Category: Buffy

In August 2012, a high school girl in Steubenville, Ohio went out to a party and got drunker than she intended. In the hours that followed, a succession of popular boys took sexual advantage of her, and two raped her. The case went big after it appeared the town was rallying behind the boys instead of their victim. It marked a turning point in global discussion around sexual abuse and consent, particularly in the context of young intoxicated people.

This case, and many others like it before and since, cast a long shadow over this episode of Buffy. The episode was deliberately aiming at a known target: powerful young men luring young women into trusting them, and then feeding them drinks or drugging them, and raping them while they are insensible.

It happens a lot, and it’s been happening for a long time. The focus for some years has been on campus, particularly college fraternities, where this kind of abuse is rife (as researchers were at pains to point out after one story of frat brother abuse turned out to be unreliable).

This is heady stuff for a TV show about cheerleaders fighting vampires. It takes the ostensible structure of the show, monsters as metaphors, and slams it hard against the unavoidable emergent theme of rape culture. Vampires are metaphorical rapists, sure, but episode writer (and show veteran) David Greenwalt takes the idea much further – the metaphor here becomes almost literal, and the intention unmistakeable.

The episode is about a fraternity at Sunnydale’s elite school Crestwood College. (The fraternity is portrayed much like a Skull and Bones-style secret society, but it’s definitely part of the Greek system – this means Greenwalt gets to incriminate both types of boy’s club at once.) The frat boys have an unpleasant habit of luring high school girls into their clubhouse, then drugging them and feeding them to their (phallus-shaped) demon. The demon, in return, delivers wealth and power to their families.

There’s no metaphor at all to the first part of that, the luring and the drugging. The show makes this explicit by having one frat boy correct another who is about to follow through the real world script by raping the unconscious Buffy: “I was just having a little fun.” “Well, she’s not here for your fun, you pervert. She’s here for the pleasure of the one we serve.” The show applies the monster-metaphor as late as possible to make its real-world target crystal clear.

The effect of this is interesting. In the text of the show, literal rape is about pleasure and satisfaction, whereas metaphorical rape is about consolidating social and economic power. Or put another way: being a good business executive is morally equivalent to rape.

This is a politics I can get behind – linking the show’s in-built feminist angle to a left-wing criticism of capitalist power structures. But it is, as stated, heady stuff for this show. Aren’t we meant to be focusing on the horrors of high school? What are all these frat boys doing here?

The episode glosses this link by examining the age difference between Angel and Buffy, and having the frat boys use their age and “maturity” to lure in younger girls. (There’s no particular reason the frat boys target younger women when they have access to a campus full of co-eds.) It’s a pretty weak link, and the two halves of the episode never really illuminate each other. For what it’s worth, the resolution to the age difference conflict is “Buffy doesn’t care about it, and Angel eventually accepts this and gets over his own anxieties about it”, which is about the only way you can play it. Age differences are really about power differences, and if Angel doesn’t fret about that, then the dynamic gets very problematic very fast.

Throughout her relationship with Angel, Buffy never really commits to a perception of Angel as an older man. Instead he’s almost a wish-fulfilment teenage projection of what an older man boyfriend would be like. (Later, when he gets his own show, we see Angel outside the filter of Buffy’s perspective, and he’s kind of goofy and uncool.)

Anyway, with that conflict disposed of, the show is finally able to take the step it’s been teasing since episode one: Buffy and Angel becoming a couple. He asks her out – and she says maybe. In an episode in which we saw so many awful men with so much awful power, this is a nice way to go out – with all the power in Buffy’s hands.

Other thoughts:
* The Buffy/Willow/Xander threesome is portrayed as so close in this episode it almost gets weird – Buffy and Xander together braid Willow’s hair.
* I’m not sure if the costuming here was a deliberate nod to the “what were you wearing?” victim-blaming around rape culture, but Buffy wears two separate outfits where her bra is visible through her top.
* Buffy lying to Giles is a big moment for her. As discussed a couple episodes ago, she doesn’t often do the wrong thing. This is a pretty clear instance of after-school special mistake-making. The show goes out of its way to make sure we buy this act of rebellion, not by really giving Sarah Michelle Gellar a convincing emotional journey to sell (she still almost pulls it off), but by having Willow berate Giles and Angel for not understanding it. Who could resist that?
* As wild frat parties go, this ones looks pretty sedate – close dancing and chill-out music and only one drunk person!
* Jonathan is back and he gets his name!

Not a praying mantis.

So, Xander falls for a woman who is actually a monster, and yes the show is fully aware they already did this story. They’re having a second go the same reason anyone has a second go – they want to get it right this time.

This episode has some character work to do, too. As we’ve seen, the Willow-Xander-Buffy love triangle (really an unrequited-love-chain I guess?) was resolved in the season one finale, and its end was reiterated in the first episode of this season. This raises some questions – what is going on among the trio now, exactly? We saw that Buffy, Willow and Xander have love for each other at the end of When She Was Bad, and we saw them happily dancing together in School Hard, so we know they are in a good place with each other. But the intense romantic feelings of teenagers don’t untangle easily, and if this show is going to live up to its promise of real emotions then it needs to look harder.

But let’s start with the monster. Inca Mummy Girl (her real name is never revealed) is a complex character. She was an innocent girl chosen for an unpleasant fate, and now she is willing to sacrifice people in order to experience some of the joys she missed before. Her powers are classic Bathory – draining the life from other people to maintain her own youth! It’s really just vampirism in a slightly different form (a form traditionally marked as feminine, in fact, with its emphasis on looking youthful).

The show takes care to portray Inca Mummy Girl with sympathy, but also to point out repeatedly that her murders are horrific and inexcusable. It’s an effective balance, and she remains understandable even when she decisively chooses murder at the end.

So, what’s the monster-as-metaphor this time? The argument she has with her bodyguard points the way – he insists she must accept her fate rather than hurting other people. This is ultimately a monstrous riff on that blinkered teenage selfishness where you think the whole world revolves around you, and anyone (usually a parent) who stops you doing what you want is a monster who is ruining your life! The show is savvy enough to complicate this metaphor, because the people who sacrificed the Inca Mummy Girl were indeed monstrously unfair, and submitting to her fate will indeed ruin her life. So the show cleverly has its cake and eats it too – it criticises that selfishness while also agreeing that teenagers can be right about stuff.

This metaphor works just fine. She is a moral counterpoint to Buffy, who explicitly notes the parallels between them (although Xander has to remind Buffy that she made a different choice when she was faced with death). It also ties her to Xander, who is at the centre of this episode. Xander’s behaviour in season one was pretty awful, although the show tried to make it forgivable. Xander even had a heroic redemption after hitting rock bottom in Prophecy Girl. His post-redemption relationship with Buffy is given a lot of time this episode, and it’s pretty damn healthy. There’s hope for him after all!

But Xander still manifests the fundamental flaw of patriarchy: thinking the whole world revolves around you. (That’s also the fundamental flaw of teenagers, it’s just people who ain’t white male heterosexuals get it knocked out of them faster.) For all his obvious love for Willow – he outright states it, even – he still hurts her, over and over again, by not considering her feelings. And because it’s Willow getting hurt, the show knows you will feel that pain thanks to Alyson Hannigan’s talent for being a wounded puppy. These harmful acts don’t make Xander a villain, far from it – but he doesn’t get to be an uncomplicated hero either.

