At time of writing, this is freely available from the Hagerty Drivers Foundation channel on YouTube: https://youtu.be/fgOb22gz_TY
The continental breakfast and crazy clown sketches were the best.
Average episode rating for this season: 7.181818…
There are a lot of great episodes in this season. A number of not-so-great ones, too, but I found that the average was good enough that it kept me wanting to continue watching. (And the only reason I had a big gap between episodes 20 and 21-22 was because I wanted to make sure I could watch both parts of the season finale in one sitting.)
From the following century, "Whistler" looks kinda like Mark Zuckerberg. Anyone else see it?
And speaking of seeing, the establishing shot of Los Angeles sure looks like the town square of Hill Valley (Back to the Future).
Meanwhile Richard Riehle will look awfully familiar to any other Star Trek: Voyager fans—but kudos if you know who he is without looking it up (I had to; he played Seamus Driscol in two "Fair Haven" episodes).
Who doesn't put ketchup on it?
Ketchup on a hot dog? I dare Sakurai to visit Chicago!
While it suffers from having to follow a stellar episode like "Passion", this episode isn't bad. We get some worldbuilding in the form of Buffy's cousin, plus a bit of badass Xander and a moment of Clever Cordy when she teases Xander about watching Buffy's butt.
Listening to David Boreanaz speak in vampire mode gives me a good idea just how much of Armin Shimerman's vocal affect (and all the other Ferengi on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, really) must have come from the mouth prosthetics, rather than conscious choices to make the characters speak a certain way. Those fake teeth really change one's speech!
The doctor who tells the Scoobies they can't follow Buffy any further into the hospital (Juanita Jennings) has been in so many other one-off roles, from Sister, Sister and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to Frasier and beyond.
Plus, seeing Willie Garson in anything these days is a bittersweet treat after his passing just three months ago. This episode of Buffy aired just a few months before his guest role on Star Trek: Voyager (5x09 "Thirty Days"), and I was just recovering from repeatedly seeing him in Stargate SG-1 too.
And speaking of Voyager, our friend Dr. Backer is played by none other than Admiral Owen Paris himself, Richard Herd. He and Garson were both on the show after this, so I'm sure it's just coincidence that the first demon Giles describes to Cordelia "extracts vital organs to replenish its own mutating cells" and not a reference to the Vidiians.
"No one can love two people at once." Ooooh, very '90s attitude.
If only Xander wasn't such a fool, he might have noticed the convenient deadbolt lock on the library door. That might have worked better for keeping Buffy, Amy, etc. out than pushing furniture around. And maybe he would have realized that Buffy's mom is also a woman and thus would have been affected by the spell, and thought of a better hiding place.
Character growth for Cordelia is good. Affirmation of Xander's character is also good—better if it hadn't come as a result of doing something very stupid and selfish in opposition to his core, decent, self, but still.
Let's just try not to take this episode too seriously. If one looks too hard past the silly fun, there are some problematic elements that could ruin one's enjoyment of the absurd chaos.
I probably would have just rolled with it if I'd watched the show as it was airing, because I would have been a literal child of six years. But from the perspective of an adult, Angel x Buffy is a very uncomfortable relationship. Angel has no business sniffing around a teenager literally a quarter of a millennium his junior. That's a massive imbalance of maturity.
I didn't realize androids were fair game for a "supernatural horror" show. Nice foreshadowing in dialogue throughout the episode, though. Coworkers at the office referring to Ted as "the Machine" was a great touch.
John Ritter was an unexpected guest star, and boy did he look different. The decade-ish that had passed since Three's Company ended seemed to weigh heavily on the poor guy.
You know, Giles, you don't have to sit right next to the boom box.
The "acne cream" zinger directed at Xander would work better if Nicholas Brendon's skin wasn't so clear.
At the time it aired, this would have been a real eye-opener. We have that minimum-payment disclosure on credit card bills now, but the card industry certainly still vastly prefers "revolvers" to "deadbeats" like me.
