Category: Buffy

Oz was already a firm audience favourite before he was inducted into the Scooby Gang. It’s not hard to see why, as he holds three mighty assets: an abundantly good heart, sardonic imperturbability, and the laser-accurate comic timing of Seth Green. All three of these meant Buffy now had a voice perfectly suited for mordant self-aware observations, its favourite comic mode.

Oz’s slow introduction, in isolation from the rest of the cast, allowed the show and Green to find their way into the character and work out how to best make use of him. This paid off in spades – his first full conversation with Willow in What’s My Line part 2 is a strong candidate for the show’s all-time highlight reel. The writing team had figured out how to ground Oz’s humour in good sense and morality, instead of leaning on character flaws like anxiety (Willow), overcompensation (Xander), and self-obsession (Cordelia). Oz was presented as a good man, Buffy-style. Which raises the question – what kind of man is that?

And so we come to Phases, an episode with Oz at its heart, and with the question of masculinity very much on its mind.

But before we talk about any of that, there’s some other business on the table. It’s the same damn thing I’ve been bringing up since the start of this blog. You guessed it: the problem of Jesse.

To recap: the first Buffy story ended with Xander and Willow laughing happily with their new best friend Buffy, despite having just seen the horrible death of their old best friend Jesse. If this show wants us to take its threats and its emotions seriously, this just isn’t good enough. And yet, if deadly and existential threats and the resulting emotions are taken seriously, then what room is left for laughter? This show would have to be completely different if Xander and Willow were embittered by grief from Jesse’s death. So how can you balance this triangle?

Over the last two episodes the show threw down its marquee storyline, in which Buffy had sex with Angel, transforming Angel into a murderous psycho. This plot twist turned the dials on real threat and real emotion right up to 11. Here’s the test we’ve been waiting for. Has the show worked out the Jesse problem? What happens next?

At the conclusion of the previous episode, Innocence, Giles refused to judge Buffy for her sexual activity. This redemptive moment was founded on empathy and respect – on love. In that moment, Buffy was able to find a way to escape judging herself and accept her own humanity. This is essential to the show’s method of resolving the problem of Jesse: the core ensemble of characters must love one another, so they can give each other the strength to move past trauma and remain in touch with joy.

That moment couldn’t escape the whole problem. The emotional consequence of Angel’s threat isn’t limited to Buffy’s profound guilt. Indeed, I made a comment last week about how killing Angel would mean tumbling into the problem of Jesse, by which I meant, such an action at this point in the narrative would be so emotionally devastating to the characters that there would be no plausible escape back to “normality”. However, that exchange with Giles shows the model that Buffy wants to apply to the more-manageable grief and confusion currently at play.

The problem of Jesse is really about the compact between a show and its audience. The show encourages us to love its characters, then puts those characters into enormous misery. Then it must earn back the right to have the same characters crack jokes without making us feel cheated. It does so like this: it shows us pain, and then it shows us love, and then it shows us the bruises.

There are storytelling choices at work here. The story has to show us pain on a scale that matches the harm they suffered. And then it must show us enough love that we can believe the character sees some light in their darkness. And that’s usually enough for us to accept they have been to a dark place. We are being told a story, here, and like all stories, we don’t need to be told all of it to believe in it. After this, the character can step back into the regular narrative function, as long as – and this is essential – we can see the bruises. We can’t settle back into “business as usual” unless we are shown from time to time that the character is still hurting.

It’s a neat solution to the Jesse problem, and it works fairly well here. It doesn’t stand by itself – this process only works because of other qualities of Buffy, like the hazy timekeeping that never quite nails down how much time is passing between (or even within) episodes; like the clearly different rules for minor characters, who don’t need to be depicted with psychological believability, thus allowing the whole edifice of a monstrous and murderous Sunnydale to continue; and above all, like the embrace of self-awareness on the part of the show as a whole. Being meta allows Buffy to get away with its neat solution to the problem of Jesse, because it enlists the show’s viewers as co-conspirators in achieving big tears and big laughs (two great tastes that taste great together).

But the heart of this process is love. Love is the pivot point that lets us, the audience, take the character’s hand and walk them back into the party. Our love for the characters, as expressed through the love the characters show for each other.

So: maybe the perfect Buffy man is one who can solve the problem of Jesse. One who is wise enough and good enough to save other characters with his love.

Through this episode we get a bit of a tour of the male cast of Buffy, but it isn’t love at the forefront, it’s lust. (Willow: “I want smoochies!”) Hello metaphor monster: there’s a werewolf on the loose and werewolves (says hunter Cain) are drawn to “sexual heat”. This is the show directly addressing something previously only featured in Xander’s dialogue: guys only have one thing on their minds. Right?

The episode dives into it hard, featuring returning character Larry (the I-became-a-rapist-pirate from Halloween) as the uber-macho sports guy sexually harassing all the women, to the point of outright groping Buffy Summers (which doesn’t go down well). He’s the obvious candidate to be the werewolf, especially after he shows off his dog bite injury.

Then it introduces new character Cain the werewolf hunter, who is even more macho than Larry. His attitude towards women is condescending rather than salacious but he still reinforces the theme by instantly assuming Giles and Buffy were having a sexual rendezvous.

Next the episode gives us a young woman named Theresa, who is the designated victim of the early episode – she was harassed by Larry before, and we are led to believe the werewolf is about to strike. Instead, Angelus steps into frame, and he smoothly lures her into his fatal embrace.

Three men, each of them a cliche, each of them dangerous. The show is making it clear in no uncertain terms that there is a problem with men and masculinity. Against these three, we are given compelling portraits of Xander and Giles: the first, too hung up on Willow to make out with his girlfriend, and the second nearly moved to violence by the insolence Cain the hunter shows towards Buffy. Both presented as flawed but clearly on the right side of things. And then there is Oz, presented as essentially a mystery – Xander frets about him, in fact.

Having put all its pieces in play, the episode immediately sets about subverting them. Most dramatically, there’s Larry. The decision to have Xander lead the investigation would tip off any audience members who hadn’t yet clicked that he was a red herring. But then the show makes a beautiful ju-jitsu move, taking that audience expectation of Larry’s innocence and yanking them right around into a reveal that Larry does have a secret: he’s gay, and all that sexual harassment has been overcompensation. It’s a splendid move that quickly undermines the very idea of hypermasculinity by revealing Larry’s version was just a performance. The show moves on to make Cain the hunter such a male cliche that you can’t take him seriously either: his unrelenting manly man act is clearly positioned as a performance like Larry’s, even if it isn’t hiding anything.

Angel, however, doesn’t need to be subverted. He’s a straight-line character at this point, a murderous troublemaker out to make Buffy’s life miserable. When he sends his message to Buffy via the girl he killed and turned into a vampire, it shocks Buffy, rips open that wound – we see her bruises.

Giles is essentially a secondary character this episode, with his bravery and support for Buffy and her friends reinforced several times. With Xander however, the show makes some trickier moves. Xander’s past (I-became-a-rapist-hyena-spirit in The Pack) hangs over him, and the show overtly references it when he almost reveals to the other characters that he remembers what happened in that episode. Buffy lets the moment pass, which is just as well, because that unpleasantness is the last thing the show needs to put front-and-centre. Later, Xander is allowed to save Buffy when she loses herself before Angel’s threat, and then he is the character on-hand to give her the love she needs to continue. The moment between them is layered with the complexity of their relationship, but the central emotional transaction is clear.

Which leaves Oz, who turns out to be the werewolf. The climax comes, hilariously, when Willow confronts him to demand that he be *more* of an animal, whereupon he turns into a werewolf and attacks her. After OzWolf is incapacitated (and saved from the hunter), we finally get the measure of Oz the man. He is calm, and considerate, and suggests forgoing his own happiness for the greater good of everyone. But Willow doesn’t accept that: “Yeah, okay, werewolf, but that’s not all the time. I mean, three days out of the month I’m not much fun to be around either.”

And Oz listens to her.

If you follow pop culture at all, you’ll know just how unusual that is. The man is meant to make the decision for both of them – it is his tragic burden. (The prominent recent example is Spider-Man, which has had film after film where Peter Parker must tragically end his relationships to protect his partner regardless of her opinions on the matter.) The episode never really explains why Oz has been withholding smoochies – presumably he just likes to take things slow – but it makes it very clear what kind of man he is.

Xander’s moment comforting Buffy made clear that he could do the job of carrying her through the problem of Jesse, but it also showed he was compromised. Oz, in contrast, has none of those limitations. Oz has empathy and respect. He cares, and he listens. He’s just what this show needs.

Other notes:
* At the top of the episode, Oz is watching the cheerleading statue from way back in Witch. It’s a neat little continuity nod, the kind of comics-style back-issue reference that was leveraged last episode to save the day. It’s also a cute reinforcement of Oz’s acuity and perceptiveness.
* It’s kind of beautiful that Xander’s many, many flaws can bring together Willow and Cordy.
* The introduction of werewolves to a vampire-focused mythology is commonplace now, but wasn’t when this episode aired. The show has been working through a list of non-vampire monsters since Witch, so it was bound to hit “werewolf” eventually, but it sure does play differently in 2015 when it’s almost a cliche.
* Using werewolves to talk about masculinity might seem obvious (men are animals!) but it wasn’t actually that much a feature of werewolf fiction. The reverse, using werewolves to talk about femininity (they change with the moon!) has perhaps been more common, with two standouts being Alan Moore’s story The Curse in Swamp Thing and the subsequent film Ginger Snaps.
* Oz’s cousin Jordy is just a kid, and also a werewolf. Apart from being a very amusing bit that is pointedly never referred to again, it’s interesting to note that a pre-pubescent werewolf clearly serves as counterpoint to the association in this episode between lyncanthropy and sexual drive.
* Angel is a great villain because the show can just have him be nice to someone and cut away and you know it’s awful.

