Buffy: Grave (6.22)

So we reach the end of Buffy's most polarizing season. It's been an intense journey full of strong ideas and lousy execution, but has mostly achieved what it set out to do. This was a season that, to this day, still provokes discussion and controversy, and definitely pushed the limits of the term 'darkness'. Grave, fittingly for season six, is a mixed bag. Some of it is incredibly powerful, and some of it is just as contrived and ridiculous as a lot of this year. It's by far the weakest season finale the show ever produced, but not the all-out horror show that I remembered it being.

Buffy: Two to Go (6.21)

While there's a lot of vacuous fun to be had as Willow tears up the joint, my problem with this entire arc is that it quickly loses track of Willow's purpose for wreaking havoc. It becomes less about Tara's demise and Willow's self-destructive levels of emotional devastation, and more about Willow making snarky jokes and being mean to people. All season has built up to this point, and it's annoying to see such interesting character work thrown out in exchange for typical 'evilness'. It's underwhelming.

Buffy: Villains (6.20)

The overriding sense of the writers failing to have the courage of their conviction feeds into Villains, especially when it comes to the obvious themes of the episode. Much of Marti Noxon's script is about morality, and whether it's right for Willow to pursue her own form of vengeance. Buffy insists that, regardless of his actions, Warren is a human and therefore should be punished by human means. Willow, suited to her character, bulldozes through the show demanding instant retribution. The issues of what is right and wrong and whether capital punishment is ever really a good thing are both strong, but all of it is undermined via the cop out of making Warren such a reprehensible sack of shit. As a result, it's hard not to cheer Willow on when she's slicing the creep up, and that sort of diminishes the credibility of the episode.

Buffy: Seeing Red (6.19)

Season six is usually regarded as Buffy's 'dark' season, the year in which everyone's miserable and seem to do stupid things that go against the characters as we know them. For me, the biggest problem with season six is that the writers never had the conviction to actually make things real dark. I bring this up because Seeing Red and, to an extent, Dead Things are two of the most daring and fascinating episodes this year. But both are rendered awkward and gratuitous because the events captured in both episodes feel too self-contained to be truly genuine. Buffy and Spike's actions during each hour at odds with their respective characterization in the episodes surrounding the two I just mentioned, which make all the rape dreck here seem so ridiculous.

Buffy: Entropy (6.18)

Outside of the vengeance demon elements, this is Buffy entirely in soap opera mode. Now it's understandable that a show would get soapier in its later years, especially when the small ensemble begin getting a little incestuous with each other like it has this season, but Entropy is probably the most overtly soapy episode in a long while. The back-end of the hour is full of ridiculous contrivance and silly plot twists, Spike and Anya getting it on, the two of them being unknowingly filmed by video surveillance cameras that the Scoobies just so happen to be hacking into at that very moment -- it's all crazily annoying. Like always this year, logic seems to have flown out the window in the writers' pursuit of melodrama, but the strong performances manage to salvage things.

Buffy: Normal Again (6.17)

There's an interesting story in here somewhere, and you can understand why the writers would want to explore what in general is a cool idea, but Normal Again struggles to be coherent as an episode. The pacing is horrible, certain elements of the story fail to resonate, and there's a gradual sense of redundancy to the whole thing. It's the first and only episode credited to Diego Guttierez, and it's unfortunate that the script stumbles from one strange subplot to another, failing to produce a ton of internal logic as the whole thing spins into weird, unexplainable directions.

Buffy: Hell's Bells (6.16)

Because this show can't go five minutes without dumping all over at least one of its cast members... Hell's Bells is the unsurprisingly maligned Xander/Anya wedding episode, something that strives to be engaging and sympathetic, yet comes off as yet another desperate attempt at throwing misery into the lives of the Buffy ensemble with little rhyme nor reason. It could have worked if the following episodes featured interesting new avenues for both characters to go down, but since Xander and Anya ultimately end up becoming even less integral to the Buffy ensemble, Hell's Bells is a total wash.

Buffy: As You Were (6.15)

This is another example of the show dumping all over Buffy for no reason other than making her more miserable than ever. While you can still understand a lot of her sadness, this is really the point where her constant humiliation becomes almost laughable. It's bad enough that she's working at a burger joint, but here comes her uninterested ex, then some awkward flirtation on her part, then the arrival of his wife, and finally an awkward bedroom encounter between the ex and her sleazy new lover. It's all overtly fetishistic, as if the writers were intent on dragging her down to the lowest ebbs of human crumminess.

Buffy: Older and Far Away (6.14)

If you were disliking the creative direction Buffy had been headed in of late, you could almost view this episode as a week where the writers gave up, coming up with a script where the Scooby Gang literally stand around in a house wondering why they can't do anything. While Older and Far Away doesn't work on any particularly deeper level (I guess you could strain that it's a metaphor for early-twenties lethargy, but that's sort of a stretch), it's fine as a standalone mystery. It does grind all the high-strung emotion and devastation of Dead Things to a severe halt, but I guess the show couldn't throw even more angst at us right now.

Buffy: Dead Things (6.13)

So we arrive at the ugliest episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's Dead Things that pretty much encapsulates the sixth season, with a ton of ideas being thrown at us all at once and only some of them sticking. Like so many of these episodes, it's the Spike and Buffy relationship that is most problematic, as well as the most fascinating thing on offer. Here we have confirmation that it's somewhat mutually abusive, with both parties manipulating the other and both being unhappy with the results. It's troubling, and there are several moments here that are plain uncomfortable to watch.

