Liadnan

So, that's that... I reached the end of my marathon run through the entire boxed set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Sunday afternoon. I really feel somewhat bereft. And my mouse finger is itching for the "order Angel" button (I only have series one and am cursing the fact I didn't throw caution to the wind and take advantage of working on Jersey, and indeed having Play.com as a client, to pick that up at the same time).

It's a rather worrying number of years since I first watched the first episode, on its first outing on BBC2. Most of the episodes I had only seen once, but up until about the end of season 5 I think I caught almost all of them (I had a working VCR at the time, unlike now). For a while at least BBC2 were showing a cut version in the early evening, usually the cuts were only mild but I remember a telephone conversation with K shortly after the episode where Kendra dies. Having watched the cut version K thought it uncertain whether Kendra was definitely dead - having stuck to the late night versions I had no doubts on that score (basically, the frame in which the actual slash across the throat is seen was thought slightly too much for 6.30PM). By the time season six came round I think the schedule had changed again, inconveniently for me particularly since I had changed work patterns too, plus I had slightly gone off the previous two seasons: I kept missing episodes and eventually gave up. Season 7 I had never seen at all until now, but I did always have it in my mind I would do this. Angel incidentally, which I actually thought at the time was better than the parallel seasons of Buffy was also killed for me by scheduling by about the end of season 3 (I think).

Very brief, vague unfocussed musings..: Season 1 feels like foreverago but my recollection of rather more rubbishy production values seems slightly unfair now: it may have been the rather ancient TV I had at the time. And the Master is still a rather good villain. I still think season 2 was the best, but there's far too much compressed into it: Spike and Drusilla and the whole of the Angelus plot: there was material for two series there. Season 3 very good indeed. Season 4 is still rubbish and there seems an enormous disconnect between 3 and 4, though that's probably largely ascribable to the change from school to university: the uncertainty Buffy shows at the start of the season never seems to be lost from the season as a whole. 5 and 6 rather better this time round, surprisingly so: Season 5 in particular seems far better plotted than it did at the time, but 6 is pretty depressing and seems fundamentally different from most in its concentration on character as opposed to the Big Bad Plot. Still, I don't think you can knock the season that brought us Once More With Feeling, not to mention the self-parody implicit in Jonathan, Andrew and Warren.

Season 7: I still don't know. Maybe I'll have to watch it again. But the ending is Right.

Oh, and the film: still awful, particularly when viewed alongside something like Lost Boys, but it was only £1.99...

Martin, did I win?