Buffy Rewatch and Recap thread

1x10: Nightmares

This episode in a nutshell: Everyone's nightmares are coming true, but after coming up with the premise, the writers didn't bother to come up with any particular reason for it.

We open on a creepy underground lair filled with candles. Buffy is creeping through the lair with stake in hand, and the Master is stalking her. As soon as he confronts her, she freezes, drops her stake, and is unable to fight. The Master advances for the kill, she backs away in terror, and just as he reaches out to grab her, she screams, and -- oh look, it was just a dream, and Joyce is shaking her, telling her it's time to get ready for school.

There are two odd things about this sequence. One, Buffy has yet to actually meet the Master, so how does she even know what he looks like in order for him to show up in her dreams? Two, this is the second time in as many episodes that Joyce's only daughter has woken up with the screaming night terrors. Shouldn't she at least be a little concerned, and not just assume that Buffy is frantically shrieking "NO!" because she doesn't want to wake up and get ready for school?

(Season 1 Buffy, by the way, even wears her pushup bra to bed. I guess a girl never knows when a hunky vampire might decide to pop through her window.)

Anyway, Joyce tells Buffy that her absentee father will be picking her up for the weekend, and in the next scene we get a bit of exposition about the enigma that is Hank Summers. "So, do you see your dad a lot?" Willow asks as they walk to class. "No, I plan to see him exactly twice in the next seven years, and he probably won't even notice when I spend an entire summer dead," Buffy replies, or at least that's what she would reply if she knew what a dillhole her dad would eventually turn out to be. We also learn that Willow's parents are emotionally repressed and at least a little passive-aggressive, which probably explains a lot.

In health class, Cordelia says something bitchy, because that's basically all they let her do in Season 1, and a long-haired guy named Wendell -- who appears to be friends with Xander and Willow, although we've never seen him before and will never see him again -- gets attacked by tarantulas. Also, Buffy sees a creepy kid, who has a very '90s haircut and a '90s Henley shirt to match, staring through the classroom door. He looks a little bit like the Annoying One, but he isn't, and he calmly says "sorry about that" as Wendell continues to scream and we cut to the opening credits.

Deep underground, the Master pontificates to the Annoying One about the meaning of fear. We don't really need to get into it, because as usual, the Master is pretty boring.

The following day, we learn that Joyce has once again heard Buffy screaming in her sleep, but at no point does she begin to think that a visit to a therapist might be in order. We also learn that Buffy is a little insecure about her relationship with her father -- no wonder, since the previous nine episodes have given us no indication that he has any interest in her life, or for that matter that he even exists.

Buffy learns she has a history test that she forgot about, and also that she doesn't actually know what room her history class is in. Her test, by the way, includes the Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Seward's Folly, and the presidency of Harry Truman, which means that it covers roughly 150 years, so either the teacher is using some sort of super-accelerated syllabus, or the episode wasn't meant to be freeze-framed.

A girl goes into the basement for a smoke break -- the basement? what happened to just sneaking off behind the school? -- and gets attacked by a Big Ugly Guy who bellows "Lucky 19" as he's beating the crap out of her. When Buffy and Giles visit her in the hospital, they learn that she's the second such victim this week; the first, a young boy, is still in a coma. The other nightmares follow in quick succession: A tough guy who dresses like the Fonz is humiliated when his mother shows up and starts talking to him like a toddler; Xander walks into class and realizes he's in his underwear; and Giles suddenly loses the ability to read. We also learn that the boy in the hospital is named Billy Palmer, that he's the same as the eerie kid Buffy has been seeing around school, that he was beaten up after a baseball game, and that he wears the number 19.

Buffy's dad shows up to inform her that she made her parents get divorced by being such a rotten kid, and that he doesn't really get anything out of spending time with her and doesn't want to see her again. In retrospect, this isn't that much more cruel than the disappearing act he pulls later on, but it's jarring because it's Season 1 and we have yet to fully explore the extent of Hank's douchebaggery. Xander's underwear incident is enough to make Willow and Giles tumble to the fact that everyone's nightmares are coming true, including Cordy, whose worst nightmares involve having bad hair, dressing like Willow, and being part of the chess club. Giles realizes that, the Slayer's nightmares being bloodier than most, Buffy is probably in considerable danger.

Also, Willow gets forced to sing on stage alongside a world-famous tenor and Xander wanders down a hallway filled with swastikas and gets attacked by a giddy, knife-wielding clown. These scenes are mostly filler. Buffy wanders into a graveyard and we learn that one of her biggest fears is being buried alive, which will become important much later on, and when Giles, Willow and Xander follow her into the graveyard, they find a headstone that reads "Buffy Summers, 1981-1997." Nitpickers will notice that, between this episode and "I, Robot ... You Jane," Buffy has now been born in three completely different years, but there's also a pretty touching moment in the development of Giles and Buffy's father-daughter dynamic when we learn that Buffy's death is actually Giles' nightmare.

Buffy emerges from her grave as a vampire, and Xander gets an instant erection. Giles realizes Billy is the key to all this and they rush off to the hospital, where Giles decides that the best way to awaken a coma patient is to yell at him. The Big Ugly Guy returns and Buffy kicks the crap out of him, then tells Billy's creepy avatar to pull his mask off. There's a bright flash of light, and then somewhere in the Delta Quadrant, Captain Janeway pushes her Magic Reset Button and everything is back to normal.

It turns out that Billy's Kiddie League coach beat him into a coma for losing a game. How this resulted in everyone's nightmares coming true is never fully explained. (Something about astral projection? Is the Master involved? It's not at all clear.) Buffy's dad wants to see her again, and Xander confesses to Willow that he was still attracted to Buffy when she was a vampire. Which, after Miss French, really should not come as a surprise.

Casualties:

• Xander's dignity, again.

Parent of the Year award:

• Hank Summers, because even though most of the stuff he did wrong was in Buffy's dream, he's gonna abandon her in the end anyway.

Don't forget, Buffy's dreams are prophetic. So whether she met the Master already or not doesn't matter.
Don't forget, Buffy mother is pathetic. I mean seriously, has there ever been a more clueless parent in TV history?

And I'm ptryy sure Xander's relationships are an intentional running joke. Praying mantis, vampire Buffy, Inca mummy girl, robot, demon, witchy Willow, vengeance demon...

