Buffy Rewatch and Recap thread

... from Axe to Ze Other Axe? I don't have a good tagline.

I've been meaning to do this for a while, so here goes ...

1x01: Welcome to the Hellmouth

We open with some good old-fashioned schmuck bait: a guy and a girl in a darkened high school, presumably sneaking off to play Hide the Salami in the cafeteria. One is a vaguely sinister-looking guy and the other is a pretty blonde girl, and anyone who has even the most passing familiarity with Joss Whedon can predict that she'll end up kicking his ass. What might not be as obvious is that he turns out to be the innocent one in all this, and she wants to wreak bloody death on him and everyone he knows. Which she proceeds to do.

After the opening credits, we see pretty much your standard supernatural nightmare scene, whereupon Buffy is woken up by her mother, the caring-but-perpetually-oblivious Kristine Sutherland. Before dropping Buffy off for her first day of high school, she leaves her with these parting words: "Honey? Try not to get kicked out." Thanks, mom.



Sunnydale High School is a '90s cyclone of '90s semi-grunge music, girls with '90s bangs, and oh lord, '90s Xander Harris with his '90s shirt, '90s skateboard, and '90s parted-down-the-middle hair. He proceeds to get distracted by Buffy, specifically the rear half of Buffy, and takes a spectacular gainer into a handrail. This is followed by some banter with Willow, who we are promptly informed will be The Smart One in our eventual trio of Brains, Brawn and Heart, and don't think that metaphor won't get used over and over again for the next seven years.

Cut to Ken Lerner, who joins Kristine Sutherland in our pantheon of well-meaning-but-clueless authority figures, and also treats us to some pretty awkward line delivery. ("We're not interested in what it says on a piece of paper, even if it says ... whoa," he is supposed to say, but the "whoa" comes out as a sort of truncated "wuh," leading us to wonder if he's having a stroke.) Principal Flutie is basically a good guy but completely useless, is the message we're meant to take away from this scene.

Xander meets Buffy and proceeds to make an ass out of himself, in a scene that will be cringe-inducingly familiar to anyone who was ever an awkward teenager. ("Maybe I'll see you around. Maybe at school. Since we both go there.")

Buffy meets Cordelia, who is promptly revealed to be a bitch, and that's about all the character development she'll get for another year or so. Then she meets Giles, who tries to fulfill his role as Mr. Exposition, but fails when Buffy won't let him finish a sentence before fleeing the library as if it were on fire, which it will be eventually, so maybe she's just getting a head start.

Next we come to what is possibly the worst piece of dialogue in the entire series. After the first episode, Joss & Co. stopped trying to write how they imagined popular teenagers in southern California talking, and just made all the characters talk like the writers themselves. This was a good move, because here's what their attempts at teen dialect sounded like. I'm going to quote the whole damn thing so you can revel in the awfulness of it:

Bitch #1: "The new kid? She seems kind of weird to me. What kind of name is Buffy?"
Bitch #2: "Hey, Aphrodesia."
Bitch #1: "Oh, hey!"
Bitch #3: "Well, the chatter in the caf is that she got kicked out, and that's why her mom had to get a new job."
Bitch #1: "Neg!"
Bitch #3: "Pos! She was starting fights."
Bitch #1: "Neg-ly!"
Bitch #3: "Well, I heard from Blue, and she said --"​

Whereupon we are mercifully spared from any more attempts by thirtysomething comedy writers to sound sixteen by the sudden appearance of Schmucky McSchmuckface's dead body falling out of Bitch #3's locker.

Outside, Buffy approaches Willow, who has some kind of inexplicable pin on her dress, and we get our first real taste of Willow's personality. Yes, there's the beaten-down-uncool-kid ("Willow?" "Why? I mean, hi!"), but there's also the sardonic wit that would later become one of her trademarks. ("Aren't you hanging out with Cordelia?" "I can't do both?" "Not legally.")

Xander comes up with his slightly-dorkier friend Jesse, and between Eric Balfour's absence from the main credits and the fact that they're spending an awful lot of time on this guy who is clearly meant to be part of the gang, it's obvious Jesse isn't long for this world. (Joss wanted to put him in the credits for just this reason, but time and money intervened. He would later get to give his sadism free rein in Season 6, but that's a story for another time.) Cordy shows up and is bitchy some more, albeit with better writing than the other popular girls ("Don't you have an elsewhere to be?"), and tells Buffy about the "extreme dead guy in the locker," whereupon Buffy runs off to investigate.

Buffy creeps into the locker room, and I'm pretty sure she wears a pushup bra through most of the first season, 'cause Sarah Michelle Gellar isn't actually built the way she looks here.



She finds the dead guy, finds the wounds that make him look like he was attacked with a barbecue fork, and runs off to find Giles, whereupon they engage in Dueling Exposition and we are introduced to the concept of the Hellmouth, which explains why all this weird shit keeps happening in Sunnydale, even though nobody ever notices.

The other thing nobody notices is the male faculty member getting into a weirdly intense conversation with a female sophomore in the hallway, to the point of putting his hand on the wall in front of her to keep her from getting away, but I guess Sunnydale's Weirdness Censor applies to more than just the supernatural.

In between all this, Cordy invites Buffy to The Bronze, a nightclub with questionable carding policies, and we get our first of many mixed signals about just how big Sunnydale is. The Bronze, see, is in "the bad part of town ... about half a block from the good part of town; we don't have a lot of town here." And it is also, in Xander's words, "a one-Starbucks town." But it somehow manages to have two hospitals, one of which is large enough to have a neurology ward; a decent-sized regional airport; and a state university. Go figure.

After a brief and appropriately ominous introduction to this season's Big Bad, an ancient vampire known only as The Master, we see Buffy and her pushup bra picking an outfit for The Bronze. For a moment we think Joyce might actually engage in some parenting, when she asks Buffy if there will be boys there, but when Buffy snarks back with "No, mom, it's a nun club," all she can manage is "Well, just be careful." Thanks, mom.

Buffy heads to the club, but on the way there she meets David Boreanaz. This was before the acting lessons that made his later appearances more bearable, so the less said about this scene, the better.

At The Bronze, we get our first look at the Xander/Willow dynamic that will dominate the first two seasons (she wants him, he thinks of her as a friend, and if you've ever listened to a Taylor Swift song, you basically know the rest of it) -- and, oh look, there's Giles! This isn't inappropriate at all. Buffy goes up to him and points this out: "So, you like to party with the students? Isn't that kind of skanky?" He remains suitably square, and would certainly be horrified to know that he's leaning up against the very railing where Buffy will eventually spend her off-hours getting nailed from behind by James Marsters. When he challenges her to spot the vampire that is almost certainly in the crowd somewhere, she zeroes in on the only fashion disaster worse than Xander's unbuttoned flannels, and is horrified to realize he's talking to Willow, to whom she had just given a pep talk about "seizing the moment." Way to go, Buffster.

Buffy chases after them, almost stakes Cordy, blah blah blah, and now Jesse is chatting up Darla (the blonde vamp from the teaser), and we're back to The Master's lair, where The Master commands his lackey Luke to "bring me something ... young."



Okay, then.

The guy-vamp from the club leads Willow to a crypt instead of the ice cream bar, and if this is her first romantic experience with a guy outside of Xander dismembering her Barbie when they were five, it's no wonder she hops on board the lesbo train as soon as she gets to college. Darla hauls an already-bitten Jesse into the crypt, then she and Disco Vamp menace Willow and Jesse for a while before Buffy and Xander burst in.

Buffy begins what will be a seven-year tradition of dispensing fashion advice in between good old-fashioned ass-kickings. She dusts the dude who was macking on Willow, then fights with Darla until Luke shows up, and we fade to black with Buffy on her back in a coffin and Luke about to send her to Vampsville.

Casualties:

• Schmucky McSchmuckface (killed by Darla)
• Jesse (killed by Darla, though we don't realize it yet)
• Thomas (Disco vamp dusted by Buffy)

One-liners that should be turned into domain names:

• AWholeBigSuckingThing.com
• WhatIsYourChildhoodTrauma.com

1x02: The Harvest

We left Buffy in a coffin being menaced by The Master's chief henchman, Luke. She quickly manages to beat him off -- I mean, repel him with her cross -- whereupon she runs after Willow and Xander, arriving just in time to save their asses (this too will be a recurring theme).

After the main titles, Giles is in the library, delivering a whole bunch of exposition to Willow and Xander. Both the dialogue and the kids walking around outside the library in other scenes indicate that this episode takes place the following day. It's not clear what exactly our Power Trio spent the rest of the night doing after Jesse got kidnapped, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they didn't just go home and get some shut-eye. (We're pretty sure Buffy didn't, at least, since Joyce later gets on her case about it.)

Our heroes talk about how vampires love to hang around in Absurdly Spacious Sewers, and also apparently there are man-sized electrical tunnels running underneath Sunnydale. Luckily, they are able to access the plans for these municipal labyrinths from the computer in the library, because when she's not busy seeing the softer side of Sears, Willow is also a criminal mastermind. Buffy heads off to rescue Jesse but is interrupted by Ken Lerner, who luckily is fairly stupid.

Once she gets to the cemetery, David Boreanaz shows up and engages in some more bad acting. He is largely irrelevant to the plot, but he made the casting director all tingly, so here he is. Buffy breaks down the door and heads for the sewer, where she runs into Xander. Xander is also out to rescue Jesse, and she tells him a fun story about the time she had to behead a varsity-football-player-turned-vampire using only an X-Acto knife. "You're not loving this story," she says. "No, actually, I find it oddly comforting," Xander replies. Admit it, Xander, you've never been this turned on in your life.