This is peak Buffy. The highest viewership ratings, the greatest critical acclaim, the favourite episode of the show’s creator, the archetypal metaphor-as-monster, the definitive “what people want is not what they need” Whedon storytelling decision. The last eight episodes of excellence have led to this, making television history. This is why you came.

The first people you see are Spike and Drusilla and the newly-assembled demon, the Judge. It’s a brief sequence offering a minuscule recap, a few character beats, and a tiny bit of exposition. It isn’t there to excite or illuminate. It’s there for rhythm. It’s ushering you back into the fiction, giving you a chance to find yourself there again. It’s the rollercoaster cranking up to the first high at the start of the ride. You breathe out and in. You hold on as it comes into view:

Buffy, alone in Angel’s bed.

Then Angel. Hurting in the rain, still. His pain stops as a woman approaches him. She looks a bit like Buffy, blonde, red jacket, but older, smoking a cigarette, hanging out in an alley. A prostitute as surrogate for the leading lady. This is not a category of character we’ve seen before. Angel has stumbled outside the frame, dragging the camera with him to somewhere colder, more desperate. Yet even here, the instincts of ordinary people are good and kind. The woman comes to offer help. Then you watch Angel kill her. He murders her swiftly and callously, then mocks her with a breath.

He mocks her and smiles.

You feel the show tilt on its axis.

Credits play, and you nod your head to the propulsive music. Then you’re in the Summers home. Joyce finds Buffy just after she sneaks in from her night with Angel. Buffy’s knowledge that she has just lost her virginity is all over her face. (You know exactly what’s going on inside Buffy’s head, because Sarah Michelle Gellar has a special talent for taking you along on Buffy’s internal journey.) Joyce senses something, and starts to say Buffy looks different or changed – but she stops, leaving her sentence hanging, unfinished. You hold on to that ambiguity.

The library. The Scooby Gang confer with Buffy. You can see the pieces being arranged for the next phase of the story. Along the way, Xander is mean to Cordelia. It’s the exact kind of snarky put-down he’s been throwing all season but now they are a secret couple, it snags you – because it’s about Buffy, and her importance, and because Xander does love Buffy more than he loves Cordelia. And you know in that instant he always will. And you see that Cordelia knows it too. A tiny throwaway moment but Whedon finds another knife to twist. Everything is working in this episode, everything raising the stakes, everything charged with emotion.

The Factory, and Angel saunters in to join Spike and Dru. The Judge tries to harm him and fails, proving to them that Angel has changed. Proving the same to you, reinforcing the implication of that cruel murder before. It is sinking in: this isn’t pretend. They’re not kidding around.

Library. Xander tries to apologise to Cordelia, and she doesn’t let him, but they make out anyway. You are just wondering how you came to feel so much empathy for Cordelia when the pair are discovered by Willow. Alyson Hannigan uses her special powers to make you feel every part of her devastation. You knew this was coming, and it is exactly what it had to be, and you hoped that somehow you could get through this without hurting Willow, but you can’t. She has to get hurt. You have to feel it.

Angel’s apartment. Buffy finds him and is so relieved – and you tense up, because Angel just said he was going to destroy her. But he doesn’t threaten her. He is… almost gentle. His casual attitude and his belittling words are given so little weight. And you see Buffy try to understand, you see her connecting the dots. Review the dialogue in this scene and you discover it is so bare, so simple, there’s almost nothing there at all, because it was written specifically for Gellar’s talents. You are there with her, every moment, as her self-assurance crumbles. “Was I not good?” And you see how Angel is choosing to destroy her, the sheer pettiness of it, and it’s breathtaking. The metaphor in this episode is widely shorthanded as “the boy who turns into an asshole after sleeping with you”, which is accurate, but it misses out a whole layer in what’s going on. The interaction is coded in the status politics of high school existence. Everything Angel says is an expression of power and distance as channeled through the iconography of high school bad boy popularity, because this is the culmination of the vampires-as-cool-kids imagery that’s been deployed since episode three. The cool kids are good at adult stuff, and the uncool kids or the kids who secretly fear they are uncool – which is to say, you – are not. That boy you liked is too cool for you. You thought he loved you but he was just using you. You don’t measure up. You know about this feeling, this nightmare. It happened to you or to one of your friends, or maybe just to someone you wished was your friend. But it happened. Because high school is hell.

Jenny and her uncle. It’s a jarring sequence for you not just because it follows Angel’s awful betrayal, but because it’s still a very strange development. Jenny’s secret gypsy heritage and mission concerning Angel is hard to reconcile with everything you’ve seen before now. Uncle Vincent Schiavelli is superb of course but it feels forced and perhaps inauthentic in an episode where everything else rings so true. But the scene adds to the rhythm of the episode, letting you catch your breath with a side character while you process, and you start to realize that Angel is only just starting.

The school. Willow and Xander reach an uncomfortable truce, and are interrupted by Angel. The scene plays as straight terror, with shadows and isolation and an audience who knows badness is there as a coiled snake. It is no accident Angel targets Willow. She is a lightning rod for our emotions. That’s why the writers choose Willow, you know that. But Angel knows it too. Angel goes after Willow because he knows it will hurt everyone who loves her. And you love Willow, right? She’s fictional, but so what? After all those real emotions and real threats, you have a connection with her. How can you not? You love her. And Angel knows. He is targeting Willow to reach out of the television and hurt you, too.

Xander figures it out. Jenny is already there, and Buffy too who knows the moment she sees. The characters catch up to you in a rush. The show wants you right there with them. But it’s Xander who makes the move, takes the risk, frees Willow, sees Angel off without anyone getting killed. His role in the Scooby Gang – Willow is the heart, Cordelia the truthteller, Giles the conscience – he is the instinct. He gets it wrong as often as he gets it right, more often, but he is necessary, and sometimes he is the only one who can save the moment. Right now, Buffy can’t fight Angel. She can see, she can say, but she cannot yet do. It’s too big. You’re with her.

Then in the library, the gang piece it together and Buffy realizes this change happened because they slept together. It’s too much for her. (Willow, of course, instantly understands.) We’ve already left any close analogy to the source of the metaphor – when boys sleep with girls and don’t call them again, they don’t start a campaign of terror to make the girl guilty. But it doesn’t matter. The metaphor was just the crank that wound up this nightmare. What matters now is that Buffy feels terrible and there’s no way out.

Factory. Angel returns. You watch him put Spike in his place. It’s fascinating to watch. Angel the villain starts making sense to you as a character. You discover he’s fun to watch. That’s an awful moment.

Buffy’s room. She sleeps, cries, dreams – then school, confronting Jenny. Again the show burns through a secret, puts it out in the open as quick as possible. You’re still not convinced about this plotline but Buffy’s rage gives her and you something else to feel, gives you a focus. Anger at Angel’s betrayal is seamlessly transferred on to Jenny.

Angel kills the gypsy man.

Oz’s van. It is such a relief to see Oz. This episode has been pushing your emotions into bad places and he is reliably a source of sanity and delight. And while Xander and Cordelia steal army weaponry, revealing comics-style continuity links to the events of Halloween where this run of storytelling began, you get a moment of perfect Oz, albeit one where he doesn’t give Willow, or you, what you want. Instead he gives you what you need. It’s the only joy you will feel this episode.

Jenny, Giles and Buffy find the gypsy man. Buffy knows, now, deep down, what you’ve feared. There is no way out of this: she must kill Angel. At the factory. Angel usurps Spike. The season has, at last, its Big Bad. At the school, Buffy takes control, telling Jenny to bugger off, snapping out orders, coming into her own. What’s My Line had Buffy embracing her slayer identity and power; and here is the test. Giles dismisses Jenny as Buffy says. There is no question where the power lies.

The mall, as you saw just eight days ago. The surprise of the rocket launcher, upending “no weapon forged” as a comedy beat, somehow finding levity in this awfulness and shortcircuiting the great battle with the Judge (3/4 swerve!) so the episode can focus on what really matters:

Angel in the rain, as he was at the start of the episode. Now you/Buffy are ready. Now you can fight. And you defeat him, but you can’t kill him yet. You let him go, knowing he will kill again. You have no choice, because to kill Angel would be to tumble irrevocably into the problem of Jesse. Threat is real. Emotions are real. What possible future can there be, apart from misery?

Giles and Buffy speak at last, and your heart breaks because Giles refuses to be disappointed in Buffy. He is full of love. Love is the answer to the problem of Jesse. Love will carry Buffy forward. Love will carry you forward.

Buffy with her mother. At the beginning of the episode Joyce stopped short of saying Buffy looked different. Now, she says it clearly: “You look the same to me.”

You don’t feel the same.

You watch to the end of the credits. The little monster says “Grr Arrgh”.

It’s just perfect TV.

Two episodes, broadcast over two nights, that changed everything for this show. This is the story that still defines Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the perfect expression of teenage emotional trauma as monstrous action adventure. The big turn still feels ambitious today, a brutal twist of the knife that is equal parts ridiculously melodramatic and fiercely poignant. This is critical, mighty television.

