Time of Your Life
OK, where to start? I had a lot of fun revisiting this arc. I don't remember my thoughts about it the first time, but having not read Fray, I know I definitely didn't get it then (though I do remember doing a lot of googling to understand the basics). And I still don't get it now, really! Too many unanswered questions.
It's such a treat to get Joss-written scripts, though. I wish so much he was actually writing Season 12. Christos is serviceable as a writer but lacks that Jossian flair. I thought it was funny that I had a much easier time following the Fray-era dialogue than the dialogue in the Giles mini, which is self-consciously witty but feels so crowded and heavy that it should be sinking right out of the speech balloons.
Time travel stories are so hard to make sense of! I still have zero clue how Joss and Christos can tie together the two worlds again (and explain Future Dark Willow) without a cataclysmic ending to the Buffyverse (as it seems we won't get, based on Dark Horse's promises that the Buffy comics will continue outside of the season format).
Some of the elements that stood out to me as I watched/read:
But, Willow continues, it's deadlocked spatially. So unless Xander and Dawn moved to Manhattan from SF, then it's unlikely it'll be the same temporal event that causes the problems in Season 12. It's also interesting that the promos have said that Buffy will be caught in a time warp, which is, I think, different from this anomaly. Based on what's said in the issue and some analyses I've read, it seems pretty likely that the temporal anomaly that's deadlocked at the building at 53rd and Lex is caused by Buffy killing Future Dark Willow, though, so it seems possible that we will revisit it in some form.
It's made clear in the arc that FDW could be lying to Harth here, because:
But, since the Fray world *didn't* end when Buffy went back through the portal, it's possible that FDW was lying to Mel, not Harth. Buffy seeing the Frayverse could be what makes it happen, and we just don't know why yet. Or Buffy could have still messed up the Fray timeline somehow and we just don't know it yet. Maybe one of the precipitating events of Harth's return to the past in Season 12 will be wanting to re-establish his world as the future of Buffy's world instead of being in what is now an alternate universe/timeline. Or, maybe the Frayverse can't happen without Harth coming back to Buffy's time and he only knows how to find her because Future Dark Willow brought her into the future to begin with, or something.
It would be interesting if Urkonn and the Fray-era sources have been wrong about what caused the end of magic in (presumably) Buffy's time. Maybe Buffy destroying the seed was conflated with this upcoming demon battle, and it's actually an entirely different explanation. I'm on board with the theory out there that Gates the spider-monkey demon is named after Giles, and the "Battle of Starbucks" at which he sacrificed himself is the Twilight battle, so I think there's at least some possible evidence of the two being conflated.
Also, unless someone tells me it's been directly contradicted, I'm going to assume that Buffy is actually talking about Twilight as the one that's "too ridiculous to comprehend" here, since a) c'mon, that's always the true one, and b) I personally cannot comprehend it, either.
I've only read each of the comics seasons once, so I could be majorly forgetting other clues or misinterpreting stuff, so please clue me in if I'm clueless.
I can't wait to find out why Dark Willow is so sad...
I loved getting to see the bigger cast of Season 8 again as well -- Vi especially. Also, sue me, but I love Centaur Dawn and the Xander/Dawn banter. I also liked Erin and Buffy's big-sister bonding.
