A very different season

Warning: The following review of the Season 6 DVD set for Buffy the Vampire Slayer contains some vague spoilers for this season, and at least one specific spoiler for an earlier season. If you want to experience it completely unspoiled, don't read on.

Season 6 was a new beginning for the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as it transferred from the WB network to UPN. Season 5 ended with the show's 100th and last episode on the WB network, and for a while it looked like the series might come to an end. Fortunately UPN was willing to pay the higher fee per episode demanded by show's producer 20th Century Fox, and creator and executive producer Joss Whedon was able to persuade all of the cast and the fine writing team and production crew to stay on.

A minor problem was that Season 5 ended with Buffy's death. Of course it's no great challenge in the world of the supernatural to bring someone back from the dead. The question was rather how would Buffy come back, and what would she do next? The story of her first 5 years had built to a dramatic conclusion and reached its natural end with her death.

As it turned out, this was a very bleak season in the life of Buffy and her friends. It started and ended with Buffy in a grave. She spent the whole season getting kicked by life while she was down. Her friends Xander and Willow went through their own personal tragedies, and couldn't offer much help. Giles, her mentor through the first five seasons, abandoned her early on and was gone for most of it. Both Buffy and Willow went a little insane at different points in the season and tried to kill all their friends.

This was also the season where the writers abandoned the frequent use of metaphor that characterized previous seasons - "Adieu, monsieur Metaphor!" as Joss Whedon put it. Instead they went with the theme that real life is the true horror story. Having to abandon your dreams and take a crappy job to support your ungrateful family. Overwhelmed by bills you can't pay. Suffering through destructive relationships. Being betrayed by friends and lovers. Petty animosity from people you don't even know. Trying to survive in a world that doesn't care. It all got a little depressing. After a while even the most resilient fans just wanted to cry "stop, enough!". Joss Whedon and Marti Noxon, the executive producers and head writers, have said that they intended all the individual stories to take a dark turn, but taken together it all came out a bit more depressing than they originally intended.

But don't let that put you off! There's some very fine storytelling here, and paradoxically this season had some of the funniest comic moments of the series. Fans tend to love it or hate it as a season, but personally I loved it just as much as the other seasons. Regardless, I think it remains a must-see for Buffy fans.

In terms of the episodes, the season is dominated by episode 7, Once More With Feeling, the musical. Regardless of how you feel about the season, most fans agree that OMWF is the single greatest episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and maybe one of the finest television episodes ever. It made a recent list of the top 20 musicals of stage and screen by popular vote. It was certainly the most work for creator Joss Whedon and the entire cast and crew. It took Joss a year to write it, and the cast were rehearsing and taking lessons for months to learn their parts. Season 6 is worth it for this episode alone, and on DVD it comes with the bonus of an excellent commentary by Joss Whedon and a fascinating behind-the-scenes look produced by David Fury. Hard to imagine that someone who had never written music before could write an entire musical with songs and lyrics, and that the regular cast of actors not hired for their singing or dancing ability could pull it off. Even harder to imagine that it wouldn't suck - but on the contrary, it was universally hailed as a triumph by reviewers.

But it certainly wasn't the only great episode of the season. Other personal favorites are Tabula Rasa (episode 8), which ranged from hilarious comedy to terrible sadness, and the chilling Normal Again (episode 17) which left fans upset for weeks.

In fact many episodes of this season were controversial, including Doublemeat Palace, which disgusted a lot of people (and Joss Whedon said that it was the only thing they ever did that drove advertisers away); Smashed, with its over-the-top rough sex scene at the end; Wrecked, in which magic was heavily used as a metaphor for drugs (so much for dropping metaphor!); and Seeing Red with its rape scene to remind everyone that Vampires Are Evil. And to top it all off, the producers played a cruel trick on the fans by finally adding popular Amber Benson (Tara) to the opening credits of the show in episode 19 after she'd been a full-time cast member for almost 3 years, only to ... well, let's just say that after that everyone was paranoid that their favorite new cast member would suddenly appear in the opening credits.

A lot of people felt that Buffy's sexual relationship with Spike this season was demeaning to both of them (although as Spike put it, "not really complaining here!"). Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy) herself later said that she didn't like some of the sex scenes, and felt that it strayed from her character. The writers didn't agree, and said that it was integral to where they wanted the character to go. James Marsters (Spike) merely said that he didn't like having to appear nearly naked in sex scenes where SMG was fully clothed. In any case, some scenes might verge on an R rating rather than PG (for content rather than nudity), and the producers have said they were amazed that some of it got by the network censors at the time.

As for the DVD set itself, there are 6 discs in fold-out holder with some nice cover art. Content includes:

- 22 episodes, averaging 42:39 in length
- 6 commentaries, on Bargaining Parts 1 & 2, Once More With Feeling, Smashed, Hell's Bells, Normal Again, and Grave
- just over 3 hours of video extras, including the aforementioned OMWF behind-the-scenes, the A&E Biography special on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and a fun hour-long panel discussion at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences with writers, cast and crew members from the show.
(for complete content details see http://tinyurl.com/3hy5b)

This season DVD set had both the shortest episode to date, Two To Go at 40:58, and the longest, OMWF at 50:04, which was actually too long for the broadcast time slot. UPN allowed it to run long the first time it was shown, and Joss Whedon subsequently cut it by a further 6 minutes for syndication. The version on the DVD is the original long version. OMWF was also the only episode of the series originally composed for wide screen. The DVD version is wide-screen, although not anamorphic in Region 1 (i.e. it's encoded as 4:3 NTSC frame with black bars above and below the picture).

All video is NTSC, 4:3 aspect ratio in Region 1 (except for OMWF). Audio is Dolby Surround format. Episode sound tracks in Region 1 are provided in English, French, and Spanish, with English and Spanish subtitles. There are some significant region differences. The episodes were filmed in wide-screen format, and the Region 2 DVD set shows them in wide-screen format. Joss Whedon insists that the episodes were composed for a 4:3 broadcast aspect ratio, and should be seen that way, and his view prevails in Region 1. The Region 2 DVD set also includes the "Previously on..." introductory segments before each episode, while the Region 1 DVD set does not; apparently Fox Video believes that Americans don't like "Previously on..." segments.

All the featurettes are quite good, but only some of the commentaries. I think Marti Noxon and David Fury should be embarrassed about the poor commentary on Bargaining - it's unusual for the writers of an episode to do such a bad job.

There's an update of Willow's Demon Database as a DVD-ROM feature on disc 6 (an update of the earlier version on the S5 DVD set), and a single jpeg image of the Call Sheet for Normal Again on disc 5.

There's one "Easter Egg" on this DVD set. On disc 2, under the Language Selection menu for OMWF, move the cursor to the left of the visible menu list to display a large letter "B" in Buffy font. Click on it to view the Easter Egg.

Video quality on the DVDs is generally good for this season, although a few scenes always manage to fall short. Note Joss Whedon's comments about the "look" of OMWF in the Commentary for that episode.