Once more

Finally reached the long-awaited "Once More, With Feeling" episode of Buffy. Famously a musical, it occurs to me that everything that's great about the show is brought into stark relief by the singing, even more so than in "Hush," which was mostly worldless. Often, it's easy for, in this case, a few years of advance hype to blunt the power of a movie/show/play/etc. Little is capable of standing up to such hype. Here's the exception to that merciless rule. A handful of times I had chills, not so much because of danger, peril, or whatever, but because of the emotional resonance of the scenes, seeing the distillation of what you've come to love about these people: seeing the rest of the gang decide, after all, to join in with Buffy, to stand with her -- you're seeing how art or artifice raises the ordinary (walking out of the magic shop, down the sidewalk) to the mythic, the transcendant. And that's precisely the source of my chills, bravery that's thrilling. What a wonderful episode. You almost wish it had been saved for the very last.