Prophecy Girl

My parents have FIOS.  Which means they have fast internet. Which means I can actually watch hulu.com.

It is a wonderful thing, except for the part where I have to travel to Texas.

They also have an elliptical machine with a board fastened to it so you can watch your laptop screen while you pedal or step or whatever, and sweat.

All this is to say, I watched Prophecy Girl tonight.  Again for first time.

Background here: first off, nothing I’m about to say is meant to imply that Whedon is anything close to a Christian.  He’s not.  The ending of Angel was as much a Norse apocalypse as one could ask for.  And according to this spoiler summary, the new comic book season 8 shows Whedon just can’t let go of Lesbian soft p0rn cliches.  But Whedon knows a good story, and Gospel’s story of sacrificial death and resurrection is too good to pass up.  Season 5 was marred by only one thing, that it didn’t end the show.  The end of season 6, however, also did the them almost as well, with the carpenter saving the world by being willing to die at the hands of the one he loved.

But I came into Buffy through reruns and never saw it in order.  When I finally saw season 1, I was amazed at how poorly it was done in so many ways.  Prophecy Girl itself features a three-headed muppet worm that screams “low budget” in a tri-vocal wail.  So I saw Prophecy Girl and thought it stood out, but I didn’t really pay much attention to it.

I must have been blind.

[spoiler warning]

The show features the rise of The Master, an ancient vampire with a demonic (and B movie) face who has been trapped underground by a mystical force (though he has been able to cause plenty of trouble and mayhem in the town of Sunnydale above him).

Buffy learns that she is prophesied to meet the Master and die.  At first she attempts to reject her role, but then when she realizes her friends are in danger, she goes to meet him hoping “maybe I can take him with me.”

But this is the punchline: the Master is only powerful enough to break free and go up to the surface and open the hellmouth to start a demonic invasion of the earth after he has fed on a sip of Buffy’s blood.  There is hardly a real fight.  When Buffy reaches his lair he is a practically invincible monster who can disappear, speak from all directions, and simply pull Buffy toward him by his will.  Before he bites her he mocks her that she did not understand the prophecy.  That she was the only one that could enable him to escape his underground prison.

He bites her and feeds real briefly because that is all it takes.  He is able to burst out of his prison and ascend to the surface.  He drops unconscious Buffy into a pool of water face down.  She obviously drowns.

When the master ascends he goes to a rooftop overlooking Sunnydale and gloats about how it is a new world, “my world” now.

But it is a new world, just not his.  Buffy gets revived by CPR and mouth to mouth resuscitation by her friends who were tracking her to help her.  And it is no ordinary revival.  She feels stronger rather than weak from loss of blood or anything else.  And she instinctively knows where the Master is.

She tracks him down and destroys him rather easily.

So the Chosen One (one of Buffy’s titles as the Slayer) actually increases the power of evil in order to bring it to a place where it could be destroyed.  It is just too perfect.

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