6.19 Seeing Red

[Clare]

6.19 Seeing Red - Episode #119
While Willow and Tara share a happy reunion, Warren obtains a powerful magical artifact, and Buffy and Spike’s relationship hits its darkest ebb.

Review (also post a score out of 10) and discuss this episode.

[cyclica]

Ok so willow and tara are back together. That plus putting tara in the opening credits makes you think tara will be sticking around, but no, joss was just toying with us, and killed tara off. The worst part is that tara deserved to be in the opening credits long before now but wasn’t, purely for this cruel trick on us to work. Boo!

So anyway, buffy finds the nerds’ lair, and encounters giant, spinning blades. Wha? Why would the nerds set up a trap that destroys their own lair, why not have a trap that releases sleeping gas or something? And if the intention was to destroy evidence of what they were doing, why not just, um, destroy evidence themselves, instead of relying on giant spinning blades? Where do they get those things anyway? Or the jetpacks later on? Or for that matter freeze rays or invisiguns?

Aside from the blades scene and the big fight at the end (I loved seeing jonathan helping buffy out, and Andrew jetpacking into a ceiling), the only other scenes I remember are the rape scene (painful to watch, not to mention both buffy and spike were out of character, but at least it got him to leave town) and the end scene where warren shoots buffy and tara (though he must really be a terrible shot if he was aiming for buffy when he shot through the upstairs window).

This wasn’t an awful episode, but it wasn’t at all memorable, except for a few scenes. It gets a 3.

[partcynic]

6x19 “Seeing Red”

Episode Rating = 3

In a huge departure from the seasonal norm, “Seeing Red” is shocking in being an episode where (brace yourself) things actually happen. Granted, most of what did occur was either bad, boring, contrived or all three, but it remains that by the end of this story, major progression had been made in almost every arc. Unlike the dreary, go-nowhere midseason, this edition had a sense of purpose, and parts of it were tense, exciting and enjoyable to watch in a way we hadn’t really had since “Tabula Rasa”. Although there are way too many issues with this ep for it to rise above below-average, there’s no ignoring that for S6, it’s a pretty good achievement.

What I Liked about “Seeing Red”:

- With the exception of the ending, all of Willow and Tara’s scenes were good. They were romantic and sexy, and it was about time that their relationship got treated in the same manner as the heterosexual ones. Amber Benson and Alyson Hannigan were both great, and being given some non-metaphorical, actively flirtatious material allowed them to demonstrate some real chemistry.

- Dawn’s responses to Willow and Tara getting back together are a bit overdone, but I was still amused by her cheerleading and fangirl-ness.

- Although Andrew still makes me want to hurt cute, fluffy animals (okay, I liked the comedy with him jet-packing into the roof), Warren and Jonathon were both good. It was great to finally see the Trio’s scheme in action, and the episode became interesting once Warren got his hands on the orbs. While I don’t like him at all, his sleaziness, cruelty and misogyny make him work as a despicable character; and he’s incredibly easy to hate (making it satisfying to watch Buffy bid him “goodnight, bitch” and strip him of his powers). Elsewhere, I liked seeing Jonathon (finally) break out of his holding pattern and do the right thing, which made him comparatively sympathetic (though it’s no remedy for all the bad things he’s done this season).

- The symbolism with the orbs is heavy handed (Warren the woman-hater gets his strength and invulnerability from two balls, and is enraged when a strong woman ‘castrates’ him), but it definitely works. In fact, the simplicity of Warren as a character probably lends itself to a more basic metaphor (but hey, it’s still a metaphor, and we haven’t had many of those lately).

- The Buffy/Warren fight scene is exciting and fast-paced. There are a few nice moves here and there, and I’ll say that I liked that Warren didn’t suddenly develop amazing battle skills. It was good that he fought as awkwardly as you’d have expected him to, and compensated for his lack of technique with pure power.

- Anya’s brief scene in the bar was tacked on and added nothing to the story, but it was funny, and the little snapshot of her current mental state (and justified anger) was worthwhile.

