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Buffy Season Five: Spoilers and Foreshadowing

The Buffy Re-Watch continues! We're keeping spoilers out of the review comments, but they're very welcome right here. Post anything you like about the fifth season of Buffy and how it relates to the entire series.

We're assuming everyone who reads or posts comments in this thread HAS SEEN IT ALL, including all of Angel. (We'll have a separate spoiler post for Angel.)

Seriously! If you haven't seen both series in their entirety yet, leave now -- or you're certainly going to be spoiled! You can always come back and post a comment later. It'll be here.

There are a number of Buffy/Angel crossover episodes. Here is my crossover guide.

12 comments:

  1. "Not that I think Buffy will ever sleep with Spike" Billie, that is just adorable. I'm so glad you never went back and changed your reviews after the series ended. It's so much fun seeing you try to guess what's coming. :D

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  2. One thing I love about these early season five episodes is that they're so thematically strong. Not only did the pilot introduce several of the season’s main themes and “Real Me” introduced the season’s key plot, now “The Replacement” keeps the thematic consistency with its split-in-two central story. That’s a lot of foreshadowing cleverness that ties to future plot and character developments:

    - Ben/Glory: the two entities occupying one body.

    - Buffy the girl/Buffy the slayer: and so returns in great form Buffy’s dilemma of choosing her slayer life over her personal one.

    - Dawn/The Key: should the girl be killed because she is also the destroyer of the universe?

    Man, I can’t wait to watch the rest of the season.

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  3. sunbunny, I thought about rewriting, but at some point I just decided to leave them all as they were. I was so obsessed with Buffy while it was airing; I'd watch the episode as it aired, and then I'd watch it a second time almost immediately. And then I'd watch it a third time before the next one aired. Unless it sucked.

    Lamounier, that's an excellent point about "The Replacement" foreshadowing Ben/Glory.

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  4. I can’t believe this is only occurring to me know, after having seen Season Five so many times, but is there any chance that Spike’s lust for Buffy is caused by the ad hoc brain surgery?

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  5. The beginning of "Triangle," when Anya asks Xander to give her a countdown clock if he is ever going to leave her, made me sad. Boy, did she not get that at the end!

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  6. I’m a little behind on the rewatch, and one thing confused me while watching “No Place Like Home”: what was the monk doing in Sunnydale? Was he looking for Buffy? I mean, the dude basically attracted Glory there. Not the best move, dude.

    That made me wonder about other plot points: where Ben lived before the monks turned Dawn into human? He’s a freaking resident doctor, there’s no way he could’ve become one if Glory had been troubling his life for a long time. Glory’s appearance must be relatively recent. Anyway, Glory was chasing the monks on the flashback two months ago. Where was that? Around Sunnydale? Overseas?

    Which reminds me of the Knights of Byzantium. They seemed to be Americans and were on a fight against the monks for centuries... So either the monks and the knights are international organizations that converged to Sunnydale, or there’s some plot boo boos taking place. Why, oh, why did the writers had the monks speak that hard to identify language? (It’s Czech according to the shooting script).

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  7. Chris - that is one of the times where, in rewatches, it really hits you how meticulously Joss planned this show out.

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  8. Isn’t it interesting that the writers never brought Xander and Buffy together. I remember the first time through the show, watching episodes like “I Was Made to Love You” and assuming that, someday, they would realize that they belonged together. I still think it would have been an interesting story line to pursue.

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  9. Hmmm, I just can't imagne Buffy and Xander together in a successful relationship and think it would have been very difficult for the writers to pull off without ruining the scoobies dynamic.

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  10. I'd forgotten that Anya gets so badly hurt in the season finale. Foreshadowing?

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  11. I think I remember hearing she was supposed to die in The Gift but Emma Caulfield was moving around too much.

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  12. I guess that's one way to save your job!

    :-)

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