Oz escapes from his cage during a full moon and runs across another werewolf, the sultry, sexy singer Veruca; and wakes up next to her naked in the wilderness the next morning...

Maybe very slightly better than I remembered. The encroaching jealousy and infidelity is very nicely set in motion. The scenes at the Bronze and at the table are highly effective.

Though I agree with The Sunday Times that we do not really care about a taciturn werewolf where normally the series is normally so sure footed there is some degree of sophistication here as Oz and Willow are torn apart.

The nice Buffy metaphor operating here where Oz's werewolf drives are effortlessly projected onto Veruca nicely mirrors adultery in a way.

I don't think this is anywhere near as good as Dead Mans Party which is another Marti Noxon effort. What I think works much better in DMP is that the beginning is loaded with laughs nicely segueing into pathos at the end. Though WAH is well structured I found it a bit clinical. I do not really care about the Oz and Willow relationship.

My feelings are along the lines that Marti loses it around this point delivering pathos without puncturing serious pretentions the material might throw up. I do not believe Buffy can maintain anything serious full stop. The premise is too preposterous for that.

I suppose the counter argument would be along the lines that Oz and Willow are a serious relationship and hence they deserve a suitably serious send off. I would counter that though the relationship acquired depth it is still Buffy and so Oz's adultery should have been suitably bonkers and humourful seguing into a moving closing parting. After the mildly dubious Beer Bad Marti seems to have lost perspective. 5/10. sk

Wild at heart

A sad but fantastic willow/oz episode, the struggling of oz with the beast within and having to make a choice (saving people and sleeping with veruca or let her free and having someone wounded or worse as buffy was on the hunt………. Of course the easiest way would have to actually tell buffy about veruca before the sun went down). Willow reaction at the sight the day after and the mention of the willow/xander thing (yep you can’t compare the two “incidents”). It’s all about self acceptance. If you’re different, do you learn to embrace that difference and revel in it, or do you sideline it, keeping those ‘unnatural feelings’ in check?

The intro is fantastic: buffy slaying a vampire (while w**king on her pun) and then the return of spike (making his usual “the big bad is back” speech but end up caught by the initiative). :lol: @ willow going to xander for male translation (even if you can’t really compare xander and oz: two different character with different struggle/girl problems, imo).

More about the initiative commando (they are supposed to be marines and be sneaky ………… apart when they actually catch vampire, they are anything but: see them in fear itself, see them in the wood ……… but it’s kinda true the slayer needed to run into one while going after veruca to finally wonder who they are). I love the end between giles and buffy and their discussion about handling guy problem (plus a reference to buffy “kill angel, run away, went to hell and then went over her problem”)

The willow/oz scene is one of the powerful and sad scene ever (once of the very few time you see a guy kind of crying, not happen a lot in buffy)

Willow: oz, don’t you love me

Oz: in my whole life, I never love anything else more

Do you think WAH is more of a girly episode? Mehitabel made me think about this the other day when she commented that girls might take another perspective on IFTP. sk

Aha!

Eventually decoded your initials and caught on :thumbsup: I think my immediate reaction is - without claiming to speak for others of my gender of course- the damn-near invincible stalker monster of that episode really plays on typical female fears I think (or possibly females' mothers' fears as soon as we're old enough to walk/ date...god fobid leave home.....)

But didnt mean to say that's my definition of a 'girly episode' - is there such a thing? trying to decide how that works with this one now... because we end up feeling sorriest for Willow when they break up?

Do you geezers out there feel it's NOT for you in some way? And is there as typical blokey episode to trade explanations?

Random thoughts- haven't been able to take a character called Veruca seriously since Willy Wonka. :x ... Willow kicking into the dark magic :fear: And funnily, can't remember what Buffy does the entire time
:whistling:

You raise some very difficult generalised questions there. I feel with S4 the show became the Buffy-Willow show rather than the Buffy-Angel show it was S1-S3 so it became more feminine, in a way the masculinity being absorbed into Angel. I would argue the clear sidelining of Xander and Giles is some support to that supposition. The loss of Oz is even more obvious.

I am not sure if there is a typically girly episode or masculine episode but WAH and Redefinition are surely examples that point in different directions.

