Buffy the Vampire Slayer - The Complete Fifth Season

Rating:
Summary: yeah
Review: Worst season yet.

I don't mind dawn. I'm not a Dawn hater. I hated Glory.

A villian so card-boarded that Adam looked like a real winner.

The only reason I could stand this season was the drama in The Body. That episode saved this season.

Rating:
Summary: The beginning of the end
Review: I have to join the legions of BTVS fans who say it jumped the shark this season. And it's mostly due to Dawn. Anytime a new character is suddenly introduced to a show, especially when that character is a bratty annoying little kid, you know the show's best days are gone.
Another weakness is the season's big bad, Glory. The idea of the character being a god to up the stakes was good. But,the character's personality was badly conceived and Clare Kramer is the worst actress to ever appear on the show. She couldn't act like she was on fire if she was burning. Her annoyance level is off the scale. And we had to endure a whole season of her.
Riley (Marc Blucas) is the most underrated, underappeciated character in the show's history. After a promising start to the character and to his relationship with Buffy in season four, things quickly get derailed here and he is gone in episode ten.
He is sorely missed.
Buff's death lacked emotional impact for the fact that of course the main character won't stay dead, despite a summerlong wait, she was back to the living at the end of the very next episode. For a main character's death to be effective, there has to be the threat that the character will stay dead, that threat was never there. (Well, it was for the few people that were in the dark about the show going to UPN who thought Buffy was gone for good, but they soon found out otherwise. When this episode aired the deal was sealed the show would be on UPN in the fall and thus Buffy would not stay dead.) They should have killed Dawn instead and of course left her dead. The death of her sister would have devastated Buffy and made for some good storytelling next season. The people who liked Dawn would be moved by the sense of loss and the many Dawn haters would be happy to see her gone. Everybody wins.
Ther are some good moments this season, and with the exception of Michelle Tractenberg (Dawn) and Clare Kramer (Glory), everyone's acting was excellent. I especially enjoyed the introduction of the Buffybot.
This season was still way better than a lot on TV, but the high standards the show had set effectively ended with the season four finale.

Rating:
Summary: The Top, The Best Season for sure!!
Review: How can some people say that Buffy "jumped the shark" in season five, just because of the introduction of her sister Dawn? I just can't believe it.

Season Five is the best Buffy season. Ok, Season Three runs a close second, but it's in season five that things get extremely dangerous, extremely dangerous, extremelycreative. How many times have you seen a new character (Dawn) introduced this way, and to play such an important role?

Also, this is the most "Sarah-oriented" season of them all up till that point. She completely rules the screen time on almost every episode, with amazing and emotional peformances,leaving not too much room to Xander and Willow and the others, but this serves the history and every actor is in total top notch form here. James Marsters is supreme in the new twist of his character, who falls in love with Buffy.

The Season is a rollercoaster to a dramatic, breathtaking ending in "The Gift". The history arc was very well planned, and the first episodes barely mention the existence of Glory.

Also, there's one great improvement: stunt action. Whereas in the first seasons the producers did not care too much about "hiding" the face of the stunt people (mainly of the Buff's stunt woman), in Season five it's clear that someone at top level said: "We must make it better." Buffy's stunt is more similar with Sarah than the previous stunt, and there's pratically not a single shot where you can see the stunt's face turned towards the camera (in the previous seasons, this happened everytime, what was a little bit annoying).

Riley had nowhere to go, and the producers found a decent way to make him leave the show.

Rating:
Summary: Fun season but a shame it wasn't widescreen
Review: My only complaint is I didn't get it in widescreen. Otherwise it was a fun series of disks.

Rating:
Summary: You can't hit solid gold every time.
Review: After season 4 came out on DVD, I found myself still a devoted Buffy fan but unsure about the fifth season. I wound up buying it on the advice of a friend I'd ensnared in the Buffyverse, and can't say it was too much of a letdown; I enjoyed it, but I felt something was ultimately lacking in the series.