The climax brings Xander’s and IMG’s respective selfishnesses into collision. Xander is the one who demands the Inca Mummy Girl leave Willow alone – if she’s going to murder anyone, it’s got to be him. It’s his turn to step up to his responsibilities, the same test that Buffy passed, and that Inca Mummy Girl failed. For all is failures with the day-to-day business of not being a dick, when the choices are clear, he chooses well. After saving him from the consequences of his sacrifice here, Buffy gives her endorsement by comparing this to his saving her from her sacrifice in Prophecy Girl. Through Buffy, the show forgives him his weaknesses. The implication is that he will learn to see himself more clearly and do better all ’round. He’ll grow up. It’s a hopeful moment.

Willow, meanwhile, drifts along in the wake of Xander’s journey. She’s not over him, and she’s stuck. She doesn’t even get any dialogue after Xander makes his big heroic stand to save her life. All you get from this episode is that Willow feels unnoticed. However, even though Willow doesn’t get to address this problem, the show solves it for her by having someone notice her. This is quite heartening too – Willow hasn’t been doing anything wrong, after all, and by introducing Oz the show acknowledges this. In the rhythm of the episode the Oz scenes are very strange – why are we suddenly cutting away to some random other person? – but because we have been primed to sympathy for Willow this episode they work, another hopeful moment, and an emphatic expansion of possibilities for our core characters and the show.

Other notes:
* When you appeal to a sympathetic villain with the power of love, the villain is supposed to have a crisis of conscience and repent. Hasn’t Inca Mummy Girl seen any movies! Oh well okay I guess she hasn’t. This is the episode’s biggest swerve.
* Who’s that near-victim? Hey, it’s Jonathan! Like Harmony, he’s another bit player from the unaired pilot who returned in a very minor role in the regular series and ended up becoming an important part of the story.
* This ep was written by Matt Kiene and Joe Reinkemeyer, who were also behind The Pack, another episode that did smart work with the monster-as-metaphor. The Pack had a significant rewrite from Joss Whedon, though, and I suspect this episode did as well.

Vampires can breathe now okay

In the precredits, a new vampire rolls into town and smashes the Sunnydale sign with his arrival. It represents the destructive path he intends for the town – but it’s also a marker that his debut overthrows the current order. Sunnydale stories have been told a certain way, but now there’s a new antagonist in town and all that’s gonna change.

Season two starts in earnest right here. Episode one tidied away the overhang from the first season, then episode two let us catch our breath with the show in default mode. Now, the new era begins. And in a very real sense, that sign getting smashed is also the beginning of Buffy the cultural phenomenon. Across season one we watched the show work itself out and get all its pieces in place. Now the engine is assembled, it puts its foot on the accelerator and starts to race.

Back up a bit. The actual intro for this episode is Buffy being snagged by Principal Snyder and put in charge of parent/teacher night. Snyder marks Buffy as a “bad element”, pairing her with another troublesome student for this chore. This pairing is a weird move, exposing one of the faultlines in the show. Part of the premise of the show is that the teenagers know the truth and the adults don’t – otherwise the adults would take over the whole battle and the show wouldn’t exist any more. To keep Buffy independent, she has to fight in secret, breaking adult rules as she goes. There’s metaphor here of course – teenagers have their important reasons to sneak out of school that boring old people just wouldn’t understand. The trick here is that Buffy’s reasons for sneaking out are laudable and heroic, and if the grown-ups ever did figure that out they would start to appreciate what she’s doing.

And, of course, Sarah Michelle Gellar just doesn’t play Buffy as a troublemaker. Seeing Buffy side-by-side with Sheila just makes it comically obvious how that label is a very unconvincing fit for Buffy. Sure, she skips classes and she burned down a school building or two, but she radiates good sense and consideration. She isn’t a bad kid. It’s obvious. Buffy-as-delinquent is an unsustainable premise, which in turn shines a light on the way that Sunnydale is beset by monsters on a regular basis without anyone noticing. We suspend our disbelief because that’s the way genre storytelling works, but moves like this really rub our noses in it.

But, surprise! Later in this same episode, we find out the show is ahead of the game here. Snyder and the Police Chief discuss a cover story for the vampires, revealing that the town’s authority figures do know the truth, and in fact are actively working to keep the town in the dark. While the show will never really take this conspiracy far enough to absolve us of the need to manage our disbelief – a gang on PCP, that’s the whole cover story? – for the rest of its run the show will give us little handholds like this to make the burden easier. (This also changes the nature of Principal Snyder’s relationship with Buffy. Does he really think she’s just a troublemaker, or does he know the truth about her too? The conspiracy is kept small for now to keep the focus on the high school, but ground continues to be laid for looking at the wider world.)

This doesn’t shore up every aspect of the Buffy-as-unconvincing-troublemaker problem. The same issue was used throughout season one as the basis of conflict between Buffy and her mother. But, surprise! The episode has you covered here too, putting Joyce in the middle of the action and giving her this lovely little speech: “Principal Snyder said you were a troublemaker… And I could care less. I have a daughter who can take care of herself. Who’s brave and resourceful and thinks of others in a crisis. No matter who you hang out with or what dumb teenage stuff you think you need to do, I’m gonna sleep better knowing all that.” In other words, Joyce sees what the viewer does, and sensibly decides that this “troublemaker” label is a very poor fit.

So, what are these monsters that threaten Sunnydale? Our sign-smashing vampire is Spike, and this is the best character intro in the series so far. (It sure beats the way Buffy herself was introduced, also every other regular with the possible exception of Giles.) He steps out of the car, takes a drag from a cigarette, shot from below like a rock star. The show’s visual storytelling has moved up a level – when Spike crashes the Anointed’s gathering the dialogue could be in Swahili and you’d still get every plot beat.

At the end of the episode, Spike casually wipes out the Anointed One. The old way to do bad guys is over. Out goes emotional coldness and ruthless efficiency. In come new villains who are full of emotion, who are driven by their feelings. The Master was all about ironic distance and not really feeling anything any more, but Spike and his crew promise villains who get reckless and wildly out of control. And feeling out of control is something that resonates for teenagers. Now Buffy and her friends have something new to push against, bad guys who are even more messed up and dramatically interesting than they are. In other words: the bad kids.

Other notes:
* There’s a cute scene at the Bronze where Buffy, Xander and Willow dance together. It’s a pointed (and pleasant!) contrast to the dance of cruelty from When She Was Bad.
* Willow rescuing Cordelia is marvellous.
* Back in comments for When She Was Bad, Pearce talked about how a key message from the end of season one was Buffy’s reliance on her friends, which is how she managed to survive. Spike complains about exactly that in this episode: “A Slayer with family and friends. That sure as hell wasn’t in the brochure.”
* This episode’s TV broadcast in NZ infuriated me to the point of writing a letter to the broadcaster. It was screening pre-watershed, and all the violence was being cut from the show, which meant whole sequences became unintelligible. The end of the episode, with the Anointed One being killed by Spike, was impossible to understand and I had to go on to usenet to figure out what the hell was going on. Dumb. I remember getting a reply that seemed to ignore my complaint entirely, which just made me grumpier, but they did change the timeslot for the show a few weeks later.