Meanwhile, Cordelia and her Beta Bitch, Harmony, are in computer class. "Why do we have to devise these programs? Isn't that what nerds are for?" complains Cordy, because "devise" is totally a word that non-nerds throw around in casual conversation. Cordy gives a largely fictional account of her near-stabbing by Buffy to a rapt audience consisting of Harmony and Jeff Spicoli --



-- whereupon Willow sticks up for her and is promptly smacked down, 'cause Cordelia ain't the Alpha Bitch for nothin'. But Willow gets her revenge by telling Cordy that the way to save her project is by hitting the "DEL" key, for "DELIVER," and this works, because apparently the makers of this operating system decided it would be a good idea to let users erase all their data with a single keystroke. (Although it was 1997, so maybe that's not totally implausible.)

Buffy and Xander find Vamp!Jesse, who sounds like a stoner ("I'm connected, man, to everything!"), and then there's some Master stuff that's really pretty boring, The Master being one of the Buffyverse's least interesting Big Bads (although he's still better developed than, say, any Abramstrek villain). The important things to know are that:

• Tonight, for one night only, The Master will gain strength every time a victim is drained by a minion called The Vessel.
• The Vessel is Luke.
• The Vessel is most easily recognized by the fact that he has a Mercedes hood ornament on his forehead.

After Buffy and Xander break the news about Vamp!Jesse to Willow, Xander concludes that Luke will go to The Bronze to feed, because of "all those tasty young morsels all over the place." Tell us more, Xander.



Before they head off to stop the massacre, Buffy stops off at home to collect her weapons. Unfortunately, Joyce picks this exact moment to grow a backbone and ground her, although she kind of undercuts herself by admitting that she gets her parenting advice from self-help tapes. At any rate, all Buffy hears is this --



-- so as soon as Joyce is gone, she pulls out her nineteenth-century steamer trunk, because Buffy is actually a character in a Jane Austen novel, and reveals that underneath various childhood trinkets is a secret compartment filled with stakes, crosses, garlic, holy water, and what appears to be a big jar filled with either poker chips or Nilla Wafers.



Over at The Bronze, Cordy is busy being shallow, talking about senior boys and their cars and how Jesse is like a little puppy dog, whereupon Vamp!Jesse pops by and tells her to shut up, and she suddenly finds him irresistible. (Working through some issues there, Joss?) Outside the club, the bouncer intercepts Luke and demands to see his ID, which is a little strange since the place is already crawling with teenagers, although I guess maybe he has to wristband everybody or something. The Vamps storm in and cut the lights, all except for a single followspot that was apparently on a different breaker, and Luke gets on stage to tell them they're all fucked. Like, monumentally.

Luke eats the bouncer, making him the first casualty of the episode, while Buffy & Co. try to find a way in past the vampire guard. Next Luke eats a pretty blonde girl, and not in the nice way, and he's just about to make Cordy his third victim when Buffy jumps down from a conveniently placed catwalk and starts wreaking mayhem. She stakes one vamp with a pool cue -- offstage, to save on the SFX budget -- and beheads a second vamp with a flying cymbal, because although there wasn't a band tonight, there was a full drum kit randomly on stage, just because. The vampire she chucks it at is holding Xander, who manages to dodge it just in time -- and considering this is the guy who can't even skateboard down the sidewalk without landing flat on his ass, you're taking a pretty big chance there, Buffster.

Next up, Darla is on top of Giles when she gets doused with holy water by Willow; she runs off screaming but doesn't die, so that she can later be a recurring guest star on Angel. Xander is engaged in a battle of wits with Vamp!Jesse, and you can imagine how well that's going, when a fleeing civilian accidentally pushes Vamp!Jesse into Xander's stake.

Buffy picks up something long and shiny from the Conveniently Placed Drum Kit. "You forget, metal can't hurt me," Luke taunts, but Buffy has something else in mind. "There's something you forgot, too -- sunrise," she says, hurling her makeshift javelin at a window and letting in ... light from a streetlamp or something. Luke cringes and screams, because being The Vessel doesn't require an IQ test, and Buffy quips "It's in about nine hours, moron" before staking him through the heart.

The Master gets a Big NOOOOOOO! and we get a nicely lit power shot of Buffy that will remain in the opening credits for the next two seasons.



Angel shows up momentarily to be useless, and then we're back at school, where Xander and Willow marvel that despite a bunch of undead showing up to cause mayhem and commit mass murder on Friday night, everything is back to normal. Giles utters the words without which very little of the rest of the series would make any sense: "People have a tendency to rationalize what they can and forget what they can't." Buffy decides that maybe life will be easier if she gets kicked out of school, and Giles sighs "The earth is doomed."

Casualities:

• The bouncer, eaten by Luke (that'll teach you to ask for my ID!)
• Blonde girl, eaten by Luke
• Vamp who gets staked with a pool cue
• Vamp who gets beheaded by an airborne percussion instrument
• Vamp!Jesse
• Luke

One-liners that should be turned into domain names:

• TheEarthIsDoomed.com, maybe? I don't know.

I pinned this so it's easier to find.

Love the recaps/reviews Tafkats. Hope you can keep them coming!

And yes, Sarah was wearing a push-up bra for the first season.

Fun fact about actors playing high school sophomores:
Sarah was 20
Nick was 26
Alyson was 23
Charisma was 27! (and looked more like a Hollywood trophy wife than a student of any kind)
Boreanaz (admittedly playing a 200-year-old) was 28.

1x03: The Witch

We open with Giles in full-on British fuddy-duddy mode, berating Buffy for wanting to be a cheerleader as she stands there pouting in her pleated skirt, pom poms and '90s top-ponytail. Basically she's Topanga Lawrence.



Anyway, Giles forbids her to try out for the squad, which goes over about as well as you might expect. This is followed by an eerie scene full of mysterious witchy stuff, which will be repeated several times over the course of the episode.

After the witchy stuff, it's on to tryouts, where a bunch of high school students who look to be about 25 years old are leaping around the gym doing moves that probably require several years of intense gymnastics training, accompanied by the mellow sounds of Jock Jams Volume 1, and if Buffy's hair wasn't enough to convince you we're in the '90s, all doubt should be erased at this point.

Xander gives Buffy a bracelet with an inscription that says "Yours Always," though he quickly backpedals and insists "that was on there when I got it." He then proceeds to gawk at the scantily clad cheerleaders for a while. Tryouts begin, but are quickly suspended when one of the girls spontaneously combusts. Buffy has to put her out, because everyone else at this school is basically useless.

Speaking of useless, Joyce spouts some comforting platitudes at Buffy before admitting that she actually wasn't listening to a word her daughter was saying and isn't really sure what she was trying out for -- water polo or something? She expresses pleasure that cheerleading will keep Buffy out of trouble, and Buffy says "I'm not in trouble, Mom," whereupon Joyce absentmindedly replies, "No, not yet." Thanks, Mom.

Amy chats with Buffy after the next round of tryouts and we learn about how totally awesome Amy's mom is. Greatest cheerleader in Sunnydale history, gave Amy everything, never gained a pound, blah blah blah. She was even nicknamed Catherine the Great, presumably for reasons having to do with her cheerleading prowess, rather than for having sex with a horse. Anyway, Amy's mom is the absolute best. So much better than her lame-o daughter could ever hope to be. We'll get back to this later.

Amy is in the locker room when Cordy shows up to threaten her in '20s mobster movie style. Hmm, maybe it's Cordy's fault! Then Charisma Carpenter would actually get to do something interesting this season. Meanwhile, Willow consoles Xander over his lack of success getting into Buffy's pants, and he tells her why she's so cool. "You're like a guy!" he exclaims. "You're my guy friend that knows about girl stuff!" Bear in mind that, a few episodes from now, we will learn that Xander is fully aware of Willow's crush on him, so every time he makes Willow listen to him pine over Buffy, he's basically being a colossal douche.

Spooky stuff, spooky stuff, and then something even scarier: Joyce has discovered her high school yearbook, which Buffy looks at with horror. "Mom, I've accepted that you've had sex. I am not ready to know that you had Farrah hair." Look who's talking, Miss Poofy-Bangs.

We get a little more Xander/Buffy angst, and then it's on to driver's ed, where Cordy massacres a bunch of traffic cones with a Cutlass Ciera before crashing through a fence. Buffy has to make a running tackle to save her from an oncoming UPS truck, because Adults Are Useless, and we learn that Cordy has been stricken with blindness. We're not really sure what the UPS driver's excuse is, though.

Buffy, Xander and Willow tumble to the idea that Amy is casting spells, and they pull up the library records to see who's been checking out books on witchcraft (doesn't every high school library have a collection?), whereupon we learn that books about Pagan rites form a major part of Xander's spank bank. Presumably Willow has chosen not to teach him about internet porn. (And yes, in retrospect, Xander's witchcraft fetish explains an awful lot.)

Our heroes cook up a spell to expose Amy, and they have to do it in science class, where nobody thinks to ask why Willow is messing around with brightly colored chemicals in the middle of a lesson on frog dissection. Maybe this is because Willow's so smart that the teachers are intimidated by her and leave her alone. Maybe it's because everyone, including the teacher, seems unclear on what subject they're supposed to be studying in the first place. Or maybe they've been forced to merge biology and chemistry due to budget cuts, said cuts presumably stemming from Sunnydale's mysteriously plummeting property values. At any rate, Amy tests positive for witchiness, but when another cheerleader starts screaming because her mouth has disappeared, Amy looks just as shocked as the rest of them. The mystery deepens!

