1) do this even if you're under 40. seriously. I definitely should have been doing something like this for years and I only turned 40 a month and a half ago
2) if you're like me just now trying this going "oh god i've only done 15 and i think my hands are cramping" start lower than 30 and increase by 5 once whatever number you're doing no longer makes your hand cramp up. I can manage about 15 per exercise at the moment.
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A new report found ICE arrested more than 10,000 immigrants last week, roughly double the number being detained soon after pulling out of Mi
In its place, the Times reported, is a new push to hit a new set of quotas for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to meet. And unlike previous demands from White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, it seems that ICE has been on track to hit those numbers. Over the course of last week, according to the Times, federal officials detained more than 10,000 people — and intends to keep that pressure going.
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the real moral lesson in chess is that you can only move forwards 5-6 times in your life before you're turned into a beautiful queen but also rarely you might be turned into a horse
Last time around I confidently predicted that we were set for a run of good episodes from now until early Season 4. You'd assume, then, that I had only good things to say about Homecoming. But the truth is that this is something of a strange episode, isn't it? Very much a mixed bag.
It's not obviously bad, the way Dead Man's Party or Beauty and the Beasts were. But it's not obviously good, either, at least not in the straightforward way I'd remembered it being. It certainly has many different good parts: fun ideas (Slayerfest 98; Cordelia being mistaken for Faith), memorable scenes (Faith awkwardly asking Buffy if she wants her to replace her ex-boyfriend in a purely heterosexual way; Buffy telling Cordelia why she's so focused on running for Homecoming Queen; Cordelia bluffing her way out of being killed by a vampire), important developments for the future of the season (Buffy and Scott break up; Buffy has committed to not telling anyone about Angel; we finally meet the Mayor after months of build-up).
And yet they don't quite cohere in the way that I'd like to them to (or that, in my memory, they did). Plus, as I hinted in an earlier post, this episode introduces what might well be the worst multi-episode subplot of the WB seasons of the show. It's not quite on the level of Willow's drug addiction or Spike's hypnotic trigger, but it's still ... not very good, to put it mildly.
Breaking things down into four different strands, I want to briefly talk about -- in no particular order -- Cordelia Chase, Faith and the Mayor; Xander and Willow, and more generally the idea of continuity and how this episode deals with that.
(1) Cordelia
Let's start with Cordelia first, as she's the character (other than Buffy) whom this episode is most obviously about.
As I've noted before, by this point it had probably already been decided that this would be Cordelia's last season on the show. I don't know exactly when this was decided, but by this point in 1998 the internet seemed to know it would be happening (or at least that the writers wanted it to happen). This episode thus serves as something of a swan song for her character on Buffy: with perhaps one exception, she won't ever really be the main focus of an episode again after this.
From what I've read, Greenwalt himself was the main voice pushing for Cordelia to join that spin-off (in an interview with the BBC in around 2003, he said that "I [told Joss Whedon] "I think [an Angel spin-off would be] a fabulous idea and I think we should bring […] Cordelia Chase with us, because I think she will be a great foil for Angel").
And in fact, if we look at the episodes which Cordelia has had the most screen time in on Buffy so far, two of the top three -- this episode and Season 2's Reptile Boy -- are episodes written and directed by David Greenwalt. This is probably the best of the three, showcasing a Cordelia who is (by turns): self-absorbed, funny, breathtaking unpleasant, comically inept and heroically brave. She doesn't exactly have an arc here -- unlike Season 1's Out of Mind, Out of Sight I don't get the impression she's particularly changed as a result of her experiences this week -- but nonetheless I think this is basically the definitive statement on (the pre-Angel) version of her character.
But ... OK, well. The big shadow hanging over this part of the episode (and one that is only just about averted in the final scene) is that there's no way Cordelia should be in the running for Homecoming Queen. She is not popular anymore! She very consciously chose to give up being popular last season! Do we think Harmony or Aura or any of the other Cordettes are going to be voting for her after she called them all sheep and decided to publicly date Xander Harris? Have we even seen Cordelia talk to any of her non-Slayerette friends all season?
