[champ]

Briar King, on 05 May 2016 - 08:22 PM, said:

Y'all can eat my ass seriously...

What am I re watching now?

Breaking Bad?

[Werthead]

I just got into Season 2 of LOST and I forgot how mythology-dense the show gets at that point. They explain the hatch, the polar bear and the electromagnetic weirdness the survivors encountered in Season 1, but of course that then opens fresh questions about the Incident, the DHARMA Initiative and so on.

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it seemed like it was ANGEL rather than BUFFY. If that makes sense.

Well, ANGEL was better than BUFFY (although that may not be fair as it learned from all its parent show's mistakes and avoided them, like DS9 and TNG), so I'm not sure what you're going for there. I do agree that FIREFLY is a little overrated, but it is impressive in that it had 14 episodes of very high quality without really missing a beat. The worst episode is the "River is a witch!" one and even that has several classic moments and lines (such as the "big damn heroes" one).

What I do find odd is when people have watched/heard of FIREFLY but never seen BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. They aired within a few months of each other, but BSG got higher viewing figures, lasted a hell of a lot longer (80 episodes, a mini-series, three TV movies and a 20-episode spin-off prequel), had far more fantastic episodes (I mean, it had 37 episodes plus the mini series which were straight-through excellent, with the weakest episode in that bloc - Black Market - not really being that awful), dealt with weightier themes, had comparably awesome characters, far superior worldbuilding (FIREFLY's solar system makes absolutely zero sense) and better fx.

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A fight might be close, but Jack could definitely torture information out of Sayid, while Sayid would have a personal crisis before he got Jack to break. Heck, he couldn't even break Sawyer!

He did break Sawyer. Sawyer gave in after like 5 seconds of torture, it was pretty weak going on his part.

[QuickTidal]

Werthead, on 05 May 2016 - 11:50 PM, said:

Well, ANGEL was better than BUFFY

^^This opinon is the minority, I assure you. BUFFY is a thousand times better than ANGEL. You know who you see at comic con? BUFFY fans....you rarely see ANGEL fans.

[worry]

I liked em both a whole lot. I think Angel's first season takes a while to get its footing (it starts a little boring, tbh, but the second half is good), and 2-5 are on par with Buffy's best. But also I liked the Dawn seasons of Buffy fine too, even if they're less consistent. Also, Angel is one of the most singular shows I think I've ever seen. There's really nothing else like it, even among other supernatural-heavy shows.

[QuickTidal]

LOST is WELL worth the re-watch BK. You notice so many extra things. I've seen all 6 season 3 times now.

[Werthead]

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Ep 2 Locke is talking to Walt about a game holding up the stones...light and dark. Ha

That was quite well done. And to be fair to them, they did plan from Episode 1 that there would be a struggle based on duality (light/dark, science/faith, pragmatism/obssession) that would eventually coalesce into two individuals. I don't think they planned for the smoke monster to be one of those individuals at that time though.

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^^This opinon is the minority, I assure you. BUFFY is a thousand times better than ANGEL. You know who you see at comic con? BUFFY fans....you rarely see ANGEL fans.

That's mainly because they're the same people and BUFFY is a bit easier to cosplay...although I have seen quite a few Angels around and a couple of ambitious Lornes

BUFFY came first and most people saw it first, so it has the whole nostalgia thing going on. But it also has several problems: a lot of Seasons 1 and 6 are bad and large chunks of Seasons 4, 5 and 7 are very patchy indeed. The show rests an enormous amount of its reputation on just two seasons (2 and 3). Those seasons are brilliant, to be sure, and the show has excellent episodes peppered throughout, not to mention a highly likable cast. And even the worst episodes usually have a few good lines or some memorable moments. But even Joss Whedon has admitted they made a massive mistake doing the Angelus storyline in Season 2, as they used up their best idea too early. The season-by-season structure was also a little bit too artificial and predictable after Season 3: a big bad shows up, but halfway through the season they get replaced by an even bigger bad! And again, and again. Also, the ending was never much more than okay, and Joss Whedon had a hideous problem with keeping characters around because he liked the actors, long after the character had ceased to do anything particularly interesting (Oz, Spike and Tara most notably, but Anya was the most egregious example).

ANGEL was vastly more consistent in quality, was (deliberately) more mature and its character arcs were just a touch better delineated. The show was better at getting rid of characters once their purpose was served (Lorne probably is the only one they kept hanging around when he had nothing to do, but then he did get a great moment in the finale) and it was much more morally murkier and interesting than BUFFY (the Fred/Illyria stuff was amazing). The consistent series-long threat of Wolfram & Hart gave the show a continuity and tension that BUFFY lacked, and Angel and Cordelia were certainly much-better explored on ANGEL than they ever were on the parent show. Arguably BUFFY might have just the edge on the best-ever episodes (Hush and The Body, most notably) but then ANGEL never had an episode anywhere near as bad as Beer Bad or at least half of Season 6. And there is absolutely zero contest on the ending: ANGEL might have the best ending of any supernatural show ever. The badass attitude of that finale is something to behold.

It's the DS9/TNG thing again: DS9 is more dramatically intense, far more serialised, has much better characters and is far more consistent in quality, but it's hard to argue against TNG coming first and maybe having a couple of better episodes than the average of both series.

This post has been edited by Werthead: 06 May 2016 - 10:38 AM

[QuickTidal]

General consensus says your opinion is still in the minority (my old roommate would fight you for that opinion; BUFFY was her soul-show). That's okay you know? Own that. Angel was entertaining and I could see some people liking it better...but BUFFY is generally the better show to most overall.

And Re: the finale...I agree that was a great finale on ANGEL...I loved it. But the BUFFY finale had emotional weight, and that wins out when watching TV every time. It's the difference between getting someone to say "That was cool" and "That affected me emotionally". BUFFY earned that, and ANGEL didn't.

[Abyss]

QuickTidal, on 05 May 2016 - 03:21 PM, said:

I liked FIREFLY, but I never got why it was SO huge. It's a solid show, and it really was only gaining momentum as it ended...but really, it wasn't the second coming so many people seem to indicate it was. ...

FIREFLY was never SO huge. It just had a very vocal fanbase, many of whom were BUFFY fans carrying the Joss-love forward regardless of whatever he was doing. These are the same people who loved DOLLHOUSE, but i digress...

In retro, FIREFLY was huge enough to have survived if Fox hadn't jumped the gun so utterly and killed it, but even so, massive ratings eyeballs dollars success not so much.

Nevyn, on 05 May 2016 - 03:41 PM, said:

champ, on 05 May 2016 - 03:38 PM, said:

Nevyn, on 05 May 2016 - 03:23 PM, said:

QuickTidal, on 05 May 2016 - 03:21 PM, said:

I liked FIREFLY, but I never got why it was SO huge. It's a solid show, and it really was only gaining momentum as it ended...but really, it wasn't the second coming so many people seem to indicate it was. If we can throw up Whedon comparisons...it seemed like it was ANGEL rather than BUFFY. If that makes sense.

Can we split the firefly discussion to another thread? This thread is meant to be about hijacking Lost discussion by talking about 24.

For some reason I watched the first 2 seasons of 24 and never got around to watching anymore of it. Sacrilgious I know!

Well, at least you were around for "I'm gonna need a hacksaw"

Honestly, the show never quite got back to that high point.

Nevyn, on 05 May 2016 - 06:30 PM, said:

Abyss, on 05 May 2016 - 05:41 PM, said:

I still say Sayid could have taken Jack Bauer in a fight.

A fight might be close, but Jack could definitely torture information out of Sayid, while Sayid would have a personal crisis before he got Jack to break. Heck, he couldn't even break Sawyer!

Yes he did. And that was with an audience and sub-par tools.
Anyhow, Jack was a talented amature, Sayid was all pro torture.

...no wonder Shannen was into him.

Briar King, on 05 May 2016 - 08:22 PM, said:

Y'all can eat my ass seriously...

What am I re watching now?

ALCATRAZ.

...i'm still bitter about how that ended.

champ, on 05 May 2016 - 08:48 PM, said:

Briar King, on 05 May 2016 - 08:22 PM, said:

Y'all can eat my ass seriously...

What am I re watching now?

Breaking Bad?

Or that. That's good too.

Werthead, on 05 May 2016 - 11:50 PM, said:

...Well, ANGEL was better than BUFFY (although that may not be fair as it learned from all its parent show's mistakes and avoided them, like DS9 and TNG), so I'm not sure what you're going for there.

Yes/no. Angel Seasons 1 -3 and the first half of 4 were mostly like the bestest parts of Buffy but less cutesy. The balance of S4 (Cordelia's pregnancy, Connor, whatever the fuck else was going on there) and all of S5 where they sort of only not really took over Wolfram n Hart were just atrocious, minus the finale.

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What I do find odd is when people have watched/heard of FIREFLY but never seen BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. They aired within a few months of each other, but BSG got higher viewing figures, lasted a hell of a lot longer (80 episodes, a mini-series, three TV movies and a 20-episode spin-off prequel), had far more fantastic episodes (I mean, it had 37 episodes plus the mini series which were straight-through excellent, with the weakest episode in that bloc - Black Market - not really being that awful), dealt with weightier themes, had comparably awesome characters, far superior worldbuilding (FIREFLY's solar system makes absolutely zero sense) and better fx.

Not so odd. FIREFLY fans were migrating Joss fans. BSG fans were sf fans. Obviously there was some crossover, but the majority were split along those lines, i think.

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A fight might be close, but Jack could definitely torture information out of Sayid, while Sayid would have a personal crisis before he got Jack to break. Heck, he couldn't even break Sawyer!

He did break Sawyer. Sawyer gave in after like 5 seconds of torture, it was pretty weak going on his part.

Sawyer was always a wimp. He never actually won a fight that wasn't against someone old and weak.

QuickTidal, on 05 May 2016 - 11:58 PM, said:

Werthead, on 05 May 2016 - 11:50 PM, said:

Well, ANGEL was better than BUFFY

^^This opinon is the minority, I assure you. BUFFY is a thousand times better than ANGEL. You know who you see at comic con? BUFFY fans....you rarely see ANGEL fans.

I think there are very few ANGEL fans who weren't BUFFY fans, but many more of the opposite. BUFFY is still the cultural benchmark, ANGEL was a spinoff, albeit a good one.

Briar King, on 06 May 2016 - 03:05 AM, said:

Ep 2 Locke is talking to Walt about a game holding up the stones...light and dark. Ha

Damn... i have like a thousand+ hours of solid tv in the can and you're making me want to re-watch. Semi-re-re, i've seen most of it twice.

Werthead, on 06 May 2016 - 10:36 AM, said:

...BUFFY came first and most people saw it first, so it has the whole nostalgia thing going on. ...Joss Whedon had a hideous problem with keeping characters around because he liked the actors, long after the character had ceased to do anything particularly interesting (Oz, Spike and Tara most notably, but Anya was the most egregious example).

ANGEL was vastly more consistent in quality, was (deliberately) more mature and its character arcs were just a touch better delineated. The show was better at getting rid of characters once their purpose was served (Lorne probably is the only one they kept hanging around when he had nothing to do, but then he did get a great moment in the finale) and it was much more morally murkier and interesting than BUFFY (the Fred/Illyria stuff was amazing). The consistent series-long threat of Wolfram & Hart gave the show a continuity and tension that BUFFY lacked, and Angel and Cordelia were certainly much-better explored on ANGEL than they ever were on the parent show. Arguably BUFFY might have just the edge on the best-ever episodes (Hush and The Body, most notably) but then ANGEL never had an episode anywhere near as bad as Beer Bad or at least half of Season 6. And there is absolutely zero contest on the ending: ANGEL might have the best ending of any supernatural show ever. The badass attitude of that finale is something to behold.

I agree with most of this.
Fred/Illyria was a bad retread of what had just happened to Cordy the previous season, but Amy Acker is just so great that she almost sort of saved it. Almost. I still hate everything about that season except the finale.

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It's the DS9/TNG thing again: DS9 is more dramatically intense, far more serialised, has much better characters and is far more consistent in quality, but it's hard to argue against TNG coming first and maybe having a couple of better episodes than the average of both series.

TNG may have been the better show, but DS9 was the better story.

QuickTidal, on 06 May 2016 - 11:38 AM, said:

...And Re: the finale...I agree that was a great finale on ANGEL...I loved it. But the BUFFY finale had emotional weight, and that wins out when watching TV every time. It's the difference between getting someone to say "That was cool" and "That affected me emotionally". BUFFY earned that, and ANGEL didn't.

I would give ANGEL more emo kudos than that, but the last season squandered those feels while BUFFY S6 brought back most of what had been lost in S5.
Finale vs Finale, i give it to BUFFY because there was way more emotional investment by that point while ANGEL felt like a last hurrah before putting the show out of its misery.


LOST was good tho'.

[Slow Ben]

This is my favorite thread.

[champ]

Slow Ben, on 06 May 2016 - 02:51 PM, said:

This is my favorite thread.

Haha I was just thinking the same thing.

My Lost rewatch starts tomorrow.

[QuickTidal]

You people are the best, you know that?

[QuickTidal]

Oh, and LOST Season 4 Episode 6, THE CONSTANT, is the highwater mark for the entire series, and still the finest hour of television I've ever watched.

And and this is one of the best scenes in the series: Boone's death, followed by Aaron's birth/celebration, followed by Jack having to tell Shannon Boone died. What impresses me here is the body language is PERFECTION. Shannon's little stagger backwards as Jack ostensibly tells her the news still impresses me. The whole scene is so subtle, and yet fraught with emotion (Giaccino's "Life & Death" score helps)

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 06 May 2016 - 03:16 PM

[Abyss]

QuickTidal, on 06 May 2016 - 03:08 PM, said:

Oh, and LOST Season 4 Episode 6, THE CONSTANT, is the highwater mark for the entire series, and still the finest hour of television I've ever watched.

It's funny how one episode in an entire long running series can stand out as just brilliant while others the work tends to stand as a whole. Sometimes just a single season... ALIAS S2 is one of the most glorious things JJ Abrams ever did. Seasons 3 and 4 did not happen. DID NOT LALALALALALA YOU CANT MAKE ME REMEMBER LALALALA...