With all this import, it’s strange to be reminded the first episode is kind of weak.

There’s certainly plenty going on. Willow and Oz start dating in the cutest way possible, Jenny Calendar is revealed to have a secret mission of vengeance, Drusilla and Spike are gathering the pieces of a terrifying demon, and Cordelia thinks chips & dip = cooking.

However, through all this it’s Buffy’s relationship with Angel that stays in tight focus. The episode begins with a prophetic dream in which Buffy witnesses Angel’s death at Drusilla’s hands. (The dream sequence is superbly done, laden with symbols and a hilariously obtuse callback to the Monkey Pants conversation from What’s My Line part 2 – the show has now figured out how to present dream sequences that actually feel like dreams without being a waste of time, a magic trick that will be deployed multiple times in coming seasons.) Buffy rushes to Angel and they can barely control their desire for makeouts – the same beat from Bad Eggs but here played not for gleeful comedy but as an urge that threatens to overtake their sweet romance with something riskier. Then Buffy relates all this to Willow, and confides that she thinks sooner or later their relationship will become sexual. That’s the show opening with three scenes in a row entirely devoted to Buffy/Angel. And there’s more to come on this front. As with What’s My Line and Bad Eggs, the show has realized it needs to actually put the Buffy/Angel relationship onscreen where we can see it and tries to cram as much into this episode as possible. It’s great to watch as the two actors have solid chemistry – Sarah Michelle Gellar continues to build her performance and take the audience along her emotional journey, while Boreanaz is almost pleasingly wooden, deferring to his role as the love interest in a female-led show and not yet leavening his performances with the self-mockery that would become his trademark.

All of this intense relationship focus is intended to bring both characters, and the audience, to the climactic moment. After a tearful farewell (later rendered unnecessary), and then a showdown with Spike and Dru, Angel and Buffy seek shelter in Angel’s apartment. There’s a deliberate counterpoint to Angel’s makeout-heavy visit to Buffy’s bedroom window in Bad Eggs, and Buffy’s chaste sleepover there in What’s My Line part 1. The energy between the two is very different to anything we’ve seen before. Buffy cries, simply overwhelmed from the highs and lows of the last few days. This is perhaps the last piece of the relationship we needed to see to believe in it: Buffy allowing herself to be vulnerable, and trusting in Angel to catch her. And then the moment pivots into desire as the emotional intensity jumps to a different track and engulfs both of them. They confess their love for each other, and Buffy takes the initiative, and the camera cuts away. It’s a well-played sequence, surprising in its tenderness and rawness after the goofball makeouts and high melodrama that have characterised their relationship before now. The moment is grounded in real threat and emotional reality, giving it major weight.

Then the climax is Angel mysteriously walking outside and wailing and um what? If you don’t know what this actually signifies, and the portentous gypsy talk earlier doesn’t give much clue, then the ending is incomprehensible. If you do know what’s coming – and I think even on first broadcast most viewers had some idea – then you can read it as a chilling and exciting cliffhanger, but if not, it’s just bizarre. It’s a bit of a head-desk moment, the most important cliffhanger of the whole series so far, the one the show has been deliberately building too all season, and it’s a complete clunker.

But that’s the story of this whole episode: not really Buffy at its best, loading up with stuff but not really making much of it count. Two separate mook-fights over the Judge’s arm? Couldn’t the show have figured a better way of managing that? The obvious diagnosis is that everyone was so focused on what was about to happen, they didn’t tighten up the steps getting there.

That said: what was about to happen was worth getting excited about. So goodbye, early Buffy. It’s been fun, but this is where you finish. Everything’s about to change.

Other notes:
* Willow in a Blossom hat is love. Also, Seth Green is the best at delivering Whedonesque dialogue, they must have loved writing for him.
* Dru is in charge and in control of herself, but she’s still pretty loopy while Spike still has the wits in the relationship. Keeping Spike around definitely dilutes the recovery of Drusilla we supposedly saw in What’s My Line.
* It’s a two-part macguffin chase, right? Wrong! 3/4 swerve – the bad guy is fully assembled as of right now!
* Vincent Schiavelli! Another lovely swerve with Jenny – we know she’s pledged to harm Angel, and we think she’s taking Buffy away to some sinister destination, only to have her deliver Buffy to the previously-mentioned surprise party. Although there is a bit of weirdness where Jenny apparently drives Angel home to get some dry clothes, then drives him back again, and it’s only mentioned in passing. Missed opportunity…

Everyone’s thinking lustful thoughts in this episode. Buffy wants to buy a sexy outfit. Cordelia and Xander can’t keep their hands off each other. Buffy and Angel likewise, although they aren’t conflicted about it. There are makeouts a-plenty (though not for Willow or Giles, whose partners are missing this week) and it is super-strongly implied that Cordy and Xander are going All. The. Way.

Trust a boring health class assignment to pour cold water all over this sizzle! It’s the old “look after an egg to learn about responsibility the egg is a metaphorical baby okay kids NO SEXING” thing that apparently happens! By the way the eggs are monsters. And with that, the episode runs out of ideas.

It turns out the egg monsters are mind-controlly bodysnatchery things and there’s a thing in the basement of the school they want to dig up. There are definitely some creepy set-pieces with the critter in Buffy’s bedroom (complete with Alien homage shot of creature landing on shoulder) and the reveal that Willow has already been controlled, and there’s a brilliant 3/4 swerve (actually at the 3/4 break for once) where Joyce ends up joining the fun. But beyond the set pieces, there’s not much here to talk about.

The episode thinks it’s about “responsibility”, i.e. look after an egg, don’t forget to pick up your mother’s dress, um, stuff. It all feels thin because the episode has actually set the viewer’s eye on one of the most intense subject areas in its thematic focus area – the powerful experience of teenage lust – and then does literally nothing with it. The monsters just mind control people to go dig a hole together as asexual drones. There is so much to work with here and the episode can’t backpedal away from it quickly enough.

All of which is very disappointing because this is the very same move you get from most teenage media, at least, it was in the 90s. Lust was a feature of after-school special morality plays, Christian rock songs, and dumb comedy films, but didn’t much get talked about beyond that. Buffy has so far been pushing hard at taking the emotional experiences of teenage life seriously, but here it doesn’t want to get involved, and the avoidance is jarring. Buffy is meant to be better than this! (The show does start getting stuck into lust as a thematic interest next season, at least.)

What this episode should have done is make the egg-monsters lean right into the sex and lust continuum. There’s some ironic appeal in having the abstinence eggs turn their hosts into ravening lust machines, but given that this show can’t actually descend into a wild orgy, that episode would be tricky to write. So maybe something like this.

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PRECREDITS

• The mall – a shop. Buffy wants a sexy skirt that Joyce won’t buy for her. Then she spots a vampire (Lyle Gorch) on the hunt. She makes some transparently false excuses why she has to slip away, and Joyce lets her go.
• The back rooms – Buffy interrupts Lyle, but he gets away.
• The mall – Buffy returns to Joyce, who reveals she didn’t believe Buffy’s excuses. “I know that look. You spotted a cute boy and suddenly had somewhere better to be.” “Um, kinda.” Then Joyce initiates a super-awkward version of “the talk (teen version)”, about how sometimes her head is going to want to do one thing, while her body is pushing hard to do… another thing. The talk goes swiftly out of Joyce’s control too. (Buffy: “Oh please don’t say any more words.” Joyce: “Too late for that. I’m terrible at this.” Buffy: “Let’s just pretend we never have any of those feelings.” Joyce: “Milkshake?” Buffy: “Milkshake.”)

ACT ONE

• Closet. Cordy and Xander having makeouts in the closet, both conflicted about it.
• Health class. Teacher introduces the egg challenge to a very distracted class! He has to yell a few times to get people to settle down. Willow spots that there’s something happening between Cordy and Xander.
• Library. Xander and Willow give Buffy her egg. Xander is like “I’m not sure one little egg will make much impression on the frying pan of testosterone that is the teenage boy.” Giles identifies the Gorches.
• The park. Buffy and Angel make out instead of hunting. The Gorches are watching, identifying Buffy as the slayer and Angel as Angelus. Tector Gorch is envious of Angel – he thinks Buffy is pretty. Lyle berates him for always thinking with his crotch. “Ain’t like there’s anything down there any more, not since that crab demon got super friendly with her pincer hands!” Tector is unrepentant. “Don’t matter that I’m dead. See a pretty girl, and things get stirred.” Lyle says he knows how to kill the Slayer.
• Buffy’s bedroom. She falls asleep, with some dialogue to the egg indicating she’s going to be thinking about Angel – all those makeouts are fresh in her mind. As she slips into bed and closes her eyes with an Angel smile on her face, we see the egg… crack… a tentacle extends…