Hey, Joyce is singlehandedly running a struggling art gallery while trying to find love as a single mom in a new city. That takes a lot of time and energy, probably.

1x11: Out of Mind, Out of Sight

The most common recurring trope of Buffy Season 1 was that of taking something that people say figuratively about high school and making it literally true, generally within the context of a monster-of-the-week episode. This episode is no exception, but it is also notable for two other reasons:

• It marks the first time Cordelia Chase got anything resembling character development.
• It demonstrates that in Season 1, while the writers hit their stride about halfway through and started turning out some genuinely good episodes, they were still pretty bad at the whole arc thing.

The episode begins with Cordy being Cordy, and nothing else really needs to be said, except that we discover Cordy's current beau is named Mitch. Then we cut to Buffy's English class -- led by a woman who seems like she's actually a pretty good teacher, an anomaly for Sunnydale High -- and Cordy being Cordy again. Clearly this is going to be a Cordelia episode. I'll wait for you to finish expressing your joy.

Right after class, Cordy is telling Harmony about her dress for the May Queen dance, which is so amazing that "Mitch is gonna die."

This is Mitch's cue to, well, die.

Okay, not quite. But he does get the snot beat out of him by a giggling apparition wielding a baseball bat, and we cut to the credits.

After the credits, Cordy is being Cordy again, campaigning for May Queen and insulting her best friend. This prompts Xander and Willow to dissolve into giggles over some Noodle Incident from sixth grade involving antlers and a deputy. Xander sticks his foot in his mouth by asking what kind of moron would want to be May Queen anyway, and it turns out Buffy got all those titles at her old school before she burned down the asbestos-filled gym. Buffy is quietly angsty, reflecting on how she went from the belle of the ball to the headcase with only two friends, both of whom are once again wracked by paroxysms of laughter over whatever it was that sixth-grade Cordelia did with the antlers.

Their mirth is interrupted by the news of Mitch's severe beating. Buffy tries to interrogate Mitch -- aided by the paramedics deciding that they don't really need to get the maimed kid to the ambulance quickly, so it's fine to just stand there and let this random and weirdly intense girl grill him for a while -- when she is interrupted by Principal Quark. Sensing that Buffy needs to spend some quality time with the attempted-murder scene, Willow and Xander distract Principal Quark with rumors of a lawsuit long enough for Buffy to sneak into the boys' locker room, where she finds LOOK scrawled in spraypaint across a bank of lockers.

This is odd, she muses over lunch, since monsters usually just kill people rather than sending messages. (Well, until next season, anyway.) Giles agrees and adds that he's never heard of anyone being attacked by a baseball bat acting all by its lonesome. "Maybe it's a vampire bat," quips Xander, and the others look at him like he has a foot growing out of his head. Come on, guys, give the poor guy some credit -- that wasn't half bad!

On the off-chance that it's a ghost, Willow goes off to compile a list of dead and missing students. This being Sunnydale, that means we'll see her in about a month.

We cut to Cordy being Cordy again, and then to an eerie black-and-white flashback of Cordy and Harmony ignoring someone (the cameraman, possibly), and then back in the non-flashback world, Harmony falls headlong and not-very-convincingly down a flight of stairs. (I haven't been pushed down many flights of stairs, but absent some unusual circumstance like the steps being coated with Crisco, I have to imagine that a reasonably fit high school sophomore who falls the way Harmony fell would be able to arrest her downward progress at some point and not just keep rolling down the steps like a bowling ball.) Oh, and there's that disembodied giggling again.

Buffy stalks the apparition into an office, even bumping into it momentarily, and then into the band room, where she arrives just in time to see a misplaced ceiling tile slide back into place.

Outside, Xander is expounding on what he would do if he were a ghost ("protect the girls' locker room," in case you were wondering) and Buffy informs the gang that it's not a ghost after all since she bumped into whatever-it-was.

Later on, Buffy is wandering around the school after hours when she hears eerie flute music. Then we cut to the library, where, in a departure from the current episode's plot, Angel shows up to surprise Giles and engage in a little foreshadowing. (You know how I mentioned they weren't very good at arcs yet? This is why. Instead of integrating The Master into the plot in some way, or building toward the season's climax, they basically just have Angel drop in every so often to go "Hey, you know that dude we've been fighting? Yeah, he's still around.")

There's another flashback, only this time instead of ignoring the cameraman, Cordy and her minions are ignoring Clea DuVall. When the flashback is over, Buffy and friends notice a couple of guys in black suits hanging around outside the school (and attracting no notice from school personnel), and Willow pulls out the "dead and missing" list. Marcie Ross, who disappeared six months ago, is the most recent, because apparently Willow's exhaustive search didn't turn up Emily and Morgan and Dave and Fritz, all of whom bit the big one within the last few episodes. (Though to be fair, the laughter sounded pretty feminine, and what with the flute thing and Emily being a dancer and that whole "dancer-band rivalry," maybe Willow ruled all of them out.)

Buffy investigates the ceiling above the band room and finds a nest of sorts, with a mattress, a flute, some sheet music, a teddy bear, and Marcie Ross' yearbook. A floating knife almost stabs her, but then changes its mind. The English teacher is less lucky, getting attacked by a plastic bag before LISTEN gets scrawled on the chalkboard behind her.

The inside cover of Marcie's yearbook is filled with exhortations to "have a nice summer," which the gang explains to Giles is what you write when it's the last day of school and you have no earthly clue who the person who just handed you their yearbook actually is. Willow discovers that she and Xander each had four classes with Marcie last year and yet neither has any memory of her. It's all starting to come together, and in a flashback to an earlier English class, we see Clea DuVall being ignored by everyone as her raised hand slowly starts to disappear. In keeping with the Season 1 "that which is figurative becomes literal theme," Marcie felt like she was invisible, so eventually she just vanished.