I loved the storytelling and relationship in Stendhal The Red and the Black for instance but WAH does absolutely nothing for me. I still think The Sunday Times is right when it said we are meant to care about a taciturn werewolf when manifestly, they suggest, it is not warranted.

I think it likely Joss thought of Buffy as the feminine show while Angel is the masculine one. Some element of branding surely took place when they were planning S4/AS1. sk

by season seven, it was clear there was a message about girl power (not to mention the overmacho hate woman evil priest) ............................ way too much girls at the summer house :rolleyes:

xander did comment (2 or 3 times) that he needed more male friend because his joke was usually lost with the girls

The fact that Iyari Limon and Sarah Hagan were incredibly cute goes a long way to placate any misgivings I might have. sk

Wow- lots to think about...

yes- to stoylines which explore the sidelining of (male) scoobies. but they're sidelined by Buffy, not the writers :shrug: I never felt any less for them. I think we were supposed to feel more, that they when through a phase of feeling neglected....and Joyce sidelined too....

the show more feminine - :ponder: I would have thought that the whole mad scientist/ government conspiracy theory storylines were pure blokishness... a balance of Buffy seduced by a cynic, and Oz ditto...

And I do care about a taciturn werewolf. I mean, it's Oz we're talking about: what's not to care?


Now plan to think more about the masculinity of 'Angel' OK of Angel as well....

See you're around at the mo- if you dont catch this soon, happy weekend :thumbsup:

angel had a mixed message: just for the writers to play about the fact that a few fans understood "are you gay" when doyle ask angel "are you game" in city of :rolleyes:

Never noticed that one.

I love the 'I really wasn't hitting on you' line in Lonely Heart when Angel is trying to canvas the clientele in the bar. sk

Okay I'll bite :)

Whilst I don't necessarily disagree that Willow became more prominent from S4 onwards I would disagree with your description of S1-3.

Season 2 developed the Angel/Buffy relationship, where eventually the central storyline of the show was largely concerned with their interaction, however without the supporting cast and the storylines relating to them the show would not have worked. Season 1 introduced Angel but in no shape or form was he a central character or even close to being as central as Giles, Willow or Xander.

Season 3 certainly dealt with the repurcussions of Buffy and Angels pretty screwed up relationship but this was in no way the main point of the show for that season. Clearly Angel was important but to say that Angel/Buffy were the Show is an inaccurate simplification.

Let's look at Xander for example. To start with he was only being kept alive by Buffy and yet by S7 he was the only Scoobie to have a good job and a key roll in helping Buffy - he was the 'eyes' of the group who could see things the rest missed. Contrast this with Willow who was orginally courted by big business and ended up a magic junkie who nearly destroyed the world and Buffy who worked in a burger bar and was made a counsellor purely because she was the slayer and not because of any skill she had for the job.

Buffy as a series (after S3) badly missed the direction of Joss Whedon but to say the show became more feminine is imo misleading. The whole premise of the show was a feminists wet dream - the helpless blond chick is actually a strong, hero type who frequently saves the comparatively useless menfolk from painful death. In what way was the premise of the show made more feminine after S3

:shrug:


I must admit I don't tend to spend ages trying to fathom the thoughts of the various writers and nor do I try to w**k out the 'message' of any given episode. As far as I can see Buffy is good escapist TV that lost some of the elements that I enjoyed after Joss devoted his time to Angel. The quality of the dialogue and the episodes themselves dipped noticeably when Buffy ceased to be Joss' main concern. The main problem I have with ascribing messages or morals to any given episode is that unless you are privvy to the writers thoughts you run the clear risk of simply overwriting what you wish to believe over what they intended, to the extent that what was written purely as an interesting story ends up dissected and judged according to values that have been invented by the over zealous viewer.

Whoa......... :o

I think I pretty much agree with every word of that Dave...... :thumbsup: :lol:

Steady on there ;)

Agreeing with me usually comes with a health warning :lol:

Too late I think.... :thumbsup:

Oh dear! And too late for me too!