Buffy: Doublemeat Palace (6.12)

Doublemeat Palace is a strange beast, something that looks and feels a lot like something the show would casually dispense in its first season, only with the depressive melancholy that has become season six's trademark. Even after watching it at least a couple of times since it first aired, I'm still unsure whether it's a good episode or not. To praise it, Jane Espenson's script is pretty funny, while the most inventive element is the use of meat as metaphor. Lengthy shots show Buffy watching as the burger meat becomes processed and identical, an unfortunate depiction of burger joints pushing the idea of conformity, turning employees into meat-dispensing machines and stopping any shred of individual identity. It's a strong message, but the rest of the hour feels a little contrived.

Buffy: Gone (6.11)

This is Buffy on auto-pilot, an episode derived from a weak conceit and desperately given some kind of meaning or purpose via Buffy's ongoing personal woes. But, in the end, it still feels like an unnecessary detour, one with little momentum or actual 'reason'. Buffy's invisible. She likes it, plays around with it for a while, faces death, feels sad, and gets over it. There are funny moments sprinkled through the script, but Gone still ranks up there among the most forgettable episodes of the entire series.

Buffy: Wrecked (6.10)

Before it was undermined here, Willow's reliance on magic appeared to originate from her need for power and control, turning to Wicca in order to prove her own worth or importance. There was also that element of the girl being plain lazy. Why bother performing menial tasks like buying party supplies when you can just magick shit in? Elements of both explanations appear here and there throughout Wrecked, and there's a wonderful coda where Willow seems to reveal that the only reason she's become so wrapped up in her abilities is because of her own fear of returning to her pre-magic self, where she was, in her own words, 'some girl'. Unfortunately, most of this is drowned out by the hideous 'magic equals drugs' metaphor, one of the laziest and most unintentionally hilarious storylines Buffy ever attempted.

Buffy: Smashed (6.9)

And this is where the season begins to fly off the rails. Smashed is all about individuals who tow the company line, only to find potential for badness to be more appealing than ever because of how moral and 'proper' they are. It's a theme described in vivid detail by Xander and Anya during a Magic Box conversation, and produces the bones of the hour. It's also pretty good in theory, but is executed in a way that's borderline ridiculous and sometimes plain ugly.

Buffy: Tabula Rasa (6.8)

It makes sense that hot on the heels of so many revelations comes an episode that tries to stall total fallout of said revelations. It makes even more sense that Willow is the source of the stalling. Tabula Rasa is all over the place in terms of structure, with a weak opening, an even weaker start to the main crux of the episode, a fun third act, and a strong montage finale. It's pretty schizophrenic, which nicely sets up the messy quality of the rest of season six. But the dark places Tabula Rasa takes some of our characters is worthy of acclaim.

Buffy: Once More, with Feeling (6.7)

One of the worst things I've ever seen was last year's Grey's Anatomy musical episode, in which weepy lesbian spirits sang Snow Patrol while watching themselves being operated on. It was just one of the most ludicrous, embarrassing and illogical things I've had the displeasure of watching; a perfect example of over-ambitious TV writers who think it'd be fun for characters to randomly burst into song. You see a similar mode of thinking on Glee, where kids randomly start performing some awful Katy Perry track that has nothing to do with the character's current predicaments. I'm obviously bringing all this up because Once More, with Feeling could have so easily been a collection of random scenes where characters began to sing Top 40 hits. Xander could have sung Mr. Cellophane, Anya maybe Material Girl. Buffy, with her recent death woes, could introduce a self-referential angle to an old Lesley Gore tune. It could have been so very silly.

Buffy: All the Way (6.6)

If any episode managed to single-handedly destroy a TV character for me, it's All the Way. I've never been a huge Dawn fan, but it's crazily frustrating to see five episodes worth of strong characterization this season violently plummet down the toilet with just a couple of actions here. We all initiate a collective eye-roll over her hideous kleptomania arc, but I always note one random part here as the scene that killed her for me. It's that ugly moment where Dawn continues to flirt and make out with a guy who just robbed an old man in his home, later happily taking some of the money herself. I'm probably being annoying, but that's just one of the worst, lowest things somebody can do, and entirely destroyed Dawn Summers for me.

Buffy: Life Serial (6.5)

So the major themes of Buffy season six continue. Life Serial is all about Buffy trying to discover her role in the world she's found herself suddenly occupying again, the script neatly divided into four separate vignettes in which Buffy tests out some new kinds of vocation. She experiments with college, then hard labor, then retail, and finally boozing. By the end she's chosen to not pursue any of them and turns to Giles for help, assuming he'll be around whenever she runs into a bind. It's sad seeing her rely on other people, but it folds in neatly with what this season appears to be doing with the characters.

Buffy: Flooded (6.4)

Flooded marks the show once again stumbling into soap opera territory with a barrage of various plot strands flying at us all at once. Being season six, some of these stories are considerably affecting, and others are riddled with plotholes and annoyances. Four episodes in, and it's becoming clear that the character work right now is far more interesting than the routine Sunnydale action stories. Have the writers just grown tired of demons and antagonists? Or have ideas simply dried up? Where Flooded works is in the dramatic character moments, which are totally anchoring the show right now.

Buffy: After Life (6.3)

For a lot of this episode, the Scoobies speculate on whether Buffy has come back 'wrong', that awful things occurred during her summer vacation in deathville and that she's somehow damaged as a result. But what After Life eventually proves is that it isn't Buffy that feels 'off' this season, but everybody else. It's no surprise that Buffy sparks up an immediate connection with Spike, since he's the only one who isn't bombarding her with questions and trying to figure out why she's acting differently. There's obviously a lot of overt symbolism (the knuckle wounds, both having dug themselves out of graves), but the deepest connection is found in the natural chemistry between the two of them. Their conversations are covered in long pauses and quiet trepidation -- an unusual friendship that feels weirdly right.