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Big Bad Benevolent Boss.
One of the Buffy podcasts I follow, Buffering the Vampire Slayer, just started covering season four. And it's really making me think: Sunnydale only really started going off the rails after season three.
Not the show itself - it did as well as it could with what it had, a piece of ongoing serialized media balancing being a piece of art and a marketable commodity that almost never knew if it'd be renewed for another year or not. I mean Sunnydale as a town. As a fictional location that served as the setting for the narrative. Within that narrative, its stability began cracking after the death of the Mayor. Because that guy was a great and wonderful villain who had the strengths of unfettered ambition and personnel management. He knew what happened in his town, and I'm not saying it was a good place to live by any means. I'm saying he knew how to run the place to make sure it stayed around.
Stability. Organization. Management.
I cite the Initiative as proof of this. Canon-wielding it onto the existing world isn't hard: recruiting Marcy from "Out of Mind, Out of Sight" into the shady government organization, the army base where they stole the rocket launcher, and the fact that no one as civic-minded as the Mayor would've let a giant underground base get built in his town without him knowing about it. Before Maggie Walsh set up shop, it didn't seem to have much focus on capturing, killing, and experimentation. Just on existing as a military force that knew demons existed and how to fight them. After the Mayor's death, the Initiative probably looked at the power vacuum above them and began working on the stuff they'd always wanted to pursue but never got approval for. Hence the capturing and experimenting, and the whole Adam plotline. Nobody was saying "no" to the crazy ideas anymore.
(Momentary digression: please imagine the Mayor touring the Initiative facilities and clapping with glee over the idea of putting giant murals of monumental American public works projects on every wall. Hoover Dam over here, part of the Interstate Highway System over there, the greatest hits of the National Park Service all along this one corridor...)
The Trio from season six would've been recruited within minutes of breaking out onto the scene. Glory, exiled Hellgod, versus Pure Giant Snake Demon would've been a battle for the comic book pages because early 2000s CGI would've just been sad - and it would've happened because he'd have known she was around and he wouldn't want his town sucked into the nothingness between worlds.
Like I said, Buffy was a piece of ongoing serialized media that was making itself up as it went along, and did a pretty good job of it. Some of the stuff it did was planned out years in advance, and sometimes it scrambled to keep going on a week-to-week basis. And every so often, things lined up in such a way as to make it appear like that was the idea all along. Which itself is something that you can only get in this sort of work, and that's to be celebrated.
Not the show itself - it did as well as it could with what it had, a piece of ongoing serialized media balancing being a piece of art and a marketable commodity that almost never knew if it'd be renewed for another year or not. I mean Sunnydale as a town. As a fictional location that served as the setting for the narrative. Within that narrative, its stability began cracking after the death of the Mayor. Because that guy was a great and wonderful villain who had the strengths of unfettered ambition and personnel management. He knew what happened in his town, and I'm not saying it was a good place to live by any means. I'm saying he knew how to run the place to make sure it stayed around.
Stability. Organization. Management.
I cite the Initiative as proof of this. Canon-wielding it onto the existing world isn't hard: recruiting Marcy from "Out of Mind, Out of Sight" into the shady government organization, the army base where they stole the rocket launcher, and the fact that no one as civic-minded as the Mayor would've let a giant underground base get built in his town without him knowing about it. Before Maggie Walsh set up shop, it didn't seem to have much focus on capturing, killing, and experimentation. Just on existing as a military force that knew demons existed and how to fight them. After the Mayor's death, the Initiative probably looked at the power vacuum above them and began working on the stuff they'd always wanted to pursue but never got approval for. Hence the capturing and experimenting, and the whole Adam plotline. Nobody was saying "no" to the crazy ideas anymore.
(Momentary digression: please imagine the Mayor touring the Initiative facilities and clapping with glee over the idea of putting giant murals of monumental American public works projects on every wall. Hoover Dam over here, part of the Interstate Highway System over there, the greatest hits of the National Park Service all along this one corridor...)
The Trio from season six would've been recruited within minutes of breaking out onto the scene. Glory, exiled Hellgod, versus Pure Giant Snake Demon would've been a battle for the comic book pages because early 2000s CGI would've just been sad - and it would've happened because he'd have known she was around and he wouldn't want his town sucked into the nothingness between worlds.
Like I said, Buffy was a piece of ongoing serialized media that was making itself up as it went along, and did a pretty good job of it. Some of the stuff it did was planned out years in advance, and sometimes it scrambled to keep going on a week-to-week basis. And every so often, things lined up in such a way as to make it appear like that was the idea all along. Which itself is something that you can only get in this sort of work, and that's to be celebrated.