. - The scene outside the museum is decent – Buffy jumping up and down to try and see over the tall people was cute It's a shame the writers had forgotten that she is capable of jumping high enough to leap right over the crown if she wanted to. If only she had checked to see if no one was watching, then lept lets say ten feet in the air to get a better look, the continuity alone would have elevated this episode significantly for me. - Though some of the dialogue in this ep is great, there are an equal number of painful lines... Buffy telling Xander and Anya about Spike’s phone call I didn't have a big problem with that scene, but then again usually miss it as I'm still laughing from the scene before it. The idea of buffy being shocked that spike would phone her was hilarious, and it's my one happy memory from this episode. Like Warren’s time manipulator in “Life Serial”, the freeze ray was a comic book device that didn’t sit well in the Buffyverse, and concepts like it hurt the series’ verisimilitude. That's the biggest problem I have with the nerds - that they sometimes feel like they've been plucked out of some other tv show. Especially when they use freeze rays, invisible guns etc. Part of the problem is the fact these gadgets have so little to do with magic or the supernatural, and the other part of the problem is that no one ever seems to remember these gadgets exist after their initial appearance, regardless of how easy they would be to find and use, and how useful they would be. ...Willow/Tara/Amy’s powers are now ridiculous. I hate that characters can suddenly cast extremely powerful and complex spells just by waving their hands, and the scenes at the Bronze made no sense. The patrons should have been massively freaked out by all of the bizarre things that were occurring around them, yet they act as though coloured bolts shooting through the air and people transforming into sheep are a big nothing. Did Amy and Willow make everyone forget what they’d seen when they were done messing with them? What I'd like to know is if/how they made everyone forget what they'd seen while they were messing with them. It's like the basic rules of social interaction don't apply. ...but then again we did see a man get zapped by the judge, and no one seemed to care what was going on then. Perhaps it's just a town where everyone is such a cold, heartless person they don't care one bit if someone next to them is being killed, or messed with by magic. - What exactly happened with Willow’s de-ratting spell at the start? Did she just pull it out of nowhere, or suddenly remember seeing it in the past and somehow summon it? If she’d read it before, did she try to cast it then? If not, why? I always assumed she simply cast a spell that created spells. Kind of like the magic equivalent of putting in a cheat code. - It seems that Willow got replaced by a robot or a pod-person in “All the Way”, as she now exists only to do bad things with magic. As I’ve said before, I don’t buy the addiction plotline, and having her actions make sense requires you to make large assumptions about her mental state that aren’t shown onscreen. It’s a classic case of characterisation being dismissed to tell a specific story, and I see very little of the actual Willow in the figure who’s currently going by her name. It was particularly disconcerting to watch her toy with innocent people for fun – there’s nothing in her personality suggesting it’s something she’d do (getting back at people who upset her – yes. Harming strangers? No). There are plenty of ways she could have misbehaved without becoming one-dimensional and OOC, and it’s even harder to tolerate this stuff when you know it’s essentially filler. Agreed. Though I wouldn't really call it filler, I mean this *is* the story. - Spike’s actions during this ep were also strange. The script acted as though what he did (both on his own, and with Buffy) between “Forever” and “OMWF” hadn’t happened – instead portraying him as a generic bad boyfriend who suddenly became super-nasty. The events of “Intervention”, “The Gift”, “Bargaining” and “After Life” demonstrated that he does truly love Buffy, but that was ignored in favour of randomly toughening him up – and while that was okay to watch, it didn’t flow naturally from his prior development. Sure, his learning that he could hit Buffy changed their power dynamic, but we know he’s still a ‘fool for love’, and I doubt he would really treat her as he did here. I'd buy that he'd turn nasty, in the sense of being violent and considering biting her, because deep down he is still a vampire. He's gone without blood or killing a human for a long time, and I'd buy that he was momentarily torn between satisfying his desire and his love for buffy. I only wish this struggle was given more focus, rather than going straight to the attention-grabbing sex scene. ............. I consider this ep one of the worst episodes of buffy, but there are still a few good scenes, and so for now I'm not going to bump my 'low 3' score down any further. |
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Post by partcynic on Jan 7, 2011 9:08:31 GMT -5
Yep. If she could do that, why didn't she just do it a couple of years ago?
That's actually consistent with Amy and Willow's original characterisation. In "Something Blue", Willow even says that Amy was the one with the real power - and given that Willow got a couple of extra year's practice while Amy was stuck in rat form, it makes sense that they'd now be similar in ability.
Agreed. Horribly written, witless, unbelievable, out of character. They fail on all counts.
Agreed again. There's humorously incompetent, and then there's plain stupid - guess which the nerds are.
0 is the lowest score I give, so this one is actually above the very bottom rung. The positive things I mentioned are all so meagre (they would be nothing-esque in S1-4) that it's not enough to elevate things, especially when there are so many problems with the main plot(s).
I'd have found that cute, but it wouldn't have changed anything for me. It'd just be a sweet five seconds in a poor episode.
Agreed on all counts.
Sad, isn't it? The whole addiction is total filler. Mentally delete it from the season in its entirety and have Tara killed a few eps in instead. Would there be any difference in how Willow would have reacted? (the answer's no - we've already seen a less severe version of this arc in "Tough Love").
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