True, Cordelia won't actually become Homecoming Queen. But it's not clear to me if the episode realizes this is because she never had a chance anyway. It doesn't help that Cordelia's "rivals" are two girls we've never seen before (and won't ever see again) and so can't hope to relate to any of the social structure the show has implied before (Michelle is a cheerleader: does she know Cordelia's friend Joy? did Joy graduate last year? do the writers remember who Joy is?).
You can argue, of course, that none of this stuff matters. But it feels at times as if the writers don't have a grasp on whether Cordelia has wrongly convinced herself she's the favorite when actually she never was or if Cordelia was the favorite and Buffy running cost her the crown. And these are two quite different beats, aren't they?
I use the word "feels" above advisedly, because the frustrating thing is that (as I learned only after writing most of this post) this is actually all covered in the shooting script! Early on in the episode, we would have gotten this exchange:
BUFFY: So, Cordy, what's your strategy for winning the election? Is it safe to say bribes are involved?
CORDELIA: Bribes are only part of it. A year ago, I would have had this thing sewn. But the public's fickle. There's competition now, not to mention my liabilities ... [she glances at Xander]
XANDER: Are you saying that dating me is some kind of hindrance to you bagging Homecoming Queen?
CORDELIA: Oh, sweetie ... it's okay, I can overcome it.
I'm not sure why this was cut -- maybe somebody thought it spoiled the 'twist' at the end if the possibility of Cordelia not winning was raised earlier? -- but it feels like a mistake to me. I think they should've kept that in.
(2) Faith and the Mayor
Jumping from one of Buffy's shadow selves to another, let's talk about Faith.
This episode also features her third appearance in a row, although her screen time is limited to just a couple of (rather memorable) scenes. It's hard not to get the sense that she's a character that the writers don't seem to have quite worked out what to do with yet. We also finally meet the (much teased) Mayor himself, Richard Wilkins the 3rd (and the 2nd, and the 1st). Faith and the Mayor will go on to be pretty closely linked, though when exactly the writers decided to have them team up is something of a mystery.
People online are irritatingly fond of the idea of an "original plan" for the show which, frankly, often doesn't seem to have existed in any meaningful way. For Faith, in particular, there's a often repeated claim that, to quote one typical source:
"The plan was for Dushku to guest star in five episodes. After accidentally killing Deputy Mayor Allan Finch [...] in season 3, episode 14, “Bad Girls”—mistaking him for a vampire—she would have committed suicide."
Now, there are some problems here. The article I linked above offers absolutely nothing in way of evidence: it's just one unsupported and uncited assertion after another. It doesn't really seem plausible tonally, either. The idea that a teenage character would have been written out of the show this way seems pretty grim for even the sixth season of the show, let only the third. Would the characters have just shrugged and moved on?
And, crucially, the claim here doesn't really add up. We're told that Faith would have appeared in five episodes, the last of which would have ended with her killing herself in Bad Girls. The strong implication is that the only deviation the writers made to the plan was that Faith doesn't die at the end of Bad Girls; that those first five episodes were always going to end with that episode. But ... uh. Bad Girls is not Faith's fifth episode on the show. It's not even her sixth episode. It's her seventh (Faith, Hope & Trick; Beauty and the Beasts; Homecoming; Revelations; Amends; The Zeppo; Bad Girls). If they did change the plan as described here, they must have done so as early as Amends (which ... in this hypothetical, wouldn't have included Faith originally? or was going to be the episode where she killed Finch and herself?). It just doesn't make sense.