Angel’s never-to-be-seen-again tan jacket: hot or not?

In terms of the overall 22-episode arc of Buffy season two, this episode is nothing but padding. It’s there to put some space between the last episode, which had the important job of making sure the door hit season one’s ass on its way out, and the next episode, in which the grand story of season two will begin. On the whiteboard for this season, this ep was probably marked “business as usual”.

Which gives us some irony. Business as usual can only mean “just like those season one episodes”, so we have the bemusing spectacle of the show defiantly promising not to do season one over again and then straight away doing an episode that could be right out of season one.

It’s a very standard metaphor-monster-of-the-week. A Sunnydale student resurrects his dead jock brother into a decaying zombie-like form, and then promises to build him a female companion out of parts. Aided by his creepy best friend, the student gets to work graverobbing, but targets Cordelia for the head, which leads to Buffy smashing the crap out of everyone and the zombie jock being destroyed in a burning building.

The metaphor this episode is brutally clear, and utterly in line with the core concerns of the show. It’s about male entitlement and the objectification of women. All three men are guilty of variations on the theme: Daryl feels utterly entitled to a woman and clearly doesn’t consider himself complete without one; his brother Chris promises his brother a woman in the first place, fully endorsing Daryl’s views; and Chris’s creepy friend Eric eagerly evaluates the bodies of women and attacks those he chooses as victims. It’s all utterly typical high school sexism, dialled up into the fantastic realm of Buffy, and while it’s ultimately a pretty forgettable episode it is clearly lining up some worthy targets.

And yes, the first season echoes are plentiful:

• The monster being consumed by a burning school building is precisely the fear Principal Flutie expressed in Welcome to the Hellmouth – pity he’s not around to see it.
• Cordelia wears her cheerleader outfit again, as seen in Witch, and we actually see the football team – Sunnydale seems like a real school again!
• Cordelia gets abducted by the bad guys – twice in one episode. (To be fair, this happens a fair amount in future seasons too.)
• The source of the trouble is Sunnydale’s supreme geek (this time the “reigning champ” of the science fair) – see also Fritz and Dave in I Robot, You Jane and, swerved, Morgan in Puppet Show. (It’s a bit weird how the show keeps going to this trope – don’t they know that geeks are their audience?)

Still, it’s obvious that all these echoes are fairly superficial. While the surface material is very familiar, the changes wrought in the previous episodes have stuck as the characters start being pushed into different emotional places. The flashes of humanity we’ve seen in Giles coalesce into the very funny and very charming sight of him nervously going on a date with Jenny Calendar. Angel and Buffy continue to deepen their relationship, as they talk through Buffy’s behaviour with Xander the previous episode and Angel admits his jealousy. Even Cordelia continues to accrue sympathy as her attempt to thank Xander gets completely brushed off. It’s all small-scale stuff, quietly laying groundwork for major emotional beats down the line, but it’s satisfying to see. This is a different storytelling mode to season one, where mostly the relationships between the characters were simply repeated every episode – now they are all moving.

Overall then, a pretty solid placeholder. The show knows what it’s doing now, and even its wheelspinning is funny and charming and thematically on point. There are much worse ways to fill out a season than this.

Other thoughts:
* the character of Jenny Calendar continues to be developed in the most excellent ways possible. The fascinating and diverse female ensemble on this show is great, with the male contingent both outnumbered and outshone.
* I have no further thoughts. There isn’t even really a 3/4 swerve this time. This was a perfectly acceptable and unremarkable episode of Buffy. Next!
* EDIT: I forgot to note the writer – Ty King & Joss Whedon are credited together. Okay.

This is the episode with the dance.

Buffy returns to Sunnydale after a summer away, and finds the vampires are stirring again too. Buffy reconnects with her gang of friends but something is amiss – she is carrying some bad psychology after the events of season one. Finally the vampires trick Buffy into leaving her friends unguarded so they can kill ’em to raise the Master from the dead, but Buffy still turns up in time to save them. The end. The primary focus here is Buffy’s emotional journey: she’s not over the nasty events that closed last season – she accepted her role and her fate, and she died (and got better).

The show, too, seems like it’s not over season one. The episode spends its whole runtime threatening to revive elements of season one that we thought we were done with. The love triangle is explicitly revived, with tension playing out between Willow, Xander and Buffy in pointed emotional setpieces. Buffy’s dad is back along with those family tensions. The Anointed One, minor figure on the villain side last season, is driving the plot as the opposing force. Even the Master is brought back, despite his death, and his return to prominence is threatened. (A nightmare about his return marks the point where Buffy transitions from “unhappy” to “outright unpleasant to be around”.)

This episode is like a mirror image of “Prophecy Girl”. Both episodes are weighted with the narrative of season one. “Prophecy Girl” was threw that narrative on the ground so hard it smashed, but this episode threatens to pick up all those broken pieces and start carrying them again. Essentially this whole episode is about television narrative expectations – that change can never be trusted, that shows find safe story structures and then hide there forever. If television has its way, then season two of Buffy will be much the same as season one. That’s how it works. Buffy Summers will be trapped in reiterations of season one forever.

Buffy, however, gets to push back. (Her name’s in the title after all.) She needs to break out of season one and force this show to allow real change. She’s not happy about it, though. She has no illusions about any of this – the Slayer path promises her misery, and while she made her choice, she still resents it. Given all this, her attempt to break free takes the form of some bad behaviour. And so we get the dance.

The dance. For my dollars, one of the best scenes in the whole run of the show, and probably the cruelest. In one mesmerising turn, Buffy crushes all three of her closest friends. Willow and Angel can only watch as she dances seductively with Xander, but Xander himself gets the worst of it, a nightmarish punishment for his behaviour in season one. But it’s not only her friends she’s destroying. Here, Buffy is destroying herself. She’s directly attacking the version of her that we saw the previous year, and trapping herself in cruelty that she can’t take back. It’s devastating and definitive. As of that moment, season one is dead. There’s no return possible.

But there’s still a whole vampire plotline to resolve of course, and that can’t happen until Buffy is pulled out of her destructive spiral: tearing down the old must eventually give way to rebuilding into a new form. And the tool the show uses to jolt Buffy across the line is, of course, Cordelia. As was established late last season, her role is truthspeaker, and so she is the only one who can call Buffy out for her bad behaviour and give her a new course.

Here the show brings in a second concern – if the show is rebuilding, what form will it take? Specifically, is this a show where a bunch of ordinary people help the Slayer with impunity, or is it a show which takes its threats seriously? (Notably, this also counts as unfinished business from season one – Buffy faced the Master alone, without help from her friends, who had other battles to fight. So does she need her friends helping her at all?)

Buffy goes to fight the vampires alone, telling her friends that they are a burden, and she can’t protect them – the show will kill them if it can. This, of course, is the trap. Buffy cannot do this alone. She needs her friends, so her friends are part of her fight, and yes, she won’t always be able to protect them. That’s the deal she makes – the deal we make – with the show. If we are to have Buffy the Vampire Slayer, then we have to accept this package: real emotions, real threats.

