Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 12: The Reckoning #4
C. A. Wylie
Recap
The last issue ended with Harth taking the powers of all the slayers except for Buffy and Melaka. The gang decides to go ahead and try to go with their plan to suck all the bad guys into hell. Unfortunately, Willow is too wiped to blow them all into the portal. Illyria takes one for the team and assumes her old one form and drags most of the demons into hell. Which leaves pretty much just Harth and the Mayor. The Harth kills the Mayor because he doesn’t want to share any spoils with him.
Buffy and Melaka face off with Harth. The slayer/vamp seems to easily handle them until he starts accessing all the slayer’s memories at once. He could handle it when he only had the memories, but having the full slayer power gave him all the emotions that came with the memories. While he is incapacitated, Fray and Buffy finish him off. This changes everything. The slayers keep their powers and Buffy doesn’t get trapped in hell. Fray gets the slayer memories for the first time. They send Fray, Erin, and Gates back to the future. It is all different now. They are welcomed by the slayers of the future.
In the present, Faith and Buffy go to the police academy and will eventually be part of the supernatural division. They meet up with the gang at Dawn and Xander’s for a party. The future for Buffy and her friends is wide open with possibility.
Review
The only complaint I have about this series is that it was too short. But that wasn’t anything the creative team could do to fix that. With the license going from Dark Horse to BOOM, they only had four issues to finish. I thought with the amount of space they had that they gave a good end to the Dark Horse seasons. It wrapped up all the plots from the various books over the years nicely. I loved that Buffy ended up becoming a police officer since she was told she should be a cop as far back as season two of the television series. This development gave a nice closure to Buffy’s question of what she should do with her life. The art was a little rushed again, but that is understandable, given the reasons already mentioned. This series had excellent covers, with about three covers per issue. I decided to just share the cover for this review because they are nice to look at. Joss left everyone alive and reasonably content for the end. That’s gotta be a first for him.
Final Thoughts
This series gave a nice end to the long-running Dark Horse seasons. I am sad to see it finished. It left me wanting more. But I always want more Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so that's nothing new.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 12: The Reckoning # 4: Finito!
- Writing - 10/1010/10
- Storyline - 10/1010/10
- Art - 8/108/10
- Color - 8/108/10
- Cover Art - 10/1010/10