ACT TWO

• Buffy’s bedroom. She wakes up. The tentacle is gone. The egg has repaired itself.
• Summers kitchen. Joyce observes Buffy getting ready for school – impressed by how she’s uncharacteristically calm and well-organised. Buffy suggests the egg is just focusing her attention, reminding her she has responsibilities…
• Library. Buffy (with egg) reports “no Gorches” to Giles. Willow has her egg too. Xander has boiled his egg! After Xander leaves with Cordelia, Willow confides that there’s something weird happening between them. Buffy asks Willow if she’s also feeling really alert and focused; Willow says she is. Giles asks Buffy to once again go Gorch-hunting with Angel.
• Near the park. Angel meets Buffy, who is carrying her egg this time. Angel goes to kiss her – she avoids it. They talk about the egg, and hunting. Buffy doesn’t even seem to notice Angel’s physical interest in her.
• The park. The Gorches attack! Tector tangles Angel in a lasso (might as well put that old west style to some use) and Lyle seizes Buffy, saying “Like I tell Tector, lust is a distraction. And distracted slayers are -” He is cut off by Buffy smashing him in the face and clinically giving him an ass-whupping. The Gorches flee in different directions.
• Near the park. Angel asks Buffy about her change in tone – last night, he was a distraction. Tonight… is she feeling all right? Buffy isn’t sure. Something’s off. Like she’s run out of steam. But… that little fight scene might have woken her up again… Makeouts start in earnest. But Angel pulls away – “I’ll get after Tector. You track down Lyle.” Angel goes, and Buffy looks after him, and it’s obvious that she did not want to stop kissing him. And while she thinks these thoughts, the egg cracks open and the creature emerges, and it crawls up her and it COVERS HER FACE…

ACT THREE

• Near the park. Buffy FIGHTS OFF THE THING. She stabs it to wriggly death, and then realises it came from the egg. “That’s not good.”
• School. Morning. Willow arrives, cradling her egg. She looks around the school, and observes many couples doing couple things. All seems normal. She opens her locker, sees the Dingoes band poster with grainy Oz picture – and sighs happily. The egg quivers. She doesn’t notice. And she goes to the…
• Library. Willow finds Buffy, Xander and Cordelia are already there. “Where’s your egg?” they ask. They grab it from her, and put it in a box, then slam on a lid. “There might be a creature in there,” Buffy says. Cordelia says it was probably only Buffy’s egg. If it was her egg, then her maid might be in terrible danger! Xander reminds everyone he hardboiled his egg. Willow comes up with the idea of opening his to see what’s inside. And she’s still noticing Xander/Cordy chemistry, as she remarks to Buffy again…
• Giles’s Office. Willow leads the dissection. The egg is cracked open revealing a weird, disgusting creature. They make a plan: Giles and Willow will hit the books, Buffy will investigate the Teen Health classroom, while Xander and Cordy volunteer to check out “several out of the way places”. Willow doesn’t stay with Giles – she moves to follow Xander and Cordy.
• Health classroom. Buffy stalks around. She finds several additional racks of eggs… and a pickaxe? Why would a health teacher need a pickaxe? Then the teacher enters. Buffy hides as he goes to the egg racks, picks up an egg, and it extrudes a tentacle to wiggle at him…
• Hallway. Willow creeps after Xander and Cordy, who are obviously looking for a good makeout spot. They go into a closet. Willow goes over, pushes it open: “All right you two, caught in the act -” Except they are NOT making out. Cordelia is putting one of the weird egg creatures on Xander’s face! They both turn to look at her! She backpedals, falling, sprinting back to the
• Library. Willow rushes in. “Giles!” The librarian tells her he’s just had a very interesting phone conversation with Ms. Calendar and he now knows what they’re dealing with – a Bezoar. The eggs are disguises for their hibernating young. They feed off hormonal surges. When they get enough hormones, they come alive and take control of their host.” Willow says “Well here’s a couple of hormonal hosts right now!” Sure enough, Xander and Cordy, smiling oddly, are coming into the library as Willow backs away… only for Giles to PUT AN EGG CREATURE ON HER TOO.

ACT FOUR

• Health classroom. Buffy hides. Teacher comes very close to where she is hiding when… the door opens and her classmates start filing in! Time for Teen Health! Buffy pops up with a grin and takes her usual seat. There’s Cordy and Xander and Willow, all sitting happily smiling in the class. In fact the whole classroom is sitting smiling, calm and easy. Teacher asks: “Now, does anyone still have their egg?” As Buffy watches, Jonathan holds up his hand. He gives an uneasy “Yay me?” as classmates all around him converge, and he too is creature’d up. They pull back. Teacher: “Anyone else?” Willow looks at Buffy: “She broke hers.” Buffy has to think fast: “Oh I did. But then I came sneaking around in here and one got me. Also I found a pickaxe.” She hefts the pickaxe. The room is silent. Teacher: “Great! Well let’s get moving then.” And they all start filing out…
• Tunnels. Tector Gorch, wrapped up in his own lasso, is walking with Angel. “I swear, Angelus, Lyle will be down here somewhere.” Angel realises they are almost under the school. Tector asks Angel about Buffy. “No judgement, brother. Nothing like forbidden fruit to give you an itch. Like the time Lyle put some stinging nettles down my trousers.” Angel has to defend his feelings for Buffy – it isn’t just an “itch”. Tector calls him on it. “I seen you kiss that girl. There was itches. I reckon she’d like to be scratched.”
• Cavern. Tector leads Angel into a cave where a weird critter peers through the floor – the Bezoar. A tentacle wraps itself around him and drags him close! Tector unwraps himself. He lied about Lyle coming here. He’s fallen under the spell of the Bezoar.
• School basement. The class descends through a bashed-open hole in the floor into the basement. The teacher takes the pickaxe from Buffy and knocks some of the hole wider to allow easier access. They all go down and see… the Bezoar, and Angel wrapped up, and Tector nearby. Teacher: “Now, let the Bezoar cleanse you of your impure thoughts!” and they all form a line to let the Bezoar soak up their hormonal surges. Appalled, wondering how to free Angel, Buffy shades back when someone grabs her and pulls her to…
• Tunnels. Lyle has grabbed Buffy. He proposes an alliance to kill the Bezoar and free Angel as well as “my dumb brother”. Buffy figures out what’s up – the Bezoar is feeding on teen horniness. “Like a disgusting old man at a bus stop.” They both roll out – into the:
• Cavern. Lyle and Buffy make their move, but the class move with swiftness and co-ordination, Cordy and Xander cleanly take down Lyle. Buffy’s attempt to get to the Bezoar fails – Willow and Giles cut off her options. She ends up next to the still-trapped Angel. Teacher: “You can’t stop us, Buffy. We’re all focussed. Calm. Our minds are clear in service to the Bezoar.” Buffy: “Well my mind isn’t clear. But I do know what I want.” And she turns and locks eyes with Angel. “Trust me,” she whispers. And begins the MAKEOUT TO END ALL MAKEOUTS. All the servants of the Bezoar shudder, close their eyes, as the psychic feedback hits them. Xander and Cordy reach out and hold hands. Willow bites her lip. Tector gyrates foolishly. And Lyle RUNS FORWARD AND SINKS THE PICKAXE INTO THE BEZOAR’S BRAIN. Game over.
• Basement. The Gorches have fled. Everyone is rubbing their necks in confusion. Giles is telling everyone there’s a mold problem down here, everybody out… Willow approaches Xander, “Are you okay? Can you believe I thought you were having secret kissing sessions with Cordelia? But no, you were just being mind-controlled by a demon! I should have known.” Xander flails. Meanwhile, Buffy and Angel have a moment. Then he leaves too.
• Summers home. Buffy sits with Joyce on the couch. Joyce breaks the small talk to say, she didn’t mean to worry Buffy before, and if there is anything she wants to talk about – any person or any feeling – then she should. Because Joyce will always be there for her, and will probably not ground her too bad. Buffy is reassured. They talk about how everything would be so much simpler without any of that stuff. Joyce: “But also, kind of boring and pointless.” It isn’t easy finding the right balance. Buffy rests her head on her mother’s shoulder. End on a nice mother-daughter bonding moment.

---

So.

Where was I.

Bad Eggs is a bit of a failure as a Buffy episode. It’s the one bum note in this great run of episodes – and being surrounded by amazing episodes surely does it no favours, reputation-wise. Perhaps because of its thematic problems, it never finds its tone – it is bizarre for a purely-plot episode to play all the final defeats of the bad guys as comedy beats.

Anyway, this episode does contribute something to the bigger picture. All this physicality and lust is an important aspect to the Buffy/Angel relationship, and one we haven’t yet seen. The relationship has often felt a bit weak onscreen because the show forgets to actually put them in front of us as a couple doing chemistry-laden couple things, and this episode attempts to make up for that all by itself by underlining just how hot and heavy (and yet chaste) their relationship is. This is necessary setup – and just in time for a very significant payoff. Next episode. (Hint: abstinence eggs don’t work.)

Other thoughts:
* A rare visit to the Sunnydale mall! We don’t see it much, because it’s a complicated set to manage requiring masses of extras, but that’s a pity because it does make a lot of sense as a hunting ground for Sunnydale’s vampires.
* Buffy sniffs out a vamp in a crowded place, just like in episode one! Which is to say, she uses her powers of observation, not the slayer-senses spoken of by Giles. Another gap in Buffy’s education?
* The Gorches have no role to play in this episode, but there they are anyway! Note that these are characterful season 2 vampires, not boring season 1 vampires.
* Urgh, the tentacle violation of a sleeping Buffy is something I could have done without, especially in an episode that encourages you to read everything sexually.
* If midriff tops weren’t on trend, this invasion would have succeeded.

This is not a moment you fix with one scene eating vegetables on the porch.

This is a tricky one.

Buffy’s mother takes up with a new man, Ted. Buffy is protective and suspicious, and it is revealed that she is right to be: Ted is dangerous and abusive (and a robot). The experience of a divorced mum or dad meeting a new partner is a common one for teenagers, and although it falls outside the high school environment, it still slots neatly into the core “high school years are hell” premise. Put Whedon and Greenwalt on the script and cast the marvellous John Ritter as the boyfriend, and you’ve lined up a solid episode. You’d think so, anyway.