Yes, it’s the problem of Jesse again, emphatically re-emphasised for the start of season two. This is a show where threats are real, and it’s a show where emotions are real. And the risk of holding both those two ideas is that your show will descend into misery – in the same way Buffy descended in this episode. The show accepts this risk, and in the episode’s conclusion it points the way forward. Buffy crushes the Master’s bones into dust, but more importantly, in the next scene Willow and Xander welcome her with friendship despite her behaviour to them. Here the show for the first time presents a possible answer to the problem of Jesse: the past can be overcome, because people love each other.

It’s good they have an answer in mind, because this season is going to get rough.

Other thoughts:
* Buffy’s dance as an act of self-destruction jibes nicely with the tendency towards martyrdom that Pearce has identified in his rewatch, and also feeds into the discussion between Alasdair and myself about whether Buffy in Prophecy Girl was choosing life or choosing death… All in the comments on the “Prophecy Girl” entry. I’ve been getting some great comments on these posts you guys, well worth trawling back through and reading them.
* Part of Buffy’s brand is making pop culture references (itself a bit of a 90s phenomenon) – reinforced by the cheeky decision to open season two with two characters playing a film-quote game.
* Speaking of which, check out the sheer confidence it takes to launch your second season with a whole episode of your lead character as an unappealing bitch. This is the show’s gambit to win over new viewers? I’m not sure how exactly Whedon is doing it, but he’s making unsafe choices and getting them past head office, and it’s exciting to watch.
* Jenny Calendar is back! Her character gets rounded out with a view little dialogue bits – imagining her at Burning Man sure puts her claim of being a “technopagan” into context! But I like the subtle moment where she says “Hey kids”, a phrase Giles would never utter, giving her relationship to the others a different flavour without compromising her status as a senior figure.
* “We got to wear robes” says Willow about the burial of the Master’s bones. I love it.
* Following what Ben has suggested in comments, I intend to track writers during season two and see if anything interesting (to me) emerges. This episode was written by Joss Whedon. Ok then.

Joss Whedon has spoken about the origins of Buffy the Vampire Slayer many times: “I had seen a lot of horror movies, which I love very much, with blond girls getting killed in dark alleys, and I just germinated this idea about how much I would like to see a blond girl go into a dark alley, get attacked by a monster and then kill it.” (source)

That reversal of expectations, where the victim is revealed to be anything but, isn’t in the TV show. In “Welcome to the Hellmouth” Buffy’s true nature is introduced piecemeal, dropping clues to the audience then revealing the truth in dialogue, but not actually showing her in action until the back half of the episode. Instead the episode begins with a swerve on that originating set-piece, a reversal of the reversal: the boy goes into the dark place with the weak, vulnerable blonde girl, but it turns out she is not the victim, nor the slayer, but in fact she is the monster. These choices seem odd to me – Whedon had the chance to bring this potent scene to life, and passed it over. I can see why, primarily because the character arc here is Buffy figuring out that her Slayer life has followed her to Sunnydale, and it’s hard to tell that story if she fights a vampire in the precredits sequence. Still, there are ways to square that circle, and I think this stands as one of the show’s biggest missed opportunities.

As I’ve worked through season one, I’ve usually referred to the creative force behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer simply as “the show”: “the show is trying to do this”, “the show did that”, etc etc. I’m deliberately murking up the relationship between showrunner Joss Whedon and the final content we see on our screens. There are lots of complications and compromises and improvisations involved in the journey from vision to final form, and a large team is needed to make a TV show possible. In fact, I feel like pretending that the show itself has creative agency is quite truthful – large collaborative projects take on their own shape under the accumulation of conflicting interests, systemic needs and unexpected pressures. Choices emerge from the morass without any obvious author, like a planchette moving across a ouija board. You can still see the forceful vision of the showrunner, the distinctive rhythms of the director, the unique choices of the screenwriter, but these are just ingredients in the whole.

I was curious, then, to take a look at the first takes on the concept of Buffy, which are relatively undiluted Joss Whedon. Buffy originated as a screenplay that long-haired Whedon shopped around for a while before some producers took it up. His dissatisfaction with the final film is well-known, but that original script could tell us something about what he saw in this concept.

There are plenty of places to find it online – here’s the one I referenced. It’s an interesting read. It obviously isn’t the TV show, because the structural demands of film force it to resolve things that you don’t close off if you’re going to make a TV series out of it. It also doesn’t quite fit the TV show’s backstory – Buffy is older and not a virgin, and she doesn’t burn down the gymnasium. However, it does show some of what we’ve been told to expect. Buffy starts out as a Cordelia-type popular girl dating a jock and screwing up her nose at the weirdo social outcasts, and she discovers she can sense vampires and she has the strength and speed to fight them, but it’s pretty devastating for her social life.

It’s a fun expression of the bimbo vampire slayer concept, but I think the script does have one major flaw: the female characters are pretty empty. Buffy’s mother (who bears zero resemblance to the TV show’s harried but engaged version) and her popular-girl friends have nothing much to say, and nothing much going on beneath the surface. Obviously the point is that Buffy acquires new dimensions when she engages with the unpopular vampire-slayage path, but it’s unfortunate that her friends are depicted as such empty caricatures of people.

In fact, for a film with such a central interest in female power, there is a notable lack of interest in female relationships. Buffy’s important relationships are all with men – with her jock boyfriend, with her burner love interest, with her mysterious watcher, with her vampiric nemesis. Even the school principal has a more meaningful and multi-dimensional relationship with her than her mother and friends.

All of which makes me think about vampires. Buffy is conceived as a vampire slayer, and though the show expands to imagine many other kinds of critter, they are the iconic monster against which Buffy stands. The show was always aware of the metaphorical dimension of its monsters, but it was never entirely clear what vampires stood for. Partly this was because they weren’t meant to have just one meaning – different vampires could be used to represent different concepts (or just to provide an action sequence in an otherwise quiet episode, for that matter). However, the film script really points the concept of Buffy at one reading above others: that vampires are a metaphor for the sexualised power of men, which is to say, vampires are rape culture.

The film isn’t a strong coherent feminist statement of course. For example, Buffy’s internal journey is expressed primarily through realising that her current boyfriend is a sexist jerk and she should switch to a new boyfriend who is not a sexist jerk. Still, throughout the film it’s clear that the physical threat of the vampires is being mirrored by social threats from society in general: “She’s had sex!” says the random younger student at the football game when he sees Merrick is watching Buffy; “You’re a dyke!” says the motorcyclist whose come-on is rejected and whose bike is commandeered; “I’ve always wanted you!” says the vampire footballer as he prepares his killing blow. Men watching and desiring Buffy and conceiving of her in sexual terms is presented, over and over again, as an oppressive force that is threatened by Buffy’s power. The two sides come together in Lothos, the vampiric big bad, who uses the same kind of language to speak of the Slayers he has killed in the past: “The names, the faces, they all melt together. After a time, there really is no difference. One more pathetic bitch, begging for me to suck on her clotted heart.” Lothos is a big speechifying dick, basically.