Fans of Clare Kramer's Glory (or, as it were, Glorificus) tend to cast her as one of the best villains of the series. I heartily disagree; she may be on a par with the Master, but she's not the Mayor and she is certainly no Angelus. Season 5 was extremely heavy on the arc elements, and Glory was too powerful as an individual and lacked good henchmen to act as "little bads" to contrast with herself as the "big bad." That meant that Glory's threat was overplayed and overdone by the culmination of the season; a mistake of involving her in the arc too, too early. The arc was not aided by the involvement of the Knights of Byzantium, who were frankly like the Buffyverse's equivalent of "they need something to fight - I know! Ninjas!". But, season 4 had taught us that Buffy could persevere despite less than perfect villains, and honestly after the Initiative one could almost be forgiven for thinking Glory outranks Angelus.

The big controversy is over whether, at the end of the overrated "Buffy vs. Dracula," the appearance of Dawn meant the sound of Buffy jumping the shark. I found Michelle Trachtenberg to be a breath of fresh air on first view, and thought her performance was actually strong in season 5. (Season 6 is a different question.) It was a change that worked for the plot, letting the show do a "damsel in distress" routine to a certain extent.

The rest of the actors pretty much stayed the course. Sarah Michelle Gellar worked except for the late-season catatonia that Buffy was thrust into; she was particularly wonderful in "The Body" and "The Gift." The spotlight isn't really on Nicholas Brendon or Alyson Hannigan as Xander and Willow (respectively), but both troop through like old pros; so does Anthony Stewart Head as Giles. Amber Benson stays sweet and wonderful as Tara, though the main Tara-centric episode, "Family," is pretty rank on the whole. Marc Blucas (Riley) still can't make it believeable with Sarah Michelle Gellar, and his departure from the series is a welcome event. It's James Marsters as Spike who goes through some real growth here; he is wonderfully fleshed out, and we see some deep (and some dark, and some pretty disgusting) layers added to his already intriguing portrayal of a vampire.

As with most Buffy seasons after season 2, it's the standalone episodes of season 5 that have the most impact. "The Body" is artistically brilliant, wonderfully filmed, and entirely emotionally devastating. It is so brutally physical, so real, that it's hard to take. Joss Whedon's directing has never been finer or tighter; he uses his camera to provoke realistic images that remind me of the brutal realism of Sven Nyqvist's camera work in Ingmar Bergman's film trilogy. Yet my favorite episode (because "The Body" is something one admires, not likes) is unquestionably "Fool for Love." Playing on the character arc of Buffy, it singly crafts much of the Spike / Buffy relationship, and at the same time masterfully reveals Buffy's fixation with death and darkness. As a counterpart to Angel's wonderful "Darla," "Fool for Love" is one of my personal favorite Buffy episodes.

But, as usual, not all the standalones are brilliant. "I Was Made to Love You" is somewhat weak in introducing the season 6 villain Warren; and a lot of the episodes just don't work that well. The best comedy of them is probably the offbeat "The Replacement," bringing Xander into focus for what feels like it was really the last time in the show, if we don't count the execrable "Hell's Bells" in season 6. But the real weak point in season 5 is "Into the Woods," which ranks among the worst episodes in Buffy history. It takes Riley out of the show, which is welcome in and of itself, but the speech that Marti Noxon has Xander deliver to Buffy about Riley's good qualities at the end is practically Noxon beating the fans up for not liking her cardboard creation. Just as Riley had been taken to a dark and interesting place, Noxon tries to sanctify him when he goes; it is a cruel move, and the episode deserves the vilification it receives.

The up-and-down quality of the standalones is contrasted well with the main arc, which itself is a bumpy ride. It ends fairly well, and there's some good drama and action, but the Knights of Byzantium really are just Random Ninjas thrown in to spice things up, and Glory really doesn't hold it together all that well. It's still good television, and it's still worth watching, but it's almost unfair to compare this to the caliber of material we were used to with seasons 2 and 3. It all finally works, and works well, in the cataclysmic and ultimately pyrrhic "The Gift."

Season 5 of Buffy still works for the Buffy fan, and should be seen if only for "Fool for Love" and "The Body," both of which are truly great episodes. And the Glory arc isn't bad, it just isn't the Mayor arc or the Angelus arc. "Into the Woods" aside, even the low points of this season are at least somewhat enjoyable. It deserves watching, but it's not really a priority for the viewer who wants just the essentials.