Back at the Summers household, Joyce is making orange juice while Buffy cheerfully bops around the kitchen singing about how she wants to be a Macho Man. Buffy is under a spell that basically mimics the symptoms of being on a whole bunch of drugs, but Joyce is oblivious. Thanks, Mom.

At school, Buffy is still drunk and/or high when she decides to tell Xander why he's so cool. "You're my Xander-shaped friend!" she exclaims. "Do you have any idea why I love you so? You're not like other guys at all ... you are completely and totally one of the girls!" Xander is crestfallen, and if you don't think Willow is loving every second of this, take a look at her face. You won't see her this happy again until she's in college and has Amber Benson between her legs.



Our heroes go to Amy's house, where they discover the secret: the real witch is Amy's mom, who is switching bodies with her so she can relive her glory days as a cheerleader. This, by the way, is one of the truly genius things about this show: it takes all those things that people say metaphorically, in this case about parents living vicariously through their kids, and makes them literally true.

With Amy-as-Catherine in tow, they head to the science lab, where Giles starts trying to crack the spell, and this is where we get our first peek at Giles' eventual Total Bad-Assness. Catherine-as-Amy falls off her human pyramid, decks Willow, and does a Darth Vader force-choke on Xander. She punches through the glass shield covering a fire axe, sustaining no injuries in the process, and hacks her way into the science lab. She's just about to turn Drunk!Buffy into Slayer McNuggets when Giles finishes reversing the spell (about time, Giles!) and Amy and Catherine revert to their original bodies. Catherine chews the scenery for a while, but she's basically doomed, and before long our heroes defeat her and go on their merry way.

At the Summers household, Joyce admits that she'll never be able to understand Buffy, and Buffy says "I love you, Mom." While Drunk!Buffy barely got Joyce to raise an eyebrow, this seems to cause her some concern. Amy moves in with her dad, who is Totally Enthusiastic about having Amy in his life even though he abandoned her when she was twelve, and -- what's that? Catherine Madison is still alive, but trapped forever in her own cheerleading trophy? Surely this calls for a sequel, or at least a random Brick Joke a few seasons later.

Casualties:

• None, amazingly enough. The episode also features no vampires, an interesting choice for so early in the first season, but it does set up the idea that we'll be seeing all kinds of supernatural weirdness, and humans will be the villains as often as not.

One-liners that should be turned into domain names:

• XanderShapedFriend.com

Parent of the Year Award:

• A new category, this time it goes to Catherine Madison for obvious reasons, but Joyce Summers and Amy's deadbeat dad are also in the running.

It would, in fact, not be biologically impossible for Charisma Carpenter to be Michelle Trachtenberg's mother.

How are you watching this? Streaming or DVD?

I heard there is a widescreen version of Buffy but it's all messed up (because the show was never meant to be widescreen).

Buffy really needs an HD remastering on Blu Ray. The first season looks pretty terrible on DVD.

I've been watching on DVD because for some reason, when I try to watch it on Netflix the audio and video are about a half-second out of sync.

I think the Region 1 DVDs are all in 4:3, but I could be remembering wrong. And, yeah, the video quality isn't great. I usually crank up the brightness to make it easier to watch, and it gets pretty grainy that way.

This may in fact be more entertaining than Season 1, which I was never able to finish.

1x04: Teacher's Pet

"Xander is horny," is basically the theme of this episode. Also, "Xander is dumb." The two are closely linked.

The episode opens in The Bronze, with a girl screaming. There's a vampire, and Buffy, looking uncharacteristically helpless. That's our first clue that something weird is going on. The vampire advances on Buffy and manages to get her on her back on the pool table, and it's a little weird how many of the shots in these fight scenes are, when taken out of context, largely indistinguishable from sex scenes. Anyway, the Vamp is about to kill Buffy when Xander saves the day.

Obviously this is our second clue that something is wrong.

Xander hurls the vamp to the floor, and when the vamp gets up, Xander pulls an Oddjob with a stake broken off of a convenient chair leg, probably remembering when Buffy almost decapitated him with a cymbal. Then he says something suave and super-cool to Buffy before jumping up on stage and wailing on a guitar while Buffy looks on, all starry-eyed.

Yes, you guessed it, Xander is dreaming. In real life he's dozing off in science class, and Buffy is not gazing at him with bedroom eyes, but rather pointing out that he has drool on his chin.

The teacher, Dr. Gregory, quizzes Buffy on the reading, which she obviously hasn't done, and Willow tries to bail her out with some Emmy-worthy pantomime that accomplishes nothing except for proving that Buffy is probably very bad at charades.



We assume Buffy will be in trouble, but it turns out this teacher is the rarity: an authority figure who is neither evil nor blindingly incompetent, and on top of that, actually likes Buffy, and not in a creepy Joey Buttafuoco way, either.

Naturally, he's toast.

After the teaser, we move to The Bronze, where Xander is dancing awkwardly, just like the guy we know and -- holy shit, get a load of that leopard print tank top!



After the wardrobe designers put away their crack pipes, Xander makes his way to the stage, where he catches the lead singer's eye and smiles. The lead singer smiles back at him and Xander licks his lips, and this is probably a good time to mention that Joss knew from the beginning that either Willow or Xander would turn out to be gay, but it took him a while to decide which one it would be. And maybe he made the wrong choice, because seriously, this scene is gay as fuck.

Xander sidles up to two jocks -- we'll call them Suave Guy and Unnamed Black Friend -- who are boasting about their female conquests. They start quizzing Xander about his sex life, and luckily that's when Buffy and Willow walk in. Xander goes "Hey, look, it's my beards! I mean, my buds! I mean, babes!" He awkwardly drapes his arms around them, but his efforts at faking a menage a trois are foiled by Angel showing up. Buffy goes to greet him, and Xander and Willow have the following exchange.

Xander: "Wow, he's buff. She never said he was buff."
Willow: "You think he's buff?"
Xander: "He's a very attractive man. How come that never came up?"​

You know what, how's about both of you just ease on down to the Pride Parade and be done with it. You both have pretty tragic taste in the opposite sex anyway, so everyone will be better off.

Buffy and Angel engage in a little verbal sparring, during which no useful information is exchanged, and Angel gives her his badass leather jacket, revealing his white tank top and his rippling muscles, and Xander gets all jealous, although by this point we're not really sure of whom. Angel warns her to beware of a guy with a fork, or something like that -- it's not really clear because Buffy doesn't really take him seriously. He may be a tall, dark and handsome stranger, but there's also a pretty good chance he's a lunatic.

At school the next day, Xander shows up with the news that Reasonable Authority Figure Dr. Gregory is missing, and therefore Xander is off the hook for today's homework. Despite a very recent experience with one of his best friends being abducted and murdered by bloodsucking fiends, he doesn't think Dr. Gregory's mysterious disappearance is anything to worry about, because, well, Season 1 Xander is not the sharpest crayon in the drawer.

Xander can't provide them with any useful information, and he blames the fact that he was distracted by the cheerleaders modeling their new skirts. Presumably while he was on his way back from the weekly meeting of the Sunnydale High School chapter of the Judy Garland Fan Club.

Then Miss French shows up. She's the substitute teacher, and her appearance turns Xander into even more of a babbling idiot than usual, much to Buffy and Willow's amusement. He stammers uselessly for a minute before Suave Guy comes along and steals her away.

Buffy and Willow walk into the science classroom, where Buffy spots Dr. Gregory's glasses lying on the floor. Nobody else has noticed them up until now, because Buffy is the only competent person in Sunnydale. Miss French starts seductively singing the praises of the praying mantis, all the guys start drooling, and frankly this scene goes on way too long.

In the cafeteria at lunchtime, Suave Guy taunts Xander a little bit, and has the bad manners to leave before he can hear Xander's (actually halfway decent) comeback. This is interrupted by a piercing scream: Cordy has just discovered Dr. Gregory's headless body hanging in a walk-in cooler. And you thought your high school cafeteria was sketchy.

Buffy, Willow, Xander, Giles, and Giles' pea-soup-colored sweater vest regroup in the library, where they wonder if Angel's mysterious Fork Guy could have anything to do with this. Maybe you should have taken better notes during that conversation, Buffster? Giles and his sweater vest make Buffy promise not to do anything rash. Buffy promises, and Giles believes her, which makes him only slightly less dumb than Joyce and Principal Flutie.



How about you just let your sweater vest handle things from here on out, Giles.

Naturally Buffy runs off in search of Fork Guy. She is accosted by a friendly wino and peers curiously at a homeless guy sleeping under a bench, before discovering a hidden hole in some shrubs. She starts poking around and gets jumped by a guy who appears to have replaced his hand with a garden cultivator. They fight until the police show up, and he runs away.

Shortly thereafter, Fork Guy is stalking Miss French and Buffy is chasing him, the police apparently having been wholly uninterested in asking her any questions about the knock-down, drag-out fight she was just involved in. Then Fork Guy gets a good luck at Miss French and runs away in terror, vanishing down a manhole cover.

Well, clearly Miss French is not what she seems. But Buffy's attempt to get to class so she can watch her is derailed by Principal Flutie, who waylays her in the hallway and insists she speak to a counselor about Dr. Gregory. When she finally gets out, Miss French is macking on Xander, and Buffy arrives at the classroom just in time to see Miss French do a Linda Blair and rotate her head a full 180 degrees. "Nothing human can do that," Giles says helpfully. "No shit, Giles," Buffy replies. "But there are some insects that can." Hey, Buffy did the reading after all!