My take on the episode... well, I really enjoyed watching it again. Well, enjoyed probably isn't the right word as it was actually quite hard going. Aly and Seth were both superb, Aly especially. Seth did a pretty good job too. As we know, Oz is a taciturn character, and it must have been difficult to portray what Oz was going through, but he did pretty well.

I have to say too, that I have much, much more sympathy for Willow too than for the self-obsessed way Buffy was acting over Parker. Sure, it's only a tv programme, but the way the Willow/Oz relationship was portrayed was touching, and had a sense of reality about it, taking out the werewolf factor of course! The break-up was painfully real too.

If there is kind of female only thing about liking this episode, then I'm a misfit as I like it. If there's any male/female thing about any episode, all that's passed me by I'm afraid, so I can't comment on it. But hey, I like Bridget Jones, and not averse to reading a bit of chick lit when I get the chance!

Also, I'm with Mehitabel... Veruca? How the hell can you take her seriously? But also, I'm with Oz, Xander and Giles... she does have a certain something. :drool:

It's also the first episode where we get a mention of the strange commando types we've seen... nothing very informative but now we know Buffy has noticed them.

Big :thumbsup: for the teaser, and it's easy to forget what happened to Spike with all the emotional drama going on... will be interesting to see how that all pans out again!

Andrew :yahoo:

That was a quality post, Dave, pretty much my thoughts exactly :)

:thumbsup: :yahoo: :thumbsup:

1 I was only suggesting how the outlook of the show was tweaked at the beginning of S4. I was not making a grand exlusionary statement in the manner you suggest ie if I had said the show was simply about Christianity I would have needed to say why and how other outlooks fail.

2 I was only talking about S4 and specifically did not mention the later seasons where further tweaks take place again ie if I had talked about S5 I would have needed to say something about the Buffy and Dawn 'love affair' which drives the whole season.(This seemed relevant to me because we are at the beginning of S4 on the rewatch)

3 Your 'vulgar relativism'(or positivism?) which drives the whole last paragraph seems to say you should not have said the things you do say in the earlier paragraphs. You make 'interpretations' in the earlier paragraphs and then effectively say we should not make 'interpretations' in the last paragraph.

If you are right in your last paragraph then Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Hume, Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Freud are more or less worthless. Presumably Mehitabel and Joe are 'complete idiots' too because they are involved in literature and the arts. Everything in philosophy, psychology, scriptural studies, theology, social sciences, aesthetics and media studies must be worthless being populated by 'over zealous' types.

This takes us into very difficult areas. sk

Dunno about difficult areas petal- you've pretty much defined a perfect party invite list (or philosophers' football team) there- I can live with being lumped with that lot, no worries.

And yes- 'over zealous' would probably be my middle name (if that wasn't too silly)


But I would just add that I think we ARE privvy to the writers' thoughts- at least, what they write down for the actors to say... and that their 'messages' are ususally well up front without being patronising. I doubt Joss ever briefed his writing team to go forth and embrace obscurity with the deliberate aim of confusing his loyal audience. :unsure:

:) It's good to see a passionate debate on the Buffy Boards again, lets keep it on topic and civil :)

was quite a statement

I think Giles was a very strong character in S4 - the season deals with Buffy learning to deal with things more independantly and her need for him lessens with her involvement with Walsh and Riley but his need for her and his role as Watcher is also an important theme so I wouldn't say he was sidelined. Quite a few episodes are based around his home - takes over from the library as a base - Xander on the other hand is kind of left high and dry with Anya :)

Great fun as usual Mehitabel.

Just in case I need to be really clear seeing as irony can easily be lost when we are dealing with text only, I clearly am saying such things(philosophy, theology etc) are worthwhile otherwise we are faced with a kind of 'positivist zero hour' where all we are left with is the 'impositions' of science without any kind of questioning from us. Kant, for instance, tried to save philosophy from the proto-positivist Hume.

