Please pardon a sad fanboy moment...
One of the (many) things that I really like about Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the way the internal continuity is carefully maintained. Characters often refer to things that happened in earlier series.
I was therefore very disappointing to see a major continuity error in the episode I watched last night (Potential from season 7). I'll only talk in general terms to avoid spoilers for people who haven't seen season 7 yet.
There is always supposed to be exactly one Vampire Slayer. When one Slayer dies another is called. Buffy died at the end of season 1 and Kendra was called. Fortunately, tho', whilst she was technically dead for a minute, Buffy was revived leaving the world with two Slayers. Kendra (and later Faith who was called when Kendra died) is the "real" Slayer. Buffy is just some freak occurance[1]. When Buffy died (again!) at the end of season 5, no new Slayer was called.
These rules were all thrown away in Potential. Twice people mentioned that Buffy's death would activate a new Slayer. It's probably the only way that the current storyline would work but, even so, it's extremely frustrating that the writers thought the viewers wouldn't notice the discrepancy.
[1] Although, actually it's lucky that she's around as Faith is currently in jail and therefore wouldn't be much use as a Slayer.
ya these serial makers just manipulate
the storyline from episode to episode,
without bothering how weird the entire
storyline then seems :)
But my point is that the Buffy writers have never done this before. The continuity was always maintained.
Perhaps they're just getting lazy because it's the final season.
Just because a character says something, that doesn't mean it's true ...
I'm assuming that the writers do actually know what's come before, and are just having the characters say these things to set up some misdirection for what will come later.
You can't really make this complaint until Buffy's death does actually lead to a new slayer being called!