Between Seasons: Buffy Season Ten speculation

Last time, I spent a long time recapping the end of Season Nine, finally freed from the shackles of avoiding spoilers. Now that I’ve wrapped up the season and put it behind me (at least, until the final trades come out), it’s time to look ahead, carefully consider what has come before, and be completely wrong about the future. This is just part 1 – my speculation got so out of hand it’ll be split across two articles. For now, I’m going to focus on what creative teams and series will be present.

Left to Right: Scott Allie, Jane Espenson, Drew Z. Greenberg, Joss Whedon, Nicholas Brendon, Andrew Chambliss, Ruth Gage, Christos Gage, Victor Gischler

The closest to any concrete information we have right now is the Season Ten Writers’ Summit (see picture). This was the meeting where they determined the direction that Season Ten would take, and I think it’s safe to assume most, if not all, will be writing for the next season.

My first reaction is that Christos Gage is coming back. He’d confirmed that on Twitter way back in April, if not earlier, but concrete proof is good. Angel & Faith was easily the best series in Season Nine (like I’ve never shut up about), so while we don’t yet know what he’ll write, just the fact that he will be is a positive (in my dream world, he’d write it all). If he was announced as writing the main Buffy series, my opinion would go from “I’ll read it, I guess” to “Have to read it!” immediately, but I won’t get my hopes up too much.
Victor Gischler was a surprise to me. Yes, he was a part of the previous season, but I didn’t know that the Spike miniseries was well enough received that they wanted to make sure that he came back. That’s not to mean that I don’t want him to come back, I just don’t know what to think about it quite yet. (Notably, Jeff Parker, who wrote Willow: Wonderland, is absent.)

Jane Espenson, Andrew Chambliss, and Drew Z. Greenberg were also present. I’m not surprised, but not happy. It’s no secret that I hated the Billy storyline, which was written by Espenson and Greenberg. The main Buffy series was a bit of a mess in general, and most of it was written by Andrew Chambliss, so this looks bad all around. They’re not bad writers, they’re TV writers, and that doesn’t translate directly to comic writing. I wouldn’t have a problem with them being to help with story (which is obviously the main reason Joss and Scott Allie are there), especially since Espenson has been around since the second season of Buffy, but their track record with the comics doesn’t leave me with an abundance of optimism.

I’ll be back to the picture in a moment (I know that everyone wants me to mention one specific thing), but there is one (at the time of writing) recent announcement that might have an effect on this season. Georges Jeanty has been announced as artist for a Serenity series (I’ll talk about that once there’s something concrete to talk about), so I don’t know for sure if he’s going to be back for Season Ten. Given that he’s been drawing the comic for the last six years and seems to love it, I doubt he would, but it’s still a possibility.

Okay, I’ll finally talk about the elephant in the room (though he’s not that large): Nicholas Brendon. Anyone who’s seen the series will recognize him as Xander, and that’s what makes this so interesting. The comics (well, some questionably canonical ones) aren’t strangers to having actors help with writing (Amber Benson and Juliet Landau wrote comics that involved their characters), but their quality is debated at best. Nick does have some experience writing comics, specifically a web comic called Very Bad Koalas (which I admittedly haven’t read), but his presence is already controversial before having written anything, which is just par for the course as fandom goes.

This does lead into the other thing that I want to talk about with Season Ten: the structure. After Season Eight lasted forever, going off on tangents (and off the rails) that left everyone confused by trying to shoehorn everything into a single series, they divided Season Nine into two series running simultaneously with occasional miniseries along the way. That seemed to be a success, and I’m assuming that they’ll do something similar this season as well. The question is, what series are they going to do this time?

The reason that relates to Nick Brendon is that implies a miniseries focused on Xander (something on the scale of the Spike or Willow series), which I wouldn’t have expected based on the comics alone. Yes, they did a lot with his character and I want to see what they do from here, I just didn’t expect that based only on the comics.

The most obvious prediction is that there will be a Buffy Season Ten comic. That is not a question at this point – there will be something with Buffy as the central character, given that she’s the namesake not only for the series, but also the entire universe (it is called the “Buffyverse”, after all).

I’m also going to assume that there’s going to be an Angel series as well, not just because of an Angel spin-off being the status quo, but also the ending of Season Nine. Angel is going back to basics, helping the helpless, and him starting over in London would be a good place to start a new series (more on that later).
Besides that, I don’t know if they could make a third main series for the season. There’s the possibility, but I feel that most everything would work as recurring characters in one of those series or miniseries along the way. Now, why do their stories fit that mold better? What are those stories going to be? I’m saving that speculation for the next article, where I participate in even more baseless speculation.

Zac Kandell (known mostly on the internet as Mischlings) knows that it’s likely things are going to be Jossed, probably as soon as the first issue of the next series comes out. If you find what he says interesting, follow him on Twitter at @Mischlings for more, shorter thoughts.