I will have to think about this more so I can better articulate it when I write my review.

I haven’t had the same experience with autism-spectrum kids, but for me too, Marcelo didn’t ring true. Good to know it was the same for someone with a lot of knowledge of autism. 🙂

Yeah! I think we’d have stuck with a show called “Wesley” quite a bit longer.

OH. The fourth series of ANGEL. No! No, no need to start up again if you’d stopped enjoying it. I thought you’d stopped in the middle of the fourth series of BUFFY, which, God, if you did that, you’d miss out on some of the very best of Buffy.

Yeah, Angel got sort of lame in the fourth series. My sister and I carried on watching it because we’re completists, but we thought everything went dramatically downhill after Wesley did his Bad Deed and then became all, you know, beardy and no glasses and no fun. We missed old-school Wesley embedding adzes in walls by accident.

We stopped with the DVD where Faith comes back and has a showdown with Angelus, and Connor + divine Cordelia (or is she divine then? It’s been a couple of years.)

Anya is great!! I haven’t followed any of the Buffy love on the web. Probably tons of people have already said this, but what made the show so awesome was the seamless ensemble. There were no main characters who were a blot on the show. Nobody where you’d groan and say to yourself, “oh, they’re doing a whole show about HER.” It got them through even when the scripts were a little sup-par.

The Angel ensemble was that way sometimes, but not all the time. Subjective, maybe? The retro forties noir detective vibe leaves me cold. And LA. I cared more about high school kids saving the world starting in Sunnydale than twenty-somethings saving the world starting with LA.

But probably the main thing (please don’t hate me!) was that Angel was my least favorite character. He pulled his weight in Buffy, he just wasn’t who I would have chosen to carry a whole show on his own. It always seemed to me like David Boreanaz wasn’t having any fun unless he got to be Angelus. Which made sense, because that was when he got the best scripts. Same with Xander. By the end of Buffy I sensed that Nicholas Brendon was totally bitter about being relegated to supportive chump position, with nothing to do but make a couple of Xandery remarks per episode.

Also, I enjoyed Cordelia a lot more when she didn’t have to be the responsible mom/secretary type.

To me, I guess it smacked a little too much of a magic cure. I know that it wasn’t a cure, and that he was going to continue to struggle with it, but I felt like the story was implying that people with mild autism just need to get out of their comfort zone to improve dramatically.

I may be being completely oversensitive though!