Summary
Cory and Laine discuss what turns out to be a surprising favorite- Superstar! We talk proper ways to leave a coffee date, bizarro worlds, and really dumb bears.
Thanks for listening to our discussion on Season 4, Episode 17: Superstar.
Listen
Links
We have a Patreon account where you can support us and get access to all kinds of fun things!
You can follow us on Twitter or Facebook.
We also have a threadless shop here! It’s mostly for our other podcast, but if you’re looking for something to drink Miss Edith’s tea out of, we’ve got you covered!
You can also always email us with your thoughts, questions, and ideas! We love hearing from you! You can send an email to mythtakenbtvspodcast AT gmail DOT com.
Music
Music for this episode is “Digging a Grave,” by Shadows from the Underground, and is used under license from Audiosocket.
Myth Taken: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Podcast 
Jonathan breaks my heart. He’s the character I related to most growing up, and his high school experience is the one on the show that most mirrored my own. I didn’t really have friends I fit in with until grad school (which was yes, also after some therapy), but Jonathan doesn’t get a chance to get that far. He briefly thinks he has it with Warren and Andrew, but that sours quickly. And though obviously it’s wrong what Jonathan does, in Superstar, I don’t know how I feel about the implication (not from your episode or discussion, but from ‘Superstar’ itself) that Jonathan was only interested in taking shortcuts. Buffy met Willow and Xander and fell in with them almost immediately. Willow and Xander themselves have been friends since they were very young. They didn’t have to work to earn each other’s friendship. I think Jonathan had as much potential to be a good friend as anyone, but just didn’t get the chance. And by this point in the series (actually long past this point in the series – because he was like this in Earshot as well) he’s desperate. He takes desperate actions – attempting suicide is one, and what he does here is another. He’s at this point – the point of taking big shortcuts and trying to change things completely for himself in one fell swoop – because nothing else has worked for him and he doesn’t know what else to do. Again, what he did wasn’t okay, and we can see that this is a step that leads him in the direction of Warren and Andrew, but I have so much sympathy for him. He wanted to be better, but he needed support and he didn’t get it. (And he STILL eventually chose to do what was right, in season 7. And then he got his final dose of bad luck. No offense to Andrew, he’s funny and all [though not so much when Warren attacked Buffy in season 6 and Andrew started yelling for him to kill her. That kind of sucked], but Storyteller meant much less to me than Superstar, or any episode where Jonathan was present, honestly.)
Anyway, aside from how sad Jonathan’s arc can make me sometimes, this WAS a very clever and funny episode, and you both covered why in your discussion. Just the way it was set up, and all the background Jonathan adoration and the other characters like Buffy having to be made a little less so that Jonathan could shine (it really was very interesting to see him condescend to Buffy – he’s probably never had real friends before and doesn’t really understand what it’s like to have a give-and-take relationship. In his real life up to that point he was the person who always felt at a disadvantage, so maybe he couldn’t conceive of a relationship where *someone* wasn’t at a disadvantage, even if it wasn’t malicious. He just didn’t want it to be him).
I also meant to mention w/r/t the Buffy-Faith body switch and Buffy’s lingering feelings about Faith sleeping with Riley – I was recently rewatching the show Fringe, which has a plot that’s very similar to that in season 3. (Spoilers for Fringe if you haven’t seen it-) Joshua Jackson’s character, Peter, sleeps with an alternate reality version of the woman he’s in love with, Olivia, who’s pretending to be his Olivia. When everything comes to a head, the real Olivia has a conversation with him that gets at a lot of what Buffy’s feeling. She tells him she knows she’s being irrational but asks him point blank “how could you not tell it wasn’t me?” Now, the plot in Fringe was more extended than the one here (Peter is in a relationship with Fauxlivia [the show calls her that :)] for weeks before the truth comes out, and him and Olivia weren’t actually together before that point, but had known each other for years) but I couldn’t help but think of it while listening to both your thoughts on the body switch.
LikeLike