299: A Wasted Opportunity

Still can't figure out why I love
Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

Can’t.  Stop.  Re.  Watching.  Old.  Buffy.  D.  V.  Ds.  It’s.  Season.  Four.  Buffy.  Fueds.  With.  The.  Initiative.  Spike.  Has.  Chip.  In.  Head.  And.  Battles.  Demons.  I.  Can’t.  Stop.  Watching...

It’s just not healthy.  I’ve seen it all already.  This is what a lack of internet does to people.  Only two days with no super-duper fibre optic connection to the larger world out there, and I’ve resorted back to old pre-industrial habits.  Scrambled eggs all over my face, what is a boy to do?  Good night, Seattle, we love you.  Good night Sunnydale, time to go patrolling.  (Get a grip Kevin, cold-turkeying from internet withdrawal is so unbecoming of a fellow.)

I can’t let my mind and my browser wander all around the world; I can’t automatically generate pointless concerns to distract me; I can’t spotify or Last.fm or YouTube or twitter or Facebook.  I can’t use google images, Wikipedia, or make all sorts of pointless links.  What can I do other than formulate a finer, more concise blog post than I usually would?  Nothing, and yet I seem to be wasting this golden opportunity by climbing up inside my own arse.

Successful writers are often asked to produce 10-point guides to better writing, and one tip given as much as any other is don’t write on a computer connected to the internet. On the surface this seems like a good idea.  It immediately removes a million worlds worth of distractions from within fingertip reach.  And yet here I am – offline – and entirely unable to do anything worthwhile.  I feel like crying.  Oh, I’ll cry and type my only-human passion and rage onto the page.  Boohoo.

See, what’s going on is this:  right, Buffy has been getting on pretty well with Riley, and also quite likes her sociology or psychology or whatever lecturer (she is a co-ed college student now, having graduated high school in Season 3).  Willow is no longer with the werewolf geek, but is getting along nicely with Tara, a fellow witchcraft enthusiast.  Zander is at going from job to job and is living in his mom’s basement, but he is doing the sex with Anya, a former vengeance demon.  Finally Giles is at a loose end; he lost his job as a librarian when the apocalypse happened at Sunnydale High and is no longer Buffy’s official watcher, as a result they have written in a pointless character for him to play with; if only he had something cool to do, like run a magic shop.

Meanwhile Buffy becomes aware of a secretive military organisation operating from a top-secret underground bunker.  They are capturing and experimenting on demons of all kind for some nefarious purpose.  One such demon is old favourite Spike, aka William the Bloody.  He has had a chip implanted in his skull which gives him incapacitating pains whenever he tries to attack a human.  When he discovers he can still attack other demons he goes on a rampage. 

Turns out that Riley is one of the army dudes and the sociology professor is head of the army dudes, and the nerd scientists too.  She is involved in some sort of crazy project to create a Frankenstein’s monster out of human, demon, and mechanical parts.  She calls her project Adam and tries to kill Buffy.  Riley can’t cope and runs off.  He then gets ill and it turns out he was being fed some crazy chemical to make him a better soldier; now he has got the cold turkey.  Adam wakes up, kills the professor, then calls her mommy; roll credits... grr, argh.

If I had the internet I could be doing something more productive.  Like illegally downloading and watching epic American serials I haven’t already seen.