Deus Axe Machina

The last episode of Buffy was on tv yesterday. Don't worry, I'm not about to wax lyrical about the joys of Buffy (even though it was easily one of the finest shows on tv - but I'll save the rest of that for another time), rather I want to have a brief rant instead. The rant goes like this: "It's an axe!"

I told you it was brief.

The rant was prompted by the short tv guide description I read about the episode. It included the line "Buffy wields her magic scythe for the last time". The scythe in question is a mystical object obtained under slightly suspiciously plotted circumstances and which turns out to have quite a large role in the series grand denouement. There's only one problem with the scythe: It's an axe!

Buffy (the show rather than the character) is usually very good about treating the audience with a surprising amount of respect (compared to a lot of television at least), which is why I found the axe/scythe dichotomy a little odd. As soon as Buffy comes across the object she calls as a scythe. I thought at the time it was a strange way to refer to something that clearly looked like an axe, but I was prepared to go along with it, until everybody started referring to it as a scythe. Characters who looked on the thing for the first time uttered lines like "Hey, nice scythe". I'm sorry, but no one, no one gazing upon the axe/thing/object would call it a scythe - in case I haven't made it perfectly clear yet, it looked like an axe, worked like an axe and, was in fact, an axe! Call an axe an axe please!

It's a minor point admittedly, but it's one of those annoying things that brings me crashing out of my finely honed suspension of belief, when I'd much rather be getting on with the simple act of enjoying a well crafted television show. Which Buffy is/was.

It's a shame Firefly was sent to an early grave. I haven't seen it yet, but it sounded as though it had a lot of potential. Hmm, I may need to fork out for the dvd's of that one...