From The Morgue

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.

wow this show has awesome looking monsters!

um wait what

Buffy has been shaking down its approach for seven episodes now, and it clearly feels good about how it’s going. The Angel reveal is in the bag, and the show is clearly ready to spend the back half of the season showing what it can do!

Naturally, it immediately screws up.

The story in this episode: Willow gets an internet boyfriend who turns out to be a demon. If the self-awareness and fashion choices don’t already tip you off, this storyline dates the show precisely to a few years in the mid/late 90s. There was a very narrow window of time where “mysterious internet boyfriend” was a thing. The internet was starting to become a visual environment and making waves in the wider world, but users still played in a text-only world. It was a good time to be online – hey there SCFBBS alumni – but also a short-lived one.

Anyway, the show figures it can take this core idea and make good Buffy out of it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. Let’s count some of the ways this episode fluffs it:

One: It fails Willow. The show doesn’t actually have much idea what to do with Willow. As with Cordelia, she’s in the opening credits but what does she actually contribute? She’s Buffy’s best friend, OK, sure – that means she listens to Buffy sigh about Angel. And she’s in unrequited love with Xander, so she gets to sigh at him while he sighs about Buffy. And she’s in the know about fighting evil, so she gets to help out/be captured whenever an extra character is needed to help out/be captured. Oh yeah, she’s a hacker – in the 90s every show had a computer hacker – so she gets to supply crucial plot information whenever the writers need to throw it in. These are all useful things when you’re writing a scene and you need to get on to the interesting stuff, but they sure don’t add up to a character you root for or a character who generates stories and drama.

Just two episodes ago the show had started to figure out what it had in Willow and Alyson Hannigan. Sadly, this episode puts her right at the centre and it still has nothing to offer her. She is a lonely wallflower geek, so naturally she gets obsessive about a mysterious internet boyfriend who gives her the attention she craves, but he turns out to be a demon so whoops, and that’s all really. It’s a waste. The show doesn’t even give her the minimal respect this plotline affords – her obsession is sudden and happens offscreen (she goes from “I have a cute boyfriend” to “I’m cutting classes and you don’t understand wooo” literally overnight), she doesn’t get to work out her boyfriend is a demon until he kidnaps her, and oh yeah he kidnaps her. At least she gets to yell at him at the end before he smacks her to the ground, and she lies there while Buffy deals with him! Oh okay that’s no good either. Sigh.

Hindsight gives us some comfort though – as with Cordelia, we know the writers’ll figure out what to do with Willow, and soon.

Two: the metaphor sucks. Yes, sometimes people who claim to be nice on the internet are not actually nice. This is metaphorically represented by making the internet boyfriend a demon. Well, I guess it counts?

Three: the monster sucks. The show has its best-looking monster yet for the demon Moloch – but you only see it briefly in the opening prologue sequence. Then the show has its worst-looking monster yet when Moloch turns into a cyberdemon for the final act. It’s such a misjudged visual, it’s kind of embarrassing. In between, the demon hangs out in a high school intranet and romances Willow while controlling some other people and it just isn’t very interesting or good.

Four: the tone is all over the place. The episode goes from goofy and stupid to really dark and back again like a drunk driver weaving back and forth across the centre line. The demon has one high school boy murder another while faking it as a suicide, which is one of the darkest scenes in the entire series, but then right after there’s a poor graphic of a demon face saying BOO on the library computer and it’s just silly.

Five: the scale is off. This one is an interesting one – it’s a rule that isn’t obvious, so the show could probably only learn it by breaching it. But if you are a show about teenagers in high school facing monstrous representations of teenage life problems, then your scale is high school life and you have to stick with that. In this story, there’s a big factory staffed by dozens of adult workers under the spell of the demon. It’s too big. It violates the high school rule. If there’s all those adults there, then what happens to them? Where are the police? What do they have to do with high school life? It just doesn’t feel right – it’s the wrong sort of show to have that kind of setup. (Now those who know what’s coming know season 3 does step resoundingly outside the high school scale with an enemy who’s part of the wider world – but note that the show has been diligently setting up this move since, well, since the very next episode. You can get there, but you have to lay the groundwork first.)

