Buffy the Vampire Slayer-Season 7 Box Set Part 1 (2002)

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General		Extras
Category	Vampire	Main Menu Introduction Menu Audio Audio Commentary-Lessons, Selfless, Conversations With Dead People Trailer-Buffy Seasons 2-6, Angel Seasons 1-3, Buffy Game Trailer-Buffy Themed DVD Trailer, Buffy/Angel Great DVD's Trailer Trailer-Buffy The Vampire Slayer Movie Featurette-Buffy: It's Always Been About The Fans
Rating
Year Of Production	2002
Running Time	448:47 (Case: 495)
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Layered Multi Disc Set (3)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	David Solomon Michael Gershman Nick Marck James A. Contner
Studio Distributor	Twentieth Century Fox	Starring	Sarah Michelle Gellar Nicholas Brendon Alyson Hannigan Emma Caulfield Michelle Trachtenberg James Marsters Anthony Stewart Head
Case	PUSH-27
RPI	$80.95	Music	Robert Duncan Douglas Romayne

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) German Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) English Audio Commentary Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.78:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.78:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	Danish English for the Hearing Impaired Finnish German Norwegian Swedish German Titling English Audio Commentary German Audio Commentary	Smoking	Yes, infrequent
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 7 — the final season. And it's a good one. There are a few weaker episodes, but on the whole this is a good season. It was known at the beginning of the season that this was to be the end, so Joss Whedon and team had even more freedom than usual — none of the characters were coming back for another season, so they were free to kill off anyone.

    You may care to consult my reviews of:

• Season 1
• Season 2 Part 1 and Part 2
• Season 3 Part 1 and Part 2
• Season 4 Part 1 and Part 2
• Season 5 Part 1 and Part 2
• Season 6 Part 1 and Part 2

    It is amazing that it has been a year since they released Season 6. It seems both longer and shorter than that.

    If you have not seen earlier seasons of Buffy, you might want to skip to the Transfer section now...

    This first half of the season is mostly setting up the situation, and disorienting us — making sure that we understand that the rules have changed. The episodes in this box are:

    This season is pretty much a serial — they have given up the pretence of this being a regular TV series. There is a focus to each episode, but they are all part of the on-going saga.

    It was a delight to see our "old friends" ((SPOILER ALERT: highlight with mouse to read) Warren, Glory, Adam, the Mayor, Drusilla, and The Master) in the very first episode, and so cool that we saw them working backwards season by season. And the episode is bookended by the same character talking about power. Very stylish. It's not surprising that this episode was penned by Joss Whedon.

    There is a lot more death in this season (both the first two episodes feature a death before the opening credits), and rather more horror, including some classic horror techniques (straight out of Hitchcock's arsenal, in fact). But there are also some marvellous comic moments: things like the scenes of Anya's origins in 800AD (in Selfless), and some of the events in Him, for example.

    It's rather amusing that Camden Toy has played three different characters on Buffy, but I still didn't recognise his face when I looked him up in IMDb — he was one of The Gentlemen in Hush, and he played both Gnarl and the Turok-Han in these episodes. (SPOILER ALERT: highlight with mouse to read) One of the writers commented once that The Master was an ancient vampire, and more advanced than the regular vampires; the Turok-Han looks like an even more advanced version — a follow-up to that part of the mythos.

    At the end of this half of the season, we are fairly sure we know who the big bad is, but there are lots of open questions, the biggest being Principal Robin Wood (D.B. Woodside) — where does he fit in? And how can they win?

    Brace yourself — this half of the season is easier going than the second half.

Video

    These episodes were broadcast here in Australia in full-screen on analogue TV, but they were broadcast widescreen on digital TV. Every episode here is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.78:1, and 16x9 enhanced. It has been said that Buffy was meant to be seen at 1.33:1, but I have compared all of seasons 4 and 5 in both 1.33:1 and 1.78:1, and I prefer 1.78:1. Interestingly, there are some (brief) video composites in Him that don't fill the 1.78:1 frame, but they are somewhat wider than the 1.33:1 frame.