On Aesthetics I am interested in Nietzsche and Heidegger who argued that aesthetics is 'realist' ie independent of mind(of the artist). This, more or less, pushes art into the world so it is not somehow 'in the head' of the artist. This feels a bit like Mehitabels last paragraph. The w**k of art is part of the world that can be questioned by anyone. sk

Thought it would be a bit easier to read if I started a fresh post and quoted your comments, which I'm assuming you're okay with :)

I couldn't quite tell from your post if you were replying with a view to further discussion or you had a big problem with my comments and weren't intending to engage further :shrug:

Although I'm assuming the former, I have no problem if you want to agree to disagree rather than reply to this post :)

The quote of yours I was initially disagreeing with was :-

I fully appreciate you are voicing an opinion, which I respect but disagree with, hence why I posted mine. As far as I can see you are making a sweeping statement. If you did not intend to make such a statement you could have clarified this in your response to me, instead you seem to be saying you did not state that S4 was the Buffy/Willow show and S1-S3 was the Buffy/Angel show, despite this being the point you make in the comment of yours I quoted :shrug:

This was your comment in response to mine, which was:-

Firstly, an apology as looking back you were specifically referring to S4 and I countered by going from S1 right through to S7. However, I believe the basic point I was making is still relevant. Xander in S4 is to an extent directionless as a person, but I wouldn't class him as marginalised - along with Giles he is an integral part of 'Uber Buffy' and thus in defeating Adam. I would argue that this does not contribute to the show being more feminine. S4 would seem to be no more or less feminine imo than any other season and I am genuinely curious as to what makes you say that - from a purely personal point of view I find the sentimentality of the Buffy Angel relationship in S1/S2 to be far more feminine than anything in S4 :shrug:

Couple of things here, firstly I'm not entirely sure 'vulgar relativism' is an accurate representation of what I was saying. That aside the main thrust of my argument is that imo it is not necessarily desirable or indeed correct to look for morals and/or messages in each episode or to 'decide' the thoughts of the writers. I fail to see in what way this does not allow me to make a statement that concerning Buffy's central premise which has been stated often enough by Joss Whedon or to discuss how the characters have developed over the course of the series, especially as the latter is simply a case of me describing said development :unsure:

Secondly I would be interested to know where I called Mehitabel or Joe 'complete idiots' or indeed yourself :unsure: Yes, I disagree with your dissecting of some of the eps in such detail and some of the points you make. No, I do not think this makes you or them complete idiots - it's clear from the contents of your posts and the way you express yourself that you are not a complete idiot. This doesn't mean I agree, however, or that I won't post to say so. Equally I have no problem with you or anyone else disagreeing with me (see the various Star Trek threads :lol: ), but I would reserve the write to reply, as indeed I am doing now :)

I'll admit that my 'overly zealous' comment was a tad inflammatory but in essence it is an accurate representation of my final point and in no way intended to suggest anything other than this.

Finally, I was very specifically referring to Buffy with my comments in the last paragraph and as such I don't see the relevance of your other comments. At no stage did I refer to the study of literature/the arts in general or make reference to Plato et al.

Of course as our ways of looking at entertainment appear to be quite divergant I would expect we could have some fairly in depth debates on the literature/arts etc. front as well, but as you touch on this is not really a suitable forum :)

Anyway, apologies for the ramble and if I've not addressed/paid attention to comments raised whilst I've been writing this. I'll also reiterate what I said at the start and mention that if this is causing a lot of offence I'll happily drop it :)

I think you are on the right lines laughtitupfuzzball. Giles was genius in S4 especially in A New Man where his 'alienation' was expressly dealt with in a brilliantly humourful manner. It has my vote as Giles finest hour and is one of Jane's best.

I was not trying to make some extreme exclusatory statement in my original post somehow delivered in stentorian tones more I was just interested in how the team 'tweaked' the show.(ie prompted by the S4 rewatch) My philosopy training sometimes leads me to make generalised statements where I end up in trouble.

The other brilliant thing about S4 has to be the development of Riley even if his actual character was a bit lacking. The structuring is brilliant with the reveal in The Initiative that he has a similar kind of life to Buffy switching all the lights on about the teases in the first six episodes. The Initiative to Doomed fuses Buffy and Riley together. They are then ready for the Adam and Initiative encounters. I am not sure what weight to give all that but the team show some degree of skill is evident in the very neat fusion of the two of them.

