One New York Life

I posted the review for The DaVinci Code a while back. After I read the book, most people told me that the first book including Robert Langon, Angels & Demons, was much better.

After reading it, I agree. Two main reasons:

1) You don’t spend the entire book really wading through heavy-handed spirituality regarding the Catholic Church and giant Conspiracy Theory. There is obviously a taste of conspiracy in it, but nothing that tries to shake the foundation of the church to its core.

2) An extension of the above, you don’t have to deal with pages and pages and pages of background explanations to make a point.

The general plot in this book is that CERN (a research facility) has discovered how to make anti-matter. Anti-matter, is the theoretical opposite of matter. When it and and matter come in to contact, they annihilate, destroying each other. A scientist (and his hot, adoptive, Italian daughter) created anti-matter and a way to store it without it destroying all the matter around it. The anti-matter gets stolen and planted somewhere in the Vatican on the day that a new Pope is about to be elected.

Elsewhere, the Illuminati have kidnapped the four front-running cardinals in line for the Papacy and have promised to assassinate each of them on the altars of the Illuminati. Robert Langdon discovers a way to find the altars in an attempt to save the cardinals before they are murdered. A few twists and turns later and Robert Langdon saves the day.

Sound familiar?

Yeah, that’s the one huge problem I had with the book. Angels & Demons and The DaVinci Code are essentially cookie-cut from one another. Robert Langdon, shocked into action by a gruesome murder, runs around with an exotic beauty. He follows clue after clue trying to track down something before someone else does… with a shocking twist(~!) or two at the end. As it started to become more obvious it was cut from the same cloth as The DaVinci Code, you were really able to predict exactly what was going to happen before it did. The shocking twists and revelation become kind of tired because the reader of the first book can pretty much guess what’s going to happen.

If you had to pick one of the two books to read, I’d pick this one first. If it seems like you really liked the format… like, so much that you want to read it again with the same characters, then read The DaVinci Code.

The first half-season of Buffy aired from March to June 1997. As we learn a bit later in the series, Buffy comes to Sunnydale after having been expelled from her school in Los Angeles after burning it down. She’d also spent some time in an insane asylum after telling her parents about the first time she saw a vampire. The movie, at this point, is non-canonical (it would later be revisited and merged with the series in The Origin comic.

Surprisingly, as I worked my way through this series, I was shocked at how little had been spoiled for me over the years. Willow becoming the Big Evil in season six was just about the only thing I knew that was coming before it came.

Episodes

Welcome to the Hellmouth: Where it all begins. The very first scene is the show defined in a microcosm. A boy and a girl, in a stereotypical movie moment, travel together into the school after hours. The girl is nervous at the boy’s brash breaking of the rules. However, the girl turns out to be Darla (a character I knew from spot watching Angel) and kills the boy. The show was essentially turning all the stereotypes around. The boy would always be in danger and the girl would save the day.

Buffy leaves behind Los Angeles and, she presumes, he Slayer life. After arriving in Sunnydale, she discovers that she’s come to a town that sits on top of a Hellmouth (a portal to hell) and there is a new watcher waiting to take over her training. After finding the town infested with vampires, watchers, and portals to hell, Buffy realizes she can’t leave the life of a Slayer behind her. The core gang is formed when Xander, Buffy, Willow, and Giles all meet and, against all odds, make it through to the end of the series. Eric Balfour appears as Willow and Xander’s good friend Jesse. He only makes it two episodes as he’s turned into a vampire to lure the slayer to The Master… Season One’s Big Bad.

The Harvest: Xander is forced to kill his friend Jesse who’s become a vampire. Granted, he does this in Xander’s own inept way. Angel continues to be the dark stranger who only comes to warn Buffy about impending doom. This episode gives you one of those “holy crap” moments at how much different the world is now as Willow uses a laptop roughly the size of an investment banker’s briefcase to get information about the city’s sewers. An important concept is hinted at toward the end of the episode when Cordelia, a tangential member of the Scooby Gang, denies the fact that there was a near slaughter at the Bronze the night before. Fans of the show call it the “Sunnydale Syndrome”; people’s tendency to explain away the inexplicable or pretend it never happened. People’s eyes can be opened, as Willow’s, Xander’s, and Oz’s, but they ignore it for the most part. The fog is very similar to that which surrounds Derry, Maine in Stephen King’s It. The residents in the town of Derry know that children disappear or are brutally murdered, but are not horrified by it. The children in It have their eyes opened by surviving encounters with It. The characters in Buffy are similar. When they’re brought into the Scooby Gang, they become more aware of what’s going on in town. Meanwhile, most of the residents seem miraculously un-phased by the huge body count that must be racked up by having a town full of vampires. Sitting on a Hellmouth, or sitting on some manifestation of The First Evil (I would submit that the creature behind Pennywise in It‘s is King’s version of the First Evil) puts the fog around people. They have to overcome inertia to see reality.