    The picture is excellent. The picture is razor sharp in daylight, and even in quite a few of the evening scenes, with little or no grain. This being Buffy, there are some scenes that are very dark, and these push the limits of film technology — it's no surprise that these scenes show some grain (like 26:30 in Help, for example). Shadow detail is excellent in all but the darkest scenes. There is no low level noise.

    Colour is marvellous: deep, rich, and fully-saturated, with some serious reds (very important this season). There is one strange sensitivity; for some reason bright blue comes up imperfectly — the most obvious examples come around 14:33 and 20:01 in Beneath You, where Spike's blue top looks quite odd, almost grainy. There are no other colour-related artefacts.

    There are no film artefacts. I looked hard (I watched every episode at least twice, not that that was onerous...), but everything I saw that looked like a potential (pun intended) artefact turned out on review to be, for example, a shiny zipper tag. Impressive stuff.

    There is minimal aliasing, occasional brief moiré, and no MPEG artefacts. They have gone to considerable trouble to produce a high quality transfer (which makes the blue artefact stand out more).

    There are subtitles in German, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish, plus captions in English. I watched the English — they are often a little abbreviated compared with the dialogue (understandable, given the length of the sentences), but they are otherwise accurate, well-timed, and easily read. The only dialogue subtitle error I spotted was at 28:07 in Never Leave Me, where the dialogue says "Kill me", but the subtitle reads "Kill mm" — I think we can let that one go. Oh, and the very annoying (and constant) subtitling of the Mutant Enemy credit as "Urgh Argh", when we all know it should read "Grr, Argh". The episodes with commentary offer subtitles in English for the commentary, selectable from the Language menu. I spotted an error in the commentary subtitles (the joys of being pedantic!): at 10:47 in Lessons the commentary subtitles read "they don't have due coverage" when it should be "they don't have to do coverage" — should we let them get away with that one, too?

    The discs are single-sided and dual layered, formatted RSDL, but there is no visible layer change. This is because there are two episodes on one layer, and two on the other (except on the last disc, with three episodes, with two on one layer, and one + extras on the other).

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The English soundtrack is Dolby Digital 2.0, surround encoded, at 192kbps. The commentary is the same. There is also a dubbed soundtrack in German, again in the same format. Ich sprechen kein Deutsch. However, it sounds German to me, mostly (the names aren't translated, for example). The choices of German voice actors don't sound right to me, because I'm so familiar with the voices in English, so I couldn't listen to it for long.

    The dialogue is clear and comprehensible, although there are, once again, a few words with just a hint of clipping distortion. There is no sign of audio sync errors.

    Robert Duncan scored most of these episodes, except for Lessons and Same Time Same Place, which were scored by Douglas Romayne. The music is well-suited to the action, which is exactly what we need. The score is somewhat more orchestral in places, which is a change, and apt.

    The surrounds are not used significantly, but that's understandable given the TV origins — I wondered whether the surround encoding was intended to bring the centre channel to the fore. The subwoofer is not used at all.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

    These discs all start with the same transition, and then come to a static main menu that lists the episodes on the disc. Disc one has a background picture of Buffy; disc two has Xander and Dawn; disc three has Giles and Willow.

    They have finally arranged the episodes in a list, so it's easy to tell the order of the episodes.

    Selecting an episode leads to the episode menu for that episode, and that's where you'll find the language menu (this seems odd, but it lets them put the commentary subtitle selection in there selectively).

    Try not to pay too much attention to the pictures in the episode menus — they often contain spoilers.

Commentary: Lessons

    This commentary is provided by the writer and the director of this episode: Joss Whedon and David Solomon. This is an excellent and entertaining commentary, dividing its time between talking about the episode specifically, and the season in general — there is lots of interesting content, including the fact that David Solomon worked on every Buffy episode in some way or other.