I think what's happening here is that people are conflating a couple of different ideas. It does seem to be true that Eliza Dushku was initially only contracted to appear in a limited number of episodes. In an interview she gave in 1999, she said:
"When I got the role on Buffy, I was only supposed to come on for five to ten episodes[. ... A]s we started doing it, the crew just started seeing some potential to make her a more involved character and keep her on. About halfway through, they told me we're going to plan on making her into the villain"
So, yes, it likely wasn't originally planned that Faith would defect to work for the Mayor or that she'd be around for more than "five to ten" episodes. (Although it's possible the writers did have the idea earlier, but just chose not to let Dushku in on the plan at first, I suppose.). I fully buy that the writers would sign somebody up to play the new Slayer for a few episodes without necessarily knowing how long she'd be around and not wanting to risk committing to more than that in case she turned out not to be a good fit for the show for whatever reason. And, in hindsight, the way Faith is written in the first half of the season gives the writers plenty of scope to write her out if they'd decided she wasn't working: she's only staying in Sunnydale until the Council assign her a real Watcher, after all.
But only being signed up for "five to ten episodes" doesn't in any way imply the "plan" was to kill her off or write her out of the show once her time was up. It just means they hadn't committed to her necessarily being on the show beyond that point. And I think the specific idea that Faith was going to kill herself, either in Bad Girls, or -- as I've also seen claimed -- in Consequences, seems to be a bit of a leap too. Assuming it's not just pure fan speculation (which I honestly think it might be), I can just about imagine somebody throwing it out in an initial writers room discussion as a way they could write Faith out of the show. But I've never seen any evidence to suggest it was more than that (or even as much as that: I have never seen anybody even hint at a source). If somebody did suggest it, I suspect it would have been shot down pretty quickly. It's just pretty clearly not a good idea or a plot twist that would have fit this era of the show. It wouldn't have been very fun to watch!
(3) Xander and Willow
Speaking of things that aren't fun to watch....
I think I'd let myself forget how much of a factor the Willow/Xander cheating subplot is in this episode, which was one of the reasons I didn't enjoy it as much as I was expecting to. As Willow points out, it's the reason they both back Cordelia over Buffy for Homecoming Queen, which is why Cordelia and not Faith is waiting for Buffy in the limo, which is why the rest of the plot unfolds. I've not sat down and counted exactly, but I think there's more screentime devoted to this subplot this episode than there is to either Angel or Faith or Giles.
I think I can see why the writers convinced themselves this would work -- obviously Willow had had a crush on Xander for a long time, and we did get Xander telling Willow he loved her in Becoming (even if I think that was mean to be read platonically), and especially with Cordelia leaving for Angel next year I can see they wanted an excuse to break things up and (as Willow might put it) spin the whole group dynamic out of orbit. And giving Willow and Xander a big secret to parallel Buffy's own secret about Angel also makes a lot of sense.
The problem is that, well. The execution just doesn't work. Yes, Willow had a crush on Xander, but the key word there is had: we've not seen any sign of that since she started dating Oz back in Phases. And yes, Xander can be weirdly possessive of Willow, but (perhaps that Becoming scene aside) he's never seemed interested in her: if anything the friend who isn't his girlfriend he's still pining over is Buffy, not Willow. The whole pace at which things happen just feels too fast: Willow blames the clothes, and it honestly wouldn't be surprising to have found out this was a Him style plot where Xander's tux had turned out to have been cursed by his wealthier relatives. As it is, it just feels fake -- it is too clearly happening because the writers have decided it should, and not because of anything organic and character-driven.
Perhaps most importantly, certainly most fatally, the actors just don't manage to sell it: 'chemistry' is a difficult thing to define, but whatever it is these two don't seem to have any. I actually did mostly buy Willow's crush on Xander back in Seasons 1 and 2 -- during their almost-kiss in When She Was Bad, for example -- so I'm not sure what's changed now. Maybe both actors were as wrong-footed by the script as I was on watching the episode, and didn't have enough time to prepare?
Bizarrely, the old BBC Cult website review of this episode (which aired on terrestrial television in the UK for the first time in May 2000) has this to say:
“The highlight of the episode, and, not coincidentally, the only element of the story that has any lasting resonance, is the kiss between Xander and Willow which revives a storyline that harks back to the groundwork laid out in the series’ earliest episodes.”