Six: technology and magic don’t mix. I’m not even really sure why this is, but mixing technology and magic/supernatural stuff just doesn’t seem to combine well in the Buffy aesthetic. This episode tries hard to mix and match, and it just clunks – Giles fretting about the endless damage the demon could do now it is loose on the internet just seems stupid. New character Jenny Calendar is a “techno-pagan” but that mostly comes to mean “pagan who uses the internet sometimes”. Willow is a hacker and (spoiler!) in time she does a little magic but never ties the two together. As the show goes on, it shows little interest in bringing these back together again. (Until season four, of course. We’ll get there.)

So the episode just doesn’t work. But that’s not to say it’s without merit. There is one part of this episode that is worth remembering and celebrating, however: the final scene. It features our core group of friends sitting together discussing their doomed love lives. And they all laugh! And then the laughter fades out into a miserable silence. It’s a great scene that does cool stuff.

It’s a parody of many other shows that liked to close on the cast sharing a joke together, only here they let the laughs die away into silence. Also, note the self-awareness of the trio knowing they’re doomed. Both of these put Buffy firmly in the post-modernist mode of self-aware 90s entertainment, and combined into one scene they come close to breaking the fourth wall and knowing they are characters in a TV show.

But I’m most interested in the specific references to previous episodes: “Hey, did you forget? The one boy I’ve had the hots for since I’ve moved here turned out to be a vampire.” / “Right, and the teacher I had a crush on? Giant praying mantis?” This signals one of the key structural influences on Buffy: comic books, specifically Marvel superhero comics. Casual but obsessive references to past stories like this had a key role in creating “the Marvel universe”, and it’s easy to imagine the caption box that would appear in the corner of the panel here: “Episodes 4 and 7, Slayerettes! – Japin’ Joss”. These references send a message to viewers: this show knows it has a past, and it will use that past to enrich the present. The show isn’t just telling stories – it’s building a world.

Other notes:
* If “Never Kill A Boy On The First Date” is the best episode title in all of Buffy, this one is clearly the worst. The WORST.
* Xander isn’t awful this episode, and there’s a nice bit where Buffy calls him on enjoying being the object of Willow’s unrequited adoration, although she of course lets him off pretty easy.
* Librarians everywhere will snort at the show’s attempt to sell librarians vs. technology opposition to create conflict between Giles and Jenny. Librarians, of course, embrace tech harder than anyone not actually involved in tech. Get-out clause: Giles is not a real librarian.
* Speaking of the show feeling like it knows what it’s about – this episode actually contains a cheeky parody of its own surprise 3/4 swerves, setting up Jenny Calendar to be revealed at the 3/4 mark as a villain (c.f. the zookeeper in The Pack), but then revealing she’s a heroic technopagan. (It was the 90s, we’re all lucky she didn’t call herself a cyberpagan.)
* Jenny is kinda fun, and her flirtation with Giles is cute. I hope they bring her back.

Every vampire story is a romance.

That isn’t true, but it comes close these days. As I understand it, while the vampire has always been seductive, the idea of a two-way romance with a bloodsucker emerged via Anne Rice’s swooningly gothic Lestat books, with Coppola’s weirdly magisterial film of Dracula the turning point. “I have crossed oceans of time to find you,” Gary Oldman’s Dracula says to Winona Ryder’s Mina Harker, imbuing the line with both romance and threat, and it’s a straight line from there to Twilight.

In this episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel comes into focus as Buffy’s romantic match. The show has of course been setting this up since episode one, primarily by casting David Boreanaz as Angel. What has he done so far?

• Episode 1: He follows Buffy in an alley, freaking her out, then says she has to be careful because of bad stuff happening, and then he gives her a cross on a chain.
• Episode 2: He intercepts Buffy before she goes to face the vampires, and tries to talk her out of going down there. And he refuses to help because, in his words, “I’m afraid”. He does tell her his name at least.
• Episode 3: He isn’t in this one.
• Episode 4: He finds Buffy to warn her about fork vampire, and gives her his leather jacket because she looks cold. Then after fork vampire is dead, he turns up to say “well done”, and says she can keep the jacket. He refuses to tell her anything about himself beyond his name. And voila – Buffy is smitten.
• Episode 5: He interrupts Buffy’s date with Owen, and acts perplexed by the fact she’s on a date.
• Episode 6: He’s not in this one either, but it’s established that Buffy talks with Willow about how she’s into him, and she wears his jacket too.