Sometimes, however, when you start actually turning an idea into a series of actual scenes in which things happen, you find things don’t turn out as you expected. Hidden in this premise are a bunch of nasty hooks, enough to rip down the whole Buffy machine and transform it into something else.

Before tumbling into this pile of trouble, the episode checks in on Giles and Jenny. This is part of the show’s new commitment to ongoing/longform storytelling and emotional consequences. Jenny is still in a bad place after the events of The Dark Age. Giles is desperate to help her, to restore their connection, to fix things. And he can’t. This is quite an emotionally sophisticated move. Typically, conflict in a dramatic situation is generated by a character who gets pushed to change but, for reasons sensible or irrational, refuses to budge. Then the story forces the character to appreciate the consequences of both paths, and lands them in a crisis where they have to either stand firm or give way or (often) compromise. That’s the basic structure underneath enormous amounts of dramatic entertainment, including the last trauma-coping episode of Buffy, When She Was Bad. This situation, however, is different. There is no refusal to move here. Jenny, we sense, would like to make the change Giles is ever-so-gently pushing her towards, but she is emotionally unable. It’s a jarring, unpleasant situation. As viewers we feel the helplessness that torments Giles here, because it’s clear the usual story pattern will be no help at all. Jenny has fallen outside of the story. We’ve lost her.

Jenny’s trauma doesn’t lend itself to typical storytelling structures, especially not the abbreviated versions you need for a 45-minute television episode. The creative team seem well aware of this, although it isn’t clear how they’re going to land a resolution out of it. The same team, however, seem to have missed that the episode’s A-story presents the same kind of difficulty. I presume it slipped by because everyone was so focused on the evil robot stepfather, which seems like a solid Buffy premise, that they missed the real problem area until it was too late. The problem here isn’t what the robot boyfriend means to Buffy, it’s what the robot boyfriend means to Joyce.

To make the episode work, the show has to put the relationship between Buffy and her mother under enormous strain. Buffy witnesses abusive behaviours from Ted, but for the episode to work, Joyce can’t listen to her. Buffy is subjected to psychological and then physical abuse from Ted, but Joyce can’t protect her. In a stunning mid-episode swerve, Buffy causes Ted’s death, and Joyce has the shocking experience of finding the man she has fallen for dead at her daughter’s hands, but the two characters have no way to make sense of this. When it turns out Ted is a robot, it’s a thin salve on what has been a very straightforward portrait of a family becoming overwhelmed by toxic abuse. The show puts a wash on it by indicating Joyce was not properly herself, but this doesn’t go nearly far enough to create a protective layer around this plotline that will allow Joyce and Buffy to walk away from the experience unscathed.

There is a clear sense throughout of the episode getting out of control. It breaks the rules of Buffy by bringing in the police. (Recall we last saw the police in The Dark Age when Buffy lost control of her own narrative and it became the Giles show – here the show itself is losing control.) This violation is especially jarring when those rules were just restated one episode previous, when Buffy was shot at in a school by an assassin posing as a police officer – those events wouldn’t just have drawn police attention, they would have made global headlines.

But all of this is necessary because we are invested in Joyce, who is Buffy’s only remaining foothold in the normal world. A story that threatens Joyce is led inexorably towards police intervention. (The school, meanwhile, is so thoroughly framed by the supernatural that the assassination attempt seemed almost reasonable; it would be far more shocking to see Buffy actually attending a class or handing in some homework.)

In this way, by relentlessly following its own logic, the episode forces Buffy into a new shape. It is as if Ted’s robotic need to remodel the world around him is reaching outside the fiction to affect the show itself. And as with Ted, the corrective has to be drastic. Buffy has to break its own principles to get out of the situation. This is supposed to be the show where emotions are real and danger is real and things have consequences. Jenny is embodying those principles, but in the very same episode we have Buffy and, particularly, Joyce dodging them entirely. If the same emotional care was applied to Joyce as to Jenny, then these events would destroy her emotionally and change her forever. The wrap-up mother/daughter bonding scene is laughably inadequate at providing a realistic emotional resolution to the awful experiences depicted throughout the episode.

The episode ends with Giles and Jenny getting back together. Jenny just announces she’s stopped being upset, and happiness ensues. It’s a funny way to play out the conclusion of this subplot, but it gets the job done, and the overall feeling I get from this episode is getting the job done. At the end of act one you know Buffy’s mum is in a relationship with an abuser while Jenny is experiencing trauma – and in both cases the end of the episode just announces “problem fixed” and hopes that’s enough.

So Ted disappears down the memory hole to allow Joyce to remain the same. It’s sad to break the run of great episodes with this – and it is a good episode, even a good Buffy episode, but it’s one that can’t be subjected to the same emotional scrutiny as the rest of the Buffy narrative. It’s the Problem of Jesse, of course, and proof that part of how you deal with that problem is by avoiding some tricky situations entirely.

And it should be said, also, that I can’t really see this episode as a failure. Sure, it has to be yanked unceremoniously back into line at the end, but it’s a heck of a ride getting there. (Also, John Ritter!) It’s a problematic piece, a misfire, but also a brave attempt to keep pushing into risky territory with intense emotional stories about women being challenged and rising above the threats they face. One of the big reasons people have started to care about Buffy is because this show takes risks. An episode that jumps the rails is part of the deal, and ultimately, a small price to pay.

Other notes:
* As noted before in I Robot, You Jane, Buffy’s robot/technical episodes often feel a bit wrong. This one is no exception. I still have no clear sense of why this might be. Any new ideas, anyone?
* Imagine an alternative version of this episode that wouldn’t mess up Joyce – it could be a friend of Joyce, with a daughter in Buffy’s class, who’s just found a great new man. This is more or less how Some Assembly Required insulated the regulars from the weight of its intense abuse storyline. It could work, but the episode would lose a lot of its juice as a result (see: Some Assembly Required).

What does it mean to have your name in title of the show? Especially when your name is accompanied by a succinct job description: Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Recent episodes have put this question into focus, with both Halloween and The Dark Age spending much of their runtimes with Buffy stripped of her rights and responsibilities as protagonist, and the first part of this story shining a light on the relationship between the Buffy part of the title and the Vampire Slayer part. Of all the possible directions to take in this second season, the show has turned its focus on its own premise (as represented by the title character), and started interrogating itself, forcing itself to justify and re-justify the storytelling choices involved in placing this particular teenage girl at the centre of a narrative world where both emotions and threats are real.

That’s not all that’s at work in the show right now. In this episode we properly meet Kendra the Vampire Slayer, Buffy’s successor after her death (nearly) at the hands of the Master in Prophecy Girl. Kendra brings on-stage more of the wider supernatural world. We already knew about the Watchers and the lineage of Slayers – they’ve been part of the mythology from the very beginning – but we’ve never really seen them before, and it’s no coincidence that they materialise now just after Halloween and part one of this story revealed more of a monster society, while Lie To Me and The Dark Age allow glimpses of how humanity at large copes with the existence of magic and monsters. Again, this is the show interrogating itself, extrapolating from its own conceits not to build a coherent and believable world – it doesn’t much care about that – but to add weight to the core structure of Buffy and friends versus monsters.

And it’s no coincidence either that almost all the episodes I just mentioned are from the Halloween-onwards period. I said in that episode write-up that it was the beginning of a fantastic run of episodes, and it’s obvious that the show’s creative team are getting fuel from diving hard into the story they’ve created. They’re engaging with Buffy the Vampire Slayer with the zeal and care of fans who write fanfiction and create video mixes and write lengthy analysis on their blogs, and while their priorities are necessarily different to those fans, there is an obvious deep respect for their own creation that is often absent on such shows. (I hasten to add that this absence of respect in other shows is often due to the frenzied pace of creation and the contradictory pressures of studio higher-ups, not because the writers and producers themselves have contempt for what they are doing.) To me, this ascension of Buffy into excellence is intimately linked to its embrace of the fandom aesthetic.

Returning to the point – what does it mean for Buffy to be a protagonist? Buffy’s uneasy relationship with Kendra can easily be read as her reaction to the existential threat Kendra poses. How can she be the protagonist if her titular role is claimed by another?

The episode spends its time reassuring Buffy of her position. Kendra represents tradition, the accepted and expected way Vampire Slaying should be done, the very approach Buffy spent her first season rejecting. Indeed, her rejection of it was so successful – so moral, in fact – that Giles himself became her biggest champion, and her friend rather than her master. Simply explaining to Kendra about Angel and Buffy indicates the extent to which the show has the rejection of traditional expectations and restraints at its heart. Likewise Buffy’s and Kendra’s argument about emotions – assets or weaknesses? – which, in a narrative world where emotions are real, is
basically asking “are you a central character in this story?”

The implication is that Kendra is not just compromised and limited by her adherence to tradition, but that she is also unable to be a protagonist. She doesn’t have the freedom and initiative to assert herself over a narrative, and so she cannot be a good centre to a story world. (One might imagine that in the future Buffy might encounter the counter-example, a potential usurper who is unable to be a protagonist because she is too committed to freedom and initiative.)