I think this take on vampires-as-rape-culture makes a lot of sense in thinking about the TV show, and indeed, I am hardly the first person to frame it in this way. It’s one more point of reference I’ll try to keep in mind as I keep watching, anyway. I don’t think it was ever a deliberate interpretation but it doesn’t need to be – the nature of vampires and their associated imagery is such a good fit for the pervasive harms of rape culture that the linkage comes through regardless. TV shows are cultural products and reproduce that culture, even (especially) when they want to interrogate it. Rape culture sits under the whole series, like the spirit at the seance, slowly spelling out its name.

Other thoughts:
* Movie Buffy can sense vampires through menstrual cramps. It’s a vivid, interesting idea, but I honestly can’t tell if it’s a good idea or not.
* There’s a great Whedon 3/4 swerve in the death of Merrick the Watcher. You know it’s coming – the setup is exactly like the death of Obi-Wan in Star Wars! But how it plays out is a definite surprise.
* The weird slang that became known as Whedon-speak makes sense here. It’s the same valley girl caricature depicted in Clueless. Buffy transitions out of it as the movie goes on, to the point of saying to her friends “what language are you speaking?” – but Whedon obviously liked the rhythm of this hyper-stylised form of expression, and Buffy in the TV series keeps using it.
* The other pure-Whedon thing to look at is the original pilot for the TV series. Easily findable on Youtube (such as here) but I didn’t find much to say about it. Although it is interesting to imagine an alternative universe where Riff Regan carried on as Willow.)
* Two links relating to Buffy & rape culture, but both of them are about stuff much later on in the series – Gem told me about this episode of the F word podcast analysing the season 6 episode “Seeing Red” which has a controversial plot development; and Phil Sandifer writing cogently on the same subject. Phil’s epic Doctor Who analysis, the TARDIS Eruditorium, is transparently an influence on these Buffy posts. He’s deep into some fascinating stuff on Alan Moore and Grant Morrison in the comics world, too – basically, I strongly encourage you to check out his work.

Blocking gets tricky when you have 7 cast members and you’re shooting in 4:3

The scene that sticks with me is the conversation Xander has with Willow after Buffy turns him down:

Xander: Hey, I know what we’ll do! We can go! Be my date! We’ll, we’ll have a great time! We’ll dance, we’ll go wild… Whadaya say?
Willow: No.
Xander: Good! What?
Willow: There’s no way.
Xander: (exhales) Willow, come on!
Willow: You think I wanna go to the dance with you and watch you wish you were at the dance with her? You think that’s my idea of hijinks? You should know better.
Xander: (exhales) I didn’t think.
Willow: I’m sorry it didn’t work out for you. I’ll see you on Monday.

It’s the “you should know better” that stings the most, because it’s aiming not just at Xander, but also at us, the viewers. You think this works like television, where my emotions don’t function? No. Welcome to the real world.

Well, not exactly the real world. The extremely-stylised and artificial world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is nonetheless a world in which people have real emotions. This is it, the final part of the show’s formula, showing up for the last dance. Right at the start I talked about the problem of Jesse, which is the challenge of combining real threat and real emotion without destroying the show in the process. There was some hesitation in that discussion, though, because the “real emotion” part of that equation wasn’t yet in place. Across the season, you saw a few flashes of the show’s emerging commitment to real emotion: the scene with Buffy and her father in Nightmares, some of the Buffy/Angel stuff in Angel, some of the Willow/Xander stuff in The Pack. But here it all comes together in what is a mission statement for the show: our characters feel every punch. And to emphasise the point, it punches them, over and over again.

The punches land because of the other part of that formula: real threat. Again, real threat has turned up a few times this season: the pack hunting Willow, Darla biting Joyce – but in this episode the show makes it stick, most notably when vampires kill Cordelia’s boyfriend on the school grounds, and when the prophecy demands that Buffy die. There are plenty of lesser threats in there too, such as upset in the unspoken love triangle between Xander, Willow and Buffy.

It turns out that real emotions require real threats. Without threat, emotion doesn’t have enough provocation, nor enough consequence, to feel significant for storytelling. And conversely, without emotion, threat doesn’t ever really matter to us – if we don’t have a chance to feel the effects through the characters, then it just can’t hurt us. It isn’t balancing threats and emotions that threatens the funny, fizzy tone of the show – it’s their mere existence. Real threats and real emotions are intertwined, and they inevitably drag a narrative towards misery.

How can you weight a TV show with these burdens and still try and be funny and fun? This is the fundamental question at the heart of this show, its core ambition. For that matter – why would you even try? This was clearly Joss Whedon’s vision for Buffy, but did he just not realise going in how hard it would be? And when the difficulty did become clear, why didn’t he change course? The problem of Jesse, in the end, illuminates the purpose of this show. Buffy is saying something about life beyond “high school is pretty rough you guys”, and the high school setting is just a convenient microcosm to talk about bigger questions. It will take a while for the show to articulate this question properly and give a clear answer, but there is a sense of it right in this episode: life will try to harm you, and you will be hurt and scared, but the right response is to stand up and keep fighting and keep making jokes and keep loving your friends. In the face of misery, that funny and fizzy tone isn’t ignorance – it is defiance.

So, the episode. Buffy faces down the Master, the Hellmouth opens and tentacles come out, everyone stands together to fight them, Buffy dies (3/4 swerve!) but is revived, the Master gets killed in the library. Plenty happens. The episode makes a point of using every one of its assets to the fullest. Sarah Michelle Gellar gets two knockout sequences. First in the achingly awkward scene where she tells Xander she’s not interested in him romantically – this is the longest scene in the episode and Gellar just nails every aspect of it, using her ability to communicate what’s going on inside her head to take you through every moment of her discomfort. Then, even more so, in the scene where Buffy discovers she’s fated to die that night, and where she has the entirely natural reaction of throwing it all in and walking away.

Nick Brendan’s Xander channels all his flop-sweat hopefulness into that long, long scene with Gellar, and it kind of makes sense of the character’s behaviour all season, his awful teen boy behaviour feels much less odious when you know this sharp lesson is ahead of him. Alyson Hannigan’s Willow does her full big-eyed emotion to give us a snap between the eyes at the deaths at the school, ensuring we can’t dodge this awful intrusion. And Anthony Stewart Head gets to do every part of Giles, enriching and deepening his character and showing that being the grown-up can mean many different things.

Plus, Cordy is right in the mix, and the very appealing Jenny Calendar makes a reappearance and is more or less inducted into the core cast.

But that’s not all! Lots of things get resolved. Among them:

• The love triangle. Xander admits his feelings for Buffy and asks her out; she refuses. Willow acknowledges her feelings for Xander but accepts they aren’t returned. After just twelve episodes, the show is done with the love triangle and ready to move on.
• Cordelia’s opposition to the gang. Most of this change happened last episode, but it is brought into a wider context here. Cordelia is friendly with Willow and ends up fully involved in the climax. She’s still an outside element, but she’s no longer in opposition to them.
• Buffy’s core issue this season, balancing her desire for a normal high school life with her Slayer responsibilities. The choice is made brutally stark: if she chooses to be a Slayer, she’ll die tonight. She chooses to be Slayer anyway. This question is resolved.
• Giles’s relationship with Buffy – is he the cool and distant Watcher, using her like a pawn on a chessboard, or a father figure, concerned about her welfare and seeking to keep her safe? Here Giles defies his own rules and indeed prophecy itself, trying to keep Buffy safe. Their relationship is now much more equal, and much more emotionally complete.