Commentary: Selfless

    Another commentary from the writer and director: Drew Goddard and David Solomon. This was Drew Goddard's first episode, and he did very well — there are numerous references to previous episodes. It's sweet to hear them describe this as their "love letter to Emma Caulfield". Lovely stuff.

Commentary: Conversations with Dead People

    It's usually a warning sign when there are several participants in a commentary. This time we have:

• Jane Espenson — writer
• Drew Goddard — writer
• Nick Marck — director
• Danny Strong — actor (Jonathan)
• Tom Lenk — actor (Andrew)

    That's a lot of people, but it works. There's a lot of information conveyed, including the fact that this is the first (and only) episode that misses out Xander altogether.

    Although Jane Espenson and Drew Goddard are credited as writers on this episode, apparently Joss and Marti contributed significantly, too. The work was split into the four threads of the story:

• Buffy — written by Joss
• Willow — written by Marti
• Dawn — written by Jane
• Andrew and Jonathan — written by Drew

Featurette: It's Always Been About the Fans (4:25)

    This is a short piece about the fans and how the writers, cast, and crew interacted with them.

Trailers

    A stack of trailers. It would have been more interesting if we hadn't seen exactly this selection on Angel Season 4, except that this adds the video game ad. However, if you don't happen to have that set, the trailers are:

• Buffy Season 2 (0:52)    features the UK DVD packaging
• Buffy Season 3 (1:00)    shows the video packaging, despite saying "DVD" quite distinctly
• Buffy Season 4 (0:57)
• Buffy Season 5 (0:37)
• Buffy Season 6 (0:59)
• Angel Season 1 (0:39)
• Angel Season 2 (0:48)
• Angel Season 3 (0:51)
• Buffy Video Game (1:18)
• Buffy Themed DVDs (1:10)    the Willow, Angel, Spike, and Faith themed DVDs
• Buffy and Angel Great DVDs (1:13)    a promo piece for what makes a "good TV DVD"
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie (1:41)

    Note that the themed DVDs have been released in Region 2, but as far as I can ascertain, will not appear in Region 4 (which begs the question of why this ad is included). Each is a selection of four episodes (selected by Joss Whedon) featuring the named character.

Willow's Demon Guide - a NON-extra!

    There is supposed to be a DVD-ROM extra on Disc 3 containing Willow's Demon Guide. Don't bother looking for it — it isn't there. It's the same in every region, though, so it is not like we are missing out on something that is available in another region.

    Region 1 has just received Season 5, and is about to get Season 6 — Season 7 is not yet announced (but it's expected soon). Region 2 got this season about a month earlier than we did. To my surprise, the UK Region 2 discs are different from ours: they get a choice of languages that includes nothing but English. The Region 4 has more options. However, apart from that, the transfers seem identical — it seems likely that they are using the same video transfer.

    I've changed my mind about the packaging. I used to like the R2 packaging (which packs all 6 DVDs in an album, with the discs in cardboard sleeves), but I've found that the discs are more easily damaged in sliding them in and out. The R4 packaging is much bulkier, but it is both more robust, and offers better protection for the discs. The R1 packaging (a classic digipack design, with plastic panels on cardboard) protects the discs better than the R2, but it's not all that robust.

    We expect to see a much bigger difference in R1 (when it arrives...). The R1 discs are likely to be full-screen (1.33:1) rather than wide-screen. If you want to get Buffy in full-screen, then you'll have to wait for the Region 1 (my guess is that it will arrive later this year). Of course, if you are an affluent addict, you may find it necessary to get both the R1 and the R4 (and possibly even the R2 as well).

    Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 7, Part 1. A vital part of your Buffy collection

    The video quality is excellent. I've listed a few artefacts, but they are minor. Enjoy!

    The audio quality is very good for a stereo TV soundtrack.

    I love the commentaries (and they are all good ones). The featurette and the trailers are pretty negligible, though. The bulk of the extras are saved for disc six, in the second part of the season.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall