the wildfeed summary of tomorrow’s buffy looks really good. homage to terminator, references to wonder woman storylines, and even that mel gibson movie, signs.

but spike is still in the first’s clutches and the principal’s getting stranger. oh, dear…

so there was this scholarly conference in england a few months back that mainly dealt with the philosophical/gender/wiccan/what have you aspects of buffy the vampire slayer. big yay. who really cares if you can apply foucault’s requirements of the exercise of freedom to spike’s decision to seek a soul? not me.

but then i came across this on the web, from stanford phd candidate brian thomas. a discussion of vampire population dynamics. finally, a buffy-related scholarly work that’s actually interesting.

The following graph shows human population sizes on the horizontal axis and vampire population sizes on the vertical axis. Each line represents a trajectory through time, and any point on a line represents a combination of human and vampire population sizes – a step, if you will, in that beautiful dance between Buffy and the Minions of Evil.

(click that link to see the graph)

john brought this to my attention this afternoon:

“older and far away,” buffy 6.14, is a total homage (or some would say “ripoff”) of buñuel’s 1962 classic, “el ángel exterminador.”

of course, he wasn’t quite that specific about the film or episode titles, but i figured it out. which isn’t nearly as cool as the fact that he had joss for a TA in his college film class — and el ángel exterminador was one of the prof’s favorite films.

the world continues to shrink.

yesterday the parents television council rated buffy the vampire slayer the “worst show in prime-time” due to graphic violence, sex, and the occult. (oddly, they ranked sabrina the teenage witch as one of the best shows for families. witchy disconnect much?)

congratulations, buffy!