Cheap Buffy the Vampire Slayer - The Complete Fifth Season (DVD) (Sarah Michelle Gellar) Price

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Customer Reviews of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - The Complete Fifth Season

Glory is by far (in my opinion) the best big bad ever! She's fantastically powerful, but at the same time really ditzy. She fits perfectly into the Buffy-verse: scary & funny, but believable all at the same time. This season also cements in Tara and Spike as scoobies. And it introduces Warren for the first time (who will figure largely into the plot of Season 6).

The highlights of the Season: Fool for Love (Spike's past), The Body (realistic look at death), Tough Love (first glimpse at Dark Willow), and The Gift (my favorite season finale & the death of another main character).

And as with all good things, there are some low points. Listening to Fear (alien is summoned to kill crazy people), and Family (Tara's creepy family arrive) aren't the best, but they're still better than most of what's on TV. Bad Buffy is a lot like bad pizza: even when it's bad, it's still pretty good! OK--corny, I know, but it makes a point! Also, I'm a huge Riley (Marc Blucas) fan, and was sad to see him go this season (he goes on to make a guest appearance in Season 6).

In conclusion, buy Buffy Season 5 on DVD!!! Buy several--buy them as holiday presents!! People will be glad you did!

Far-fetched, but worth it
When Buffy's younger sister, Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg), showed up early in this season, it sent fans crying out that its creator, Joss Whedon, was breaking the artistic consistency of the show.

Being Joss Whedon, however, he of course had an explanation for this sudden appearance of the character.

It was only semi-plausible.

Season 5 had a slightly over-the-top feel to it in general, starting out with the excellently written "Buffy VS Dracula" and quickly introducing a younger sister to the show's lead, a character viewers had never heard of before (except for a bit of foreshadowing in a couple of notable dream sequences in previous seasons).

The writers kept introducing new elements to the plotline, and ended up with a bunch of complex and occasionally clunky plot devices all merging together into a fairly cohesive whole.

Some despised the lead villain, "Glory", or "Glorificus" (Clare Kramer), a god from a demon dimension hell-bent on getting back to her home and destroying everything in her path. But others enjoyed her quirky, Cordelia-like ditziness and glamourous-to-gaudy fashion sense. In the end, she was an interesting character, a very torn personality, but Kramer's portrayal was, on occasion, lacking.

Though it had flaws, this season contains two of the most memorable episodes in the history of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: "The Body" and "The Gift".

The former is perhaps the most honest look at grief over the loss of a loved one ever portrayed on television, and the total lack of a musical score only serves to punctuate the overwhelming reality of the themes of the episode. It is also one of the best and most honestly acted episodes ever produced for the show, and many fans rate it very highly on their list of favorites.

The latter was written with the intent of serving as a series finale, if the show was cancelled and not picked up by another network (UPN eventually grabbed two more seasons of it). Its climax brought tears to the eyes of the several million viewers watching across the nation. It remains consistently considered one of best episodes of the series.

Despite its over-the-top nature and somewhat muddled plotline, as well as other niggling concerns, Season 5 remains one of the best of Buffy, and thus one of the best of television. It's easily worth any fan's money. Just don't go in expecting a Season 2-3 level of quality.

deceptions
The fifth season of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER feels casual, exuding, particularly in its first few episodes, an almost thrown-together quality. Coming off of season four, which contains some of the show's best episodes but probably has its weakest "arc" up to that point, Season Five seems to be following a similar line. It is funny, well-staged, and full of fascinating new characters and developments, but it is difficult, at first, to get a bead on where the season is going.

