Well, we can't have this conversation properly until we see how it all fits together. I'm pointing to one possible space where it works just fine -- and that's if the point is to draw the audience into the same massive confusion confronting the characters.
I think it has the potential to work just fine as commentary about the absence of any greater meaning and our tendency to fill in the blanks with whatever mumbo jumbo suits us. Willow sees epic romance mumbo jumbo. Angel sees "we earned this" mumbo jumbo. Giles sees bizarre this is the balance Watcher type mumbo jumbo. Joss isn't articulating one world view against another. He's articulating a stance against world views. See, e.g. the Daffy Duck cartoon. 'We just make it up ourselves'.
I'm still agnostic about how it works qua story, and I need to find out what 'really' is going on with the universe Buffy inhabits; the narrative confusion is frustrating as heck with such a long gap between issues -- there are lots of ways it could not work. But I think there are lots of cool ways that it could work. Max's point about how lame Zeppo reads if you miss that the hell mouth scenes are satire obtains. It *might* be something like that. It's too soon for definitive pronouncements that it is supposed to be X and Joss fails (utterly) at making it X... especially when X is what some other guy was trying to do.
It is indisputable that Twilight was bizarre and it booted a lot of people out of the story. I'm willing to wait and see, but I think Joss handed out masses of rope for people who wanted to hang season 8 in effigy. But I'm sorry, I think the arguments about Promethea are every but as not valid as an argument that the Batman TV show fails because it's not dark and brooding like Dark Knight. I think deciding ex ante that there's one way to read a story and then to decide whether the story does or does not make sense given that one reading is an unproductive way of approaching things, because I'd think the more natural conclusion is that since the story doesn't work if read in way X is that way X is not the way to read the story. There may be no good way to read season 8 -- but the argument that one particular way fails isn't particularly illuminating.
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I think it has the potential to work just fine as commentary about the absence of any greater meaning and our tendency to fill in the blanks with whatever mumbo jumbo suits us. Willow sees epic romance mumbo jumbo. Angel sees "we earned this" mumbo jumbo. Giles sees bizarre this is the balance Watcher type mumbo jumbo. Joss isn't articulating one world view against another. He's articulating a stance against world views. See, e.g. the Daffy Duck cartoon. 'We just make it up ourselves'.
I'm still agnostic about how it works qua story, and I need to find out what 'really' is going on with the universe Buffy inhabits; the narrative confusion is frustrating as heck with such a long gap between issues -- there are lots of ways it could not work. But I think there are lots of cool ways that it could work. Max's point about how lame Zeppo reads if you miss that the hell mouth scenes are satire obtains. It *might* be something like that. It's too soon for definitive pronouncements that it is supposed to be X and Joss fails (utterly) at making it X... especially when X is what some other guy was trying to do.
It is indisputable that Twilight was bizarre and it booted a lot of people out of the story. I'm willing to wait and see, but I think Joss handed out masses of rope for people who wanted to hang season 8 in effigy. But I'm sorry, I think the arguments about Promethea are every but as not valid as an argument that the Batman TV show fails because it's not dark and brooding like Dark Knight. I think deciding ex ante that there's one way to read a story and then to decide whether the story does or does not make sense given that one reading is an unproductive way of approaching things, because I'd think the more natural conclusion is that since the story doesn't work if read in way X is that way X is not the way to read the story. There may be no good way to read season 8 -- but the argument that one particular way fails isn't particularly illuminating.