The last third of this episode is really kind of boring. Miss French lures Xander to her house, Buffy figures out she's a praying mantis, and Giles calls up an old friend of his who went insane after researching a giant "she-mantis" that preys on virgins. Xander gets roofied and wakes up in a cage alongside Suave Guy, who is scared shitless because it turns out he's a virgin too, and therefore they're both going to get raped and decapitated by something out of the movie Them! (Both of these guys are going to have vagina dentata nightmares for life, although in Xander's case, that might just be a turn-on.)

Anyway ... Buffy tells Giles to record some bat sonar, because bats eat praying mantises. They find Miss French, disorient her with the sonar, then fight and eventually kill her. Xander is rescued from losing his virginity to a giant homicidal insect, although since he later goes on to lose it to Faith, it's questionable whether they saved him any trouble.

Blah blah blah, some boring stuff with Angel, the end.

Casualties:

• Dr. Gregory
• Miss French
• Xander's heterosexuality

One-liners that should be turned into domain names:

• ForkGuy.com

Parent of the Year Award:

• Xander's parents, for not having the slightest clue where he was when he decided to get all Mrs. Robinson with his substitute teacher.

The Witch sold me on the series. The twist, the comment on parental abuse, and the Rod Serling ending. Genius.

Teacher's Pet - Musetta Vander. GOD what a hottie!!!

Buffy is a far far better show than it had any right to be.

Especially given it was based on a movie which was basically a parody.

The show wasn't really based on the movie; it's more that the show is what Joss Whedon always envisioned the story as being from the beginning. He didn't have as much creative control over the movie as he might have liked and was not happy with it at all. The show happened, in part, because the movie was so campy and unserious, and left Whedon feeling he still had a story he had to tell.

1x05: Never Kill a Boy on the First Date

We open on a graveyard, and specifically on one of the staples of the series: Buffy sparring with a vampire, making clever quips in between punches before she finally stakes him. Giles appears with a notebook, preparing for his new gig moonlighting as a driver's ed instructor. He snarks at her for taking too long: "It should simply be plunge and move on, plunge and ..." No wonder you're such a hit with the ladies, Giles.

Giles discovers a ring lying on the ground, which gives Buffy an idea: "I kill 'em, you fence their stuff." But Giles isn't contemplating a life of petty crime; rather, he realizes that this ring must be important to the plot, otherwise it would have crumbled to dust the way things worn by a vampire normally do. "I'd best consult my books," he says with some satisfaction.

Underground, The Master is also consulting his books, which tell him of a warrior called The Anointed who will lead the slayer to hell. "Five will die, and from their ashes the Anointed shall arise."

Back at the library, Buffy and Giles are examining the ring. Buffy notices that it has a sun and three stars carved on the inside, and shows Giles a picture of the same symbol in, like, the Encyclopedia Demonica or something. "Oh, the Order of Aurelius," he says casually. "I used to hang out with them at Oxford."

A generically good-looking guy walks in. "Oh, Owen!" Buffy exclaims, proving that she actually does know someone at this school besides Xander, Willow and Cordelia. Giles is somewhat miffed until Buffy reminds him that this is a school library, after all, and students do occasionally read. Owen explains why he's here: "I lost my Emily," he says. Is this some kind of creepy reanimated-corpse-sex-doll thing, Owen? Because that's not supposed to happen till next season. But, no. "Dickinson," he continues. "It's dumb, but I like having her around." Yes, that's right, he's that douchebag. Next week he'll be sitting alone in a coffeehouse with a copy of something by Sartre.



In the ensuing conversation, Buffy keeps tripping over her own tongue, Brooding Smart Sensitive Boy manages to insult her, Giles manages to insult an entire country, and Owen goes on his brooding Emily Dickinson-reading way.

Flash forward to lunchtime. Buffy and Willow are drooling over Owen in the cafeteria (I don't have to say "the caf," do I?) and Buffy goes to sit with him. Cordelia horns in, however, knocking Buffy's food off her tray. "Boy, Cordelia's hips are wider than I thought," Buffy snarks, making up for her earlier tongue-tied stammering. "At least you don't have to eat your soylent green," Owen says. Owen, this is Sunnydale. We don't joke about things like that.

Cordy does her best to flirt with Owen, but he blows her off and asks Buffy out instead. Unfortunately, their date coincides with the thousandth day after the Advent of Sepsis, or something like that, which is when The Anointed is supposed to do his thing.

That night, Giles and Buffy are in the cemetery with Buffy slurping on a Big Gulp (because she's stealthy, yo). They finally decide that nothing is going to happen tonight, so Buffy can go on her date after all -- but not before Giles warns her of the extreme danger of letting a civilian know who she is. Buffy promises she won't, and sets up Mutant Enemy for some merchandising bucks by quipping "In that case, I won't wear my button that says 'I'm a slayer, ask me how!'"

Meanwhile, on a deserted stretch of two-lane highway, five people are on a shuttle coming from the Sunnydale Airport. One of them is a little boy with a mop of brown hair. He looks like a Colin, which is good because that's his name. "I went on an airplane," he announces to the guy sitting across the aisle. The guy replies in a raspy voice, "A pale horse emerged with death as its rider. You will be judged!" Jeez, dude, if you didn't want to talk, you could just say so.

Buffy arrives at the Bronze to find Owen dancing with Cordy, and Crazy Guy stalks around the airport shuttle sounding like a cross between a manic preacher and a serial killer, only not the one Nathan Fillion will play in Season 7. (Joss doesn't like preachers that much, in case you hadn't noticed.) A vampire appears in the roadway, forcing the van to crash, and the vamp and his friends proceed to eat the passengers.

The next day at school, Buffy complains to Xander that she blew it last night, and bemoans that she can't tell Owen the truth about why she didn't come to the Bronze last night. He suggests that she say she had a flat tire, and while Buffy has neither a car nor a driver's license, this is still a much better excuse than the one she ultimately uses, which is "my watch broke, and we don't have any clocks at our house."

Most guys would take this as a brushoff, but luckily, Owen isn't that smart. Instead, he makes another date for tonight and lends Buffy his antique pocket watch, because of course he has an antique pocket watch, while Xander looks down at his plastic Tweety Bird watch in shame. (It's okay, Xander, Willow will suffer your succotash any day!)

The Master says some stuff. To save some time, let's just recap: the entire arc for the season is that The Master is stuck underground and trying to get free so he can rule the world. However, since he can't actually interact with anyone but his minions, his scenes basically all consist of a little bit of exposition followed by The Master going "I shall rise, I shall rise, I shall RISE! Mwahahahaha." This is one of those scenes. There will be many more.

In Buffy's room that evening, Willow and Xander are helping Buffy pick out a dress. By which I mean Willow is helping. Buffy asks them to help her choose between "shy, coy and naive" or "unrestrained, insatiable and aggressive," then shows them two dresses that are exactly the same length, which is to say about two inches away from showing London, France, and probably also the English Channel.

Xander suggests a burka instead, and Buffy tells him to go stand in the corner, where he occupies himself with trying to sneak a peek at her changing through a conveniently placed mirror. The doorbell rings; Buffy's date is here -- oh no, wait, it's Giles.

"We need to talk," Giles says, and elbows his way in the door. He starts waving a newspaper in her face and ranting about prophecy when Owen shows up. Buffy quickly pretends that Giles is here to collect overdue library books, because that wouldn't be weird or anything, and luckily Owen is dumb enough to buy this as well. Owen is pretty dumb, is what we're getting at here.

Willow and Xander pull Owen into the living room (where's Joyce, you might ask? Oh, never mind), where Willow tries to distract him and Xander takes advantage of the opportunity to tell him that Buffy doesn't like to be kissed, touched, or for that matter even looked at. No, Xander, just by you. Giles tells Buffy that being the slayer and having a social life is "problematic at best," whereupon she reminds him that it's the 1990s -- as if her hair weren't enough of a reminder by itself -- and she can do both. Finally, she delivers the line that made it into the DVD menu animations -- "if the apocalypse comes, beep me" -- and goes off on her date.

Giles, meanwhile, decides to head to the funeral home, where the five victims of last night's van accident have been taken. Willow and Xander wonder if they should follow him, and -- look, can we just talk about Xander's shirt for a minute?



At the Bronze, Owen rambles on about Emily Dickinson and how he likes her because she writes about loss, death and bees. Basically he's what would happen if a mad scientist put an emo kid's brain into a J. Crew model's body. He finally figures out how to compliment Buffy -- but manages to insult every other female in the human race in the process -- when Buffy's pager goes off. Did we mention it's the '90s?

Even though Buffy knows that her beeper going off means the apocalypse is imminent, she decides to ignore it and dance with J. Crew Emo Boy, who comments that she's like two people (and you just know that literary device is going to come back over and over for the next seven years). Then Cordy shows up and says something bitchy, but it's really not important.

Giles arrives at the funeral home and is promptly attacked by vampires, but it's okay because the funeral home doesn't bother to lock its doors and he can just charge right in. They take a while to realize they can follow him, which gives him time to lock himself in what looks like the embalming room. Xander and Willow show up at the window, which is great, except that they're even less prepared to fight a bunch of vampires than Giles is, so they agree this is probably a job for the Slayer.



Back at the Bronze, we see Buffy, Owen, and a girl who looks like she just bought out the entire streamers-and-garlands aisle at Party City. Owen goes up to the bar and Angel shows up, and things start to get awkward. Owen returns with a muffin -- because this nightclub sells muffins -- just in time for Willow and Xander to run in and dial the awkwardness up to eleven. Willow and Xander pretend they wanted to double date, Buffy tries to get them to go away, and Xander finally abandons all subtlety to say "Hey, you know what would be cool? The Sunnydale Funeral Home!"

