No one liked this season when it first screened. 'Too depressing!', 'Too gloomy!', 'Not enough strained adolescence analogies!', the critics cried. Of course, these same things make it one of my favorite seasons.
For those who aren't obsessive fanboys like me, at the beginning of season 6 Buffy is resurrected from the dead. It turns out that being resurrected isn't just a matter of chucking a Phoenix Down at someone and waiting for them to get back up in the Buffyverse, so there's a whole lot of angst and downbeat melodrama as Buffy tries to get used to living again after spending a few months in the afterlife.
The standout episode is easily the musical. It sounds like a stupid idea (a demon curses the entire town to spontaneously burst into song and dance) but it's done with so much enthusiasm and talent (Joss Whedon wrote all the music and lyrics himself, and the cast did all their own singing) it ends up being one of the best episodes of the shows entire run.
Pretty much everyone liked the musical episode, but then they followed it up with the Nine Inch Nails sounding trilogy of 'Smashed', 'Wrecked' and 'Gone'. The first two are as bleak as they sound, with Willow going nuts from handling too much magic and the other characters having relatively minor crises in the background.
At the same time, there's still a lot of humour going on. In 'Gone' Buffy gets hit by an invisibility ray. And instead of the typical TV plot of spending the whole episode trying to figure out what's happened, Buffy walks in, says “Hey guess what? I've been turned invisible!” and the rest of the show focuses on Buffy fading away from her life (metaphorically of course). I think one of the reasons I like this show so much is the way it mocks normal TV cliches.
The villains of the season are unusual too. Three geeky guys decide to become supervillians, and set about executing a whole bunch of goofy comic book style schemes (freeze rays, using demons to rob a bank). They're comic relief more than serious villains (at least at the start of the season) the real conflict in this seasons story comes from the heroes internal problems. Joss and the other writers obviously know their geeks though, these guys crack me up, and a lot of it is because I know exactly what they're talking about.
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