Top 25 Dramatic Scenes

I originally posted a list of my top 25 dramatic scenes at ATPO in 2003, shortly after Chosen aired. Those original selections hold up pretty well – he said as he graded his own answers – though I’ve reorganized them to suit my latest views. In a few cases, what qualifies as a single scene is debatable, but I tried to be reasonable about it.

There’s a pretty straightforward logical connection between the scenes I list below and my episode rankings: (1) I rate dramatic episodes highly; therefore (2) episodes with top quality dramatic scenes will be highly rated, and vice versa. This list is bound to be subjective, even though many of these scenes will appear on others’ lists, because they’re the scenes which had the greatest emotional impact on me personally.

MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW


1. Beneath You: "Can we rest?"

2. Passion: “Upstairs.”

3. The Body: "Mom? Mommy?"

4. Becoming 2: Buffy fights Angelus (“Me.”) and sends Angel to Hell: "Close your eyes."

5. The Gift: "The hardest thing to do in this world is to live in it. Live. For me."

6. Smashed: B/S bring down the house.

7. Dead Things: Crypt scene

8. Becoming 2: "The winter here is cold and bitter..."

9. Wild at Heart: "In my whole life, I've never loved anyone else."

10. Prophecy Girl: "I'm 16 years old. I don't want to die."

11. Passion: “The ecstasy of grief.”

12. Innocence: "That was then. This is now."

13. OMWF: Walk through the fire

14. The Body: “I don't understand how this all happens. How we go through this.”

15. Becoming 1: "No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does."

16. Dead Things: "Please don't forgive me."

17. Innocence: “Was I not good?”

18. Graduation Day 1: “You know you're not going to take me alive.” “Not a problem.”

19. Tabula Rasa: "Goodbye to you"

20. The Body: “We're drawing ... the negative space ... around the object.”

21. Afterlife: "Every night I save you."

22. Normal Again: "Thank you. Good-bye." And the camera pans out the door of the asylum.

23. Passion: "I can't do this without you."

24. Storyteller: “I’m making it all up.”

25. Angel: Goodbye to you.

I could do another 10 pretty easily, I think. 

Episode Rankings: The Dirty Dozen (Bottom 12)

Every time I mention an episode as “weak”, someone jumps in to say how much s/he likes it. With some trepidation for the comments I might get, this post will contain my list of weakest episodes. Please do remember that even the weakest episodes can have a good scene or two in them.

I have some criteria for what makes an episode weak. The catch-all term would be poor execution, e.g., hitting us over the head with the point, or leaving the point obscure, or making the plot line implausible. That sounds as if the list is objective, but it’s no more so than my “best” list.

I’ll confess that I’ve allowed my personal distaste for Dead Man’s Party to affect its ranking. A more neutral observer might find it not as bad as I do (not much of a bar, I freely admit).

133. Gone

134. Teacher’s Pet

135. Reptile Boy

136. Beer Bad

137. Two to Go

138. Doublemeat Palace

139. Wrecked

140. I Robot, You Jane

141. Where the Wild Things Are

142. Go Fish

143. Dead Man’s Party

144. As You Were

I’ll list my top 25 dramatic scenes next Thursday.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. update

For those following the show, I thought the events of last night made this a good time to review the predictions I made after watching the first episode. Overall, the show is still not great -- it could really use Joss to improve the dialogue -- but it has gotten better after a very slow start.

SPOILERS FOR AOS AND DOLLHOUSE BELOW:

1. My first prediction was that Chloe = Echo. I feel very good about this. I still think it's dead on, down to something in their blood being special. Of course it's their blood:

XANDER: Why blood? Why Dawn's blood? I mean, why couldn't it be like a, a lymph ritual?
SPIKE: 'Cause it's always got to be blood.
XANDER: We're not actually discussing dinner right now.
SPIKE: Blood is life, lackbrain. Why do you think we eat it? It's what keeps you going. Makes you warm. Makes you hard. Makes you other than dead. (quietly) Course it's her blood.

2. I thought other characters might map on to Dollhouse characters, suggesting Fitzsimmons/Topher as an example. I think I got that wrong.

3. S.H.I.E.L.D. would be morally ambiguous. I think I called that. Here it's a case of infiltration rather than something necessarily inherent in the system, but the net result is the same: the institution is corrupt.

4. There would be Foucaltian themes of societal coercion. I'd give myself half a point on this. There has definitely been mind control, deception to force others to act, and the prospect of more subtle forms of coercion from higher up in S.H.I.E.L.D. remains.

Episode Rankings -- Top 25 Favorites

My “favorites” list will have some overlap with my “best” list. Since there’s such overlap, I’ll list more “favorites”.

The top episodes are those which are both of high quality and easy to re-watch. They’re in rough order of the number of times I’ve re-watched them. Like anyone would keep an exact count of such a thing.

I’d call this list totally subjective; I can’t even pretend that it represents anything more than my own personal taste at this point in time.