Cordy realizes that all the people who were attacked have one thing in common -- they were all nice to her. She comes to Buffy for help, which clearly pains her. But in the hallway, 11 episodes into a show that lists her as a principal character, Cordy gets her first actual piece of character development:

Cordelia: Bummer for her. It's awful to feel that lonely.
Buffy: Hmm. So you've read something about the feeling?
Cordelia: Hey! You think I'm never lonely because I'm so cute and popular? I can be surrounded by people and be completely alone. It's not like any of them really know me. I don't even know if they like me half the time. People just want to be in a popular zone. Sometimes when I talk, everyone's so busy agreeing with me, they don't hear a word I say.
Buffy: Well, if you feel so alone, then why do you work so hard at being popular?
Cordelia: Well, it beats being alone all by yourself.​

Buffy shows Cordelia to a closet where she can get changed. Presumably it's not the first time Cordy's clothes have come off in a janitor's closet. Willow, Xander and Giles are in the library when they hear the flute music and track it to the basement, where it turns out to be coming from a tape recorder. Oh snap! And Marcie starts trying to gas them to death.

Cordy gets snatched from the closet -- hey, Buffy, since you already know that Marcie travels through the ceiling, maybe you shouldn't have counted on a locked door for protection? -- and ends up in Marcie's lair. Eventually both she and Buffy wake up tied to chairs in Sunnydale High School's absurdly spacious drop ceiling. Marcie has numbed Cordelia's face and is about to carve her up with a scalpel. It's actually pretty intense nightmare fuel -- but luckily Marcie gets caught up in her own rantings long enough for Buffy to break loose and start pummeling her.

Angel shows up in time to rescue Willow, Xander and Giles, and the Men in Black (sadly minus Will Smith) show up to take Marcie off of Buffy's hands. Turns out there's a whole passel of invisible teenagers, and all of them are being trained by the federal government in methods of assassination. It's obvious sequel bait, but since this is Season 1, Marcie will end up like the aliens in TNG's "Conspiracy," that is to say, never heard from again.

Casualties:

• None, surprisingly. Marcie kept all of her attacks non-lethal, if just barely.

I'd better get a move on if I want to finish recapping the original Buffy before a new one comes out. So, we close out Season 1 with the episode that begins setting up all of Buffy's later quips about how many times she's died. I'm referring, of course, to ...

1x12: Prophecy Girl

As we open, the lovelorn Xander is asking Buffy out. "We're good friends and it's time to take the next step," he says, thus showing us that Season 1 Xander ascribes to the Nice Guy logic wherein friendship with a girl is simply an intermediate step along the road to the ultimate goal of sticking your dick in her. But wait -- he's not talking to Buffy at all, he's talking to Willow. Just as a reminder, we learned back in 1x06: The One With All The Hyenas that Xander is fully aware of Willow's crush on him, and here he is making her help him practice macking on another girl. Basically, what I'm getting at is, Xander is being a colossal douche.

Willow is all starry-eyed at first, imagining that Douche Boy is asking her out instead, and while reality intervenes shortly, damned if she isn't doing her best to be the supportive friend. She encourages Xander to just be direct and to the point, but unfortunately he can't do that right now, because Buffy happens to be in the cemetery, introducing a hapless vamp to a different kind of point altogether.

Some very melancholy music plays over a montage of Giles poring over his books. He appears to reach a disturbing realization, whereupon he of course reaches for his tea -- but at that moment his teacup starts shaking and crashes to the floor.


Screw it, pass me the Taster's Choice.

Yes, it's an earthquake, which means it's time for crashing organ music and a dramatic pan downward to The Master, who is hamming it up as usual.

The Master: My time is come! Glory! Glory! I'm eeeeeeeeeevil! Eeeeeeevil, I say! Mwahahahaha!​

Okay, I'll admit he partially redeems himself in typically Jossian fashion by turning to The Annoying One and casually asking "What do you think -- 5.1?" But honestly, the sooner this dweeb hurries up and dies, the better, 'cause then maybe we can get a villain who's actually interesting.

Roll titles.

Back in the library, Giles is distressed, and the way we know he's distressed is that he's loosened his tie and the top button of his shirt is undone. Buffy walks in and Giles is oddly distant toward her, and it's clear something is up.

Back in the world of teenage dating drama, Xander, Willow and Buffy are walking through the schoolyard until Xander hints that Willow should scoot, which she does in the most awkward way imaginable. Xander evicts some poor dude from a bench and proceeds to ask Buffy out, also in the most awkward way imaginable, and frankly this scene is pretty excruciating to watch. She turns him down as nicely as she can, and he continues to badger her for a while, because everyone knows the way to make a girl attracted to you is to bug her about until she finally goes "Oh my god, you're right, your incessant whining does mke my lady parts tingle!"

Xander flounces off, leaving Buffy alone. This will become A Theme.

Giles is still the library, and still distressed. Jenny walks in and points out he's wearing the same clothes he wore yesterday, though how she can tell is beyond me. Jenny is distressed too, because she's been hearing about some seriously weird stuff going on.

Speaking of seriously weird stuff, the next thing that happens is Cordelia complimenting Willow's clothes, which leads to this classic exchange:

Cordelia: Willow! I really like your outfit!
Willow: No, you don't.
Cordelia: I really don't, but I need a favor.​

There's something pretty refreshing about the honesty.

Xander mopes, then decides that since Buffy won't go to Spring Fling with him, he should ask Willow instead. He asks her, to which she replies "fuck you."



This is Willow's "fuck you" face.

In the girls' bathroom, we see one of the seriously weird things Jenny was talking about, namely blood pouring from the faucet. Buffy is sufficiently skeeved out that she heads for the library posthaste, arriving just in time to overhear a conversation between Giles and Angel. And here, mopey Xander aside, is where we get to the episode's real plot. "It's very plain," Giles says. "Tomorrow night, Buffy will face the Master, and she will die."

Half laughing, half crying, Sarah Michelle Gellar steps into the room and delivers one of the best performances of the otherwise-fairly-hokey first season. I can't make fun of this scene because it's perfecly staged and perfectly acted -- giving us, perhaps, our first real look at what this series could be. The moment when her voice breaks and she asks "Do you think it'll hurt?" is easily the season's most devastating moment. Eventually, she declares she's quitting the slayer gig, lashing out at Giles as her shock turns to anger, and now it's Anthony Stewart Head's turn for praise, because he doesn't need to say a word -- you can see the pain in his eyes at the thought of failing her. She throws her cross to the floor and storms out.

Xander mopes. Willow tries to call him, and he hangs up on her and mopes some more. Shut the fuck up, Xander.