Each of these is a prominent part of season one. The show tosses all of them away. This is a show committed to reinvention. It’s the flipside of the problem of Jesse – real change is possible, too. It’s an interesting move for a show with a future – they throw out the moves that work for them so they don’t get stale. But they have to trust they’ll find new moves that also work. I understand Whedon and his team having that confidence, but they’re not the only ones calling the shots. If this was a bigger show, I doubt they’d get permission from higher-ups to make such radical changes.

Luckily, Buffy wasn’t big. It was small. Very small, with a name people couldn’t take seriously. People underestimated it, never guessing just how hard it could punch.

Hmmm. That description reminds me of someone.

Other notes:
* You know, it strikes me that this would actually be a perfectly effective first episode. Is the rest of season one redundant?
* To my eyes, the opening fight scene is shot differently to previous fight scenes. Buffy comes into her own fully here. She is fierce, dominant, tough: the Slayer, fully-formed.
* Willow talks about being in “the club”, which is better than “the Slayerettes”. The definitive nickname for the Slaying gang is still a while away!
* The show has a nice nudge at the audience where it leads you to expect the big climax at the Bronze, one of the show’s two standing sets. Then it reveals, no, the big climax is at the Library, the same boring place you’ve been in all season!
* That Anointed One kid turns out to have been a bit of a waste of time, huh? The perils of making story as you go – sometimes you realise that gun on the mantelpiece doesn’t actually need to get fired, oh well.
* Cordelia’s troubled driving is a callback to her driving lesson way back in episode three.
* Angel’s not having breath is funny given he can speak, and will thereafter be completely ignored by the show. Nevertheless it gives Xander a suitably downbeat moment of heroism – building on his courage in Nightmares, where (as Maire pointed out to me) we saw Xander willingly face his greatest fear for his friends.
* After Buffy’s resuscitation she says something like “I feel strong, I feel different”. This is interesting – and something the show doesn’t make much of thereafter. Still, the implication is clear, that she becomes at this moment “slayer plus”, something other than she was before. This could be read as an escape from patriarchical control – but all of that subtext is some way from being developed. As it is, this is just an intriguing dangling thread.

This is the episode where we finally discover more about a Buffy character who’s been there from the beginning but has mostly just come across as a vapid popular girl. At this point in the show’s history, it was impossible to know how important she would later become! Well, the journey from side player to important feature really begins right here. That’s right, this is the episode where we are properly introduced to Harmony Kendall.

Also, Cordelia Chase. We’ll get to her in a moment.

Harmony gets her name in this episode. Oddly enough, she is the longest-running character in the entire Buffy television mythology. She first appeared in the unaired pilot for Buffy, and she was also in the final episode of Angel, the beginning and the end of the Buffy-verse. (If you discount the unaired pilot because it was unaired, then she drops below Angel to second place – by only one episode.) Her longevity tells us a few things about this show – here are three I can think of right off the bat:

• This is a show that loves to hold on to its bit players. (Harmony is not the only background face from the unaired pilot who eventually turns into a significant character.) That’s another sign of the show’s comics-inspired commitment to build a world around the characters and reward loyal and attentive viewers.
• Harmony, or a character like her, is useful for storytelling. Mean, dumb, and popular, Harmony is a great contrast character for the show’s central figures, who repeatedly choose to be kind, smart and unpopular. Her poor judgement and mean streak also mean she’s an easy excuse to make a bad situation worse – always handy for writers who need to hit four climactic moments every episode.
• Harmony, or a character like her, is useful for the theme and tone. This show needs to find laughs, and Harmony is essentially a comedic figure – even in these early episodes where she’s played straight as a mean girl, the show’s stance on such people is essentially that of mockery. Not only that, but she’s a female comedic figure, and when you look at the entire Buffy/Angel mythos, there are precious few of those. For all its limitations and flaws, the Buffyverse tries hard to speak with a female voice, and Harmony is a useful contributor to that goal.

Which brings us to Cordelia. At the start of this episode, Cordelia sits in the mean girl chair that Harmony will later occupy. She was intended to serve the show’s themes and narrative by being Buffy’s dark reflection, the representation of what Buffy might be like if she hadn’t pursued the slayer path. However, Buffy rapidly became a different sort of character and the mean girl just wasn’t so important to the stories the show pursued. So this episode, the show makes the moves it needs to make Cordelia relevant again.

A change like this isn’t easy. You need to take an audience from one view of a character at the beginning to a completely different view by the end. To set up the change, the episode revisits the relationship between Buffy and Cordelia. Buffy has a clumsy moment, spilling her weapons on the floor in front of Cordelia, exactly the same move from the pilot. Clumsiness like this is out of character for Buffy by now, but needs must, and it neatly shows the massive status difference between the two.

We also get some deft character work, with one of Buffy‘s increasingly rare classroom scenes. Cordy is intensely insensitive to Shylock’s famous “if you prick us, do we not bleed” speech. This is the kind of move high school shows often makes with the vapid mean girl – the amusingly skewed interpretation of something that shows how self-involved they are. But the show is ahead of the game here, because it upends this cliche by making Cordelia absolutely right. Shylock *is* self-involved, and he should get over himself. But then, before you’ve even realised she’s hit the nail on the head, she seamlessly moves to some actual self-involvement (“I ran over her leg and she thought it was all about her!”), and it’s all the funnier because it comes right after the Shylock bit. Without drawing attention to it, the show is complicating her character, and suddenly giving her a power that she will carry forward: Cordy starts being right far more often than she’s wrong. And if all this complication wasn’t enough, the scene next has Cordelia asking her teacher for academic help. We haven’t seen her asking for help before, and an interest in academic success isn’t a strong feature of the mean girl archetype, so with only a few lines of dialogue Cordelia’s character has irrevocably shifted from how she seemed in every previous appearance.

So with all this at work, we are set up for a bigger swerve in Cordy’s character and role. First, when the bad supernatural trouble kicks off, Cordelia goes to find Buffy to ask for help. Despite the status differences, she acknowledges that Buffy has power in this domain and she isn’t too proud or stupid to ask her for help. And then, building further on this, Buffy and Cordy get to have a heart-to-heart – which, in line with Cordy’s new role as truthspeaker, comes in the form of Cordy pointing out Buffy has misjudged her. It’s a short scene, but perfectly executed to reframe everything about Cordelia. It changes her position in the show. Cordelia is no longer Buffy’s dark reflection, now she’s the one who says what no-one else will say, the outsider perspective, the reminder of the need for humility, the unexpected intrusion that forces reconsideration.

Cordy’s thank you to Buffy at the end is a moment that’s been earned. This is a significant change in the basic structure of the show. It’s not a big change, Cordy isn’t really a core character despite being in the credits, but it is a clear sign once again that Buffy is not afraid to make changes and to allow its premise to shift and its characters to change and grow (or die). This is priming the audience for the next episode, which doubles down on these kinds of structural change.

