ha! i hope joss is right about sarah, but then again, her husbands made a thousand bad movies he still continues. hope sarah's a bit smarter.

i also love joss's attitude about the future and how things will eventually happen. hope he's right.

narky | July 16, 19:39 CET

Does anyone else see this re-creation of Angel in the same way as the X-Men (Issues 229-252) were in the comics after they went through the Siege Perilous. They had this tricked out, secret hideaway in Australia, and the ability to go to and from anywhere they wanted. It made for some cool stories for a while, until of course they eventually had to give it up and the lesson was that they could no longer live apart from the world -- they had to try to save it from within.

brother_grady | July 16, 20:57 CET

Bro_Grady, what I find ironic is how the series originally started with Angel apart from the world, and Cordy & Doyle helped connect him with that world. That Doyle's real mission statement wasn't so much to get Angel to save the world, but to get Angel to save himself by helping other people and doing good in the world. Now that both Cordy & Doyle have gone, W&H are systematically disconnecting Angel with that world, and so over the course of the next season there should be a resolution to that. Is being connected to W&H going to connect Angel more to the world or make him grow more aloof and distant again? Should be fun to watch.

Narky, I also hope Whedon's right, and believe he is. Gellar just needs to get the "not Buffy" thing out of her system. When she realizes that what she already has is something that few actors ever achieve in their lifetimes, she'll come back. What would bring her back sooner though would be a kickass script, but even the best script wouldn't get her back into Buffy before 2005. After almost a decade, she needs to distance herself a bit.

Then again though, perhaps if we were right, then at this point in her career SMG would find herself pining for her days in soap operas, and that's most decidedly not the case. So maybe she'll never look back and keep Buffy far behind her.

In the meantime I think the proliferation of other slayers opens up many possibilities. The article read (to me anyway) as if the only other way to get a spinoff is to get Eliza Dushku (who's in Tru Calling and so not available). However, I think they could start an entirely new story, set it in Cleveland, and introduce mostly new cast members with recurring roles for some of the BtVS characters, and people would eat it up. Buffy was ironically never just about Buffy. It's about the stories more than the people. It's about the world Whedon concocted.

ZachsMind | July 16, 22:19 CET

I'm glad Joss has such a positive outlook for the future of his Buffyverse. I hate to say this because I've been smitten by SMG for seven years but the Buffyverse can go on quite well without her. The only story left to tell that Joss needs her for is when Angel becomes human again and he and Buffy get married and settle down. I hope he waits about 10 years for that.

vpecoraro | July 16, 22:42 CET

nah vpecoraro there are lots more Buffy stories to do, such as her integration into the world outside Sunnydale, finding her place, baking her dough, etc. plus the whole Fray dimension-y thing.

and ZachsMind, i agree about there being way more possibilities than just Faith, even though she's one of the few with the charisma to pull off being a lead. i don't know why they nixed the Slayer school possibility. set it in Cleveland and put Willow, Wood, Giles etc. at the helm and you have the cool, now Angely, quandary of having the outcasts become the authority and how they deal with demon-war(along with high school issues), etc. there are tons of possibilities.

let's hope that a small break is all the cast and crew needed, and soon they can start making more stories again.

narky | July 17, 02:27 CET

I think a Faith spin-off would be great, but they'd need to bring in some new writers or something because this season's Faith appearance was chuck full of obnoxious un-faithisms. I get the whole 'she's a bad-ass look at her slang' thing, but they made her come off all ghetto as opposed to punk-rock, which ain't a pretty colour on Eliza.

I yearn for the days of 5 by 5 (even if i didn't get it) - not 'yo' every other word.

Orangeinmymouth | July 17, 06:18 CET

faith...punk rock..wha?

narky | July 17, 07:10 CET

Hey she did a couple pennies in the slammer, yo. Cut the slay some slack. Bang focus plan B. She'd nature link up with the inside lingo. Word.

ZachsMind | July 17, 07:18 CET

re: punk rock

Yeah maybe just rock, I'd say more Bif Naked than Vanilla Ice-ette.

word. yo.

Of course the writers seemed pretty incapable of staying true to any of the characters bar Anya.

A thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters?

[ edited by Orangeinmymouth on 2003-07-17 05:52 ]

Orangeinmymouth | July 17, 07:50 CET

"Whedon said the new season of ``Angel'' will emphasize stand-alone stories as opposed to the serial approach of previous seasons."

I hope this doesn't mean it's going to get too Monster-Of-The-Weekish.

stavrogin | July 17, 11:04 CET

I'm afraid the corporate types have probably wormed into Whedon's brain a bit, saying "see how successful Smallville has been? Work up a formulaic style of storytelling that's easy for a wider audience to follow, and after you have built up a larger following, THEN you can make some multi-episode plot arcs. Preferably during sweeps and for season finales." But yeah, until then it's gonna be MOTW for Angel.

1. New villian makes appearance.
   
2. Eve shows Angel Crew why they can't touch this particular evil.
   
3. Angel Crew struggle with double standards and hypocrisy.
   
4. Find a way to beat the crap out of villian anyway.
   
5. Eve tells Angel Crew how The Partners are upset, but they got away with it this time.
   
6. Eve smiles to herself and secretly reveals to a foil character that everything's going as planned for some bigger conspiracy we'll learn about between Sweeps and Season's End.
   

Or something like that. Could be worse. I mean, there shouldn't be any kryptonite involved. Thank heaven for little favors. The thing is though, the way Angel has been working, the average new viewer feels a little hesitant to get into it because it is a bit of an investment. It's very soap opera-ish. I mean much of what happened with Cordy the past year was indirectly related to what Doyle did to her before he left. It's all kinda connected and you have to know the history of Angel both in his own show and in Buffy to *really* understand what's going on. The corporate types probably don't like that much. It's not commercially profitable.

I suspect there's gonna be a little coincidental correlation next season to what Angel experiences with W&H, and what Whedon experiences with W&B. Because we all know the True First Evil is corporate executive mentality. *smirk*

ZachsMind | July 17, 17:39 CET