So as groundwork for romance goes, well, they cast David Boreanaz and put his face in the credit sequence. He does get that one bit where he gives her a jacket. That’s enough, it seems. Basically the show relies on the grammar of television to mark out that Buffy and Angel are going to romance each other – she’s the title character and he’s the mysterious hunk, say no more.

That leaves this episode to do pretty much all the heavy lifting for the romantic storyline. The show doesn’t mess about, putting Buffy in vampiric danger as the precredits cliffhanger, and resolving it with Angel turning up – and getting hurt in the ensuing fight. Buffy takes him home to look after him.

(Side note: this method of getting two characters together is not exactly original, in fact there’s an entire genre of fanfic devoted to making these exact moves.)

Buffy caring for Angel here involves him taking off his top and wincing a few times while they engage in flirtatious banter about whether or not he was actually following her around. There’s some comedic stuff with Joyce, and then Angel gets hidden away in Buffy’s room for the night, where they have that sexually charged discussion about who will sleep on the bed and who will sleep on the floor, you know the one, you’ve seen that movie lots of times. The next day she goes to school and he’s still there when she comes home. And he’s been the perfect gentleman the whole time, but he confesses that he shouldn’t be around her because he just keeps wanting to kiss her, and he’s so much older than her it’s really inappropriate. He doesn’t say how much older when she asks, but his admitting his attraction rivets her attention, and they get close, and then they kiss, and it gets passionate –

– and then Angel pulls away and he has vampface. Buffy discovers he’s a vampire! He leaps out the window and is gone.

So, let’s review:

• Angel is an adult. Buffy is underage.
• He gives her expensive presents (the cross, the jacket).
• He doesn’t admit just how big the age gap between them is, despite being directly asked.
• He knows all about Buffy but doesn’t volunteer any information about himself.
• He follows Buffy around and doesn’t admit it when called on it.
• He tells her he’s attracted to her by saying he can’t control himself around her.
• When they kiss, he does lose control, and goes vamp-face.

These are what’s known in the real-life relationship biz as “red flags”.

That last one is worth some extra consideration, because it’s different to the rest. While the first six points are all things that directly apply to the real world, actual people don’t turn into vampires when they lose control. So what does this moment mean? What aspect of real-world relationships is evoked by the sudden vampire? You get to pick your own meaning, but you’ll struggle to find one that’s not awful.

(This is a hugely important beat, revealing that Angel’s a vampire, and finally putting all the essential dynamics of the show in place. But if I remember things rightly, his sudden vamp-face is never explained directly. We just have to take Angel at his word – he’s so obsessed with Buffy that kissing her is super-intense, and that intensity means he loses his self-control, so because he’s up close to pumping veins the predatory vampiric nature comes out. There’s an interesting parallel here with something that happens in season 2 – yes, that thing, I won’t spoil it here – where the intensity of an experience with Buffy means he loses self-control, but in a different way, for very different plot reasons.)

Anyway. The rest of the episode is Buffy finding out Angel’s history as a vicious killer linked to the vamps lurking under Sunnydale, and Angel showing he’s actually a good guy by killing vampiric badass Darla to save Buffy’s life. (Gypsies made him good.) And then Buffy and Angel smooch some more, despite both of them saying they shouldn’t and it’s a bad idea. Romance!

This show is another in a long tradition of film & TV entertainments that make unpleasant behaviour seem romantic. They do this through the power of editing – careful selection of moments, pointed juxtapositions to establish sympathy between characters, etc. Add in the weight of expectation when your limited cast has only one obvious love interest figure for the leading lady, and viewers are happy to go along with it. It’s a shorthand. It doesn’t actually mean the show thinks the behaviours it depicts are acceptable, and it doesn’t actually mean that the viewers who buy into this romance think that either.

