7.10 Bring on the Night

[Clare]

7.10 Bring on the Night - Episode #132
Giles returns to Sunnydale with three "Potential Slayers". Buffy must protect these girls from a powerful agent of the First named the Turok-Han.

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

[partcynic]

7x10 “Bring on the Night”

Episode Rating = 1

In many ways, this episode exemplifies the slump in quality “Buffy” has experienced over the last couple of years. While there are specific episodes that are lower in quality than this one, there isn’t that much of a qualitative difference; and that doesn’t negate the fact that “Bring on the Night” is a lumbering, go-nowhere bore. Its biggest flaw is that it’s intended to be ‘all about the arc’, and while that’s fine as a concept, arc eps need to feature plot and character progression, and have the ongoing story at a different place by their conclusions. However, this edition doesn’t do that – it drags on for forty minutes and then just stops, with very little in the way of movement and nothing worth remembering on either the micro or macro levels. On top of that, there are also lots of minor narrative problems, as well as the unavoidable issue of the failed attempt at emotion at its close.

What I Liked about “Bring on the Night”:

- Anya’s comment about lots of beings pretending to be older than old and eviler than evil was both funny and believable.

- I always enjoy watching Drusilla, thanks to Juliet Landau’s spirited performances. While I’d much rather see the real character doing some interesting in the context of a plot, it was still nice to see her, and she provided equal amounts of humour and sexiness.

- The reappearance of the First’s “Amends” form when Willow attempted the locator spell was pretty cool, as were the multiple continuity references (like returning to the former Christmas tree lot).

- I don’t hate Kennedy as much as most people do, and I thought she was fine here. Flirting with Willow was cute (although I’d have liked to know how she discovered that Willow’s gay), and she was the only person making sense during the discussions about 1) bringing the potentials to the Summers house and 2) arming them with weapons for the big fight.

- The stunt/fight choreography department is always reliable, and they did a great job with the two Buffy/Turok-han encounters.

What I Disliked about “Bring on the Night”:

- Andrew is going above and beyond in his drive to redefine the term ‘waste of space’. The jokes the writers keep given him are repetitive retreads of things that failed to be funny at the start of S6, let alone after countless recycles. I will say that I liked Dawn and Anya toying with him at the start, but his screentime was otherwise painful.

- Buffy's dreams about Joyce made no sense. Why was she talking normally to someone who's obviously dead? Why didn't she tell anyone what she'd seen? Why wasn't she more suspicious, when she knows the First has appeared to people in the forms of the dead? If the ‘ghost’ was really Joyce, why didn't she say something useful or meaningful? If it was the First, why didn't it say something scary or try and cause some real (non-philosophical) problems? And why was Buffy even having the dreams? Why doesn’t she have any more like them later in the season? As nice as it was to see Joyce/Kristine Sutherland again, it would have been better if her final appearance had a purpose as opposed to being a bizarre non-sequitur. Having her pop up randomly was almost as strange as the Cheese Man in “Restless”, though at least His Cheesiness was funny.

- The scenes at the school were very slow. The basement bit was okay, but the conversation with Wood dragged (plus it had Dawn reprising the unbelievable vomit chat), and the mystery the writers tried to establish with him failed. Does he randomly follow people around and make cryptically vague comments all the time? That must make his parent-teacher meetings intriguing. And what was up with him looking at Buffy ‘evilly’ through the blinds? Has the show really sunk so low in its search for sources of tension?

- I disliked the pointless perpetuation of the terrible 'Is Giles the First?' red herring. If the writers wanted to tease the internet audience, something like this would be okay for one episode (though none as they were written), but it’s a pain to see something so trivial dragged out for so long. Worse, the adherence to that silly device meant that we lost the opportunity for a good return-of-Giles scene. It's also hard to believe that he touched nothing (or that no-one would try to hug him etc) outside of what we were shown. Have Buffy/Willow etc really gotten that cold?

- The show is trying so hard to make the First a viable threat, but it just isn’t working. Our heroes are endlessly chatting about a foe that’s a big nothing compared to Adam/Glory, yet we didn’t spend hefty chunks of S4/5 watching the characters sit around and go “ooh... Adam/Glory. Scary”. For the First to be frightening, it needs to do dangerous and threatening things, not just appear to people as deceased friends/family, say things they’d never say (and thus blow its cover), and then disappear. Even its physical strikes are unimpressive – the Bringers are just human beings with knives, sleeper-Spike did nothing but sire a few vamps, and the Turok-han is a generic monster. I’m really not seeing the problem here – sure, it poses a bit of a threat, but nowhere near as much as the characters are making it out to be.

- There's no written history on the First? That’s weird – there was in "Amends".