LOST... The Constant was brilliant. I might argue it was almost too complex for what they set out to accomplish, but even so it was a great example of tv done right. I might give it to S2's ORIENTATION... because that choppy video answered a bunch of questions, posed a bunch of new ones and gave the (semi-false) impression that the writing team knew what they were doing.

BUFFY... the season 2 finale where Buffy fights Angelus... everything about that ep was note-for-note perfect, as a single hour of tv, as the finale of the season, and as they didn't know there would be a season 3 it worked as a series finale too.

Can't pick one for ANGEL. The ep with Drusilla and Darla does come to mind.


FIREFLY... meh, the best episode was the movie.

24.... nothing stands out above the beginning of S2 with the hacksaw. 24's biggest problem was always its basic premise that forced a lot of filler into most seasons.

BSG .... S3... Exodus Part 2. Watched it, then immediately watched it again. Then again.

[Slow Ben]

The Constant. Man, that was fucking brilliant. I still remember the feeling when that episode was over, just wrung out and in awe. And I'm with QT, i've never had an episode of tv affect me like that. Just amazing.

[QuickTidal]

Slow Ben, on 06 May 2016 - 03:40 PM, said:

The Constant. Man, that was fucking brilliant. I still remember the feeling when that episode was over, just wrung out and in awe. And I'm with QT, i've never had an episode of tv affect me like that. Just amazing.

It helps that once he was introduced, Desmond was my favourite character throughout the shows run and to this day as well, and that ep focused on him.

[polishgenius]

QuickTidal, on 05 May 2016 - 11:58 PM, said:

^^This opinon is the minority, I assure you.

I haven't actually seen either (shame! shame!) but amongst the people I know it breaks roughly even. I've never noticed a particular skew one way or the other, apart from that one person who has a reaaaaaaaaaal crush on Sarah Michelle Gellar.

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In retro, FIREFLY was huge enough to have survived if Fox hadn't jumped the gun so utterly and killed it, but even so, massive ratings eyeballs dollars success not so much.

To a certain extent this is true but it's shocking how little patience Fox were showing at the time. I mean, we recently saw Hannibal get 3 whole fucking seasons (as sad as I am it got cancelled, I still can't believe that actually happened) and the way, way, way more public-friendly Firefly got killed after 14 episodes? Even in the less geeky atmosphere of the time it was poor.
I mean, the real reason it got cancelled was coz Summer Glau was in it but...

This post has been edited by polishgenius: 06 May 2016 - 04:13 PM

[QuickTidal]

FOX are probably the most notorious network for snipping their shows before they find their legs. Why Joss kept ending up back there with shows is baffling. I'm looking at you DOLLHOUSE.

Look at FRINGE, they had to fight season after season to get the next.

I'm actually surprised that FIREFLY never got more movies. I mean I get that you can't get all those stars together for an episodic TV series anymore logistically, but more movies always seemed on the cards. SERENITY did okay business didn't it? Leaving aside that Baldwin has proven himself to be a shitstain after the fact.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 06 May 2016 - 04:24 PM

[paran falcon]

Abyss, on 06 May 2016 - 02:45 PM, said:

LOST was good tho'.

[color="rgb(0,128,0)"]
[/color]
[color="rgb(0,128,0)"]You ALL are killing me. Lost was a favorite for my wife and I, one of the most eagerly anticipated EVERY week shows I can recall watching. I've never re-watched it but coincidentally, did throw on the pilot ep just a few weeks ago to see if my daughter would go for it. (She just finished streaming the entire X Files show start to finish on her own thanks to the new 6 ep mini season and Fight the Future. LOVE my girl!!) It didn't seem to catch her interest though, so I never put it on again. But you all and your reminiscing is starting to make me itch to...Damn you! I have more than enough to do in my life!!![/color]

[Abyss]

polishgenius, on 06 May 2016 - 04:12 PM, said:

...To a certain extent this is true but it's shocking how little patience Fox were showing at the time. I mean, we recently saw Hannibal get 3 whole fucking seasons (as sad as I am it got cancelled, I still can't believe that actually happened) and the way, way, way more public-friendly Firefly got killed after 14 episodes? Even in the less geeky atmosphere of the time it was poor.
I mean, the real reason it got cancelled was coz Summer Glau was in it but...

Fox at the time was heavy into realiTV and had little patience for dramas, let alone genre dramas after multiple other shows had failed for them.

And to be fair, it let Glau go on to do TERMINATOR TSCC which she rocked so hard.



....til Fox killed that too...

[paran falcon]

/\ Ok, that's the 2nd time the font color I choose doesn't come out, just the description of it. WTF am I doing to make that happen?