Sad music plays as Buffy looks through her photo album, presumably contemplating her possible death. Joyce snaps out of her usual obliviousness for long enough to notice that something's wrong, and Buffy begs Joyce to take her out of town for the weekend. Unfortunately, Joyce thinks it's all about not having been asked to Spring Fling by the right guy. She reveals the beautiful dress she bought for Buffy and encourages her to go stag, and then traumatizes her with a story about how she met Buffy's dad by stealing him away from his date at a similar dance, which I guess is supposed to be comforting, but that marriage didn't exactly go so well, did it?

Anyway, Buffy wistfully says "You had your whole life ahead of you," Joyce dreamily says "Yeah," and Buffy says "Must be nice."

RED FLAG, JOYCE! BIG RED FUCKING FLAG RIGHT IN YOUR FUCKING FACE!

Listen, I get that "My daughter might be endowed with supernatural powers that cause her to spend every night engaging in mortal combat with a variety of demons" isn't the first conclusion most parents would reach, but isn't Joyce the tiniest bit concerned about the implication that her troubled daughter might be about to off herself?

Back at school, Cordy and Willow are walking to the A/V room griping about flaky boys when they realize the reason the boys didn't show up to set up the sound system is because they all got slaughtered. The dead guys juxtaposed with Porky Pig dancing on the TV is a nice macabre touch. Later, a shaken Willow says to Buffy: "I knew those guys. I went to that room every day. And when I walked in there... it wasn't our world anymore. They made it theirs. And they had fun." We can see the resolve returning to Buffy's expression. Without telling Willow what's going on, she says goodbye for what she fully expects to be the last time, and leaves... alone.

(Thematically, over the course of seven seasons, BtVS keeps coming back to this root question: Is the Slayer fundamentally alone? Buffy's longevity is due largely to the fact that she subverts the old paradigm by having friends who fight by her side, but the entire series is a back-and-forth battle between that and her desire to protect her friends by keeping them at a distance.)

In the library, Giles declares that he will go after the Master in Buffy's place, but Buffy just replies "Naw" and clocks him over the head, knocking him unconscious for what I was surprised to discover is only the second time in the series. (Some lists claim more, but they tend to count every instance of him being thrown to the ground or pinned underneath something as a full KO.)

Willow and Xander decide to help Buffy, but not before Xander and Angel wave their dicks at each other for a while. Meanwhile, Buffy has located The Annoying One and is following him to The Master's lair. There's more organ music, then also a whole bunch of weird semi-homoerotic bickering where Xander keeps accusing Angel of staring at his neck.

After a brief not-quite-fight, The Master bites Buffy, drinks a little of her blood, throws her face-down in a puddle, and charges off to wreak havoc. Angel and Xander find her, Angel declares that she's dead, and Xander performs Hollywood CPR on her (that is to say, he doesn't break her ribs, she doesn't puke, oh and also, he manages to bring her back from the dead with no further medical intervention, and it's all very romantic and not at all messy or gross).

Willow and Jenny, having concluded that the Master's minions intend to attack Spring Fling, head off to warn the kids, but quickly realize the parking lot is swarming with vampires. Luckily, plowing through a hedge in driver's ed a few episodes back didn't stop Cordy from getting her license, and she roars up to save the day, then delivers them all to the library by crashing her car through a set of doors and careening down the hallway. I'd hate to see her insurance premiums. Anyway, they all barricade themselves in the library against the encroaching horde.

A fully revived Buffy heads off to the school, bickering suitors in tow, and the shot of her striding down the sidewalk in her ruined dress as the title theme plays is pretty fucking badass.



Cordy, Giles and company spend some time fighting off a bunch of tentacled Hentai demons. Buffy confronts The Master, gets off some good one-liners, and throws him through a glass skylight, where he lands unceremoniously on the jagged end of a broken table leg and dies. Then there's a Moment, and the kids all go off to the dance together, and all is well. As far as we know.

Casualties:

• Most of our remaining respect for Xander
• Vamp dusted by Buffy in the park while Xander is being a dick to Willow
• Vamp dusted by Angel
• At least four A/V Club dorks
• Buffy, briefly
• The Master

Parent of the Year Award:

• Joyce, again

One-liner that would make a good domain name:

• youhavefruitpunchmouth.com

Well, that's it for the season. Next up is an entire year of Buffy moping over Angel. I can hardly wait.

Well, I can't avoid this any longer. It's time for The Season of Moping, which begins with ...

2x01: When She Was Bad

The first season of BtVS is probably the easiest to recap: it's cheesy enough that there's still plenty to mock, but it's still fun to watch. Season 2 lacks much of that fun quality, instead dialing the teen angst all the way up to eleven for an entire year of sadness and moping that's interrupted only by the welcome arrival, three episodes in, of Spike.

The season premiere begins with ... well, actually, it begins with a bunch of absurdly long menu animations that look like they came out of Myst, and you have to sit through them because DVD technology was still new enough that the studios felt like they had to dress up their menu screens with lots of unnecessary crap.

After that, however, we open with Xander and Willow walking through the graveyard quoting movies at each other. Given everything that's happened in the last year, you'd think they would be more careful about hanging around a graveyard in the absence of a Slayer, but there they are. The purpose of this scene is to remind us that Willow wants Xander and Xander wants Buffy, and never the twain (thrain?) shall meet. This high school love triangle almost collapses, believe it or not, when a dot of ice cream on Willow's nose leads to them sharing A Moment that looks like it was on the verge of becoming a kiss, but as usual, Willow gets cockblocked by a vampire. This vampire either has the undead equivalent of a death wish or is the unluckiest person un-alive, because after an entire Slayer-free summer during which he and his friends could have used Sunnydale as an all-you-can-eat buffet (a slightly less disgusting version of Golden Corral, if you will), he chooses to rise up and attack at the exact moment when Buffy shows up. She stakes him, saving Willow and Xander from both death and a potential hookup.

After the credits, we see Joyce and Hank engaging in what seems to be a reasonably healthy piece of divorced co-parenting, which makes Hank's eventual disappearance all the more confusing. Then it's the first day of the school. In the courtyard, Cordy is being Cordy; somewhat more surprisingly, so is Buffy, who has apparently used the summer to hone her cutting sarcasm, which she wields indiscriminately at everyone in sight.

Giles has a rough first day of work, being alternately complained at by Principal Snyder, flirted with in a discomfiting manner by Miss Calendar, and beaten up by Sarah Michelle Gellar's stunt double.



