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Delving into the inner workings of this season's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel |
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Buffy: Year in Review, Season Four - Jane Espenson "There was thought of the overall arcs for the season. Some of those weren’t as strong as we had hoped. Exactly what was Adams plan and exactly what was Maggie Walsh going to do with him? Some of that wasn’t as crystal clear. But to take it an episode by episode and look at it as individual evenings of television, we felt that it was a strong season." Other areas that Jane comments on as being less than fulfilling were the Initiative, "The Initiative wasn’t what we had hoped. It was pretty good,
He's no Angel. (But we knew There was a lot of discussion as to Buffy’s state of being all season amongst the fans. "That’s actually something that happened to a much larger degree than we had expected. We were legitimately surprised when people started saying they were disliking Buffy to the amount that the fans did this year." A lot of that had to do with her first post-Angel relationship. "Buffy was suffering having been dumped by Parker. ‘The Parker Depression’ actually grew much longer than it was originally supposed to be. That’s why we ended up with a lot of mopey Buffy. ‘Beer Bad’ was supposed to be an early episode but because of something having to do when Halloween fell it ended up getting moved a little later." But aside from the minor disappointments, there was much ‘of the happy’ to be had. "We also thought we had a lot of funny this year, perhaps a higher funny quota of any Buffy season before that." There was Giles’ singing (round of applause), Anthony Head showed his comedic prowess in ‘A New Man’, the Spike/Buffy romance in ‘Something Blue’, the Jonathan epic of ‘Superstar’ and ‘Pangs’ where someone mistakenly credited Jane for Spike’s "you conquered them" speech. To which she replied, "Thank you, but I didn’t write that." (laughter) "I wrote ‘it’s a bear, you made a bear!’ " (The room bursts into applause and hoots) There was also a lot of pain this season. Seth Green's departure from the show and the Oz and Willow breakup left a lot of fans shocked. "Joss wanted to give the audience time to feel that pain right along with her. He wanted for them to go on that journey with her." Willow’s overall character change seemed very natural at a time when it’s your first year of college where a lot of girls start to go by their middle name and cut their hair. Jane made it clear that ‘Hush’ was not written to win an Emmy Award but that she hopes it does. And yes, it should. There was also talk that the Willow/Tara relationship was another rating getter. "Has that ‘ever’ helped the ratings of a show!?" Jane replies laughing. But the essence for this is looking inside the characters. "I get these characters, they’re in a relationship. You forget there’s that little bit of societal shock value. I hope that goes away as people view it, ‘oh it’s that couple’ and they won’t even think (about it). There is something very sweet we feel, that who Willow fell in love with is someone with a lot of what Willow used to be." Jane took a look at some of the characters and their relationships to one another. Riley: "We’ve dealt with finding out what (Marc) does best, those scenes where he’s relaxed and the scenes when he’s quietly intense as he was in ‘Hush’. It took us a while to figure out what Marc does well. And I think you’ll find that we have an amazing arc set up for him next year in which he is going to do a lot of stuff he does really well." Maggie Walsh: "Lindsey wasn’t interested in continuing the show. Maggie wasn’t going to die that early, but the character wasn’t giving us the zing and zang that we wanted. Maggie was going to be a mother figure to Riley and Buffy was going to be the girl from the wrong side of the tracks. The girl she didn’t want her son to date." Buffy: "Joss had something interesting in regards to Buffy, she felt alienated from everyone and everyone from her. ‘Ideally our audience is going through the same thing our characters are going through.’ ‘We wanted our audience alienated?’ (laughter) But actually I think there’s a part of Joss that believes that. There was something there and you’re loosing it and he really wanted us to feel that regret." The character arc for Buffy showed she made a very important step, " ‘I’m not going to be a cog in a machine, I have individuality and it is my strength.’ What she learned at the end of this season was another aspect of that contrasting example, ‘yes I have individuality. I have to do it my own way, but I have friends who can be part of my strength.’" Spike: "We were a little worried - can we do it? Will he still be Spike if he can’t bite? We didn’t want to cut the balls off the man. I’m pretty proud that we didn’t. We asked Joss this question, ‘We don’t want Buffy to kill Spike but how are you going to justify that she’s not?’ and Joss said ‘You don’t kill a guy you know.’ We had to come up with two different reasons not to have Xander kill Spike. One, we can’t have Xander kill Spike. We want to keep Spike around. We’re stuck there a little bit to be completely honest. And two, he can’t be tied to a chair because we want him out in the world causing problems and solving problems. He would be a very useful ally and I think Xander would acknowledge that." Willow and Tara: "Well, there were some things that really concerned me as we were going along that I wasn’t sure we’d be able to do. I wrote on the last season of ‘Ellen’ (the all-gay-season) and I knew how much focus that can pull away from everything else on the show until that’s all anyone thinks of. I’m so pleased with the way Joss has handled it!" As a side bar she stated that, "People resist change, people don’t like change and there’s always an initial bad reaction to anything new. Even Riley, the character people are going to be the most predisposed to not like have come around and we get positive feed back even for Riley. So I think people have been pretty good with the characters." Xander and Anya: "It was really that they were ‘going’ apart and not ‘growing’ apart. Xander had nothing but his girl." Xander and Giles: "Both characters were in a bad, frustrating place. Someone finding themselves without direction and when there are so many pathways open to Xander, ‘a lot of hallways but all the doors are closed.’ Giles finds himself with very few hallways. We didn’t forget them, we talked about them a lot. We were very conscious about what we were doing with them." Certainly things were touched upon at the end of the season that will lead us into the new one. There are a lot of questions and ideas that even Jane had wanted to know and was just as curious about as we were. The final episode ‘Restless’ for example, "We’re not done explaining what it means about them as characters." And the ‘Enjoining Spell’ cast in season finale, "We have not finished seeing the implications of that. Well, I think it’s about time that Giles said ‘this could have consequences’ and we see that it finally does. We’ve got lots of pain planned, there is pain on the way! I want to find out if Giles is going to get a job, if Xander is going to ‘get’ a job, who Tara really is, what new Slayer powers Buffy has, how much is Anya going to embrace being human…?" So many questions, and only two more months to wait!
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