The monster in this episode is related to these themes, but unfortunately the links aren’t very strong. Marcie, the villain of the piece, is invisible, and she turned invisible because no-one noticed her. She’s a successful example of the monster-as-metaphor approach Buffy shoots for – her power and her villainous motivation both derive from social exclusion, with Cordelia as the most powerful excluder. (Willow and Xander also implicated, however.) There are obvious connections between Marcie feeling invisible and Cordelia and Buffy feeling that no-one really knows them, but you can’t push this too far – true social isolation is much less pleasant than Cordelia’s and Buffy’s complaint of being misunderstood. It makes Marcie a deeply sympathetic character, as she is presented very much as an innocent.

Turning Marcie into an exciting Buffy episode turned out to be a little bit harder, though, and ultimately the episode decided to throw out that sympathy. Invisible Marcie’s behaviour is simply inexcusable, and probably sociopathic. She uses her invisibility to physically assault and injure unsuspecting victims, which is far beyond any reasonable response to Cordelia’s meanness. I’d be curious about an alternative run at this episode where Marcie’s revenge was more petty and in keeping with the “crimes” against her, and the threat developed not through her aggression and malice but through some other means such as escalating unintended consequences. I think the drama in such an episode would be much more engaging, but the story would obviously be harder to put together, and you’d also lose the hilariously pointed coda where Marcie is recruited by the government.

It’s also possible to read Marcie’s extreme behaviour as the show refusing to abide by the rules for how female power is exercised. If the invisible foe was a male character, would I have taken such exception to his use of violence? Probably not, if I’m honest. And it’s worth noting that the idea for Marcie comes from Joss Whedon’s own feelings and experiences in high school. There is nothing about invisibility that demands the character be female. Marcie could even be seen as closing a loop on gendered stereotypes – she is so profoundly diminished by her feminine meekness and mildness, that she becomes perfectly suited for unfettered masculine violence.

This brings up one of the underlying themes hiding in plain sight in Buffy – girls can punch stuff too! – and it is quite a profound one, a sharp rebuke to the sexist idea that women fight their battles through words, particularly through gossip and verbal cruelty. Which is, I suppose, another reason why the “vapid popular mean girl” is a useful figure in the narrative world Buffy is constructing. Cordelia can’t be that character any more, but narrative abhors a vaccuum, and luckily Harmony was right there waiting to be sucked into position. Welcome to the hellmouth, Harm!

Other thoughts:
* According to wiki, this episode is also known as “Invisible Girl”. That’s how I always think of it. Not sure where that name comes from – early TV listings maybe?
* The comics-style structure of Buffy is again visible in the scene where Angel visits Giles in the library. This scene is entirely there to set up future developments, and it’s done exactly the same way Chris Claremont would introduce an upcoming storyline in an issue of Uncanny X-Men.
* The discussion of non-mystical explanations for Marcie’s invisibility is neat – if perception can become reality, then we have a ready-made mechanism for literalising metaphors. It’s perhaps too easy, though, or it makes the mechanics of the storytelling too obvious, because the show doesn’t really use this kind of explanation again. (At the same time, moving it into the non-mystical realm justifies the intervention of government at the end.)
* The “Be my deputy!” bit is lovely because of Willow and Xander’s goofy delivery. This bit is in the show to reinforce Buffy’s isolation, but to my mind it justifies itself as the only depiction I’ve ever seen of how bizarre an in-joke can be when seen from the outside.

With the exception of one notable scene, this episode is a perfectly serviceable monster-of-the-week entry. It introduces a Buffy subgenre that will pop up once or twice every season: the whole world goes wacky! (See also “Bewitched Bothered & Bewildered”, “Band Candy”, “Gingerbread”, “Once More With Feeling”…) In this case, everyone at the school starts having their nightmares come to life. Turns out there’s a psychic kid in a coma making the nightmares happen, because his little league coach beat him into the coma.

The explanation is a bit vague but the concept of this episode is great. Nightmares coming to life is a great opportunity to reveal more about the characters and show some of the hidden aspects of who they are. That’s interesting to the audience by itself, but it also means you can help the characters learn about each other, giving them insights into the secret fears their friends are holding back.

Yet for all this potential, the reality is underwhelming. For some reason the episode ignores the “highschool is hell” motif of the series and makes the cause of the nightmares a younger boy. Making a kid be the cause puts the problem outside of Buffy’s world; Buffy is positioned as a considerate adult helping a child in need, which is a default storyline for procedural TV shows but a poor fit for this one. As we’ve seen, whenever the series steps away from its highschool milieu, it feels weaker. The show will be able to tell stories outside of high school eventually, but the groundwork is not yet in place. And there is no reason why Billy couldn’t be a high school student! That simple change would have charged much of the narrative with direct relevance to the characters. A missed opportunity.

Also, the nightmares we see revealed are utterly mundane – Willow’s stagefright (which was played for laughs in the episode just before this one!), Xander’s fear of clowns (also revealed last episode), generic nightmares of being naked in front of people or screwing up exams… Boring. Even when the episode builds towards climax and gets more personal, most of what we see is completely unsurprising. Giles’s worst fear is Buffy dying? Gosh that must be the secret reason why he’s said “be careful” five times in every episode before this one! Buffy’s worst fear is dying and turning into a vampire? Hmm well you are a vampire slayer so that’s about as insightful as the “you had one job” meme.

The whole episode feels undercooked. Even the gags, which are usually pretty reliable even in the weak episodes, just don’t land – there’s this Wizard of Oz bit when the kid wakes up that just thuds. And the episode closer, with Willow getting Xander to admit he still fancied Buffy when she was a vampire, is among the weakest finishes in the entire seven seasons of the show. This episode just isn’t finding the good stuff. Maybe it was a rush job?

Except for one scene. In fact I think it’s possible this whole episode was created as an excuse to play this scene, because it works like crazy. It’s the scene with Buffy’s dad in it. I feel like quoting the whole thing (source):

Hank: I came early because there’s something I’ve needed to tell you. About your mother and me. Why we split up.
Buffy: Well, you always told me it was because…
Hank: Uh, I know we always said it was because we’d just grown too far apart.
Buffy: Yeah, isn’t that true?
Hank: Well, c’mon, honey, let’s, let’s sit down. You’re old enough now to know the truth.
Buffy: Is there someone else?
Hank: No. No, it was nothing like that.
Buffy: Then what was it?
Hank: It was you.
Buffy: Me?
Hank: Having you. Raising you. Seeing you everyday. I mean, do you have any idea what that’s like?
Buffy: What?
Hank: Gosh, you don’t even see what’s right in front of your face, do you? Well, big surprise there, all you ever think about is yourself. You get in trouble. You embarrass us with all the crazy stunts you pull, and do I have to go on?
Buffy: No. Please don’t.
Hank: You’re sullen and… rude and… you’re not nearly as bright as I thought you were going to be… Hey, Buffy, let’s be honest. Could you stand to live in the same house with a daughter like that?
Buffy: Why are you saying all these things? (a tear rolls down her cheek)
Hank: Because they’re true. I think that’s the least we owe one another.
She begins to sniff and cry.
Hank: You know, I don’t think it’s very mature, getting blubbery when I’m just trying to be honest. Speaking of which, I don’t really get anything out of these weekends with you. So, what do you say we just don’t do them anymore?
She stares at him in shock. He pats her on the leg.
Hank: I sure thought you’d turn out differently.
He gets up and leaves.