That evening, Buffy has a nightmare in which Giles tries to kill her and is revealed to be the Master; she then wakes up to find Angel lurking outside her window and snarks at him for a while. Angsty music plays while she lies in bed staring into space, and then continues as Joyce, driving Buffy to school, does her best to parent.

The main things we learn on the second day of school are that Buffy and Cordy can now go head-to-head in cutting comments, and that the Bronze has a really good booking agent, because by 1997 I'm pretty sure Cibo Matto was past the "playing roach-infested nightclubs in third-rate towns" stage of their career. That night, the Annoying One (remember him? he's the child vampire who looks like he should be playing the title role in a community theater production of Oliver) has his minions dig something up, while at the Bronze, Buffy snarks at Angel before sultrily turning her powers of seduction on Xander, slow-dancing with him in a way guaranteed to give him an erection that won't subside until halfway through Season 4.

By now, Buffy is acting so bitchy to everyone around her that even Cordelia is starting to take notice, though it's unclear whether this is a case of Even Evil Has Standards or whether Cordy just doesn't want the competition. Cordy soon has other things to worry about, however, because right after Buffy flounces off, Queen C gets grabbed by some vamps who toss her into a dark room alongside an unconscious Miss Calendar.

At school the following day, Willow, Xander and Giles try to divine the reasons for Buffy's odd behavior. Quickly dismissing the idea that she might actually be attracted to Xander, they decide that she must be possessed. This scene is pretty standard, but it does give us this memorable exchange:

Willow: Why else would she be acting like such a B-I-T-C-H?
Giles: Willow, I think we're all a little too old to be spelling things out.
Xander: A bitca?​

Anyway, Buffy turns up and reveals that the Master's bones have been exhumed, and after some research, it turns out he can be brought back to life using the blood of someone close to him. Buffy reasons that having killed each other made her and the Master into BFF's, and she only becomes more convinced of this when the window is broken by a ransom note tied to a brick using a piece of Cordelia's jewelry. (Wonder what the school district's insurance adjusters made of that claim?)

Buffy charges off to rescue Cordy. Partway there she realizes that Angel is lurking in the shadows, and snarks "You know, being stalked isn't really a turn-on for girls." Which, really, it's about time somebody told him, so it's unclear why this is treated as another instance of "Buffy is being inexplicably bitchy" instead of "Buffy states the blindingly obvious." After spending some time trying to goad Angel into a physical fight, she arrives at the Bronze with him in tow, where she finds a female vampire dressed as Cordy giggling to herself in the corner.

Something, Buffy and Angel realize, is wrong. "There's the bait," asks Angel. "Where's the hook?"

Well, actually, the hooks are here --



but we'll get to that later, because Willow, Xander and Giles are just discovering that for once, the vampires don't actually give a damn about Buffy -- they just wanted her away from the library so they could kidnap Willow and Giles. It seems what they really need is the blood of the people who were physically nearest to the Master when he died: Willow, Giles, Cordy, and Miss Calendar.

Angel holds the female vampire prisoner while Buffy runs back to the library. She returns with a pissed-off Xander and decides to torture the female vampire into revealing where the others have been taken. She forces her cross necklace into the struggling female vampire's mouth; Angel looks disturbed while Xander looks like he may be a little turned-on.





"There ... are ... three ... lights!"

Eventually the female vampire reveals that they're being held in some sort of abandoned factory, although since the four victims are being suspended upside-down above a table, it's unclear exactly what sort of factory this used to be. Buffy arrives on the scene and goes to town, staking four vamps and setting a fifth on fire in what Xander refers to as "working out her issues." Finally, with all the vamps slain, she grabs a hammer and smashes the Master's bones into powder in what is probably the most uncontrolled rage we'll see her exhibit in all seven seasons before breaking down into tears.

Back at school the following day, Cordy momentarily seems like she might be about to say something deep to Miss Calendar, but the crisis is thankfully averted. Buffy makes friends with Willow and Xander again as some weirdly generic light jazz plays over the scene. But wait, there's a coda -- just before the credits, the Annoying One steps onto the factory floor to eerie music and gripes, "I hate that girl."

This episode gets points for actually acknowledging the psychological aftereffects of a major trauma like, y'know, being killed, but unfortunately it's also the beginning of the Season of Moping, as foreshadowed by the slow, minor-key solo piano music that plays over much of it. As a standalone episode it's far from the series' strongest, but it's also definitely not the worst.

Casualties:

• The vamp who cockblocks Willow in the graveyard
• Four vamps who get staked in the factory
• One vamp, named Absalom in the script, who gets burned to death
• Buffy's social life, almost

Parent of the Year Award:

• Not awarded for this episode, because both of the parents depicted seem to be genuinely doing their best.

One-liner that transcended its original context:

• "A bitca?"

Stay tuned for next week, when a couple of Weird Yearbook Guys will go all Frankenstein.

2x02: Some Assembly Required

A mostly-vampire-free monster-of-the-week episode in which the monsters are actually humans.

In the cemetery, Buffy is waiting for a likely vampire to crawl from his grave (presumably Willow has hacked into the coroner's office and is giving her a heads-up anytime somebody dies of neck trauma). Angel pops up, and it turns out he's still all angsty about Buffy doing her sexy slow dance with Xander in the last episode. In the heat of their argument she loses her stake, which becomes a problem when the vamp finally unearths himself. The vamp hits her with a shovel hard enough for her arm to break its handle at the midpoint -- apparently Slayer Strength also comes with Bones of Steel, which coincidentally would be a good movie title if David Boreanaz ever decides to launch a porn career -- and she stakes him with the jagged edge.

Angel sticks his foot in his mouth by dismissing Xander as "just a kid," a mistake since Buffy and Xander are the same age. Remember, this is the season of moping and angst, so the whole Buffy-and-Angel-as-star-crossed-lovers thing will be rehashed from just about every possible angle for the entire year. Buffy stumbles into an open grave and realizes it's not the site of another vampire resurrection ... rather, somebody was dug up and dragged from it. A female somebody, judging by the high heel laying on the grass. Well, that or Anthony Stewart Head got whacked right after one of his Frank N. Furter gigs.



Even if you have no interest in seeing how Giles looks in thigh-high fishnets and come-fuck-me shoes, watch this clip for the hotness that is Amber Benson. You're welcome.

