They were too suspicious of Glory to suspect one-time (I think) date guy.
They talked before the date (when they were making her spin around to check out the dress), and they talked right after the date, but I don’t think she’d seen him a second time before he sent her flowers, which was the very beginning of The Body.
EDIT: That whole plotline is start-to-finish in one episode…which actually kinda lends credence to your theory, lol. Joyce and Brian’s first (and only) date and Buffy finding Joyce dead all took place in I Was Made To Love You.
If Joyce hadn’t recently had surgery for her brain tumor, maybe they’d think Brian was a suspect, but she did and the doctors determined that was the cause and they had a god around fucking things up, so it made sense to me that Brian was never brought up again. He wasn’t a creepy guy like Ted. He was a guy she went out to dinner with once who sent flowers the next day. I’d think they’d suspect the flower delivery person more than the guy who sent the flowers, but again that becomes a non-issue when you have the doctors saying it was a blood clot caused by complications from surgery. It’s one of the main, subtle points of the episode: there’s no one to blame. There’s no one to fight over it. There’s no way to make it better. It just happened and it sucked.
Doesn’t the episode end with Buffy beating on some monster? She WANTS someone or something to blame, and she has never trusted to a cause of death before, this is why I find her non-suspicion odd. Your argument is logical, but it doesn’t seem in keeping with the series or her approach previously.
Joss has stated in interviews that she fights the vampire at the end (a move that some people thought ruined the episode) to show that life goes on. Just because something terrible happened doesn’t mean Buffy gets a day off. She’s not beating on the thing because she’s upset, she’s killing it because that’s her job. She’s in shock throughout most of the episode. Her mother just died. She now has a teenager sister to take care of and there’s a crazy god out there that’s looking to kill her and her sister and the entire world in general. She’s got bigger things to worry about than “I should probably go interview this Brian guy to see if he had any blood clot forming death powers that he would use on my mom.”
It would have been a dead end and it’s part of growing up for Buffy to realize she can’t save everyone. Not even her mom. In a world full of evil that causes terrible things to happen, sometimes terrible things just happen without someone doing them.
Hell, I just watched it last week (on my first run through Buffy/Angel and watching them in the proper order!) and holy shit, that was the roughest tv episode I’ve seen since DS9’s “The Visitor”.
I just watched it last night, and yeah, totally cried like a little girl. Must’ve been in a weird mood, as I felt like watching the West Wing episode “Noel” in which I also cried. ;)
So I finished Buffy season 5 this weekend, and wow… honestly, the show could have ended with that season finale. It was a finale befitting a series finale (and IIRC, at the time they did that knowing that it may be the end of the show, right?). Easily the best finale of the series so far, and better than the first two season finales of Angel.
As I recall, you’re correct…they didn’t know if they were going to get picked up for a season 6 when they filmed that. Or even when it aired, I believe. And yeah, it was an outstanding note for the season to end on, and would’ve been a great place to end the show, had it not gotten a 6.
I always liked knowing that Joss felt that would’ve been a suitable ending if he didn’t get another season.
Lotta people think that the show should’ve, in fact, ended there, and 6 and 7 aren’t exactly popular, but I think 6 has some great, great moments. And the best episode ever made, in Once More With Feeling.
Acknowledged. It’s my personal favorite, but I’ll grant you that it may not be objectively BETTER than Hush or The Body. I could almost argue your point about Passion, though, but I won’t. :-)
OMWF is better than Hush, I think. They’re both doing slightly gimmicky things, but Hush is really just an episode all about the gimmick, whereas OMWF ends up transcending the gimmick and being the linchpin episode of the season, where all sorts of revelations and decisions are made. Plus, the part where Joss wrote and composed all those songs makes it doubly amazing.