It’s a brutal sequence. Almost hard to watch, and a thousand times more affecting than anything else in the episode. But take another look at the scene, read that dialogue again: it’s so on the nose, it’s almost a parody. There’s no subtlety to it at all. Dad just comes up and says all the things any child of divorce fears the most. The simplicity of it, played straight, gives it power but also carries enormous risks that it would all fall over and become laughable, like a soap opera sequence. That it works as well as it does is down to one person.

So it’s time, finally, to talk about the MVP of Buffy, the person carrying this whole joint. Her name is Sarah Michelle Gellar, and she’s the lead.

Let’s be clear right away: Gellar is not a great actor, whatever that might mean. She can’t pull off the wild feat of making you really believe in the unlikely world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She’ll never really convince you that she’s a badass fighting type. She can’t trick you into thinking Whedon’s dialogue, which would soon earn its own adjective “Whedonesque”, is emerging spontaneously from her character’s mind. But hey – those are significant challenges.

But. She’s good. And there are some things she can do really well. She was early in her career, and stepped effortlessly into a sole lead aged just 20. She had come out of the daily daytime soaps, All My Children specifically, for which she won a Daytime Emmy. Her time on that show had honed some aspects of her craft to a very high degree, and they were perfectly suited for the Buffy gig.

Gellar has excellent timing (comic timing gets talked about plenty, and she has it, but it’s a general skill and her instincts for playing responses and pauses and emotional beats are impeccable). She has a big range – she can creditably play all over the emotional spectrum. But above all, she can communicate pretty much anything. Every step of her internal journey is clear on the screen. The audience always knows where she’s at and what’s driving her, and while she’s sometimes not exactly convincing, you never lose the thread. In a show like this, that’s a huge asset. It lets Buffy get away with big monsters as well as real emotional responses to those big monsters. Gellar sets the tone. She’s perfect.

As this show commits to long-form storytelling and emotional development, Gellar’s ability to tell stories with her acting choices will become an essential part of the show as a whole. By this episode, the show knew what Gellar could do, and this episode – this one scene – gave her a chance to dig a bit deeper than before. She sells this scene like crazy. She makes it land. You know exactly what she’s feeling, and it hurts.

And then fifteen minutes later she’s wearing vampire makeup and making jokes while she punches people. That’s the gig. That’s Buffy.

Other thoughts:
* Despite Mark Metcalfe’s great performance in the role of the Master (straddling the funny/scary divide), this episode is the first time he actually meets Buffy – and it’s in a dream. They don’t come face to face in real life until the final episode. Keeping the Master isolated is not the strongest choice for their conflict, although you can see why they did it – Buffy needs to be free to develop through the season step by step, and an early confrontation with the Master would make that harder. Still, it’s one of the reasons the Master is not remembered as a great villain, only a good one.

– Pictured: a piece of wood shaped like a person, and also oh forget it you can do the rest of the joke yourself

Last episode I talked about how the show had built up a lot of confidence and then promptly screwed up. This time around, they stick the landing – with style. If this episode was a talent show entrant, it would win the prize.

It surprises me that this episode has a poor reputation. It’s charming as hell. The show is relishing being itself, telling here a story that only Buffy the Vampire Slayer could tell, and the gags are interwoven with horror flourishes and solid character work in a way that shows off the potential of the Buffy formula.

Most of all, this episode wants to show off the 3/4-ish swerve that is steadily becoming a more important part of the Buffy style. This show doesn’t just want to keep you entertained, it wants to utterly wrongfoot you at least once an episode. The promise to the viewers is clear: we will surprise you.

Surprise, genuine surprise, is rare on television. The Twilight Zone traded in surprise, but most other classics of television found that surprise didn’t deliver what they needed. Structure and repetition were the things that kept viewers happy and kept them coming back. Now and then TV did offer surprises planned and unplanned, but these were memorable precisely because they cut against the ethos of the times. By the 90s, surprises were more frequently encountered on the screen, especially on the fringe networks where shock and surprise had value. They still didn’t have too much penetration in weekly scripted comedies and dramas, where they tended to be saved for “sweeps week” episodes where surprises were teased in advance to create a ratings bump. And here was this new young show deciding to make surprise one of the stylistic anchors of their whole endeavour.

Of course this goes right back to the pilot episode and the death of Jesse – the idea that noone, and nothing is safe. The flipside of that is, everything is possible, and this episode lays that out in the most clear-cut way possible.

So, the story. This episode is about a sinister ventriloquist’s dummy. Mysterious deaths are happening at the school talent show, and the dummy (and its owner) are implicated. The audience even sees the doll stalking Buffy. And yet the sinister dummy motif is openly mocked throughout the first half of the the episode. The show is taunting us: do you really think we’d go there, to the living ventriloquist’s dummy, the stupidest of all horror motifs? Can you guess what we’ve got up our sleeve? Here, let’s tease that the new Principal is the villain! Ha, that’s too obvious a swerve. Or is it?

This gamesmanship will only work if the reveal, when it comes, lives up to the hype. And they nail it. The dummy is alive! But – wait a second – it’s a good guy? It’s a demon hunter?

People who, like me, have fallen in love with the Buffy mythos are inured to its flourishes of weirdness and goofiness. This episode is where all that really starts up. Once you introduce an animate ventriloquist dummy demon hunter, you have opened a road to kooksville and put up a welcome sign. But that’s not the whole story, of course: Sid the dummy isn’t just a piece of weirdness, he is a character in every sense, and given both respect and sympathy by the script. They don’t just play him straight, they put him right at the centre of the episode’s dramatic arc. There was no other show that could tell this story. Buffy was marking its territory.

With 9 episodes down, Buffy isn’t done growing yet. It hasn’t properly started grappling with the problem of Jesse, and the dense emotional content that will become the show’s backbone isn’t in place. But so much else is right there to see in this episode, and that’s why I think the bad reputation is inexplicable. This is far and away my favourite story in season 1.

Other thoughts:
* The show’s confidence is also on show in the willingness to let the cast play a bit more loosely, encouraging and keeping some ad libs, like Xander’s “redrum” and – this one’s perfection and signals the actress’s future anchoring a long-running sitcom – Willow freezing and running off-stage. There’s also a marvellous gag where Giles brings all the young performers in for a “power circle” just before the show starts. Hilariously deadpan.
* Poor dead Morgan was the smartest kid in school. So were the demon-abused computer geeks in episode 8. It doesn’t pay to be a geek in Sunnydale High!
* Sinister, nasty, slimy Principal Snyder is introduced this episode. He immediately starts laying the groundwork for the world of Sunnydale beyond the confines of the school.
* More signs of the influence of 70s/80s Marvel Comics on this show: the subtle continuity references when Snyder refers to the school’s reputation for “Suicide, missing persons, spontaneous cheerleader combustion…”; the willingness to embrace goofiness plays to me very much like the stranger end of 70s Marvel, particularly the work of Steve Gerber – Sid the demon hunting dummy would fit right into his Defenders run.
* But most of all, this episode plays out like every single superhero team-up – two heroes meet, have a fight due to a misunderstanding (they each think the other is a demon), then figure out their mistake and team up to take out the bad guy.