5.21 The Weight of the World

[Clare]

5.21 The Weight of the World - Episode #099
Willow uses a spell to enter the mind of a catatonic Buffy; Glory starts feeling guilty about what she has to do to Dawn.

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

[cyclica]

There's some great scenes in this episode. Like the 'ben and glory have some kind of connection' scene, and the whole glory vs ben agrument. And the insights into buffy's mind were good too.

But this episode is the penultimate one of the season, and it needs more than just a few good scenes. After last weeks' action fest, the pace slowed right down. Most of the characters don't do much, in fact buffy and willow spend most of the episode sitting still. I was expecting buffy to race back to sunnydale and take revenge, but no.

And the whole giles-was-mortally-wounded story from last week was for nothing, he just goes to the hospital and now he's fine.

Still, ther was enough good stuff to make it an entertaining episode if viewed by itself, so I'm giving it a low 6. But considering it could have been the second-to-last episode ever, it should have been much better.

[partcynic]

5x21 “The Weight of the World”

Episode Rating = 2

Whenever I’ve seen this episode, I’ve always come away with the impression that it was a waste of time, and I can’t say I had a change of heart upon rewatching. No matter what criticisms I may have had of “Tough Love” and “Spiral”, they at least had lots of movement and action, and it’s disappointing to have that suddenly curtailed in favour of 42 minutes of nothing. Looking over the ep, I’d be hard pressed to say just what happened – there’s zero plot, and instead we watch a series of arbitrary scenes that either try (and fail) to give character development (the Ben/Glory material) or state what should have been obvious (the trip into Buffy’s psyche). Given that there’s also a marked lack of humour and a telegraphed ending, there really isn’t much to commend here, and I think that “The Weight of the World” might just be my least liked ep of the season.

What I Liked about “The Weight of the World”:

- The brief conversation between two of Glory’s minions (as they pack) is funny, as are their attempts at grovelling and blaming each other after Glory lets slip that she’s overheard them.

- It’s good to see Willow taking charge of the Scoobs at the start, and she’s believably powerful and commanding as she does so.

- Though I still don’t think an entire episode was needed to remedy the Willow/Anya conflict, I like that the two are now on respectful, comfortable terms.

- The one part of the Glory material I genuinely enjoyed was her speech about “six billion lunatics”. It was a unique perspective on the world from a character that was in the right position to hold it, and though Dawn’s retort that Buffy could handle the strain of living was inevitable, it was still a decent comeback.

- Willow’s psychic chat with the two Buffys (at the climax of the ‘plot’) was respectable. I appreciated getting a look at how the collective traumas of the season had impacted Buffy; and her guilt and grief after wishing things could be over was believable. That’s not to say this was anywhere near the league of the similar concept shown in “Prophecy Girl”, but I still found it to be a tiny bit emotional.

What I Disliked about “The Weight of the World”:

- The show’s approach to magic is starting to become lazy. I’d have preferred it they stuck to the rule of ‘spell = incantation plus ritual ingredients’ rather than have Willow do what she wanted by uttering a single word. It’s not a lethal problem here, but it sets the precedent for “Smashed” and “Wrecked”.

- Words can’t express how irritating and unfunny I found the constant ‘Glory is Ben’ joke to be. The only decent thing to come out of it was Spike smacking Xander, but even that didn’t warrant the repetition.

- Now that we’re approaching the climax of the Glory/Key plot, I have to say that I don’t buy the mechanics of the Key’s action at all. Since the Key is a fixed entity that corresponds to a similarly fixed lock, I don’t understand why it would need to be used at a specific time in a specific place (since it opens the gates to every dimension, it’s not even like Glory would have to wait for certain ones to align). The plot construction of the last few eps is also problematic – the writers seem to have forgotten that in the show’s universe, “Tough Love” and “Spiral” take place on the same day, with “The Weight of the World” and “The Gift” occurring that night. As a result, we’ve ended up with the huge coincidence of the day Glory decided to attack Tara (and luckily found out who the Key was) being the exact one in which she needed to use the Key’s power. However, in the show, they’re acting as though these events are weeks apart.

- I wasn’t impressed by the attempts at bringing a cute kid into the show (child Buffy), nor the forced and cheesy attempt at emotion as child-Buffy cradled baby Dawn and vowed to take care of her. This series used to be far beyond such hackneyed attempts at tear-jerking.

- Given that Glory has been co-habiting a body with Ben for 25 years, why’s the barrier between them suddenly getting breached now? There’s no reason for it to happen in terms of logic or sense, so it seems like a contrivance in order to give the characters something to do while Buffy’s catatonic – and that’s exactly what it is. Although I’d say I like Glory (mostly due to her dialogue – she’s funny), she has no depth, and this ep came across as an eleventh-hour attempt at making her three-dimensional. It didn’t work for me, and I have to say that if the writers wanted her to be more complex/conflicted, it’s something they should have started doing a long time ago.

- The constant morphs between Glory and Ben were silly, and the correspondingly poor acting meant that we kept lurching from melodramatic (Clare Kramer) to boring and personality-free (Charlie Weber). I also felt bad for Michelle Trachtenberg during the alley sequence – she had nothing to do besides stare into space and get thrown around, and that’s a thankless role.

- The visit to Doc was pretty bad. It was good to have some continuity between this ep and “Forever”, but the writing and acting were uniformly poor. For an old demon, Doc should have known better than to be hyper-defensive (and thus lead Spike to the magic box that fortunately contained everything the gang needed to know about the portal-opening ritual), and his swordplay and super-long tongue were embarrassing. I had a hard time seeing how he could beat Spike in a fight, and the ‘look, he’s dead – no wait, he isn’t’ conclusion was clichéd.

- The constant cuts from Buffy’s psyche to she and Willow sitting in Xander’s bedroom were gratuitous, and made me feel like I was being condescended. I was perfectly aware of what was going on, and didn’t need constant reminders that it was the product of a spell.

- Am I the only person who had to fight the urge to say ‘Well, duh’ at the ending? The ‘twist’ that stopping the ritual would require Dawn’s death could be seen coming from miles away, and it ended an already-underwhelming episode on a weak note.

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

I just as unimpressed as I’ve always been, and spent most of the time clock-watching and vainly hoping something interesting might happen. Sadly, it didn’t, and I stand by my statement in my last review that this and “Spiral” were big hints that the series needed to be retired. Looking at “Buffy” as a whole, this ep isn’t one of the absolute worst, but that’s only because S6/7 had so many misfires. However, when examining just the first five seasons, this ep is a blatant weak link, with nothing to offer in terms of narrative, wit or development. It plods along and fills time – and that’s it. As such, I can only score this episode a middling two out of ten.