A friend of mine says most dramatic shows have five or six good years in them, before decline sets in or they are cancelled, and I think she's right. NYPD BLUE worked for six years before it collapsed under the weight of too many teen-idol replacements for Smits and Caruso; THE WEST WING's fifth season was a travesty without Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme around to guide things; and even a sitcom like FRIENDS, whose character arcs resemble those of dramatic programs, had a hard time keeping things interesting after year five. There's no set formula, of course, but it's fair to say that a program's cast and crew might get a little bored after awhile, might have trouble finding new shadings for their characters or new spins on their environments, and might begin to take it easy and coast. Seen in this light, the initial slacker quality of BUFFY year five becomes both more comprehensible and also a little ominous-- when a program's first episode is given the distinctly Marvel Comics-esque title "Buffy v. Dracula," its not hard to imagine the blood in the water and the sharks circling.

Such fears were, for many fans, confirmed by the appearance of Dawn, Buffy's heretofore unseen, uncommented-upon little sister. Some fans and critics immediately dubbed her "Oliver," a reference to the mysterious "cousin" that appeared in later seasons of THE BRADY BUNCH, and whose name has become shorthand for a show's desperate attempts to add characters and keep things alive near the end. Who was this strange, annoying little girl? Why had we never seen her? And why was every character on the show already acting as if we had?

As if the "new relative" gambit wasn't enough, BUFFY' s writers also tossed in the Mysterious Illness ploy for Buffy's mom, and the Hot New Relationship plot for Buffy and Spike, in what initially seems like a wan attempt to recreate the old magic of Buffy and Angel. By the time, in episode six, Tara's family arrives to inform the Scooby Gang (and viewers) that this quiet girl has a Dark Secret, fans can be forgiven for thinking that the WB had secretly switched our usual BUFFY blend with episodes of GUIDING LIGHT.

Silly us-- with ep seven, "Fool For Love," everything clicks into place, plot points are clarified, and suddenly it all begins to make sense, and to take on a tremendous emotional power. The remaining fifteen episodes are some of the show's best, and looking at the season as a whole four years after its initial airing, it's remarkable how cohesive it really is. One of the major themes of the year is deception, and by offering their audience a seemingly loose and occasionally incomprehensible start to the year, creator/auteur Joss Whedon and his staff were able to place viewers in roughly the same emotional position as their characters.

By the time Season Five rolled around, Mutant Enemy knew it had a hit on its hands, and an intensely loyal fan base. They could now take their show (and its viewers) to different places, and really get under the skins of their characters. They had been doing this all along, of course, but Seasons Five and Six of BUFFY are full of a desire and yearning that is dark, fascinating, and sometimes unsettling. Far from coasting to syndication, the show would take more chances than ever.

It's notable that both Seasons Two and Five come, on DVD, in red/reddish boxes-- a color of passion, heartache, blood, and love. Season Five finds the show's characters undergoing a level of trauma not seen since the second half of Season Two, and the final resolution of that trauma is, like the end of season two, both gut-wrenching and utterly logical. I won't give more detail than that, except to note, again, how well-paced this year is, interspersing more dramatic eps with funny ones, allowing moments for the whole ensemble to shine, and keeping the flow so loose and unpredictable that, when twists and suprises come, they really are twists and surprises.

This was also a year of behind-the-scenes goodbyes: it was the last season shot by Buffy's great secret weapon, cinematographer Michael Gershman, whose beautiful balance of dark and light (in all senses) had held the show together since its first episode; it was the last year to prominently feature the lush scores of composer Christophe Beck, whose strings had always sonically captured the beautiful adolescent passions of the characters; it was the last full season for Anthony Stewart Head (Giles), whose character would continue to appear, but only in recurring "guest star" status; and it was the last year the show would appear on the WB, since contract negotiatons and public spatting led to the show's vamoosing to the UPN network the following year (this also meant it was the last time-- for awhile-- that there would be character crossovers between BUFFY and ANGEL, since the latter continued to air on the WB, which imposed a "ban" on such occurences after BUFFY left home).

In so many ways, then, Season Five marks a turning point for BUFFY, a year in which, even for a show which had always taken chances, questions of change and growth seemed central, both within the narrative and on a stylistic level. I wouldn't start watching BUFFY with Season Five, but it's a crucial year for a crucial show, and well worth one's time.