This encounter with Kendra is, in a sense, the ultimate challenge for Buffy, rounding off the process of becoming a Slayer that began with her choice in Prophecy Girl. The demonstration is a charming decision to treat Angel as a damsel in distress – a male damsel is still vanishingly rare in popular culture, and Buffy relishes the chance to rescue him. Buffy emerges from this reinforced in her role, and in fact even more freed from limitation, as Kendra carries the baggage of tradition with her when she walks away.

Buffy is at the peak of her powers. She is confident and together. She defeats Spike, who has emerged as the most significant threat to her so far. At this point, it looks like she will move steadily forward to conquer every obstacle that might be set before her. It’s a high point.

But stories are like rollercoasters, and the high point always comes just before a fall.

Other notes:
* I recall at the time of this episode a lot of geeks proposed a female empowerment methodology: the Watcher’s Council should stop the heart of each new Slayer, then revive her. You get a new Slayer so you haven’t lost anything, and if they survive the heart-stop and stick around like Buffy did, you have a net gain! Sweet! You only have to murder a bunch of innocent teenagers to get there! (At the time this proposal struck me as ridiculous because it was so out of keeping with the storytelling approach in the show, but given what is later told about the Slayer lineage and its origins, I actually think it would be a chillingly plausible plotline for late-period Buffy.)
* Xander and Cordy makeouts. It’s played for comedy – overplayed, probably – but it’s nice to realise that they’ve had a romantic comedy playing out in the margins for the whole season. Contrast with Oz and Willow finally getting together, which is also hilarious but is played for beautiful, beautiful pathos. Oz is just so charming. SO charming. But he’s been set up for so long you know he’s totally genuine underneath the quippy stuff. And his animal crackers monologue is perfect. Apparently most of this dialogue was ad lib by the actors, and Seth Green has said the Monkey Pants line was taken from a dream Alyson Hannigan had.
* The other deadly assassin: a person with a gun. Guns are still pretty much the scariest thing in this world. Also, HOSTAGE JONATHAN!
* I haven’t talked about Spike-and-Dru here. The original plan, I believe, was that Spike was going to die here, but a cured Dru would rise up to become an even more bad-ass foe – the little bad/big bad pattern that this show will return to several times. The show knew Spike was special, though, and spared his life, leading to a very interesting dynamic in the back half of the season.
* Also, Kendra. First significant character of colour in the show – there’s a whole discussion to have about Buffy & race. But that’s for later.

In every generation there is a Chosen One. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer.

These words have been intoned near the beginning of nearly every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and if the show has any mission at all it is to prove them wrong. Yes, Buffy was chosen – but the more important choice was the one she made herself. And Buffy will not stand alone – her friends are with her, no matter the risks. And yes, she slays vampires and demons, but “the Slayer” label isn’t enough. There’s more to her than that. Right?

One of the principles of this show is a commitment to emotional realism, and this is applied to the nature of Buffy’s heroic identity. “Vampire Slayer” is an iconic role that exists in immediate tension with normal life. In a simpler show, that wouldn’t matter – Buffy wouldn’t need to worry about mundane concerns because her heroic identity would define her completely, the way Michael Knight never had to worry about the real-word costs of having his face shot off then assuming a new name and new identity fighting crime with a talking car as an agent of a mysterious agency with the initials FLAG. Here, though, Buffy is a teenage girl with ordinary emotional concerns, and integrating the business of being a chosen slayer of vampires with her desire to do fun stuff and fit in and have a boyfriend – that’s a challenge. How can you be a Slayer and still fit into the rest of the world?

It’s career day at Sunnydale High. Everyone is prompted to start thinking long-term about how they might enter the world beyond high school, and more simply, about what they want to be. Buffy doesn’t see the point in thinking about it, because as far as she can tell her future is fully booked up with vampire slaying. Giles encourages her to think about finding “gainful employment” but she is unconvinced. Hoping for a normal life seems futile. The comparison is gently made with her naive childhood ambitions to be a figure skater like Dorothy Hamill: “I wanted to *be* her. My parents were fighting all the time, and skating was an escape. I felt safe.”

This confession was made to Angel, in a scene that really gives us a sense of how they make sense as a couple – Buffy relaxes around him, and he becomes less impossibly uptight as well. This episode does a good job of showing their compatibility, with a nice scene later where Buffy reassures Angel that his vampiric look doesn’t upset her, because she still sees that it’s him within; and by rhyming Angel waiting in her bedroom with Buffy going to his apartment and falling asleep in his bed. For the first time the show takes the time to make sure they feel like two people in love.

It is Angel’s thoughtful care for Buffy that points the way out of her frustrating cycle of futility: he offers to take her skating. The scene at the rink is shot with a different emotional rhythm to the rest of the show. It’s a notable breakout from the house style by new director David Solomon. Buffy skates, and we (like Angel) watch, and it’s kind of lovely. This sequence comes directly out of actress Sarah Michelle Gellar’s own life – she was a competitive figure skater with a few placings under her belt. It’s a moment of simplicity, and an indication that the answer to Buffy’s dilemma is to embrace knowingly the idea of escape – she is stuck with her calling, but she can still create moments where she is allowed to be something else. This will be Buffy’s challenge – being able to find peace on her own terms, and enjoy it in the shadow of her responsibilities. (Of course, the show issues a pointed reminder of those when she is attacked at the rink. It’s a short, brutal fight scene, finishing with the skate blade gag you knew was coming.)

That’s a coping strategy, however. It’s important, and it does mark a lesson learned for Buffy, but it doesn’t banish the burden of being the Chosen One. The show has a plan here as well, revealed in the climax, which is a tremendous swerve: one of the mysterious figures stalking Buffy is revealed not to be an assassin after all, but instead claims to be the Slayer. Buffy is not alone after all.

It’s a fittingly momentous end to the first installment of a two-parter, the show’s first proper double. (Welcome to the Hellmouth/The Harvest was conceived and aired as a single double-length episode.) The episode takes care to raise the stakes all over, with the new Slayer locking Angel up to face the rising sun, a strange assassin threatening Xander and Cordelia, and Giles and Willow discovering Spike’s ultimate goal in Sunnydale – the restoration of the clearly damaged Drusilla to full health. This is a proper event episode, and it shows that the Buffy team don’t need a season-ender to shake everything up – in fact they had barely settled into their new status quo. Once again, it’s clear that they have ambitions for this show. If this is the kind of upset we’re seeing in episode nine, then what might be coming down the pike in episode fourteen?

Other notes:
* Co-writer on this episode is Marti Noxon, whose importance to the show will rapidly grow in the seasons to come.
* We get some more neat scenes with Oz, but the show still isn’t ready to pay him off. He even gets his long-awaited meeting with Willow, but the scene cuts away before they even interact. Still, his selection as an exceptional student with the smarts to match Willow, combined with his sense of humour and rocker credentials, not to mention his good taste in being interested in her – all of this does an excellent job in putting him over. In fact, it finally gives me an idea why they’ve put so much effort into giving him point-of-view scenes even though he’s outside the Scooby Gang. Willow’s innocence and emotions make her the exposed nerve of the group, and the audience is highly protective of her – these scenes show us we can trust Oz not to hurt her.
* Speaking of which: “Scooby Gang” is used for the first time here. “Slayerettes” will turn up again I think, but “Scoobies” will soon catch on.
* Back in Halloween, the show started binding its monsters together. No longer just a series of isolated threats to normal life, the monsters now present an alternative society and culture. Spike’s move to call in the “big guns” is the most dramatic example of this so far, giving a sense of scale to this hidden world. Another, bigger, marker of this transition is the arrival of the demon bar, Willy’s Place. The main bad guys of season one and season two both had standing sets, but now the everyday sort of monsters do as well.

Chris Claremont took over the Marvel Comic The Uncanny X-Men for issue #94, cover date May 1975. Joss Whedon was about to turn eleven. And since the golden age of science fiction comics is twelve, he was perfectly placed to soak up Claremont’s heady mix of outsized action and soap operatics across the coming years. Claremont’s X-Men work is known for its strong female characters and closely-tracked emotions, and the influences on Whedon’s vision for Buffy the Vampire Slayer are obvious. Like other Marvel books, continuity was celebrated, with returning villains a particularly common occurrence. Plot threads would deliberately be left dangling, relationships between characters would constantly change under the influence of dramatic events, and shocking revelations would be made that change your understanding of a character. You were constantly reminded that the story you were reading was just a component in a larger narrative, one that a casual reader might not fully understand.

The first season of Buffy had the Claremontian strong female characters and sympathetic emotions, but it was also very episodic, with only occasional and superficial nods to continuity and development. From the start of season two a clear shift was evident as Whedon and his team started encouraging continuity and pushing characters into arcs of change. In this, the eighth episode of the second season, Buffy slips entirely out of the world of self-contained episodes and becomes the television equivalent of a Chris Claremont comic: full of action, full of emotions, and comprehensible only as part of a greater whole.

Sure, you could watch this episode as your first Buffy and you’d be fine. Scary stuff happens, there’s jokes, it’s an engaging way to spend your time. But you’d also spend the whole episode thinking “I’ve arrived in the middle of something”. This episode draws on multiple plot threads spun out over this season and the last: the flirtation between Giles and Jenny, the changing relationship between Giles and Buffy, the mystery of Giles’ past with Ethan Rayne, the uncertain position Angel holds with the rest of the group, to name the most prominent examples. As of now the show doesn’t just reward the committed, it aims directly at them and leaves casual viewers to fend for themselves. It’s a daring move. Buffy wasn’t the first show to bring in continuity-dense ongoing narrative to weekly drama/action TV, but this mode was still uncommon. The move was also very savvy indeed, because it turned out that the show’s audience was ready to commit, and commit hard.