Not the strangest thing anybody working for the BBC has ever written, certainly, but arguably up there!
(4) Lyle Gorch; Scott Hope; Holly and Michelle; etc.
Finally, a few thoughts about continuity more generally.
One of my repeated complaints during the first season and a half of the show has been that the show kept introducing new student characters as when the plot required, only to forget about them as soon as the episode was over. That happens again here, with Holly and Michelle -- I think Michelle would've made a little more sense if her role was taken up by Harmony, personally -- but at the same time the show has also clearly moved into a much more serialized era than either of the first two seasons.
We have a much larger pool of recurring characters now than we've had for a while. We get the last on-screen appearance of Scott Hope, another appearance of pre-evil Jonathan (this time here to teach us about the horrors of inflation: apparently in Sunnydale 1998 six dollars buys "a whole lotta cupcakes") and Oz's bandmate Devon (up on stage announcing the Homecoming Queen). And we get callbacks throughout the episode to recent events from other episodes: zombies attacking Buffy's welcome home party a few weeks ago; The world of Sunnydale High feels a lot more persistent than it has done for a while, which just makes the decision to make both the other challengers for Homecoming Queen one-offs all the more baffling.
And on the evil side, this episode sees the return of Mr Trick (who we might reasonably assume had left town after Kakistos died until this week). It also sees the (slightly odd) return of Lyle Gorch (who becomes the second of just seven vampires to appear in more than one season of the show¹). Apparently (although I can't remember where I read it), the original idea for this episode was that Cain, the werewolf hunter from Season 2, would also be returning (the character who replaces him is very suspiciously similar in look), and I think that would have made Lyle's return seems a little less confusing.
Deputy Mayor Allan Finch, who we first meet this episode, will of course also go on to be a returning character. For a few episodes, anyway.
Other small thoughts, more or less in chronological order:
The smash cut from Buffy telling Angel that she's found a boyfriend she can count on to Scott breaking up with her is diabolical. I bet he lied about voting for her as Homecoming Queen too.
I like the yearbook photo gags (Willow's initial confidence melting away into a worried frown which ends up being the picture; Oz remaining expressionless throughout). Not hugely original, but fun.
Speaking of which: pretty selfish of Willow to not tell Buffy about the yearbook photos because she's too focused on pursuing her dream of becoming Homecoming Queen. Buffy's real best friend Cordelia would never ... oh, right. Never mind.
The show itself never really goes anywhere with the metaphorical reading, but the fact that the politician who governs Sunnydale is the head of a conspiracy to keep the existence of demons and vampires in general and his personal specific links to them secret from the whole town is also obsessed with the idea of clean hands seems deliberate.
This is, I think, the only mention of Xander's Cousin Rigby, who apparently from the only part of the Harris's extended family to have any money ("and they shun us, as they should"). Did he get invited to the wedding in Season 6?
The fact Xander is at pains to tell Willow (and therefore us) that he would never cheat on his girlfriend with his best friend, because he respects Willow and Oz too much is ... well, it's certainly a character beat.
It's sad for Buffy that her favorite teacher doesn't remember her, but if it's any consolation she can't have been a great teacher if she hasn't mastered the art of pretending you recognize students who come up and start talking to you as if you should know who they are. There are ways to be diplomatic about that sort of thing!
Mr Trick's speech about "competition" here is meant to be the glue that links the Homecoming Queen contest with SlayerFest 98, but it doesn't really work for me. Mainly because the 'competitive' element of SlayerFest is just really underdeveloped? Who are these people, and why do think hunting a pair of vampire Slayers is anything other than a terrible idea?
Another line from the shooting script that didn't make it to air: originally, Buffy was going to respond to Jonathan bringing up Cordelia giving him "six bucks" to vote for her by cheerfully suggesting that he votes for her and in exchange she refrains from "beating the living crap out of you". I get why they cut that, sure.