And yet, and yet. This is a show that is starting early on to dig into the dangerous grounds of sexuality. It’s clear the show wants to go to these dark places, and that it thinks it can take these issues on in a responsible way through its “monster metaphor” approach. It wants to do teenage life right, not by depicting it realistically, but by showing its essence via scary creatures with big fangs. And all of those things, the whole reason and purpose of the show, pull in the other direction from that shorthand. If we’re encouraged to read the hyena spirits as a metaphor, then why should we hesitate to read Angel’s behaviour here as a metaphor for a man grooming an underage girl to be his lover? Well, the obvious answer is because the show clearly doesn’t want us to embrace that reading. But it’s there anyway, like it or not.

It could have been done differently. Angel’s relationship with Buffy could have unfolded more slowly, and carefully avoided every one of those red flags. Could have, could have. But it wasn’t, and I wonder how much of Buffy’s future character stems from this. Over the series, Buffy’s romantic choices are increasingly presented as unhealthy – Buffy herself comes to admit it. I think that course gets set right here. Pretty soon Buffy turns into the kind of show that wants to interrogate these issues and the way Angel and Buffy got together doesn’t look too healthy when you give it that kind of scrutiny. This wasn’t the intention – the goal was to get you on board with a swooning relationship – but the shorthand approach dooms Buffy to a twisted romantic future. Like Xander an episode ago, in a way Buffy gets broken here. To the show’s credit, across the next six and a half seasons the show will grapple hard with just what that means.

A few other notes:

• This episode was the low point of my early rewatch notetaking, so all the above is new. My scribbles for this episode, in their entirety: “Buffy has a diary. A DIARY. joyce gets bit!” But on that note:
• Joyce gets chomped by Darla. This is part of a stupidly over-elaborate bad guy plan, but it sure is scary to see Joyce under threat, and even scarier to see the threat realised. Again, the show is showing it’s edge – no-one is safe – by taking the threats to cast regulars further than you would ever expect.
• Buffy keeps a diary! That seems… really out of character.
• The swerve is really minor in this episode, but it is there – it’s when Darla pulls out guns and starts shooting. A vampire with a gun really throws out expectations, as there’s a style/iconography clash that is massively jarring. Guns don’t turn up in this show very often.
• Darla is also the first example of a villain type that Buffy will return to – the little bad, who is a major villain in the first half of the season but who gets killed around the midpoint, usually to launch the big bad on to the scene. She doesn’t perfectly fit the type, but you can see the outline in place.

Everyone knows the basic genius of Buffy: it made monsters out of the horrors of high school. But if you actually trawl through the episodes, you find there are a lot of Buffy eps that don’t do this, or do it only loosely, or in a roundabout way. There’s no secret as to why: this metaphor monster trick is hard. In season one there are really only three episodes that have a metaphorical monster at their heart. As we’ve seen, Witch flubbed it a bit. Invisible Girl is a few weeks away yet. But in this episode, the show nails it.

The episode features a bunch of mean, popular kids – and Xander – getting possessed by hyena spirits, and turning their cruelty dials all the way up. If you’re in the group, you’re great. If you’re out? You’re meat. The metaphor is plain and strong and central and brutal – but it’s also complex enough that a simple description doesn’t do it justice. The show is talking about power, status, in-groups/out-groups, bullying, and other crucial aspects of the high school experience, and I’m sure every viewer would see their own variation on these themes in the behaviour of the Pack. (Particularly the behaviour of Xander. We’ll get to Xander.) In terms of the general theme, to me the most shocking moment is the Pack devouring Principal Flutie. First, this is obviously another marker that in this show, no-one is safe. Change will happen! Even writing out a minor supporting player like Principal Flutie stands out from the reluctance to upend the status quo that marked most TV at the time. Looking at it now, though, with Buffy‘s reputation for character death well-established, what strikes me is the metaphor. The bullies have amped up their cruelty and they are targeting, not fellow students, but the school institution itself. The message seems to be that institutions are helpless before bullying. If you were in high school, being bullied, and you watched this episode – well, I don’t think you’d find it very comforting. (And from what I understand of bullying response statistics in the US and further afield, perhaps that’s how you should be feeling.)