1. Once More With Feeling
2. Becoming 1 & 2
3. Storyteller
4. Chosen 
5. The Gift
6. Fool For Love
7. Hush
8. Primeval
9. Doppelgangland
10. Pangs
11. Touched
12. Wild at Heart
13. School Hard
14. Band Candy
15. Triangle
16. Checkpoint
17. Tabula Rasa
18. Choices
19. Phases
20. Prophecy Girl
21. Selfless
22. Lover’s Walk
23. Life Serial
24. Lessons
25. Beneath You

"Weakest" episodes next Thursday.

Episode Rankings -- Top 15

In a comment recently, Allison suggested that I add some posts ranking such things as my best/favorite episodes, etc. I’ve gone back and forth on whether to do this, but her comment kind of pushed me into doing it.

The big reason for my previous reluctance was that my attitudes about these things change over time. Any ranking I give today would probably differ substantially from one I gave 10 years ago. However, I’ve decided that enough time has passed that my evaluation of the episodes is reasonably stable. I might still switch an episode from 8^th to 15^th, but it’s very unlikely that I’d switch one from 103^rd to 15^th or even to 41^st. Still, don’t take the exact order too seriously. There’s a real risk of being more precise than accurate when making up these lists, and in any case I might change my mind again next week.

I’m going to rank the top episodes in two different posts, one today and one next Thursday. The distinction I’m making between these two lists is between “best” and “favorite”. To illustrate the distinction, consider The Body. As you can see below, I rank it no. 1 on my “best” list (no surprise there). However, I can’t consider it a “favorite” because it’s simply too painful to re-watch. The “favorites” list will be those I enjoy watching the most.

I created today’s list by putting on my critic’s hat and trying to evaluate the “best” episodes. Don’t be fooled into thinking this list will be “objective”; I’m certainly under no such illusion. All it means is that I’m trying to put some constraints on my own subjective views, not that I’ve succeeded in eliminating subjectivity (which is, in my view, impossible).

As you’ll see very quickly, the “best” list contains mostly dramatic episodes rather than comic ones. This is consistent with my comments about the relative longevity of drama and comedy in the Introduction. However, my “favorites” list will be much more heavily weighted towards funnier episodes – or at least those less dark and disturbing – for reasons which are probably obvious.

In two cases below I treated a two-part episode as one for purposes of the rankings. That may seem unfair, but I find it hard to separate the relevant episodes and I don’t know how I’d rank them if I had to split them.

SPOILER WARNING: There’s at least one major spoiler below and any comments will likely include more.

T1. The Body

       Once More With Feeling

3.    Passion

4.    Becoming 1 & 2

5.    Lies My Parents Told Me

6.    Storyteller

7.    Normal Again

8.    Dead Things

9.    Hush

10.  Fool For Love

11.  Surprise/Innocence

12.  The Gift

13.  Smashed

14.  Restless

15.  Chosen

I couldn’t do just 10. It was too hard for me to separate out 11-15 from the top 10. For that matter, it was pretty hard to separate 11-15 from the ones I’d put at 16-20, but I felt a little better about breaking it at 15. Purely arbitrary.

Many of these episodes appear on lots of “best” lists, and their appearance won’t be a surprise, though some will disagree with the ordering. I’ll just comment on three of them, in reverse order of their ranking. Chosen is on the list because I was on line obsessively before it aired and I’m confident that nobody, except those who were spoiled, saw the twist coming. Changing the whole nature of the show like that was daring, in my view, and I loved it.

I know plenty of viewers who hate Smashed. From what I read, a lot of that is associated with the story line: they just don’t like the decision to have Buffy have sex with Spike. That’s ok. I’m not critical of that decision, but even if I were, I’m trying to base my judgment more on the execution than on the plot. Overall, I have to judge the episode as well-executed, and the final 15 minutes or so (the whole fight plus the ending) as brilliant.

Storyteller is the third one which gets, well, less love in fandom. A lot of that comes from dislike of Andrew. Andrew doesn’t bother me, and I think my post on that episode explains why I rank it so high.

Feel free to tear my list apart in comments and/or to post your own.

Veronica Mars movie

I saw it yesterday and it's very fun. It captures the spirit of the first 2 seasons really well (that's a polite way of saying that I'm not wild about S3). Even if you didn't watch the show -- and you should have, because it drew on Buffy a lot -- you'll be able to follow the movie. If you did watch it, you'll appreciate the in jokes and the recurring characters. Sadly, no Buffy alums appear in the movie, though maybe Krysten Ritter should get an honorable mention for her father's role in Ted.

Going off on a yet bigger tangent, Aeryl pointed out to me that Game of Thrones has cast Dead Eddie from The Freshman for a key role in S4.

Book update

I just updated the eBook again. It'll take about 12 hours for it to process, so it's not available yet.


This time I made what I'd call significant revisions. I didn't change any theories or arguments, but I tried to tighten up the reasoning and the writing. That means that I deleted some stuff which I thought was repetitive or confusing (mostly in Amends); added some transitions; clarified some points which, on re-read I thought were unclear; and moved some passages around in order to improve the flow.


If anyone wants to discuss the book in comments under this post, they can do that without spoiler warnings. New viewers beware!