After the credits, Giles is putting the moves on a chair -- it looks slightly less silly on him than it did on Clint Eastwood -- and Buffy offers him this classic piece of dating advice:

Buffy: You also might want to avoid words like "amenable" and "indecorous." Speak English, not whatever they speak in, uh ...
Giles: England?
Buffy: Yeah. You just say "hey, I got a thing, you maybe have a thing, maybe we could have a thing."
Giles: Well, thank you, Cyrano.
Buffy: I'm not finished. Then you say "How do you feel about Mexican?"
Giles: About Mexicans?
Buffy: Mexican. Food.​

Giles narrowly avoids having to get a facts-of-life talk from Xander, something that assuredly would have left them both traumatized, because Willow has discovered that the newly graverobbed body belonged to Meredith Todd, a teenager who died recently.

In the hallway, Creepy Yearbook Guy (who is also known as Eric) is ambushing all the girls to take pictures of them and comment on their legs, while Willow intercepts Eric's friend Chris to ask his advice about the science fair. (Turns out the secret to a high score is confusing the judge.) After Willow walks away, Creepy Yearbook Guy turns to Chris. "Cordelia is so fine," he leers. "You know, she'd be just perfect for us." Chris retorts, "Don't be an idiot, she's alive." The camera zooms in on Creepy Yearbook Guy, an ominous chord plays, and eight minutes and 18 seconds into the episode, we already know like 90% of the plot.

Willow does indeed have the coroner's office bookmarked, and she also finds a newspaper article about Meredith and two other girls from Fondren High School (which may or may not be in Sunnydale; Xander refers to the crosstown body count competition, but it would be strange for a town with two high schools to call one of them simply "Sunnydale High," so maybe they're part of the same metro area) getting killed last week in a car crash. Our heroes head out to dig up the other girls' graves -- or rather, Giles and Xander dig, because Willow needs to fill Buffy in on a bit of exposition, namely that Chris' older brother Daryl, whom Cordy mentioned earlier, was killed while rock-climbing, thus alerting us to the remainder of the plot. The graves, unsurprisingly, are empty.

After cheerleading practice, Cordy is being stalked; luckily, it's by Angel, who has yet to absorb Buffy's lesson about stalking not being a big turn-on. She reaches for something that her skirt has caught on and comes away holding a severed hand.

Buffy, Willow, Xander and Giles walk into the library, where they find that Angel has grown a new appendage by the name of Cordelia. They determine that the dead girls were dismembered by somebody who had both a reason to be near the high school (five miles from the cemetery, which is odd since our heroes basically seem to walk everywhere) and a really good knowledge of anatomy. A chipper Willow informs us that the latter item narrows it down to "five or six guys in the science club, and me." (In retrospect, some of the things we learn about Willow in this episode make parts of Season 6 make a lot more sense.) Cordy, still attached to Angel like a barnacle to the hull of a boat, pulls a helpless-damsel act to get him to escort her home, much to Buffy's annoyance.

At the Epps home (that's Chris' last name), Chris' mom is watching old football tapes of her dead son. At school, our heroes break into Chris' locker and find a newspaper clipping about the three dead girls along with copies of Grey's Anatomy, Mortician's Desk Reference, and Robicheaux's Guide to Muscles and Tendons. which I was half expecting to turn out to be a real thing. And in a creepy lab that also doubles as a darkroom, Chris and Eric are cobbling together a human out of body parts, and Eric is also hanging his yearbook photographs up to dry, including a close-up of an extremely annoyed Cordy.

Xander engages in some passive-agressive nice-guyism about people not falling in love with what's right in front of them, then the gang segues into encouraging Giles to ask out Miss Calendar, because what every high school librarian wants is a bunch of 17-year-olds playing Yenta. We learn that Giles is, indeed, incapable of asking a woman out without using the word "indecorous." Luckily, Jenny is more competent, and invites him to dinner and a football game.

In a science classroom, Willow is marveling over the technical challenges involved in reanimating multiple corpses while Xander is making a skull talk. This is their relationship in a nutshell. Giles comes in to inform them that the dead girls' heads have been found in a dumpster. It turns out Chris and Eric need a fresh head. Eric is all gung-ho about decapitating a live girl, while Chris is more reluctant ... until his brother Daryl comes out of the shadows. That's right, Chris is making a girlfriend for his reanimated dead brother, who identifies Cordy as the girl whose head he wants his zombie bride to have.

Buffy & co. realize that Chris and Eric are probably going to kill someone and fan out to find them. Buffy goes to Chris' house, where Mrs. Epps is still in a fugue state, watching old football tapes in the dark; thus safely ignored, Buffy heads to the basement where she finds Eric's stalker photo collection and an anatomical diagram with Cordy's face pasted on top of it. Meanwhile, Xander and Willow check out Eric's house, and Xander takes some time to check out Eric's pornography collection. Chris and Eric try to kidnap Cordy, but Buffy shows up just in time. Eric runs away but Chris stays.

Back in the lab, Daryl flies into a blind rage when he realizes Eric has returned without Chris or Cordy. Eric convinces Daryl they can pull this off on their own. Buffy converts Chris back to the light side of the Force, and they charge off to the football game, arriving a little too late to stop Eric and Daryl from snatching Cordy again. They haul her off to "the old science building," which seems curiously well-equipped for an abandoned classroom. (And by the way, what high school has an entire science building, let alone an abandoned one? Unless maybe they hauled her all the way to the UC-Sunnydale campus that will conveniently pop into existence at the end of Season 3.)

Anyway, Cordy is tied to a table, and Eric reassures her that "when you wake up, you'll have the body of a 17-year-old," which is a little strange since she already does. Eric is using a gasoline flame to sterilize his instruments, because apparently the curiously-well-equipped abandoned lab did not come with an autoclave. He is about to cut off Cordy's head when Buffy charges in. They fight, the lab catches on fire because of course it does, and despite being right next to raging gasoline flames, nobody gets burned because convection, schmonvection. Finally, Daryl jumps on top of his headless fiancee to save her from the flames and gets burned to death. (Re-death? Anyway.)

Later, as they stand outside watching the fire, Xander is being a dick by griping to Willow about not having a girlfriend. He blows off Cordy's attempt to thank him for saving her life (which, technically, was more Buffy's doing), thus foreshadowing the extreme weirdness that will become Xandelia later in the season.