Average season rating: 7.625
I don't know what to say that I haven't already said in the comments for individual seasons. Brooklyn Nine-Nine got into a bit of a slump near the end, as many sitcoms do. Perhaps it would have been better to delay production after scrapping the first four scripts of that final season in June 2021 instead of rushing ahead to release in August, but I can understand not wanting to push back what would be the show's final batch of episodes. Ultimately, I think the rush only affected the first few aired scripts, and the series still managed to end on a high note.
Average episode rating this season, counting the finale as a whole (total 9 episodes): 7.1111…
Average episode rating this season, counting the finale as two parts (total 10 episodes): 7.2
Pandemic production was not kind to this show. This final season felt rushed, and the writers seemed to struggle with fitting in references to current issues—issues that no doubt would have caused an outcry among viewers if ignored, but the abrupt shift in tone didn't help a fairly unfunny season premiere.
The season's latter half saw the show find its stride again, just in time to be cut short like Pappy Boyle's hand.
"Please, I would never do something that childish, and you would know that if you weren't such a big stinky dumb-dumb who smelled like butts." This is modern poetry, huh? :joy_cat:
Also, this is the kind of blend the season premiere should have been able to achieve between addressing the zeitgeist of anti-police sentiment and hanging on to its comedic heart. I daresay they rushed production a bit, perhaps.
Boyle doesn't have an earpiece in either ear when Jake is feeding him interrogation lines, Cyrano style.
"This is a very frustrating conversation."
Others have already said pieces of this in older comments, but I'm still going to stitch together the parts that hit me while watching.
First and foremost, this felt like a "we have to talk about it" episode, to the point of looking like virtue signaling on the network's part. Yes, I realize that ignoring the events of the preceding year would have upset (some) viewers. But ironically, It felt like the episode did what it portrayed Boyle as doing, making a big deal of showing how much it cares about the issues while the characters who should have had the most to say about the topic (Holt and Jeffords) were sidelined to "B" plots with no connection to them.
And underneath all of that, there was the implication of both Rosa and Hitchcock dropping off the main cast. Looking ahead to the credits for future episodes in the season, I can see that both of them appear to remain involved, but I have no idea how. If Hitchcock stays in Brazil and we only see him on Scully's tablet, that's a big change. If Rosa isn't working at the precinct any more and we only see her out in the world, that's a big change too. I'm not a fan of big changes like that near the end of a series… certainly not after what happened to Stargate SG-1.
I guess you could say this season opener disappointed me. Brooklyn Nine-Nine has shown in the past that it can tackle serious subject matter without losing its spark of humor, but it failed to hit that mark this time.
Average episode rating for this season: 7.07692308
Average episode rating for this season: 7.3888888…
Gina should not have come back for that lame guest appearance after she left the show. Not the only flop of the season in my book, but it certainly was the top flop.
Great except for the B-plot about personal-item clutter in the precinct. In any believable universe, everyone would have been asked simply to take home their excess belongings, rather than being forced to throw away or incinerate them at the office.
Bye Felicia, and good riddance.
Full of predictable tropes, but I thought it was very well executed.
Average episode rating for this season: 7.5909090…
Another astonishingly consistent season, which was apparently slated to be the last? It's good that NBC saved this show from cancelation. Only a monster would cancel a show after such a great season.
Envious of that triple-monitor setup. I haven't gotten a third to match my existing pair yet.
Now that's what I call a strong first episode.
If the whole series is just variations on this, it'll be just the kind of cuteness overload most of us probably need these days.
Well, almost half a season's break from Gina was nice while it lasted.
Really want to give the warden all the crap for saying "flaunt" instead of "flout". :upside_down:
Average episode rating for this season: 7.6818181…
The most astonishingly consistent sitcom season I can recall watching.
Ended up overusing the "ya just drank cement" bit, but otherwise solid.
Turns out the day when "there won’t be room for naughty men like us to slip about at all" came. (Really fun seeing "Malcolm Reynolds" in this. Shiny, cap'n!)
2021-01-01T00:00:00Z2021-12-31T23:59:59Z