Buffy goes "Oh, shit" while Owen goes "Hey, that sounds like fun!" Buffy tells him he can't come along, then spends some time convincing him that she still likes him, then runs back for a quick smooch, never mind that Giles is probably getting all his blood drained through two gaping holes in his neck as we speak. He follows them to the funeral home anyway, and he thinks it's super cool, because in case you hadn't noticed, this boy has some problems.

Buffy finds the embalming room, where Giles was hiding in a drawer and lying on top of a dead body. Oddly, we will later see several empty compartments in the room, meaning Giles was getting chummy with a corpse by choice. He chides her for bringing her date along, reminding her, "when I said you could slay vampires and have a social life, I didn't mean at the same time." Oh, Giles, you are going to love Season 6.

Buffy gets Willow, Xander and her increasingly morbid boyfriend safely sequestered in an office. They start barricading themselves in, and -- uh, Willow? Xander? Just how much good do you think some cushions and a lampshade are going to do?



Owen, meanwhile, still thinks everything is normal. Because he's ... you get the picture.

Buffy and Giles look for vampires, and Willow and Xander discover that the office they're holed up in has this one random dead body on a slab in it. Don't they usually have separate rooms for that sort of thing? It's the crazy dude from the shuttle bus, and vampification has not made him any more sane. He chases them around singing hymns until he runs into Buffy and Giles. They fight and throw each other around, and -- oh, look, there's also a cremation chamber in here. And OSHA might want to pay these guys a visit, because their thousand-degree furnace looks like it has roughly the same safety features as your average pizza oven.

The crazy vamp gets Buffy pinned and Owen bursts in, whacking him with ... a cookie sheet? What, are they running a bakery here in their off-hours? The vamp knocks him over the head and says he's dead, and this sets Buffy off. They fight some more and -- for fuck's sake, there are pots and pans in here! What the hell kind of funeral home is this?



Finally, Buffy knocks Crazy Vamp onto a gurney and slides him head-first into the incinerator, Giles slams the door, and it's game over. Owen looks a little shellshocked, so Xander takes him home and puts him to bed.

The next day, Buffy is moaning about how she blew it with Owen when he comes up and tells her he wants to go out again. Not because he likes her, per se, but because almost getting himself killed was such a rush. He's just starting to wax enthusiastic about the idea of going downtown and starting a bar fight at 3 a.m. when Buffy says "you know what? You're kind of a psycho. Maybe we should just be friends."

Giles gives Buffy a comforting speech full of sage wisdom, the kind you'd normally expect her to get from her parents, if her mom wasn't oblivious and her dad wasn't a total fucktard. It's really pretty touching, and this becomes a key early moment in the development of the Buffy/Giles dynamic -- the first moment when we start to see him not just as a teacher or a Watcher, but as a father figure.

"Well, at least I stopped the Anointed One!" she says cheerfully -- but look, who's this?



Annnnnd, fade to black.

Casualties:

• The vampire in the graveyard
• Five airport shuttle victims
• Crazy Vamp
• Buffy's love life

Parent of the Year award:

• Joyce, for letting the school librarian do her parenting for her.

One-liner that should be turned into a domain name:

• ImASlayerAskMeHow.com

That review was longer than the actual episode!

Isn't Miss French a casualty? Or am I taking this too seriously?

Yes, she is. I'll add her...

1x06: The Pack

Buffy is walking alone through the Sunnydale Zoo -- because in addition to two hospitals, a regional airport and a state university, this little "one-Starbucks town" has its own zoo -- when four Mean Kids show up. "Oh, look, it's Buffy and all her friends," one of them cracks. They're nastier than Cordelia, but nowhere near as witty.

Buffy shrugs it off and reconnects with Xander and Willow, who are full of news about how they just saw two zebras mating. "It was like the Heimlich, with stripes!" Willow chirps cheerfully. But their foray into the wonderful world of animal fucking is interrupted by the sight of the Mean Kids picking on a Nerdy Kid. He wins them over momentarily by declining to rat them out to Principal Flutie, and they drag him along to the currently-closed hyena habitat. Xander follows to keep an eye on things, but Buffy and Willow are intercepted by Creepy Zoo Guy, who is a little too excited as he tells them all about the hyenas' predatory habits, which include preying on the weak (remember this), following people around by day, learning their names, then calling to them at night and, when they venture away from the camp, devouring them. These things will become somewhat important later, although not very, because it's not as if the story is hard to follow without them.

The Mean Kids toy with the Nerdy Kid for a while until Xander shows up to rescue him -- I guess Buffy's influence is rubbing off -- but then the hyena's eyes flash, echoed by all four of the Mean Kids and Xander, and the music turns ominous. The Nerdy Kid runs away, and Xander and the Mean Kids turn toward him, cackling.



After the teaser, Buffy and Willow are hanging at the Bronze, which serves croissants and little boxes of Sun-Maid raisins in an effort to have the most eclectic bar menu ever, and we learn that Willow knows Xander's blood pressure, which is not stalker-y at all. By the way, if Willow is right about his BP being 130 over 80, Xander may be pre-hypertensive, although there's probably not a lot of research on how living in a town infested by demons affects your stress level.

Xander shows up. He pauses in the doorway to check out a Pretty Girl from head to toe in a fairly un-Xanderlike way, then rips into Buffy's croissant, helps himself to her drink, and sniffs her hair. "You took a bath," he says. You know, this is supposed to be the clue that he's possessed, but you could probably find a bunch of guys at, say, the average Comic-Con whose social skills are on about the same level. The Mean Kids walk in and pick on a Fat Kid for a while, and Xander laughs, much to Buffy and Willow's dismay.

After Buffy takes out her frustrations by using an insufficiently padded Giles as a human punching bag -- and by the way, it really is a good thing that nobody at this school ever goes to the library for books -- we cut to a POV shot with some Exciting Chase Music, and Principal Flutie running down the hall after ... a pig wearing a football helmet with green styrofoam ridges tied to his back. This is Herbert, the new mascot for the Sunnydale High School Razorbacks, and he takes an instant liking to Buffy, probably because she isn't the one who strapped all that shit to him.



Outside, Willow is trying to tutor Asshole!Xander in geometry, and he asks what would be so bad about flunking math. "You remember," she says. "You fail math, you flunk out of school, you end up being the guy at the pizza place that sweeps the floors and says 'Hey kids, where's the cool parties this weekend?'"

You know, this guy.



Buffy, Herbert and Principal Flutie are enjoying some quality time when Asshole!Xander walks by and Herbert starts squealing and trying to run away. "That's weird," Buffy thinks. "Usually it's only women who react that way to him." Her suspicions are further aroused in gym class, when, while playing dodgeball, Asshole!Xander whips a ball straight at Willow, knocking her out of the game. Buffy is pretty good at dodgeball, what with her superhuman reflexes and all, and at the end of the game, it's Buffy by herself on one side, with Asshole!Xander, the Mean Kids, and the Nerdy Kid on the other. But rather than gang up on Buffy, Asshole!Xander and the Mean Kids turn on the Nerdy Kid -- preying on the weak -- and pelt him with balls until he falls to the floor.

At this point it takes every ounce of self-control Buffy has for her to not beat Asshole!Xander to a lifeless pulp.

There are a few more scenes of Asshole!Xander being progressively more of a dick to Willow, and then he and the Mean Kids sneak into the room where Herbert is being kept. He starts squealing in terror.

Buffy seeks out Giles, who is singularly unhelpful in diagnosing Asshole!Xander's condition. "He's turned into a teenage boy," he says absentmindedly. "Of course, you'll have to kill him." You know, for someone whose entire career has been spent dealing with the supernatural and who lives right on top of a center of mystical convergence, you'd think he'd be a little less blasé. Luckily, he also tells her that teenage boys prey on the weak, and this tweaks Buffy's memory. Right then, Willow bursts in with the news that Herbert has been turned into a large order of pork chops, extra rare. And they didn't even bother with the barbecue sauce!

Buffy figures out that Asshole!Xander is actually Hyena!Xander. Giles starts to research hyena possession. Hyena!Xander tries to rape Buffy and fails. The Mean Kids try to turn Principal Flutie into dinner and succeed.

Back in the library, Willow is watching a video of hyenas devouring their prey when Buffy comes in, dragging the unconscious Hyena!Xander. "I hit him," she explains. "With what?" Willow asks. "A desk," Buffy replies. She further elaborates that in his current state, his idea of wooing doesn't exactly involve a Yanni CD and a bottle of chanti, which begs the question, who the fuck has Buffy been dating?



Buffy locks Hyena!Xander in the inexplicably strong book cage, and Giles comes back with the news about what happened to Principal Flutie. He says everyone thinks wild dogs got into the school somehow, because at this point Sunnydale has not yet settled on the universal excuse of "gangs on PCP."

The good news is that Giles has found a cure for hyena possession. The bad news is that it involves transferring the hyena spirit into another human, which Buffy, who is the only character operating on all four cylinders this week, points out is not an optimal solution.

Giles and Buffy leave Willow guarding Hyena!Xander and go off to interrogate Creepy Zoo Guy. Creepy Zoo Guy says he can help them if they bring the posessed students back to the hyena habitat, and he also tells them that if they just bring Xander, the others will follow, because when hyenas are separated, they will track the missing member of their pack until they find him. Ruh-roh ... that means Willow is in danger!