My mate said Buffy was quite clever in its appealing fusion of soap opera and supernatural drama. The soap opera aspect really boosted the human interest factor. One of the problems I have with TNG was that the 'team factor' was lacking a bit in the early seasons and I am not sure if they ever really gelled in the way Spock-Bones-Mccoy did. Moving back to my original statement I emphasised Angel quite strongly because he was developed quite carefully, just like Riley, so I gave him some degree of significance in the scheme of things. sk

:ponder: Hmm, now that's something I'd love to debate as I think the team factor of TNG was crucial to the show's success... but it's the wrong board and I'm hungover :lol:

Fascinating reading guys, but it's so long since I watched Buffy that I don't feel qualified to add anything valid, so I think I'll run back to my corner and continue to remember it as rollicking good entertainment that it was and leave you to dissect it further :)

I think there's a difference between comprehending any underlying message the writer wishes to convey (which is, more often than not, reasonably straightforward to identify) and pulling an episode apart into teeny tiny pieces to try and ascribe some kind of meaning to every sentence. That's how Shakespeare was taught to me when I was at school; that the Bard was some kind of literary god who could infuse 500 different meanings into a single word and it was up to later generations to pick his w**k apart to try and find them all. But is that how Shakespeare wrote his plays? Did he sit there for hours on end agonising over his choice of words, or was his intention simply to write a play using language which would appeal to the aesthete in us all? Are later generations simply reading too much into his words? In my opinion, yes. That's not to say that we should take his w**k simply at face value. But you can go too far in the interpretation.

I think the best example to illustrate Dave's point is Beer Bad. The simplest interpretation of the writer's message is that alcohol is bad and she's just not particularly good at making her point. But some people go further than that and wonder whether the OTT ram-it-down-your-throat deliverance is deliberately done in an ironic way, that the writer is taking the piss out of (for example) fundamentalist christians and their extreme viewpoint on alcohol. Or you could wonder whether the writer knows she's being deliberately OTT but that's how she wants the message to come across. There are probably several other schools of thought as well. But without knowing the writer's intentions, how do we know which is correct? They can't all be right.

How do we know what the writer's intentions were for Beer Bad? Some fan opinions are wrong, that much is guaranteed. Maybe they all are. But I think it's logical to assume that the more convoluted an explanation is, the likelier it is to be wrong. Personally, I believe that Occam's Razor does hold for this episode and the writer is just not very good at her job. Overanalysis of anything is not good, whether it be a 2000-year-old literary classic or a piss-poor episode of a modern TV show :)

1 That is just a restatement of 'vulgar relativism'. As Roger Scruton helpfully puts it:-

"vulgar relativism has no hope of surviving outside the minds of ignorant rascals" Modern Philosophy pg 33.

In exactly the same vein:-

"The existentialist certainly does not embrace a subjectivist theory of truth, if by that is meant the view propounded by Protagoras in Plato's Thaetatus, to the effect that each man is the measure of truth, that truth can only be for me, for you, or whomever. While he cannot accept a definition of truth as correspondence with a reality independent of all human conceptions of it, The Existentialist is perfectly able to accept that belief can be objectively true in the sense of being warranted by criteria on which there is tried and tested public agreement."(David E Cooper Existentialism page 17)(My underscoring)

For instance Mehitabel and I can discuss Forbidden Planet and the way it utilises The Tempest. We are not lost in some kind of 'subjectivist' confusion just because we have stepped outside 'science'. Which leads to:-

3 "The first principle laid down in the College de France's report of 1985 to the French President for education of the future runs: 'A well attuned education has to bring the universalism integral to scientific thinking and the relativism which characterises the human sciences, sensitive as they are to the wide variety of ways of life, understanding and culture.' Outside of the sciences, education is to be a 'multiculturalist' Cook's Tour through the world's religions and literatures, visited only long enough to be noted, not appraised."(ibid page 115)(My underscoring)

Cooper is entirely right especially my underscoring above where he is clearly mocking the idea that 'social sciences' should be uncritical compared to 'scientific thinking'. It is fascinating that you can say "Overanalysis of anything is not good" when it outside the arena of 'science'. You never hear Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg or Feynman being accused of "overanalysis". You never hear the accusation "But you can go too far in the interpretation" when it is about scientists. A more commonplace term would be genius but just as Cooper acknowledges above education outside of the sciences, when it reaches for the stars, is accused of "overanalysis". Which leads to:-

