Another Pink World

About

« my inner house needs renovation | Main | want to run movieminder? »

December 31, 2003

my favorite big bad

• the master
• angel
• the mayor
• adam
• glory
• willow
• the first/caleb

sarah was saying that the mayor is hers. we had a buffy marathon at shayne's house the other day, and we watched an episode with some good mayor stuff in it.

i'm inclined to agree with her, though angel is really great as a bad guy. he just enjoys it so much. and i liked the master, too, he just doesn't get enough of the story that season.

adam and the first/caleb were definitely disasters.

much of the way the willow story was handled was pretty bad-- the heavy handed addiction metaphor, egads. but jeez, she just looked so good with the black hair and the veins ("i'm simply covered in these viens...").

yeah, i'd have to say either the mayor or angel. or the master.

Posted by lisa at December 31, 2003 06:44 PM | TrackBack

Comments

Making the Master supreme fascist vampire in "The Wish" was inspired. Especially since his death machine (the human soda fount) was so deliciously corny. If that Master had been the Master of Season 1, he'd win in my book hands down.

I vote for Angel (provided you mute "Passion" during the voiceovers). The Mayor's cutesy hygene hangups struck me as really contrived. (I cringe every time I hear him say, "And boys, watch the swearing." in "Graduation Day Pt. 2").

Even though nobody in the cast can get Evil Angel to shut up for a single onscreen second, his character was so well-rounded that it didn't matter. His bragadaccio did as much to map out his character flaws as it did to establish his evilness, and it didn't seem "quirky." Favorite Evil Angel moment: the confrontation with Buffy's Mom in the front yard.* Damn, he seemed just nuts.

*Actually my favorite Evil Angel moment actually occurs when Good Angel is pretending to be Evil Angel... Specifically when he and Faith are walking down the street and run into Xander. Good/Evil Angel punches him in the face and says, "That guy just bugs me." Funny, because it's true!

Posted by: rick! on December 31, 2003 08:22 PM

i thought the hygene stuff was good for a laugh, and it didn't bother me otherwise. the show has much more egregious writing problems if you really want to start picking at it. i loved the mayor because he was a great boss and a great dad, very human and just what faith needed. he was silly, and he could get her to laugh and be silly, too, when the only other delight she took was in being a stereotypical "bad girl". (gotta love the way wood calls her on that at the end of the series.)

one of the great things about the angel character overall is that it's hard to tell where the line is between "good" angel and "evil" angel, and he can become "dark" even when he still has his soul.

i was thinking today how much more successful the "adam" season would have been if forrest had been the big bad instead of this half-machine guy who didn't have anything resembling a personality. forrest kind of hates buffy right from the start, and he so badly wants to be riley's sidekick. they could have played up a little military homoerotic thing with the two of them.

Posted by: lisa on January 1, 2004 12:13 AM

I think we can all agree that the big bads in the first three seasons were great, and things went downhill after that. Except Glory. Her shrill "I'm a high maintenance girl and an evil god!" whining annoys me the way the Mayor's prissiness annoys Rick, but I still found her a lot of fun. She was the last big bad who was truly menacing, I think. Willow just wasn't scary in the same way because, well, it's Willow. (I'm not even going to get into the abysmal writing of that story arc. Mainly because season 7 made it seem not that bad in retrospect.) She did look great in the black hair and veins though.

Posted by: Sarah on January 1, 2004 01:34 PM

Post a comment