And sure enough, the Mean Kids are outside the library, calling Willow's name ('cause that's what hyenas do). They break the windows, she flees, and they bust Xander out of the book cage, whereupon one of the Mean Kids engages in some weirdly homoerotic petting behavior with Xander before they start chasing Willow through the school.



They catch Willow and are just about to dismember her when Buffy shows up to beat them about the heads with a fire extinguisher. Then she lures them back to the zoo.

In the hyena habitat, Giles is chatting with Creepy Zoo Guy, and -- hey, why is he wearing that crazy makeup? And what's with this weird circle on the ground?

That's right, Crazy Zoo Guy is a psycho, and he was trying to get possessed by the hyena himself when the Mean Kids came along and ruined it for him. He knocks Giles out (this will become a recurring theme) and tricks Willow into a little Bondage Fun Time, but when he holds a sharp knife to her throat, she figures it out.

Buffy shows up, the hyena spirit gets transferred to Creepy Zoo Guy, and Xander and the Mean Kids are free. They fight for a while, and finally Buffy tosses Creepy Zoo Guy to the hyenas, which eat him.

The following day, Buffy reassures Xander that he had nothing to do with eating Principal Flutie, although he did indulge in a delicious side order of Herbert spareribs. Xander pretends to remember none of what happened. Giles shows up and mentions casually that he's been reading up on animal possession, and there's nothing in the literature about memory loss. Xander swears him to secrecy, Giles agrees, and Xander closes the episode with: "Shoot me, stuff me, mount me." Did he just tell a much older man to mount him? I thought we got all the Gay!Xander stuff out of the way two episodes ago.

Casualties:

• Herbert
• Principal Flutie
• Creepy Zoo Guy
• Xander's dignity

Parent of the Year award:

• Mr. and Mrs. Harris, for not noticing any of this.

Times Giles has been knocked unconscious so far: 1 (actually 2 ... I forgot about him getting knocked out in NKABOTFD)

I just realized I don't have my Yanni albums ripped onto my iTunes

1x07: Angel

In which we learn that, in addition to being all mopey and boring, Angel makes Buffy all mopey and boring as well.

The episode opens with the Master enjoying some family time with Darla and the Annoying One. He's miffed that Buffy keeps slaying his vampires. Darla wants to go kill Buffy herself, but the Master decides she's too personally involved. No, he's going to send somebody called The Three.

At the Bronze, everyone is enjoying the annual pre-fumigation party, where you get a free drink for every cockroach you kill. (Sunnydale has hundreds of vampires, but no health inspectors.) Buffy and Willow are talking about boys -- specifically Angel, who hasn't done much except for showing up, warning Buffy about grave danger, and then doing nothing to help her fight it, and Xander, who is currently on the dance floor being a giant spazz.



When Xander returns, Buffy realizes her mopiness is bumming everyone out, so she heads home. But on her way there, she runs into The Three, who are basically like really bad Klingon cosplayers.



These vampires are stronger than usual, and she's just about to get bitten when Angel shows up and decides to be useful for a change. They run to Buffy's house, pursued by The Three, and make it there just in time. When they arrive, Buffy promptly orders him to strip. Whoa there, Buffster, at least stick a couple bills in his G-string first!

But no, he's been injured, and she needs to patch him up. And from this point onward the entire episode basically reads like a bad fanfic.

They flirt a little, and Joyce comes home. Buffy frantically tries to get her to go to bed, even offering to bring her a cup of tea, and Joyce shows a rare glimmer of cluefulness: "That's sweet; what did you do?" As if to answer her question, Angel appears. "Hi," Joyce says, in basically the tone you would expect from a mother meeting a strange man her teenage daughter has brought into their home. But she decides not to press it, and Buffy pulls the wool over her eyes with the clever ruse of standing in the open doorway and yelling "Good night!" immediately before she and Angel tromp up the stairs as loudly as possible.

They get to Buffy's bedroom. "Two of us, one bed -- that doesn't work," she says, making the fanfic writers all tingly. She offers to sleep on the floor, since he's injured, but he says he's slept worse places. So will she, by the time the series is over.

At the library, Willow is all starry-eyed about Buffy's new hunk, and Xander is jealous. "Guys will do anything to impress a girl," he scoffs. "I once drank an entire gallon of Gatorade without taking a breath." Xander Harris, ladykiller. "It was pretty impressive," Willow concedes. "Although later there was an ick factor." Wait -- was she the girl he was trying to impress, possibly back in his Barbie-dismembering days, or did she just have to clean up the mess after he demonstrated his Gatorade-chugging skills for some other girl?

Giles identifies The Three as an elite squad of vampire ninjas. "Obviously you're hurting the Master," he says. "He wouldn't send The Three for just anyone." Although why not is uncertain, since they don't seem to have much else to do. Giles assures them there's no immediate danger, because having failed to kill Buffy, The Three will now commit ritual Seppuku.

Underground, the Master considers sparing them, but Darla wants to play, and she stakes them with great glee.

Giles closes the library so he can train Buffy in the use of a variety of weapons, because while it's totally fine for a student to walk in and see him researching the occult, Willow hacking into the city council's computer network, or Buffy beating the crap out of him while he darts around in body armor, a random high schooler seeing his crossbow collection would be a bridge too far. That night, Buffy brings Angel some food and he confesses that he can't be around her because whenever he is, all he wants to do is kiss her. Which, after briefly expounding on how it could never work, he does.

But for some inexplicable reason this causes him to vamp out. Yes, that's right, Mysterious Hunky Guy is a vampire. She screams, he bolts out the window, Joyce runs in, and Buffy says she saw a shadow. Joyce does not reach the conclusion that Buffy might be on drugs, but instead leaves her alone to go back to her Incan pottery, or whatever.

When Angel goes home, he finds Darla there -- dressed up like a schoolgirl and trying to seduce him. This is where we're introduced to the concept of "the curse." Meanwhile, Giles digs up some information about Angelus, a 240-year-old vampire with the face of an angel who was noted for his exceptional cruelty. This should end well.

Joyce is at home drinking tea when Darla drops by and pretends Buffy asked her over to study. Relieved that Darla isn't a mysterious older man -- although Julie Benz was 25 at the time -- Joyce invites her in, and is promptly attacked. Angel arrives to intervene, and Darla tries to convince him to take a little nip of Joyce's blood -- and tosses her to him, which is of course the position Buffy finds them in. Buffy takes this about as well as you would expect, which is to say she throws him through a plate glass window. (The Summers home takes a lot of abuse in this series.)

At the Emergency Room, Joyce tells Buffy what happened, although she refers to Darla only as "your friend," so Buffy still thinks she's talking about Angel. Also, she thinks she slipped and fell and impaled her own neck on a barbecue fork, which she is fully aware they do not own.

Giles shows up, which Joyce doesn't think is at all strange. Then Buffy goes hunting while Giles stays to bond with her mother. "She talks about you all the time," Joyce tells Giles, and the surprising thing here is that Joyce actually listened to something Buffy said on multiple occasions. "It's important to have teachers who make an impression." Giles replies, "She makes quite an impression herself." Joyce still doesn't think anything is weird about this. He also tells her that "Buffy lives very much in the now," which I remember one of my own high school teachers saying to me, and I'm pretty sure it was just a nicer way of saying "you're undisciplined as fuck."

Joyce finally mentions Darla by name. Ruh-roh! Something's very wrong, and Giles runs off to find Willow and Xander. Buffy goes to the closed Bronze -- presumably the fumigation hasn't started, because I don't think the ability to withstand clouds of industrial-grade insecticide is one of the slayer powers -- to confront Angel, who tells him about his curse. Apparently he fed on a Romani girl -- a gypsy, and there will be various offensive stereotypes about the Romani over the course of this entire plot arc -- and they cursed him with a soul. So now, after a century-plus of torturing, raping and killing people, his conscience has been restored to him and he has to live with the guilt of what he's done. "What, they were all out of boils and blinding torment?" quips Buffy.

He also reveals that his vampire instincts are still there, just kept in check by his soul. "I wanted to kill you tonight," he says. "Go ahead," she replies softly, offering him her neck, and a million pairs of panties just got moist. "Not as easy as it looks," she says. But Darla shows up and begs to differ.

Darla delivers some more backstory -- she was the one who turned Angel into a vampire in the first place, it turns out, which means technically she's been trying to seduce her own son -- and eventually they fight. Buffy has her crossbow, and Darla has ... two guns, which despite being remarkably effective on humans, are rarely used by the denizens of Sunnydale. (This is later explained away by the idea that most vampires and demons are notoriously technophobic and don't like anything that existed after, say, the fifteenth century.)

Darla fires her guns a total of at least, by my count, 27 times without running out of ammunition. She actually seems to be making some progress toward killing Buffy when Angel stakes her from behind. Which she used to enjoy in the old days, but now that he's doing it with literal wood, it's kind of a drag, and she poofs into dust.

Underground, the Master is furious, but the Annoying One reassures him that "soon you shall rise, and when you do, we'll kill them all."

Buffy, Willow and Xander are at the Bronze for the post-fumigation party, which Xander explains is like the pre-fumigation party, only with "much hardier cockroaches." Angel shows up and there is much brooding. "Look, this can't --" he begins. "Ever be anything, I know," she says. But of course that won't prevent another two seasons of eye-stabbingly boring angst. They kiss again, with more tears and moping, and when Buffy finally leaves him, we see that her cross necklace has seared its image into his chest. That sound you hear was a million 14-year-old girls orgasming on the spot, while everyone else mutters "oh, for fuck's sake." Annnnnd, fade to black.