4 Are you an 'empiricist' eg are you a chemist or other typical empirical scientist? You speak like one. sk

Yes, you can. But what relevance does it have to the matter at hand? I'm not saying you can't analyse and interpret the works of Shakespeare, Aristotle et al. Nobody is. It's just that you'll eventually reach a point where you have completely discerned the thought processes of the author when they wrote the original document. If you go further than that, then it becomes overanalysis. If you and I disagree about where that point may be, then nobody can say whether I am wrong, whether you are wrong or whether we're both wrong because the author is dead.

I wasn't aware that I restricted my statement to the social sciences. It's true that you don't hear scientists being accused of overanalysing their data. That's not to say it doesn't happen of course, everyone does it. But modern scientists, as a rule, do not publish w**k which involves misinterpreted data if only because the peer review process usually picks these things up before it makes it into the scientific literature. It doesn't pick everything up, it's just that I doubt you'd take much notice if I linked to one of Dick Marsh's papers because it's hardly ground-breaking research (or particularly interesting, for that matter).

So if everyone believed the world was flat, that would mean the world was flat? Or if I was to do a straw poll of the southern united states, I would find that god actually existed? It doesn't matter whether it's related to literature or science, if public opinion about a subject is wrong, then it's wrong. Of course for that to be true, 'wrong' would have to be some kind of absolute state - such as in the former example (which your logic would suggest that an existentalist would be unable to comprehend, if you go back 2000 years or so). Or like someone misinterpreting the message that a writer of a TV show was trying to convey.

ETA: Yes, I'm a chemist.

Can we pull the debate back to Beer Bad now thanks :)

Ok I am willing to call it a day at that point. Interesting how things can spiral out of control like our very own Cuban missile crisis. Maybe I could have quoted the Bible next in extreme stentorian tones. sk

I will allow myself one further post about what Cooper has in mind:-

"Nietzsche proceeds from here to some striking claims about truth and knowledge, such as 'truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that this is what they are.' This is his dramatic way of rejecting the view that truth is correspondence between thought or language and reality" (David E Cooper World Philosophies page 326)

I read somewhere, so don't quote me, that strange things happen at extreme IQ levels such as scepticism about the correspondence theory of truth. As well as Cooper someone like Richard Rorty also takes this line. The influence seems to be Hegel.

Also on Hegel:-

"We cannot treat therefore treat reality as a merely 'mechanical' or 'chemical' process...Again the conceptual superiority of purposive explanations over 'mechanical' or 'chemical' ones is mirrored by the emergence of purposive living organisms from merely chemical processes."(ibid page 314) sk

And I pick the very week of our own Cuban Heels Crisis to duck out and :x instead!

I've been catching up on what I missed here before- all very interesting. I realy do tend to balnk out when the references get particularly abstract in the pure theory camps: probably why I'm a performance person and not a revved up Proper Philosopher. Never was, even at college. (Like when we had to read Kierkegarde to 'understand' Ibsen and Strindberg: I hadn't been having any problem with the Intensely Gloomy school of drama UNTIL my tutor stunned me with lumps of abstract reasoning. I think it might have given me a bit of an inhibition :blush: )

Fobidden Planet? Oh boy, lead me to it! My recent baby Canadian students copped for all the versions of Tempest I could lay my paws on recently- very sadly, that wasn't one of them... Robbie the Robot and the bootleg booze- see, we worked our way back to Beer Bad, no problem. Might watch that tonight, for old time's sake. If I happen on any new ideas, should I, under the circumstances, keep them to myslef?

I've just watched this episode again this morning and some new occored to me. In the past I've said in the past in away I thought Willow was hard on Oz because as werewolf he couldn't remember what was doing so was all this fault. Now I have to say was wrong! As Willlow said that was his solution to share the cage all night he could told Buffy and Giles about Veruca there could have delt with her i.e. locked her up over night. He also pulled in the cage and started kissing her even before they changed. Oz what a :shit: I felt so awful for Willow at times it was hard to watch her hurting so much I just want to give her a big hug.