I’ve just started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a 19-year-old show I never saw before. I’m 8 episodes in and it’s already getting annoying how there is no accumulated history in that Smallville/Murder, She Wrote/X-Files way. The death toll for this small school is already catastrophic, the principal has been eaten, one girl had her mouth disappear due to witchcraft, but by the end of the episode no one has any trauma and next week it’s all forgotten. No funerals, no memorials, not even a follow-up about how those four hyena-infected kids feel about eating a human being. Class sizes and bell curves aren’t affected by the number of dead kids. No grieving families of these murdered teens are ever shown.
Like I pointed out above, it’s not unusual in episodic television, and it’s the kind of thing that probably looks far worse when binge-watching. What I don’t get is: WHO WRITES THIS STUFF AND WHY? Why does Joss Whedon write the show this way and not expect the audience to react as I do?
Of course, I found the sheer number of people who managed to visit Gilligan’s Island, escape the island and not get the castaways rescued annoying as well when I was six years old.