- The shooting at the end was shocking on first viewing, and I liked the disparate amount of destruction that Warren was able to cause. It says a lot that one twisted guy with a gun was able to do more damage to the Scoobs than a master vampire, a sorcerer/snake-demon, a cyborg, and a hellgod; and it’s a nice reminder that the human world can offer up horrors far worse than any supernatural being.

What I Disliked about “Seeing Red”:

- I hate to be finicky, but I really don’t think that Tara would betray Buffy’s confidence, even if it looked like everyone else already knew about her affair with Spike. Filling Willow in on the situation (and in particular the abrupt way she said it) felt out of character, and it seems that the writers have a hard time making her funny without breaking from her basic personality.

- The buzzsaws in the nerds’ hideout were very silly, and like so many of their inventions, owed more to comic books than the Buffyverse.

- This ep had the unfortunate task of dealing with the fallout from “Entropy”, and that detracted from the good things in its own plot. I wasn’t even remotely interested in yet another go-around on the Spuffy carousel, and a number of scenes were 1) completely dull and 2) progressed nothing. Although she meant well, Dawn overstepped her bounds in lecturing Spike, and Xander didn’t even have the ‘good intentions’ excuse in his appalling conversation with Buffy. It was nice that he realised his errors and tried to make up with her in the end, but his bitterness about her sleeping with Spike is tired, and rather than addressing any real issues in that pairing, he just ranted about how it had affected him.

- The rape scene was terrible in both concept and execution. It’s a well-known fact that it wasn’t intended to be there, and was only added at the last minute in order to try and put people off Spuffy. (For the full story, writer Steve DeKnight gave a radio interview with a Buffy fansite where he mentioned that he was writing “Seeing Red” around the time that “Dead Things” aired, and that everyone was shocked by the outpouring of sympathy for Spike that followed. In order to try and shift this in favour of Buffy, the rape was subsequently added to the “Seeing Red” script, and Spike’s arc for the last few episodes redesigned – he was originally supposed to go over to “Angel” and be the Big Bad for S3). Watching the scene, you can tell that it’s forced in, and it’s inexplicable that Buffy didn’t smack Spike in the face as soon as things started getting troublesome (yes, she’d hurt her back, but that didn’t stop her fighting Warren with no problems twenty minutes later). The whole thing was a contrived mess, and it should never have been added in the first place.

- Shouldn’t Willow and Xander be alarmed that Spike was able to hurt Buffy? After all, they don’t know that she doesn’t register as human to his chip.

- Clem’s chat with Spike was uninteresting (they try so hard to make him funny, but his dialogue is devoid of wit); and there’s no way you can honestly say that Spike’s intention here was getting his soul back.

- Given the major bashing Buffy dealt him during their fight (and the whole, getting-crushed-by-fallen-masonry thing), how on earth was Warren’s jet-pack (ugh) still functional? After all of the times he got hit and landed flat on his back, it should have been destroyed.

- The shot of Tara noting Xander’s arrival should have been re-done – from where she was standing, there’s no way she could have seen him (and later on, no way that Warren’s stray bullet could have hit her).

- Putting Amber in the opening credits (at long last) for the episode in which her character died was a cruel swipe at both the actress and Tara’s fans, and added a nasty taste to what was an already problematic demise. For a character we’ve known for two and a half years, her death was flat and emotionless, and while its abruptness and lack of meaning was the whole point, it sucks that it was never properly dealt with (the other, non-Dawn characters show almost no reaction, and it’s like Tara never existed by the start of S7). On top of that, we also have the troubling way in which the writers unwittingly(?) replicated a sorry cliché in killing off a lesbian character in an episode in which she’d spent most of her time having sex, and using her death as a plot device to drive her lover mad. It’s especially bad that the writers claimed to be aware of these tropes, yet ended up using them anyway – I guess the show is only interested in being progressive when it fits its own agenda.

Do I like this episode more or less than the last time I watched it?

I appreciate the good things more, but am more bothered by the bad bits. However, as I mentioned in my introduction, I’m willing to cut this some slack simply because it featured movement and progression. No matter how disappointing the resulting Dark Willow eps turned out to be, this still gave them a decent foundation that could have permitted greatness, and that’s worth a little credit. As a result, I’m scoring “Seeing Red” a good-for-S6 three out of ten, though it could have been higher with some significant rewriting.