Faith got dressed up for her definitely-not-a-date with Buffy!
This episode is one of a handful of examples of Buffy being quite happy to use a gun, in a way that a lot of the fandom likes to pretend she never does.
Mentioned it briefly above, but I think Buffy's speech to Cordelia about why she decided to run for Homecoming Queen ("... besides, I look cute in a tiara") is why I always remember this episode as being better than I think it actually is. It's very good and SMG delivers it really well.
Always fun to see another example of Giles being knocked out, but I'm not sure what the Gorchs' justification for not just killing him outright is meant to be. The shooting script has a reference to them wanting to get "information" out of him, but (1) he's unconscious and (2) I'm not sure what information they might possible need. Feels like it would have been a lot simpler to just leave Giles at the party with everyone else, right?
... so, what happened to the old German man, anyway?
"Long story ... apparently not that long." This is the same bit we saw in Faith, Hope & Trick. Were the writers trying to establish it as a running joke?
"After everything we've been through, this whole who-gets-to-be-Queen-capade seems pretty ..." "Damn important?" "Yeah." This is a fun scene! I've seen some people complain it's "too obvious" a twist for neither Buffy nor Cordelia to win, but I don't really agree. And however obvious it is, it feels like it's the only way the episode could have ended (Buffy and Cordelia being joint winners would be painfully sappy, and I don't think either winning is really plausible anyway).
Those other six vampires are, unless I'm missing somebody: the Master (who we met in Season 1 and will briefly return later this season); Angel (who has appeared in every season of the show so far); Spike (who we met in Season 2 and will be back for one episode this season before joining the main cast in Season 4); Drusilla (who appeared with Spike last season and will be back for one episode in Season 5); Harmony (who we met as a human in Season 1, but will be back as a vampire in Seasons 4 and 5) and (most nebulously) Sandy (who we see as a human in Season 3's Doppelgangland and then as a vampire in Season 5).
Something like this would be so colossally helpful. I'm sick and tired of trying to research specific clothing from any given culture and being met with either racist stereotypical costumes worn by yt people or ai generated garbage nonsense, and trying to be hyper specific with searches yields fuck all. Like I generally just cannot trust the legitimacy of most search results at this point. It's extremely frustrating. If there are good resources for this then they're buried deep under all the other bullshit, and idk where to start looking.
another addition as far as physical media goes there is the encyclopedia of national dress (that i still need to buy myself bc this kind of thing is super important to my sort of fantasy designing) but yes i do agree i wish there was EVEN MORE documentation on this
A fun bonus fact for you: those No Longer Buyable DVDs?
They're the ONLY surviving NONDAMAGED form of the show. In the late 90s, the masters from which the show is printed were damaged with a red-pink hazy filter.
So. Good luck buying them even if you find them. They're some of the most valuable collector's items in the entire franchise.
Without piracy, there would be NO UNDAMAGED COPIES OF SAILOR MOON AVAILABLE TO ANYONE ANYWHERE, PERIOD.
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Once on IMDB I saw a “goof” which was that during a scene set in India(?), the light flicker was at the wrong frequency (in hertz). I wish I knew what movie it was to show you guys, I want to say it was some Marvel shit.
I always wondered how this person knew that. Was there an amazing Indian electrician who just instinctively felt the flicker rate was off? Did they go frame by frame and count the flickers per second?
i'll be so real with you chief the only supergirl i give a shit about was 1/2 ooze, 1/2 murdered teen, and 100% peter david working through protestant trauma. mark waid's holy war to make the dc canon workable can't ignore matrix and linda danvers forever. destiny is coming for you old man and it looks like the earth-born angel of fire
you dont have to be a parent to understand the horror of walking into a room to discover that the baby crawled out of his crib and onto that pottery wheel you forgot to turn off, and while the baby is spinning around and around, the dog is sitting there all calm, like a person, gently using his paws to fashion the babys soft cartilage head into something a little more modern. it might be the classic tale of bad parenting, but lets see where the dog is going with this
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