BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, Season 2 (spoilers)

Wow, what a great season of television!  I think it may be my favorite so far, trumping anything I've seen from Lost, BSG, or any of the other shows I've checked out on my teevee kick.

It breaks down, to my mind, into three kinds of episodes.  The ones I like most are obviously those on the season's main story arc, directly concerning Angel and to a lesser extent Spike.  I'll discuss these in a moment.  

The ones I like least are the standalone "monster of the week" eps.  The saving grace of these, I think, is that they serve as breathing points in the pacing, and thereby help the main arc build more slowly and feel bigger.  I don't think any of them are completely disposable, and all of them introduce at least one minor development in some relationship between characters, but they usually do so in an incidental way, and it would have been nice if they'd been integrated more tightly with the bigger, broader goings-on. 

But then there's an in-between kind of episode, that does hugely important character work, but doesn't stand directly on the main arc.  I'm thinking here of "Halloween" and "Dark Ages," which really showed us another side of Giles.  Daaaayamn, I couldn't believe it when he went stone-cold Get Carter on that one dude!  How great was it, too, seeing him in full "Groovy Age of Horror" mode during that flashback?  "Phases" certainly qualifies, with its jaw-dropping revelation about Oz--oh man, I hope they let his werewolf out to fight some other monsters in later seasons! 

"I Only Have Eyes for You" seems, through most of the running-time, to be an exceptionally weak "monster of the week," but the final exorcising confrontation was a masterstroke.  The gender-swap surprised me, and it was startlingly cathartic to see Buffy pour those feelings out to Angel, especially considering how reprehensible those feelings had been made to seem leading up to that moment.  Seeing Angel play the other part was fascinating, too, since it raises the question of how much the reenactment wasn't just taking him over, but tapping into something still deep within him.  I also thought it was clever the way his vampiric immortality made him uniquely capable of completing the cycle with forgiveness, allowing the troubled spirit(s?) to pass on.  Most importantly, this encounter laid some vital emotional groundwork for the two-part season finale.

Okay, so, let's get to the meat of the season.  The whole Angel arc was just flat-out amazing, abounding with shocking developments, tragic ironies, and unintended consequences.  His backstory is that he slaughtered a bunch of Gypsies, and the survivors of that tribe cursed him by restoring his soul so he could be tormented by remorse over his victims.  But there's a failsafe clause--if having a soul ever leads to him knowing happiness again, then he loses it again.  And what comes of that last little vicious twist of the knife?  Two more dead Gypsies--one of them being Jenny's still-vengeful uncle, and the other being Jenny herself, even as she hurries to find a "cure" that would restore Angel's soul again.  The episode where that happened, "Passion," just knocked me on my ass.  Through my own careless curiosity on the internet, I had already learned that Jenny would die, and it still took my breath away, so I can only imagine what a gut-punch it must have delivered when it originally aired. 

This season also introduced Spike, and did great things with him, I'd say.  I'd been enjoying Buffy up to his appearance, but the scene where he so casually disposed of the Anointed One was the first moment where I felt that I was watching something truly special.  Restoring Drusilla to "health" (whatever exactly that means for a vampire--obviously not mental health) cost him the use of his legs, and I loved how bitterly ironic that became when she started gravitating away from him toward Angelus, in part because of the latter's non-impairment and--even worse--his cruel stream of wheelchair jokes!  Spike's savage (however relatively insignificant) beating of Angelus in the finale was a satisfying and well-earned character payoff.

As for missteps, when they introduced Kendra, I thought she'd make a fantastic occasionally-recurring character.  I was thrilled to see her return for the finale--and outraged at her perfunctory death.  What an idiotic waste of such a promising character, to no worthwhile effect, and to no purpose that I could see.  If that was the "point," the show lost more than it gained by making it.

I would much rather have seen Xander killed, as he was even more of an irksome douchebag this season.  When they paired him off with Cordelia, I was hopeful at least that this would get him out of Willow's and Buffy's hair, but no--it only gave him one more girl toward whom he could act like a totally petulant, passive-aggressive asshole.   His despicable confession to Willow that he "loves" her while a) she's happily involved with someone else, b) she's fucking COMATOSE, and c) he's supposedly involved with someone himself, made me really want to see him get curb-stomped by someone . . . anyone!

My final complaint is that this show really plays the ZOMG DOOMSDAY card too often, only to avert it way too easily.  That happened twice in this season alone--once with the big blue Judge and than in the finale with the petrified vortex demon.  I like occasional threats that are bigger and scarier than Ted or those fish guys, but it gets cheap to have so many with world-ending capability, especially when they get put down so easily in only one or two episodes. 

On to season 3!