Okay, Xander. Comments over on Facebook for my last Buffy post were not kind to Xander, and there is nothing in this episode that will turn you around. But this episode does something that I think is quite shocking and potentially brave: it uses the excuse of Xander’s possession to lean all the way into Xander’s creepy nice-guy entitlement that colours his every interaction with Buffy and Willow. He actually grabs and holds Buffy down while he says out loud all the things a “nice guy” says to himself about the girl he desires. He holds her against a wall and forces a kiss on her. It’s an upsetting sequence, even more so because Buffy reclaiming her power (by knocking him out) happens off-screen.

This is an instance of the show recognising that if it wants to talk about the horrors of adolescence, it has to talk about sex, and power, and the abuse of both of those things. There is nothing metaphorical in hyena-Xander’s behaviour towards Buffy – he is sexually assaulting her, and potentially on the way to raping her. And his dialogue indicates this is not an outsider impulse that comes from the demonic possession, but an expression of some genuine thoughts and feelings that he holds and experiences. It would be going to far to say that the episode portrays Xander as a repressed rapist – but the show is definitely showing that his desire isn’t all innocent boyish frustration. There is real darkness in the mix. And, to the extent Xander is intended as the “everyguy” character in the show, it’s a pretty ruthless and damning portrayal of the unpleasant undercurrents in the cultural experiences and assumptions of teenage boys as a class.

Of course, the show lets him off the hook. I don’t know how to feel about it exactly. Buffy, in particular, shrugs it off: he wasn’t himself, you can’t hold that against him! The parallels between hyena spirits and alcoholic spirits pass without remark. And in a sense they have to – this show can’t throw one of its core cast off the cliff in episode 6. If they couldn’t justify Xander staying friendswith Buffy and Willow, then they’d be forced to cut the scene. And I think it’s a good scene, an important one for the show. However, in terms of Xander’s character, it’s a black cloud that he never entirely escapes. Partly it’s mitigated by the fact Xander has to live with the memories of his behaviour, and he is obviously mortified and traumatised by them. Partly, too, there is some relief in Xander’s growing up/redemption plot at the close of this season. Still, to me it feels like these aren’t enough to counterbalance the dark weight of this scene. The show doesn’t want you to hold this moment close, but it’s hard not to feel that Xander won’t ever shake off the unpleasant aspects of his character. The show doesn’t quite know how to deal with the issues of sex and violence it is grappling with here, and it can’t quite address the problems with Xander before they get embedded too deep to change. From now on, he is damaged goods.

But for the show, this is a return to the issues of sex, power and abuse that were treated so lightly in Teacher’s Pet a few weeks ago. The show has a handle on what it’s doing here, and takes it all much more seriously. The challenge it faces is, of course, the Problem of Jesse, which is the difficulty with including both real threat and real emotions without destroying your show. Buffy distinguishes itself here with its willingness to explore sexual threat and sexual violence as a common feature of teenage life, but it can’t yet allow itself to honour the real emotions side of the equation, excusing itself this time with “a hyena did it”. This is just a step along the way of course – so much of season one is the show figuring out what it wants to be – and I find the weak consequences here much easier to accept knowing that the show is learning as it goes, and in future the consequences of this kind of threat will be addressed head-on.

A few other notes:

• There’s some great silent storytelling in the interactions among the pack. The show’s confidence in non-verbal storytelling grows as it goes on.
• I remembered this ep as a showcase for Nick Brendan’s Xander, but it actually turns into something of a Willow showcase – she gets a huge punch-the-air moment when she’s dealing with Xander in the cage (and compare that to the equivalent scene in the writer’s draft). But man, this episode also reveals Alyson Hannigan’s secret power: when she has emotions, you feel them. Fairly quickly the show realises what it has here, and Willow starts carrying more and more of the feels.
• The 3/4 twist here actually comes a little bit after the final commercial break, when you find out the zookeeper was a crazy cultist all along! The actual 3/4 cliffhanger is basically “Willow is suddenly in danger”, and it works like gangbusters, because of Alyson Hannigan’s secret power.
• Giles realises Xander’s hiding something at the end. This becomes a character trait for Giles, figuring out when people are holding things back. It’s certainly useful as a storytelling tool, because secrets that never come out aren’t much fun. But where the show shines is in how it uses this as a way to communicate Giles’ character. Every time he identifies, and sometimes guesses, a secret, his choice about how to act on the information is pretty much perfect. It’s something the show does consistently well.