Okay. What a fun way to start the morning. I got wind of this news a couple of days ago and have been digging for more info and trying to form a response. Here goes nothing...
There was a post at the Bronze Beta that would appear to cover the same ground that Michelle has given us. It goes into some details about what Michelle refers to as "a lot of devastating storylines out in the open." Here it is:
quote:
Spike screws anya (drunk) , xander comes in to apologize, sees them
anya goes vengence demon and goes rip****
xander finds out about buffy and spike
xander goes rip****
Spike goes to get his chip out and goes rip****
Tara is shot in willows room after they have post makeup sex by warren. Willow finds her body and goes rip****Willow kills warren and then
buffy goes rip****
Anyone still want to watch this?
3 evil scoobs, all the ships broken for good.
Tara dead for no good reason...
Buffy wounded
xander ******
So much for a light ep..
Now then, I have two rays of hope to offer:
Possibility #1 - The spoilers are fake.
No, I'm not suggesting that Michelle is lying to us. I know her well enough to know she doesn't do that. She's presenting her information in good faith. What I am suggesting is that her source material is bogus, a phony write-up concocted by the folks at Mutant Enemy to hide the real storyline and to smoke out leaks.
Why do I think that? Simple. What we see here is way over the top. It's senseless. It looks like all the Buffy writers got together and said, "Okay, what can we do to alienate every single viewer we have?" All you need is Dawn selling crack out of the back room at the Magic Box and the tableau would be complete.
Consider the case of Willow and Tara, which is after all the most important element of all this - to us, anyway:
Dead Tara
There's no good reason to kill off Tara. Yes, Joss Whedon is cruel and likes to put his characters through pain - but he always plays fair. Pain is always the natural result of the characters' actions. It's never inflicted randomly. The only reason to kill off Tara would be to punish Willow. But punish her for what? Her addiction? She's already been punished for that. She's already been working her way back. Is this her reward? Take away the person she'd been hoping to win again just at the moment she wins her? That's not Joss's style.
Also, killing Tara would be a betrayal of everything Joss has said about the Willow/Tara relationship over the past two years. It would be a betrayal of all the people he's said he's so proud to have affected in that time. It would contradict everything that everyone at Mutant Enemy has been saying for the entire season.
In other words, it makes no sense.
Willow kills Warren
This is wrong for many reasons.
First, it completely invalidates the nerd-trio arc that's been going on all year. "Gee, it only took Willow five minutes to kill Warren. He must not have been that tough. Why didn't she do it in Episode 5 and then we could have had a real Big Bad all year?"
Second, it completely invalidates Willow's story arc that's been going on all year. Whipping out the dark magics and going after payback is exactly what Willow did a year ago in "Tough Love." Has she not changed at all? Has she learned nothing?
Third, all this is supposed to happen in Episode 20. What are they going to do for the final two episodes? Take on Willow as the Big Bad? What happens to Alyson Hannigan's contract for next year? Willow becomes a villain and a murderer - she can't exactly go back to the Scooby Gang, can she? Yeah, yeah, I know... "It's a cliffhanger and Willow comes back as the Big Bad of Season 7." Not likely...
We know that Joss & co. have put out fake spoilers in the past. "Accidentally" leaking false information is something done in business all the time. It's how you find the leaks and plug them. Given the talent that the Buffy writing staff has, it wouldn't take more than a couple of days for them to put an entire fake script together, if that's what they wanted to do.
I realize I have no proof for anything I'm saying. I'm going entirely on my writer's instincts here, and I very well could be wrong. But my gut instinct is that this information isn't real.
And if it is, there's still...
Possibility #2 - It's real, but they take it back.
How? Simple. Anya's a vengeance demon. In other words, she's a Walking Reset Button. All someone has to do is say, "I wish this had never happened," and blammo! Everything's better. There's also the possibility that Willow could turn back time. She's joked about being able to do it in the past.
Either of these options would be really bad, though. It's the stuff of bad fanfic and Star Trek episodes. I suppose it could be made very dramatic and sacrificial and stuff, but it would still look really lame.
Then there's the possibility that it's all true and they won't take it back, in which case they'll have to work really hard to keep me as an audience member. This is betrayal, pure and simple, of everything Buffy has been about for the past 5+ years. This season has been difficult enough already, and an episode like this would pretty much convince me to walk away.
Before that happens, though, we need to keep digging. Let's find out for sure what's going to happen. If nothing else, it'll help us prepare better.
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Remember the Kitten Board Mantra: "Joss is nuts about Tara, Willow/Tara and Amber!"
(...and Marti's rather fond of them, too...)
