It's about time that Joss Whedon started listening to me. 
 In my review of Vol. 7 - Twilight, I complained that Whedon and his stable of writers had gotten so excited about being free of the limitations of a television show that they had made the scale too epic and the big sci-fi concepts too wacky and lost the emotional core that always made the show so good. In the afterwards of this collection, Whedon admits that he got carried away and that this finale of the so-called Season 8 was the start of a more down-to-Earth Buffy that we'll see in Season 9. 
 Validation!! 
 Hey, Joss, if you want me to look over anything you're doing on The Avengers, just let me know. I'd be happy to help you out. For a reasonable fee. 
 This collection does a decent job of trying to settle all the wild ass craziness that the previous volumes had built up to with Buffy and her crew engaging in a massive battle with dimension hopping demons and the US Army to decide the fate of all magic on Earth. Or something. There's still a whole bunch of metaphysical mumbo jumbo that's confusing as hell, but by the end, it does appear that Whedon is trying to get back to the Buffy basics. 
 In fact, despite my previous bitching on this very subject, I think the Joss-man may have hit that reset button just a little too hard. While I was all for scaling back some of the bat shit craziness in the comics, it seems like there was a bit too much baby in that bathwater. It definitely felt like Buffy had taken several steps back towards the Sunnydale days by the end of this. Fingers crossed that the next phase manages to advance the overall story without going too far over the top but doesn't try to revert back to an earlier incarnation of the show.