Casualties:

• The Three (staked by Darla)
• Darla (staked by Angel)
• Buffy's dignity (will continue to take a hit whenever Angel is around)

Parent of the Year award:

• I'll skip this one this time, because Joyce showed a small amount of progress toward actually being conscious of what the fuck was going on.

One-liner that should be a domain name:

• boilsandblindingtorment.com, which is in fact a real, and highly entertaining, Buffy fansite.

Damage to the Summers house:

• One glass bay window.

That's hot!

I have the Region 2 DVD's of season's 2-7 and they are in 16:9.

I realize you still have a ways to go, but how are you going to handle the Buffy/Angel crossovers? Or are you planning to review Angel concurrently?

I saved this from somewhere online, you might find it handy. This list preserves the chronological order with minimum disc swapping. Although I guess if you are watching via streaming it doesn't matter.

The Pack showed me that, even when the show had a terrible, ridiculous concept, at least it was produced with style.
And eating the principal was inspired!

I would truly love to see the alternate-universe Buffy series where Julie/Darla won the Buffy part over SMG.

Maybe it even would've ended in five.

1x08: I Robot, You Jane



The year is 1418. An ancient Italian with a haircut that even Scott Baio would be embarrassed by is kneeling in front of a dude with gnarly claws and giant curved horns. "Do you love me?" the monster asks. Guys, stop it, this isn't that kind of show!

"You have my love," Bad Haircut replies, and it turns out this isn't that kind of show after all, it's a snuff film, because the monster puts his hand on the guy's head and twists it like a doorknob, snapping his neck.

Meanwhile, a torch-wielding mob is assembling to defeat the demon, whose name is Moloch. To the tune of the cheesy fake-organ music that characterized Buffy before it got enough of a budget to hire an orchestra, the Head Torch Wielder invokes the Circle of Kahless to -- wait, what?



No, not that Kahless. Although maybe it is, because we never see him or anything.

Anyway, Head Torch Wielder yells, "I command you, COME!" Seriously, what the fuck was going on in 15th-century Italy? The demon screams and gets trapped in a book, which is then slammed shut, never to be opened again, unless ...



That's right, way to fucking go, Buffy.

Yes indeed, Giles went to Goodwill to buy more tweed, and while he was there he picked himself up a big ol' demon tome. "When I've examined it, you can, uh, skim it," he tells Willow, which sets up some awkward flirting banter between Giles and Jenny Calendar (she's flirting, he's just awkward) before some angry dude named Fritz starts ranting about how "the printed page is obsolete" and "if you're not jacked in, you're not alive." This is what TV writers thought about internet users in 1997, people.

Jenny comes to his defense -- "Fritz comes on a little strong, and we should probably start keeping him away from sharp objects, but he does have a point," she says -- and goes on to expound that "in the last two years, more digitized information went across phone lines than conversations." Of course, most of that was badly photoshopped nudes of Sarah Michelle Gellar, but that's beside the point.

Willow is scanning books into the computer with a handheld device that looks suspiciously like a marijuana grow lamp, and doesn't notice that all the pages have just gone blank. As she leaves, the computer screen goes black and the words "Where am I?" appear on it one letter at a time, because Moloch may be controlling the computer with his mind, but he still has to hunt-and-peck his way through a simple sentence.

The next morning, Buffy, in her '90s topknot and her first-season Wonderbra, ribs Willow for having had a busy signal last night (remember busy signals?) and learns that she was up all night talking to a boy. And it's about damn time, because -- is that a picture of you and Giles inside your locker? Red flag! Red flag!



"You are a thing of evil for not telling me this right away," says Buffy, who, given her vocation, you'd think would throw around that kind of language a little less casually. Willow is all starry-eyed and Buffy is too, until she discovers that Willow met the guy online, which Buffy knows means he's probably a 50-year-old loner with a white van and a stash of Dora the Explorer toys in his glovebox.

Buffy doesn't stumble upon this factoid immediately, of course. While trying to figure out how Willow can be dating a guy and not know what he looks like, she asks, "Does it involve a midget and a block of ice?" What the hell kind of dates have you been going on, Buffy?

In the computer lab, Willow discovers she has an email from her new beau, Malcolm. Her email client, by the way, has an address bar with the characters "//library@sunnydale.edu/term1," because the SFX guys just populated the screen with a bunch of vaguely internet-y looking things, and buttons for "reply," "delete," and "cache." (Hey, imagine how much time we would have saved, collectively, if the "forward" button had never been invented?)

Buffy tries to talk some sense into Willow and we see that she is being spied on by a webcam. Somewhere else, a computer is performing a search of school records, which apparently involves scrolling through thousands of copies of the same four images over and over again. It finally finds Buffy's record, which it helpfully displays against a graphic of a sheet of notebook paper, and it turns out that when they gave him the name Moloch the Corrupter, they meant Moloch the Data Corrupter, because in just a few seconds, Buffy goes from a 16-year-old sophomore to a senior about to turn 18.



She must have gotten held back a lot. Also, only one absence? Really?

Outside during one of Sunnydale High School's many free periods, Xander frets that Malcolm could be anybody, on the grounds that he, Xander, could pose as an elderly Dutch woman if he wanted to. And you know what? If Xander were to pose as somebody else online, that's probably exactly what he'd do. Meanwhile, Fritz is sitting at a computer in a darkened room, chanting "I'm jacked in ... I'm jacked in ... I'm jacked in" while carving an M into his arm with an X-Acto knife. Sideways for attention, long way for results, Fritz.

Buffy is pretty wigged out when Willow doesn't show up at school the next day until sometime in the afternoon, and she approaches Fritz's slightly-less-creepy buddy Dave for help. She asks if it's possible to tell who someone is from an email. "You could pull up somebody's profile based on their username," he says, which makes sense if your entire internet experience is inside AOL ... which in turn makes perfect sense for the writers but not so much for Dave, who probably spends half his day on Usenet and is the moderator of alt.sex.pictures.vampire-slayers. Dave gets all squirrelly when he finds out she's interested in Malcolm, and Fritz glowers menacingly at her as she walks away.

Buffy decides to tail Dave, all inconspicuous in her suede coat and bright red sunglasses, and Moloch tells Fritz to kill her, still one letter at a time. Meanwhile, Buffy and Xander are talking to Giles in the library when Jenny walks in and starts spewing some random computer words that don't actually make any sense. She is surprised to see the kids in the library, interfering with her painfully-awkward-flirting time, and Xander lamely offers "to read makes our speaking English good" before Buffy hurries him out the door.

Willow is chatting to Malcolm, with the computer reading his messages aloud to her for some reason, and I can't help but notice that Moloch's typing has improved. I guess he spent some quality time with a Mavis Beacon diskette. But he also knows a creepy amount about Buffy, which makes Willow suspicious. She "signs off," by which I mean she turns off her monitor.

Jenny banters with Giles some more and notices the demon book with all the empty pages. "A diary, that's what it is," Giles stammers, because apparently diaries with giant horned demons on the cover are all the rage in Sunnydale these days. Which I guess is not out of the realm of possibility.

The next time Buffy sees Dave, he's acting a little more normal. He apologizes for his weird behavior and tells her that Willow is looking for her. "She said she'd be in the girls' locker room," he says, which seems like an odd place for Willow to just be hanging out, but it makes sense after all because it's not Willow, it's Fritz, and the girls' locker room is exactly the sort of place he'd be hanging out. Fritz tries to electrocute her with a running shower and a frayed wire, which fails to work, and Dave yells at his computer, which promptly begins writing his suicide note.

Giles comments on how lucky Buffy was that "she was only grounded for a moment." (Note to Giles: in the context of electric shocks, grounding is a good thing. We know you're not up on the computer stuff, but shouldn't you at least be down with Thomas Edison by now?) They decide to delete the file that Willow scanned the book into. "Which file do you think it is? 'Willow'?" Buffy asks, which seems like a decent bet considering that it's the only file there. She inexplicably types its name before doing the sensible thing and dragging it to the trash with her mouse, whereupon a badly pixelated Moloch shows up on the monitor and yells at her to leave Willow alone.

Willow comes home, and the Rosenbergs really need to hire a decorator, because their idea of wall art is a nice matte-and-frame set with nothing inside it. She reads her email, which consists of Malcolm saying he wants to see her. More annoyed than creeped out, she turns her monitor off, and it turns on by itself, because monitors in 1997 were totally controlled by software. The doorbell rings and Fritz is there to chloroform her. You sure do know how to romance a girl, Fritz.

Giles tells Jenny there's a demon in the internet, and it turns out she already knows. Looks like somebody just got upgraded to recurring character! Meanwhile, Buffy and Xander go to Willow's house -- where the hell are her parents, by the way? -- where they see the last email she was reading, because apparently Moloch can sense when Willow turns off her monitor and send her another email in realtime, he isn't smart enough to avoid spilling the beans to her bestest buds.

Back in the library, Giles is quite flustered by this upstart young computer person knowing about demons. Jenny goes into another lecture about his snobbery, which is fine because it's not like they're under any sort of time pressure or anything. She reveals that she is a "technopagan," a word the writers made up for somebody who knows both mystical incantations and Microsoft QuickBASIC.

