‘Verse-y author/editor Vickie Willis Navarra returns at long last (my bad, sorry) to try and help me over my growing Season 7 apathy as we begin our slow, tortured crawl to the finish line. Episode 710, “Bring On the Night” is the first appearance of Kennedy and the final appearance of Joyce. So yeah. It’s also the beginning of the interminable Buffy Speechifying(™). Sooo...yeeeeeeeah. And in 711, “Showtime,” Buffy welcomes Potential Slayer Rona to the Hellmouth, we get some charmingly awful rubber monster practical effects, and I defend the cool (and previously established) Willow-telepathically-links-the-Scoobies trick.

BONUS: I begin in earnest to dunk on The First as the most ridiculously inconsistent and ineffectual Big Bad of the entire series. Good times.

Next: author and Philosophy Professor James Rocha returns to help me make sense of episodes 712, “Potential,” 713, “The Killer In Me,” and 714, “First Date.”

THE BREAKDOWN

Run Time: 01:44:09

00:00:55  -  Intro / Guest

00:10:04  -  Main Topic

01:38:45  -  Outro / Next

THE LIBRARY

Reading Joss Whedon (Television and Popular Culture), edited by Rhonda V. Wilcox, Tanya R. Cochran, Cynthea Masson, and David Lavery

At Home in the Whedonverse: Essays on Domestic Place, Space and Life, edited by Juliette C. Kitchens

Geek Rock: An Exploration of Music and Subculture, edited by Alex DiBlasi and Victoria Willis

Routledge Companion to Popular Music and Humor, edited by Thomas M. Kitts and Nick Baxter-Moore

THE MUSIC

“Conversations (feat. Wesley Mead)” by Azura (2017)

“Bring On the Night” by The Police, The Police (1979)