After a long break Buffy Season 8 Issue 19 Time of Your Life Part 4 stumbles in out of the rain and boy is it a mess. It’s appropriate that Time of Your Life wraps up on the same day that Grant Morrison’s Batman RIP wraps up, because they have something big in common, they’re both fumbled messes. Buffy specifically is big on the action but bad on the making sense. Time of Your Life had that problem from the convoluted flashback ridden launch in Time of Your Life Part 1,but elements were brought in that made it interesting.

The return of Fray to the Buffy universe was high on the list, but Fray seemed oddly willing to listen to evil future Willow, despite knowing that she was tied to Harth and his army of Lurks, and knock out and tie up Buffy. Meanwhile evil future Willow’s plan seemed to come down to getting Buffy to kill her, and while that is a powerful moment, as Buffy kills Willow in the future only to be rescued by Willow in the past, it seemed like that needed much more of a reason to tie it together, especially since future Willow unrolled a complex plan when all she needed to do was hurt some innocent bystanders enough to make the case for her own termination.

Meanwhile over on the home front, centaur Dawn and Xander and a bunch of forest creatures battle the incorporeal and then corporeal demon army sent by Warren and Amy at the behest of the mysterious masked guy known only as Twilight, apparently with the help of Angel, which really makes this old home week, though if Angel is evil now, that is really playing a bit too much havoc with the Buffyverse.

So far we’ve had two sets of four issues based on gimmicks, Buffy goes to Japan, Buffy goes to the future, in which the basic storytelling has been neglected, in favor of Dawn fighting a giant robot in Tokyo (ha ha because that’s just like a Japanese monster movie), Dawn as a centaur, the return of more old characters, Buffy in a lesbian storyline as a not too subtly calculate attempt to get attention (which succeeded) and Buffy killing future Willow. And meanwhile the thread of Buffy Season 8 that was actually interesting has slipped away, this time on Joss Whedon’s watch. What a surprise.