Finally, Angel and Buffy engage in some more mutual moping. The end.

Casualties:

• Stephan Korshak (vamp staked by Buffy with shovel handle)
• Daryl (yes, he was already dead, but so are the vamps so we might as well count him)

Parent of the Year Award:

• Mrs. Epps, for reacting to the death of one child by completely ignoring the other.

In our next episode, the Season of Moping is interrupted by the arrival of a villain with some actual personality.

2x03: School Hard

We interrupt your regularly schedule angsty teenage moping to bring you 45 minutes of genuine badassery.

After a set of needlessly long Myst animations, we see Principal Quark snarking at Buffy and a fellow student named Sheila, a gum-chewing juvenile delinquent who is basically what would happen if Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy's characters on The Breakfast Club had an unholy baby.



We learn that while Buffy is known for burning down a school gymnasium, Sheila's claim to fame is that she once stabbed a horticulture teacher with a pair of pruning shears, and while it's a little strange that an actual stabbing doesn't lead to any kind of criminal charges, way to go with the well-rounded curriculum, Sunnydale High.

Anyhoo, Principal Quark is assigning his two worst students to be in charge of parent-teacher night ... specifically, decorations, which is a great job for the girl who starts fires, and refreshments, a great job for the girl with homicidal impulses. Parent-teacher night is off to a good start. Buffy bemoans her ill fortune to Willow and Xander while Sheila gets into a car with a twentysomething guy named Meatpie who is still allowed on school property despite basically being a more heavily tattooed version of Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused.



Xander confidently predicts that nothing bad is going to happen, which Buffy and Willow know means that it will. And right on cue, we cut to ...

Nighttime. A "Welcome to Sunnydale" sign, a squeal of tires, and a big black car plows into the sign. The placement of the sign relative to the road doesn't exactly make sense, but we don't have time to think about it because hard-rock chords start to play and a trenchcoated subject emerges from the car. We pan up to see that it's a Billy Idol-wannabe vampire with a scar across one eyebrow, who despite having no breath, lights a cigarette and puffs on it. This, of course, is Spike.

And ... titles.

In an abandoned factory, the Annoying One is holding court. In this scene we are introduced to the episode's central conceit, which is that we are approaching the Night of St. Vigeous, during which vampires' power will be at a peak. The vamps are all strutting around chewing the scenery and being pretentious until Spike shows up.

Pretentious Vamp: When I kill her, it'll be the greatest event since the crucifixion. And I should know. I was there.
Spike: You were there? Oh, please! If every vampire who said he was at the crucifixion was actually there, it would have been like Woodstock.
Pretentious Vamp: I oughta rip your throat out.
Spike: I was actually at Woodstock. That was a weird gig. I fed off a flowerperson, and I spent the next six hours watchin' my hand move.​

For those of you playing the home game, this is the point in the series when the Big Bads actually start to get interesting.

In this scene we are also introduced to Spike's girlfriend, Drusilla. We learn pretty much everything we need to know about her in the space of a few lines, namely, the fact that she's completely insane.

At the Summers home, Joyce has just learned about parent-teacher night, despite Buffy's best efforts to the contrary, and engages in a rare piece of active parenting.

Joyce: So, what do you think your teachers are gonna tell me about?
Buffy: Well, I think they'll all agree that I always bring a pen to class, ready to absorb the knowledge.
Joyce: And this absorption rate ... how is it reflected in your homework and test scores?
Buffy: What can you really tell about a person from a test score?
Joyce: Whether or not she's ever going out with her friends again.​

In the school lounge, Buffy and Willow are painting a banner, and we learn that Sheila goes to "a really rank bar" called the Fish Tank that (a) is even worse at carding than the Bronze, and (b) manages to be more rank than a bar that holds a cockroach-themed party every year before its annual fumigation. Giles and Jenny walk in arguing about calendars. Jenny has learned about the Night of St. Vigeous; Xander pledges to help by whittling stakes and whistling a jaunty tune, which Giles finds endlessly reassuring. After Principal Quark interrupts their little conference, Sheila walks in clearly stoned and Buffy covers for her; this, combined with Buffy's alleged arsonist past, appears to win her Sheila's respect.

We flash forward to the Bronze, where Willow is helping Buffy study French and Buffy declares "la vache doit me touche de la jeudi," which Willow helpfully informs her means "the cow should touch me from Thursday." (Actually, using the present-tense doit instead of the conditional devrait means that Buffy was insisting the cow must touch her from Thursday, which seems strangely insistent.)

Buffy, Willow and Xander decide to take a break from homework by dancing, whereupon Spike lures Buffy outside by standing in the middle of the dance floor and declaring to no one in particular, "Where's the phone? I need to call the police. There's some big guy out there trying to bite someone." This was, remember, before cell phones were common. There is indeed a vampire outside threatening to bite a girl, but he drops her as soon as Buffy shows up. They fight, Willow and Xander get the bait to safety, and Spike watches from the shadows as Buffy kicks the vampire's ass and dusts him.

Spike steps out of the shadows and gives her the slow clap. "Who are you?" the pretty girl asks the mysterious cigarette-smoking stranger. "Whoever you want me to be," he rep ...



Sorry, wrong show.

Sheila is walking down the street outside a bar, presumably the aforementioned Fish Tank, intending to get gangbanged by a couple of dudes in a Cadillac, whereupon they disappear and Spike pops up out of nowhere, and now it's time for the "Who are you?" "Who do you want me to be?" moment. Sheila is intrigued and chases after Spike and we pan down to see the two guys who were planning to Eiffel Tower her in the back seat of their car lying dead on the ground.

Buffy, Willow and Xander have a strategy session in the library with Giles, which Angel then crashes, leading to some thankfully brief relationship angst (it ends after Willow begins speculating about how many dates a 200-year-old being could have been on). We then cut to the abandoned factory, where a bunch of pretentious vamps are making like the monks from Monty Python and the Holy Grail --



-- and which apparently now has electrical power, because Drusilla has a lamp and a television set and is doing weird stuff with dolls. Spike tries to get her to chow down on Sheila, which she does.