A commitment to long-form structures allows (requires?) a heightened engagement with the show’s ensemble. This episode delivers something genuinely new: a Giles spotlight episode. Giles is an odd character, both inside the core group (because he knows the truth) and outside of it (because he’s an adult). When a show about being a teenager at high school suddenly turns its focus upon an adult… well, what does happen?

The precredits sequence has a man seeking Giles getting killed by a very creepy monster. His screams for help are drowned out by Buffy’s aerobics music, which is perhaps the cruelest gag in the series so far, but also puts us gently in the Giles frame of mind – he spends the sequence complaining about the noise. But this is just softening us up for what we get right after the credits: a spooky dream sequence like the ones that bothered Buffy in season one, only this time it’s Giles having the rough sleep. And once we get that shot of Giles in his PJs, our point of view is locked in with him for the first time. Not coincidentally, it’s clear we’re about the get some insight into Giles’s dubious history, as hinted at just two episodes previous.

We get some time with our Buffy/Xander/Willow trio, as they talk about and speculate about Giles, before handing off to the man himself. Away from the young people we track Giles through a lovely moment with Jenny Calendar, who continues to be charmingly forthright about what she wants, and then crash right into trouble: there are police in the library investigating the murder of the precredits victim.

Now this is a shocking moment for this show. There have been quite a few deaths on this show before, several of them on-campus, but apart from the brief moment at the end of School Hard, the police haven’t been seen once. (And they were only seen in that episode to make the point that they absolutely wouldn’t be investigating the death.) A murder investigation is simply not part of the way stories work in Buffy. We have to suspend our disbelief for metaphor monsters to keep threatening high schoolers, and police investigations put all of that in doubt.

What this signifies, of course, is that we are not in a Buffy story any more. We are in a Giles story. He’s an adult, the gatekeeper to the real world, and handing him the point of view means opening the door to all kinds of adult complications. Speaking of doors – shortly afterward he closes his door in Buffy’s face, refusing to allow her to reclaim the POV of her own show. And a few scenes after that we see that the logic of Giles-POV is asserting itself over the entire show, when Buffy makes the uncharacteristic suggestion of handing Ethan Rayne over to the police, instead of electing to just beat the snot out of him. We’re in the Giles show now, whether we like it or not – and it’s clear from Giles’s behaviour that no-one’s going to like this one.

The monster, a possessing demon, seizes control of Jenny Calendar. We then have an unnerving sequence where demon-Jenny tries to follow through on real-Jenny’s promises by seducing Giles. And so we see the merit of Giles’s caution and reserve – he doesn’t give in to a demon, of course, but more importantly, he refuses to take advantage of a situation where consent is unclear. Nice work, Giles.

So, Giles has shown his worth by remaining steadfast and moral in the face of temptation, but he’s also shown he’s unworthy of carrying the show by shutting Buffy out in the first place. Time for the title character to grab control of her own show again. She does so, of course, by kicking in the door that Giles had previously closed in her face. She stomps in to save Giles from Jenny, and the truth comes out about Giles’s youthful foolishness, meddling with powerful forces that are now coming to kill him (and his old mate Ethan – the point isn’t made strongly, but Giles’ old circle is a clear parallel to the current group around Buffy).

With Buffy reinstated as protagonist for the final section of the show, we get a rush of problem-solving and ass-kicking. Willow figures out a way to out-manoeuvre the demon and Angel shows up at just the right time to make it happen. Of course, the police disappear from the narrative entirely.

Then we get a concluding moment between Giles and Jenny. Traditionally in this kind of adventure narrative, jeopardy like this brings a couple closer together – but this show is not that show. In accordance with the principles of genuine emotion and genuine threat, Jenny is unnerved by her experience and doesn’t want to pursue a relationship with Giles any more. It’s a very human reaction, and completely unexpected in terms of television storytelling, although perhaps not as surprising if considered as a relative of the unlucky sad sacks of Marvel comics. It’s also a further illumination as to how this show intends to manage the Problem of Jesse: by embracing the misery, when it comes, so the bright spots shine all the brighter in comparison.

The episode closes, as it must, with an exchange between Buffy and Giles, where Buffy reflects on her greater understanding of Giles as a person. She takes on the role of adviser and comforter to him – a direct mirror of the closing moments of the previous episode. The most interesting thing in this exchange is so small you almost miss it, however. Giles says “I never wanted you to see that side of me.” Note that he speaks in the present tense. The Giles that Ethan calls Ripper, the short-sighted and angry and foolish and dangerous Giles, is not gone. Ripper isn’t a youthful phase he grew out of – it’s an aspect of his personality that remains, suppressed but far from gone. This conversation with Buffy is the start of Giles’s slow journey to accept that side of himself. We have not seen the last of Ripper.

Other notes:
* Curious that Buffy’s breaking up a blood heist – surely it’s preferable that vampires drink stolen blood supplies rather than go out hunting for the fresh variety? And doesn’t Angel get his blood from supplies like this? This is all glossed, typically for this show, which never really pays much attention to where all these vampires are getting their blood. The real-world implications of a vampire plague in Sunnydale would belong in the Giles show, but they have no place in Buffy.
* There’s a great bit where Xander can’t stop Ethan, but Cordy promptly nutsacks him and he goes down. There’s some great Xander-Cordy action throughout this episode showing their growing sympatico – Xander grabs Cordy to protect her, Cordy asks Xander to explain things – but they still talk about how much they hate each other at every opportunity. The show is canny here, quietly priming us for something to happen between these characters but always hiding it in the periphery of scenes so it never gets soap-opera obvious.
* It’s unpleasant to see the show go after Jenny, who’s such a fun character. Luckily it all turns out all right! Phew, it’s good to know she’s safe from now on!
* This episode has a superlative three-quarter swerve: Buffy gets betrayed by Ethan Rayne. After spending the whole episode convincing you that they wouldn’t do the most obvious thing in the world, they then do the most obvious thing in the world. Love it.
* Crazy green backlight as demon Jenny arrives at Ethan’s shop. It goes out as she comes in. Traffic lights? Or is a Russell Mulcahy film being shot outside?
* “We’ve got to figure out how to solve this problem and we have to do it now!” *sips cup of tea*

The arrival of Spike & Dru has changed up the vampire metaphor at work in the show. Now vampires are the cool kids, the dangerous ones who get into fights and have sex and don’t do their homework. This episode takes this imagery and swerves it hilariously, by introducing a subculture of wannabe vampires. They desperately want to be in with the cool kids, even if they don’t really understand what that means.

The Vampire groupies are played for laughs – there’s a fantastic gag, one of the best in the whole series, when Angel sees a groupie dressed just like he is – but it also allows them some beats of tragedy because the groupies are obviously much more like the nerds and outcasts of the library than the cool kids of vampiredom. Their attraction to the cool kids is understandable, but their sheer cluelessness is almost painful to watch, because we know – we have seen – that Spike and Drusilla and their kind are dangerous to be around.

The groupies, desperately wanting more, mirror the emotion running in the main cast this week: jealousy. One of Buffy’s old friends has turned up, and Angel (and Xander) get jealous, but Buffy saw Angel with Drusilla, so she gets jealous too, and Spike gets jealous when he finds out Dru talked to Angel, and everyone’s pretty messed up with their jealousy.

The show’s principles are in action here – even though this show is full of vampires and silly groupies, it promises to take emotions seriously. All of these jealousies are not random, they are based on the insecurities built into each character. Spike knows Angel and Dru have history, and Buffy knows that Angel has a past gien his enormous age difference. Angel knows Buffy is a young girl with a life of her own that might have no place for him. Etc, etc.

This swirl of jealousy is actually just groundwork for even higher stakes. The insecurities drive the characters to expose themselves and that pushes their relationships to new places. Most notably, Angel asks Buffy if she loves him, and she says the words. That’s a big deal. But the show doesn’t stop there, moving on to use this moment to address the reality of Angel-as-love-interest. Angel confesses the horrific crimes of which he is guilty. It’s a crucial moment for the show – and a clear-eyed look at what exactly Buffy’s romance entails. (The show underlines that Angel is right to bring this up, despite his personal change this past overhangs the present – remember, at the start of the episode Angel saw Drusilla try to kill a child, and he let her go without a fight. The world looks different when you’re a vampire, even a vampire with a soul.)

Which brings us back to the groupies, specifically to Ford, Buffy’s old friend. His beliefs and hopes are also focused in a vampiric direction. Does he understand the horror he’s opening himself up to? The show equivocates on this a bit – Ford is played partly as clueless, and partly as ruthless. A late revelation that he’s terminally ill is meant to justify his embrace of horror, but it doesn’t quite work – it doesn’t really explain anything by itself, just muddies up the picture even more.

Nevertheless, the show ultimately makes clear that Ford doesn’t really appreciate what he’s dealing with, and in so doing it makes us uneasy about Buffy’s entanglement with Angel. In Ford’s fate we see the show’s principles unstintingly applied: the threats are real. There is no forgiveness for Ford, no easy out. He makes bad choices and he is killed. The show’s other principle is for the characters to experience real emotions as a result of this trauma, and this hurts Buffy. The final scene of the episode has Buffy and Giles by Ford’s grave, and we see her carry that weight: “Does it ever get any easier?”