Willow wakes up in a creepy room filled with creepy things, and hey look, there's Malcolm! He's not an elderly Dutch woman after all, but a big robot with glowing red eyes. He snaps Fritz's neck just for the heck of it. Buffy and Xander jump the fence into the closed-up computer company where Willow is being held, and Moloch professes her love for her, having just left a dead creepazoid at her feet like a cat leaving its owner a mouse. Buffy and Xander set off the building's security system, which traps them in a room that's rapidly filling with some kind of gas. Who the hell was running this factory before it closed? Heinrich Himmler?

Back at the library, Giles asks Jenny, "Couldn't you just stop Moloch by entering some ... computer virus?" "You've seen way too many movies," she responds. Yes, Jenny, that's the unrealistic thing about all of this. They do spooky chanting stuff, and Moloch, having been spurned, is about to snap Willow's neck when Giles starts screaming "Demon, COME!" Dammit, Rupert, this isn't that kind of show, OKAY?

Moloch flails around in agony, Giles' computer throws sparks from its keyboard, a wind starts blowing out of nowhere, and the demon goes -- where? Not back into the book -- aw, shit, he's back in his robot body. And trapped there, admittedly, but that won't do much good if he uses his Robot Strength to sucker-punch everybody into 1998. He plows through a wall, backhands Xander, and tosses Buffy around like a rag doll, but luckily, Buffy is able to maneuver him into punching a high-voltage electrical panel.

Annnnnnnnd, he's dead.

Now it's all over except for some more painfully awkward flirting between Jenny and Giles ... and, of course, except for the moping. Willow bemoans the fact that the first boy who liked her turned out to be a demon, and Buffy and Xander console her by reminding her that they each fell for a vampire and a giant praying mantis, respectively. "Let's face it, none of us us ever going to have a happy, normal relationship," Buffy says, and ... hang on ...











Nope, that sounds about right.

Casualties:

• Bad Haircut Dude
• Dave
• Fritz
• Moloch

Parent of the Year Award:

• Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg

1x09: The Puppet Show

I got stuck on this one the last time around, and here's why: I had been watching Season 1 with the intention of mocking it, and in this episode I just couldn't find that much to work with. Which led me to realize that "The Puppet Show" was probably the first good Buffy episode. But the show must go on ...

We open backstage in the school auditorium. A deep, breathy voice is speaking over a shot of a pretty girl stretching out in tights and a leotard, which means that the voice either belongs to the Demon of the Week or to that teacher we all had in high school who gave lots of pop quizzes during short skirt season and always seemed a little too fond of attending girls' swim meets.

Another student is playing the violin, another the tuba, and there's someone juggling. Also a guy with a ventriloquist's dummy who is pressing his fingers to his temples in pain. A gesture we will all soon be repeating, because Cordelia is about to sing, and boy, is she bad at it. (Side note: Pretending to sing badly is actually pretty hard to do. It's easy for a good singer to force themselves off-pitch, but the timbre and control that come with vocal training are harder to hide. Luckily, Charisma Carpenter has confirmed in interviews that she genuinely can't sing, and that Joss Whedon wrote this scene with that in mind, so the effect is convincing.)

Anyhoo, it turns out we're watching a rehearsal for the school talent show, and poor Giles has been roped into running it. Naturally, Buffy, Willow and Xander show up to twit him about his misfortune for a few minutes. As they leave, Xander gives Giles what appears to be a weird cross between a pat on the back and a shoulder rub, and Giles eyes the spot where Xander touched him with the same expression of disgust you would expect to see if a bird took a crap on his tweed. And -- hey, it's Quark!



That's right, now that Ken Lerner has been eaten, there's a new sheriff in town, and it's none other then Armin Shimerman and his ears. He snarks at Buffy, Willow and Xander for a while before ordering them to come up with their own act for the talent show. All three are suitably horrified, although that may have more to do with the mime over Quark's left shoulder.

Ventriloquist Guy is taking the stage now, and this gives Buffy the wiggins. "I think dummies are cute. You don't?" Willow asks. (No, Willow, we've already established that she only likes Xander as a friend.) Ventriloquist Guy is named Morgan and he's a really bad ventriloquist. Or maybe he isn't, because his act suddenly gets convincing about halfway through ... or maybe he is after all, because the camera zooms in on the dummy's face as eerie music plays ...

Cut back to the locker room, where the creepy voice is stalking the dancer from before. She screams, the voice hisses "I will be flesh," and ... roll opening titles!

After the credits, Buffy, Willow and Xander are fretting over what to do for their act when Sid, the dummy, lets out a wolf whistle and starts sexually harassing the girls. "Morgan, you're really getting good!" Willow exclaims, because she has not yet hopped on the Lesbo Train and is therefore still desperate for any male attention she can get, even if it comes from a wooden guy with somebody's hand shoved up his ass. (Buffy also has a thing for wooden men with stuff stuck up their asses, but we can talk about David Boreanaz's acting later.)

Principal Quark is telling Giles about how under his watch, Sunnydale High School will be "clean, orderly and quiet," which is the cue for another girl to scream as she discovers Dancer Girl's body. Dancer Girl's name was Emily and she was on the cross-country team, which is more character development than the victim-of-the-week usually gets. Buffy thinks she must have been killed by a vampire, but Giles says no, she wasn't bitten -- her heart was removed. At this point we also learn that the killer used not teeth and claws, like a demon would, but a knife, which we see being placed into an evidence bag completely free of blood, which means either that the Sunnydale police suck at evidence handling or that the killer, after carving out Emily's heart, took time out to do the dishes.

Willow thinks this is creepy. "It could be anyone! Even me!" she exclaims. The others turn to look at her. "It's not, though," she offers lamely. Very reassuring, Willow.

Our junior Columbos fan out to interview Emily's fellow talent show performers, and they all saw her around Morgan. Buffy goes to see him, and sees him start to argue with his dummy, whose name is Sid. And Buffy starts to tumble to the fact that something weird is going on with Sid. After school, she breaks into Morgan's locker but doesn't get very far before she is confronted by Principal Quark, who despite his deep suspicion of all things Buffy, does not seem to notice that her way of breaking into Morgan's locker involved smashing the combination lock completely through the door. Morgan and Sid watch creepily from a doorway, then we see them arguing again, and it sounds like Sid wants Morgan to kill Buffy. Mystery solved?

At home, Joyce wants to go see Buffy perform in the talent show, which would be the most attentive act of parenting she's engaged in all season -- if she didn't immediately fuck it up by asking "Is there something bothering you?" of her daughter who just had a classmate get brutally murdered. "Get some sleep, you'll feel better in the morning," Joyce helpfully counsels her. Buffy goes to bed, and we see Sid watching her through her window. Creepy, but still not quite as creepy as Angel. After the commercial, she wakes up and screams because Sid is in her bed; Joyce inspects the covers and helpfully surmises that Buffy had a nightmare. She also suggests that Buffy not go to sleep with her window open -- particularly sound advice since the Summers household doesn't appear to be equipped with screens -- and Buffy worriedly says "I didn't."

The next day, Buffy tells the rest of the Scooby Gang that she's being stalked by Sid. Giles thinks it was just a nightmare and Xander thinks it was probably a cat, and Giles prattles on about some demon. Sid gets confiscated during history class by a teacher who looks like she might be one of the rare Sunnydale adults who actually tries to be helpful and caring. Amazingly, she does not die. Xander abducts the dummy so that Buffy can interrogate Morgan alone; he then goofs off with Sid for a while before Buffy flounces off and says "You watch the dummy," leaving it unclear which of them she's talking about.

Giles and Willow browse through the school library's extensive collection of books on organ harvesting and learn that some human-shaped inanimate objects, like mannequins and dummies, collect organs in an effort to become human. Buffy stalks Morgan through the school and finds him dead. She then gets trapped under what looks like a falling chandelier, because I guess we're in The Phantom of the Opera now.

Sid shows up and tries to stab Buffy, who gets free and fights him to a draw. She's all "you lost and now you'll never be human," and he's all "yeah, well, neither will you," whereupon they both go "Huh?"

That's right, Sid is a demon hunter too, and he thinks Buffy is the demon. There's something about a curse, where he has to kill seven demons before he can be released; he's gotten six of them so far. It's like some kind of demented Pokemon game. He explains all this to the Scooby Gang, and they decide that Giles should head off to the talent show so they can see who is missing (and hence the demon).

Buffy stumbles across a brain, which falls to the floor and is surprisingly cohesive; it seems to be made of rubber, and it jiggles like a lump of Jell-O. Willow does some hacking and discovers that Morgan had brain cancer, which explains why the demon rejected his brain, despite him being the smartest kid in school. She's worried about Giles, and Xander reassures her: "Giles can handle himself. After all, he is really ... smart."

Dawn breaks over Marblehead, and they rush off to save Giles, who has been lured by a kid with a bunch of magic tricks into sticking his head in a guillotine. Buffy and Sid fight the demon, Xander and Willow rescue Giles from his brainectomy, and finally the demon gets maneuvered into his own contraption and killed. Sid stabs him in the heart -- well, in Emily's heart, I guess -- and dies. The curtain slides open, revealing to a bemused audience a tableau that consists of Willow holding an axe, Buffy cradling an insensate dummy, and a dead demon sprawled across a guillotine. "I don't get it," says Principal Quark. "What is it, avant-garde?"

And that's it except for a pretty cute over-the-credits gag involving Buffy, Willow and Xander awkwardly acting out a scene from Oedipus Rex and Willow running off the stage in terror.

Casualties:

• Emily
• Morgan
• Marc the Demon Magician
• Sid

Parent of the Year Award:

• Joyce, for her usual obliviousness

One-liner that would make a good domain name:

• WhatIsItAvantGarde.com

Sid came back in the Buffy video game for PS2!