- The ‘potential’ concept is theoretically okay, but doesn’t sit comfortably with what we’ve been shown before. If there really is a Slayer line, it would have been nice to hear about it a few seasons ago, since it's crucial mythology. In the past, it always seemed like the Slayer essence could hop into any girl it wanted, and I don’t see why killing a few potentials wouldn’t just cause more girls to be selected for the role.

- The actresses playing Annabel and Molly have both graduated from the Dick Van Dyke School of bad English accents – do people really think that’s how we speak?

- Knowing the First’s ultimate plan (as explained in “Chosen”), why is it even bothering to attack the Slayer line? If its overall goal is to raise its army, why not just sneak the Bringers into the school in the middle of the night, bleed open the seal and release all of the Turok-han? Why even bother attacking (and thus involving) the Slayer in the first place? If one Ubervamp could kick her ass, the First should reason that she'd be defenceless against an entire army of them.

- The seal of Danzalthar needs to be explained relative to the Hellmouth. Are they two separate entities? Why did no Ubervamps emerge when the Hellmouth opened before? How did the Turok-han end up sealed away in a separate place from all of the other monsters? And are we supposed to believe that the Seal’s been there since S1?

- The Spike-torture scenes were really disappointing. Why did the First think it was a good idea to drown a vampire (who doesn't need to breathe)? I'd imagine that if the water was warm enough, those dips could be quite pleasant. Have the writers really forgotten fundamental things regarding the creatures they’ve been writing about for 6+ years? And did anyone believe, even for a moment, that Spike might actually side with the First? The entire sequence was a waste of time.

- As with the Big Bad roll call in “Lessons”, if past actors are willing to return (and the show can pay for them), why not build actual stories around them, instead of having them be expensive window-dressing?

- Why is an episode that takes place a couple of days after the date-stamped “Conversations With Dead People” (November 12th) making reference to the fact that it's now December? At the latest, it should be Nov 15th/16th.

- The Turok-han was okay, but his feral nature meant that he wasn’t particularly intelligent or compelling to watch. And would a being so primal really have spent time perfecting martial arts instead of just blazing ahead with raw power?

- After Adam, Glory and Evil-Willow, Buffy shouldn't be that shocked when an opponent is physically stronger than her/is immune to her normal attacks. Smacking the Turok-han with that stalactite knocked it down for a good period of time. Why didn't she bash its head in while it was down, instead of running just as she'd gotten the upper hand?

- The Turok-han’s background doesn’t fit with previously established mythology (vampires were created when a demon being exiled from Earth fed upon a human, thus infecting that person with its essence). When exactly did this additional race pop up?

- Annabel running away from the Summers home was stupid. She knows that they're on the Hellmouth, but decides to flee in the middle of the night. Couldn’t she at least wait until daybreak? And by some stroke of (mis)fortune, she happens to bump right into the Turok-han. Just how small is Sunnydale?

- Buffy immediately coming across Annabel at the start of act four was contrived (note that they don’t explain how she found her). Also, why was the Turok-han still waiting there? Did it figure Buffy would notice the potential’s absence, leave the others unprotected and come out alone to find her?

- The big fight was underwhelming. Buffy gets beaten too easily given the foes she’s gone up against before, and it’s hard to drum up excitement at the prospect of yet another super-strong villain that can’t be stopped with physical force.

- When the Turok-han threw Buffy through the wall, why (why, WHY?!) didn't it just kill her? There needs to be a reason why the silly creature just left her in the wreckage. Wouldn’t eliminating the only person who could really protect the potentials be a very good thing for the First?

- Like with the Annabel/Buffy contrivance, how does the gang know where to find Buffy? How long was she left lying in the street?

- Seeing that Buffy was left beaten and unconscious for a good period of time, why don't the gang take her to a hospital (especially when Giles thought she might have internal bleeding, and the Scoobs even speculated that she might die?) She’s been seen by doctors before.

- Buffy's ‘rousing’ speech is abysmal – I cringed through the whole thing. It’s long, over-the-top, melodramatic, makes no sense for the character, lacks wit, and lacks genuine emotion (note that Buffy doesn’t say anything constructive about how they’re going to fight the First – she just tosses out a bunch of cheap platitudes). What were Marti Noxon and Douglas Petrie thinking when they came up with this?

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

I actually like it less – and as with “Help”, I was debating whether or not I should drop its score to a zero. Nothing in “Bring on the Night” works, and it’s so sloppily done that it almost manages to make “Doublemeat Palace” look accomplished. Since that loooong list of negatives speaks for itself, I’ll just grant this a very low one out of ten (for having one or two good lines, and the effort of the fight choreographers) and be done with it.