REVIEW: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season Four (Joss Whedon, 1999-2000)

I don't understand how the writers flubbed Frankenstein.  After Shelley's classic novel, and Whale's two superior adaptations, and the Hammer pictures, and countless other films that focus on the multidimensional monster, one would think Whedon and his band of writers could handle the character.  Their iteration - a demon-man-robot (demanbot?) inevitably named Adam - cuts an imposing figure, with his muscular body and stitched green skin and cybernetic augmentations (a floppy disk port sits above his left nipple).  He even nods to Karloff, but instead of tossing a young girl in a river, he dissects a young boy to see how he works.

This Adam learned the value of pants much faster than his namesake.

How depressing it then becomes to watch him lose that (perverse) human curiosity and become so singularly robotic.  Apart from the occasional musing on humans or vampires, Adam proceeds like a cog in a wheel, executing his plans because those plans are what he must execute.  Said plans involve the creation of an army full of recombined soldiers like himself, although he never specifies an ultimate goal for this new race.  Adam's incomplete process remind me of the underpants gnomes from South Park who can't quite nail the middle step between collecting underpants and making money.

He involves Buffy in his master plan as a means of upping the number of casualties in the human/demon war (thereby producing more parts for Adam's new army), but he carries no interest in her as a potential super-soldier herself.  Adam's focus is so narrow (and incomplete) that he doesn't realize that Slayer-parts would make for a demanbot (dewobot?) to equal him, and, heck, if nothing else, he could up the homage ante by desiring her as a life mate.  Instead, Buffy's busy mating with stalwart lunkhead Riley Finn (Marc Blucas), a well-meaning soldier from Iowa who works for the same military project that created Adam.

New ally Tara (Amber Benson) proves even more twitchy and furtive than Willow.

Riley serves as a useful metaphor for the entirety of Season Four, which is handsome, good-hearted, and strikingly one-dimensional.  I submit the following.  Riley's romance with Buffy rests mainly on nice guy safety and loads of sex.  The main villain lacks the driving emotion of former villains like the Mayor and Angelus.  The threats of college quickly fade to the background, becoming High School: Part Two.  Sure, some new developments on the side (a surprising romance for Willow, a surprising romance for Xander) keep individual episodes humming, and the banter frothy as ever, but the overall spirit of the show feels muted.

That muted feeling forces Buffy to live or die, for the first time since Season One, on an episode-by-episode basis.  Thankfully, some of the episodes here offer the show at its boldest and most exciting.  "Hush" features voice-stealing demons (led by Guillermo Del Toro veteran Doug Jones) who force the entire cast mime their way through most of the episode.  "Restless" allows Joss Whedon to discard the seasonal narrative in favor of expertly-wrought dream logic, as Buffy and her friends share dreams and nightmares.  "Superstar" suggests the bizarre idea that Sunnydale itself can be spell-cast, so a new character can suddenly become someone who was "always there."  The two-part "This Year's Girl / Who Are You" witnesses the welcome return of a former foe, and "Fear Itself" is a delightful haunted house caper.

Riley Finn is Leon S. Kennedy in Joss Whedon's Resident Mild.

The mix of episodes also includes the depressingly blunt "Beer Bad" and the unformed mess of "Where the Wild Things Are," which twists to include Catholic sexual repression, theater-sized bedrooms, and orgasm walls, which are exactly what they sound like.  Few of the other episodes lack the unique badness of those two, although "Pangs" forces another plight-of-the-Indians episode upon the universe, and "Doomed" sees the gang return to the high school for yet another round of Hellmouth closing.  I guess that plot's supposed to emphasize the distance between the Gang and their origins, but it simply made me nostalgic.

Conceptually, the Initiative is a brilliant addition to the world of Buffy.  Think of how authors like Shelley, Stoker, Lovecraft and Matheson offered supernatural beings compatible with the scientific method.  Hell, the ghost busters fought a Sumerian deity with nuclear stun-guns.  But Whedon and the gang never come at their concept from a fresh angle.  They offer the tropes of science but never the questions or the hangups.  Instead, we get nebulous aggression and bureaucracy, which offers plenty of plot but little heart.  I mean, just look at this place.

Ignore the cool science stuff and study all the empty space.  There's room for so much more.

RATING: B

Previous Ratings:

Buffy, Season Three:   A

Buffy, Season Two:    A-

Buffy, Season One:    B