And so we stare directly at the problem of Jesse. (If you’ve been following these posts you’re sick of me mentioning it, but for completeness, it’s this: putting real threat and real emotion into your stories threatens to trap you in misery.) Ford’s death has shaken Buffy. Yes, the loss is different: Jesse was an innocent casualty, whereas Ford betrayed Buffy and brought his death upon himself. But this just makes the loss all the more painful: Ford’s death is awful, but his betrayal is agonizing.

Back when Jesse was killed, the show didn’t know how to engage with the emotional impact that would follow, and so it dodged the issue entirely. Nineteen episodes later, the show has built up the emotional repertoire to embrace a character’s pain, confident that it can find its way back to joy. And in the final exchange of the episode, it demonstrates exactly how it intends to resolve the problem of Jesse. Buffy asks Giles if life will ever get easier:

Giles: What do you want me to say?
Buffy: Lie to me.
Giles: Yes, it’s terribly simple.
Giles: The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, uh, we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after.
Buffy: Liar.

Life is hard and complicated, and people die, and it hurts like hell. Faced with this, Buffy asks Giles to lie to her. And – in a final confirmation that he has abandoned his Watcher remove – he does. And it is unconvincing, and of course it was always meant to be, because the lie is not the point. The point is, he gave Buffy what she needed.
We stave off despair by leaning on each other. It’s love, of course. The pathway from misery back to joy is simply love.

Problem solved.

Other thoughts:
* Unsurprisingly, given this one pretty much gives a thesis statement for the show, this is a Joss Whedon joint. Accordingly, the dialogue is heavy with his Buffy-speak: “You made him do that thing where he’s gone!” – and a sex joke that other writers wouldn’t dare: “Of course I had no idea what it was about.”
* Not to mention that the whole arc of the season is foreshadowed in this episode in Angel’s horrific past and Ford’s painful betrayal.
* The comic-book style storytelling goes full Claremont with some juicy backstory revealed (Buffy’s past life, Angel’s past life) and some continuity threads deliberately dropped now to be picked up later (a book is stolen from the library, Willow invites Angel into her home).
* Wisely, the show never goes back to the vamp groupies, and it mostly forgets about how normal people might react to a world where vampires are real. Doing so would torpedo the metaphorical work it’s trying to do – it’s hard to keep up the idea that monsters are metaphors if they’re forced to interact with normal people as well. (Later on, in the Angel spin-off, the show’s purpose is different, allowing a return to this well.)
* hello Chanterelle, another of Buffy’s recurring bit players – we’ll probably end up talking more about her later.

Here we go. The episodes leading up to this feel like shakedown runs, but here this show goes into high gear. This is where Buffy the show becomes Buffy the classic TV show, launching into a sustained run of excellence, hitting new heights every couple weeks and still climbing, just nailing every aspect of its premise and execution and having a massive influence on the world of TV in the process. Even with one loser in the mix (Bad Eggs), this must count as one of the greatest runs of TV ever produced.

And it starts right in the precredits. It’s a vamp-fighting sequence, bread-and-butter for the opening spot. But this one is an exceptional example. It’s funny. The fight is in a pumpkin patch and it leads to vampires being pelted with pumpkins, a scarecrow getting a stake through the heart, and some silly business with a haywagon and the pumpkin patch sign.

It’s also clever and portentous: there’s another vamp filming this battle on a camcorder, and seeing Buffy through the lens is instantly creepy, making her seem very vulnerable, while also nodding to the meta that this post-modern show loves to reference – the villain, like us, watches Buffy through a screen, and has a position of power over her as a result. (They didn’t forget the comedy here either – the camcorder’s battery is in the process of dying out.)

That’s the show’s offer: we do scary, and we do funny, and we do self-awareness. Like that stuff? Stick around.

There’s one other feature of the opening worth noting: not a single word of dialogue. Buffy says nothing. The vamp says nothing. There’s no ominous voice-over. It’s just action, but the storytelling couldn’t be clearer. There could be no greater sign of the show’s increasing confidence.

But here’s another anyway, just a few minutes later:

Buffy: I was gonna stay in and veg. The one night a year things are supposed to be quiet for me.
Xander: Halloween quiet? Oh, I figured it’d be a big old vamp scare-apalooza.
Buffy: Not according to Giles. He swears that tomorrow night is, like, dead for the undead. They stay in.

The casualness of this exchange – note how this exposition would usually be delivered by a stammering Giles in dramatic tones – hides some genius. For the first time in the series it is suggested the monsters of the night have their own social rules – they aren’t just horrific aberrations of our world, but a whole self-contained counterpoint to it. This puts the creatures of the night in an essentially satirical frame, as despite their otherwordly nature they still embrace mundane habits like taking a night off. The show gestured to this a bit in season one, where the Master would sometimes undercut his own bombast, but this is a bolder act, wrapping the show’s deadly horrors in the logic of comedy – it’s only a step or two away from the Sheepdog & Wolf Looney Tunes where the two enemies exchange small talk and clock in before beginning their vicious struggle.

The “night off on Halloween” has the curious effect of raising the tension instead of lowering it – we’re watching an episode of the show so something exciting has to happen, and it has to originate outside the normal boundaries of the show’s monster logic. It threatens to upset our expectations of what can happen on this show. In the end the danger doesn’t really deliver that kind of conceptual upheaval – the big shake-up is still a few episodes away – but it does remind the viewer not to get comfortable.

Monsters taking the night off on Halloween reinforces the message from School Hard about what kind of bad guys we’re dealing with here. The implication is, unmistakeably, that the vampires think Halloween is beneath them. Once again, the vampires are being set up as the cool kids, the rule-breakers, the ones who grew up too fast. They ‘re natural enemies for the sheltered nerds of the Sunnydale School Library.

And just one more sign of the show’s faith in itself: we’re over fifteen minutes deep before the supernatural threat finally turns up. That time is spent investing in character stories, and we get to explore the episode’s theme in a different way: while the show overall is revelling in its confidence, the characters are suffering from a lack of same. Questions of confidence beset the whole crew, giving us a good opportunity to check in on all our characters as season two gets properly rolling. The nature of the threat – costumes that turn the wearer into whatever they depict – allows this exploration to get charmingly literal.

Buffy’s lack of confidence falls in the usual place – her love life. She is still a bit in awe of Angel, and finds herself wanting next to Cordelia. She has just started dating Angel, her first romantic connection of the series, and it’s natural for her to be anxious about it. She ends up becoming a fainting, weak Ye Olden Times lady like those in Angel’s past.

Xander’s lack of confidence is in his “manliness”, specifically his reputation among other men. This follows on from Inca Mummy Girl where his fundamental heroism was affirmed, complicating the picture by showing that the opinions of others are crucial to his sense of identity, which is a very human failing. It’s also, unfortunately, not an encouraging direction for the character, and Xander comes across as even more foolish than usual. Still, it’s neat to see him transform into a badass military man.

Willow’s lack of confidence is in her sexuality – no-one notices her, and she thinks if she tries to act on her feelings she’d just make a fool of herself. This was hinted at in Inca Mummy Girl, where we were reminded that her attraction to Xander was unrequited and her only other romantic prospect in the series was a computer demon. The viewer is in a privileged position to know that her confidence is due a bump because she’s caught the attention of Oz, but once again Willow herself doesn’t find this out. And just as well – it gives her a chance to improve her confidence on her own terms, rather than because some boy likes her.

At the halfway mark the episode turns into a Willow showcase, because her confidence needs actual work, whereas Buffy and Xander basically need to get over themselves. Willow’s thematically perfect ghost costume ends up trapping her in the sexy outfit she’d chickened out of wearing, and she’s forced to guide everyone through the crisis and solve the mystery (which, pleasingly, she and Giles do in about ten seconds). She nails it, basically, and by the end she’s almost catching up to the viewers in how she sees herself. Finally she’s ready to actually meet Oz.

Giles also gets an arc. It’s weighted a bit differently, but you could describe his reserved personality as lacking in confidence. In the library sequence he is as stuffy and boring as he’s ever been, and Buffy saying Jenny Calendar liked him manages to throw him completely. This demonstration of Giles the stick in the mud is just setting us up for the three-quarter swerve, when we find out Giles was also known as Ripper, and has some kind of dark and dangerous past he’s not divulged before. The Giles we see facing down Ethan Rayne is a rougher, steelier version of the librarian.

So in this episode, all our core characters get some new layers and some reversals of expectations. They all get deeper and stronger and more interesting. This is the magic of season two – your groundwork is done, but your cast and situation is still fresh. Season two is your big chance to make something special – and this enormously fun episode demonstrates this show intends to be very special indeed.

Other thoughts:
* There’s some hilarious attention to continuity when the show remembers that Cordelia still hasn’t discovered Angel is a vampire, and plays it for lovely black comedy. (When Cordy is told Angel’s parents are dead, her first response is “oh good”!)
* And yet the show forgets its own rules about invitations with a random vampire in the Summers house. Like the breathing stuff, this show is much more interested in the consistency of its characters than the consistency of its fictional monster logic.
* Cordelia and Xander get another nice moment. Their characters have great chemistry right now.
* Spike basically just wanders through the episode being cooler than everything else. Until Buffy pummels him of course – and lets him get away. (This confrontation is superhero comic logic, once again.)
* Hmm, could’ve done without the pirate rape threat from Larry. Hi recurring bit player Larry, welcome to the show!