Witch: The first episode that let’s us know that witches and magic, in fact, do exist. It introduces Amy, who will spend a few seasons as a rat before coming tremendously important. Amy’s mother had swapped bodies with her to relive her glory days. Amy’s mother is one of the few “evil” witches we ever see in Buffy. Later, witches are portrayed mostly as a persecuted, peaceful group. We find at the end of the episode that Amy’s mother had been turned into a cheerleading trophy and was trapped in the trophy case at Sunnydale High. I assume this is Joss’s dig at jocks stuck in their high school glory days, which is what Amy dealt with as her mom pressured her into cheerleading. This is the way that the show intermingled actual high school issues with magic. Amy’s mom pressured her to follow in her footsteps… but in Buffy, the mom was actually able to take over her footsteps.

Teacher’s Pet: In the first of some prophetic episodes, a hot new teacher comes to town and sets about having sex with her virile young students… unfortunately she turns out to be a giant preying mantis in disguise. Xander is one of her victims. At the end of this episode, we’re shown that the teacher had laid eggs before she was killed, but this was dropped. Whedon pretty much stopped this tactic once we got out of this season… that is, the old horror movie tactic of setting up the sequel. I would assume this was because, after the first season, he had an actual direction to go with and enough story that it wasn’t necessary to pretend he’d need more.

Never Kill a Boy on the First Date: Buffy tries to have an actual social life outside of her duties, dating a guy named Owen. Unfortunately, The Master is attempting to raise The Anointed One, the vampire who will lead the Slayer into hell. Buffy has a date interrupted by general doom. Owen, her date, goes with her on her mission to rescue Giles. He has the honor of being one of the few characters who has his eyes opened that never really appears again.

The Pack: Xander finds a new group of friends and blows off his old ones in typical high school fashion. Unfortunately, he’d been possessed by a hyena spirit and killed the principal. This wasn’t one of my faves and is the second in a long line of “Xander gets in a crazy situation” plots.

Angel: The big reveal: Angel is a vampire and was once the horrifyingly evil Angelus. We discover that he was cursed with a soul, setting up the crazy Buffy/Angel relationship that will go on for three seasons. This episode, much to my surprise, was also the end of Darla. As I saw her on Angel in later years, I was somewhat surprised to see her staked. This doomed relationship seems to be the catalyst that made the show catch on with fans.

I, Robot… You, Jane: Another fun time capsule of an episode. Willow meets a boy on IRC and everyone thinks it’s kind of creepy. Ten years later and I know at least two engaged couples who met online. Of course, in this case it does turn out to be weird… or more truly a demon inside the computer. Ms Calendar, the computer teacher and techno-pagan, is introduced and will become more important later on.

The Puppet Show: We get the new principal Snyder (Quark from DS9, minus the make-up… and it took me a disturbing amount of time to figure this out). This is kind of an odd little episode with a switcheroo. You’re set up to believe the puppet is the bad guy and he actually turns out to be a demon hunter cursed into puppet form.

Nightmares: An It inspired episode as people’s nightmares start coming true. This episode was Buffy’s chance to don the vampire face.

As an aside, this was one thing I always wondered about. How bad-ass would the “Big Bad” have been if it was a former slayer turned into a Vampire? I mean, doesn’t that seem like something Spike would have done? He was cruel enough and killed two slayers, yet didn’t turn any of them.

Out of Mind, Out of Sight: A girl is so ignored by everyone around her she actually becomes invisible. Good thought about high school… not an episode I really cared for. Although, the invisible girl is taken away by the government to be trained as a spy at the end of the episode, giving us the indication that the US Government knows that mystical forces actually exist. This is much more deeply explored in season four.

Prophecy Girl: This was actually the episode that made me realize I was going to watch the rest of the series. Well written, well acted, and probably in my top five favorite episodes in the series. Buffy hears that the prophecy says she must face the Master and she must die. She temporarily quits being Slayer. As Buffy faces the Master, she is killed by him as the prophecy foretold… but she is later brought back by Xander’s CPR. She then goes on to kill the Master ending the first Big Bad.

Summary

While it didn’t seem like twelve episodes that would launch a phenomena, the original twelve episodes were fun. Like I said, not only do they give a little glance back into what high school was like before everyone went insane with metal detectors and whatnot, it’s also a pretty decent little look at what high school is like for the non-popular kids.

The craziest part of the first season, for me, is how quickly and seamlessly Xander and Willow accept the world of the supernatural. They’re like: “oh, there are vampires and witches and magic and demons… all right.” I suppose it was mostly to skip unnecessary dialog, but still it comes off as kind of odd. The first season also sets up what would annoy me most about the show over the years: Xander rarely gets to be a hero. In this season he saves Buffy at the end and later he’d bring Dark Willow back from evil, but otherwise he just gets beaten up by demons and has to be rescued. You’d think, at some point, he’d start carrying weapons or, at the very least, training. Xander would be pretty much the only regular character in the show who would never have any power and would play the constant victim. He never learned magic or summoning or anything and, inexplicably, never managed to get killed.

As this took way longer to write than I expected… the second one will probably be a little later than I first assumed.