In the library, the gang is making stakes while Buffy slices tomatoes with a machete. It's parent-teacher night, and we also learn that Buffy doesn't know how to make lemonade (she forgot the sugar). Willow escorts Joyce around the school, in what we are led to assume is basically a Victorian drawing-room comedy involving Willow masterfully maneuvering Joyce out of earshot of all Buffy's teachers until she finally fails to dodge Principal Quark. Giles finally finds Spike in one of his books and learns that he's killed two Slayers already, and Joyce is about to drag Buffy out to the car and ground her for life when Spike and his minions come crashing through the window.

The subsequent action sequences are fun to watch but not really to describe; suffice it to say that Willow and Cordelia end up locked in a closet while Buffy, Joyce, Principal Quark and several others hole up in a science lab and Spike snaps the neck of a random parent. Buffy goes crawling through the conveniently spacious ceiling to reach Giles and the others while Xander goes to fetch Angel.

Principal Quark and a random parent disobey Buffy's command to stay put and try to go out a window, whereupon the parent gets eaten. Another vamp is breaking through the science lab door with an axe and Buffy stakes him just out of view of Joyce, who is peering through the axe-hole. Sheila shows up, and shortly reveals herself to be a vampire; she escapes while Buffy is staking another vamp and the fact that Sheila herself is never shown getting dusted becomes one of the series' missed continuity opportunities.

Angel shows up and has way too much fun pretending to be about to eat Xander; when Spike realizes they're not on the same side, he shouts "You were my sire, man," leading to many, many fanwank debates over who vamped whom, the definition of sire, what exactly happened in Romania, and blah blah blah.

Buffy and Spike fight, and he seems to have her cornered when Joyce shows up, clubs him over the head with the flat end of a fire axe, and coldly demands "You get the hell away from my daughter." Also, we get one more bit of arc significance when we learn that both Principal Quark and the police chief know about the vamp situation and don't actually believe the "gangs on PCP" line. Principal Quark's exact allegiances and level of awareness will never be completely clear, but we now know he's not just another Sunnydale mundane.

Oh, and Spike kills the Annoying One. Fucking finally.

Casualties:

• Vamp staked by Buffy outside the Bronze
• Both of Sheila's would-be threesome partners
• Sheila (vamped by Drusilla)
• Parent who gets his neck snapped by Spike
• Parent who gets dragged through the science lab window and eaten outside
• Two vamps staked by Buffy in the school hallway
• The Annoying One (burned with sunlight by Spike)

Parent of the Year award:

• Joyce, non-ironically for a change.

In the next episode, Xander will resume being kind of a dick and Seth Green will come onto the scene.

2x04: Inca Mummy Girl

We're back to teenage angst, although this week the usual Slayer-loves-Vampire angst is replaced by a little bit of Willow-loves-Xander angst and a whole lot of Xander-is-a-whiny-little-bitch angst. As the episode begins, our friends are discussing their soon-to-arrive exchange students. Cordelia's is a lunchable Swede named Sven (hopefully he can survive the episode without his jugular vein becoming a literal Lunchable) and Buffy's is an anonymous male, which makes Xander all unattractively jealous.

The setting is a natural history museum, where the gang is about to take in an Incan exhibit led by a guy in a Ron Burgundy outfit who likes making jokes about human sacrifice. That bit is over pretty quickly and the gang leaves the exhibit hall, but the shot lingers ominously on an Incan mummy. Earlier in the teaser we were introduced to a troublemaker kid who Willow has been tutoring in chemistry; he sneaks back into the exhibit hall to try to steal a plate that the Incan mummy is holding onto, whereupon the mummy reaches out of her crypt and grabs him by the neck.

After the credits, Buffy is training in the library and enduring one of Giles' periodic lectures on the duties of the Slayer, which she helpfully summarizes as "Slaying entails certain sacrifices, blah blah bitty blah, I'm so stuffy, gives me a scone." Pretty accurate, actually. Xander is still crawling up his own asshole about the idea of a boy living in Buffy's house, and Buffy makes a half-hearted attempt to get him to hook up with Willow, Xander's rejection of which idea unfortunately gets overheard by Willow, who responds with Alyson Hannigan's patented crestfallen face. But Willow has bigger fish to fry, namely the fact that there's a missing kid -- Rodney, the dude from earlier. Buffy and friends joke that maybe he awakened the mummy and it arose from its tomb and attacked him, and they have a good hearty laugh until they remember where they live and realize that's probably exactly what happened.

When they return to the museum to investigate, they are attacked by a dude in a karate outfit wielding a machete (don't ask) and discover that (a) the mummy has braces, and (b) the mummy is Rodney. But they don't have time to puzzle through all of this, because Buffy is late for picking up her exchange student at the bus station.

The exchange student, who has the conveniently androgynous name of Ampata, is indeed just as hunky as Xander had feared, but since Buffy is late to pick him up, he's easy prey for a voice in the night calling his name like ... well, like one of the hyenas from Season 1. We soon learn that the voice belongs to a dessicated corpse that grabs him and kisses him, and Ampata promptly turns into papier-mâché.

By the time Buffy and friends arrive at the bus station, they are greeted by ... well, Ampata, or so she claims. Ampata is now a ridiculously gorgeous girl who prompts Xander to go "ay, caramba!" and is also doing a pretty good job of looking like a fashion plate despite wearing clothes that she just stole off of a dead dude. She speaks slightly accented but otherwise flawless English, despite which Xander insists on talking to her like she's simultaneously deaf and four years old. She drops like a bajillion clues (she was "taken" on tour but "didn't see much," her old room was "much smaller," back home is "cramped and very dead") but Buffy is cheerfully oblivious. Oh, and machete-wielding dude is hanging around in the bushes outside Buffy's house, which last time I checked was supposed to be Angel's job.

The next day at school, Cordelia is making plans to go watch a guy's band (this will become important later) and generally abusing the apparently-no-longer-lunchable Sven; we also learn that Sunnydale High School holds officially sanctioned school functions at a seedy bar. Cordy's would-be boy toy goes to trade notes with his buddy, Seth Green with a really unfortunate mustache, who isn't impressed. (He states that to impress him a girl has to do something that involves a feather boa and the theme from A Summer Place, which may tell us more about Willow than we ever needed to know.)

Xander drools over Fake!Ampata and Giles asks her to translate the mummy's scroll, which is roughly the equivalent of asking a 20th-century teenager from Cardiff to translate ancient druidic runes or whatever. Also, Xander takes Fake!Ampata to the bleachers by the football field and tries to flirt with her by stuffing an entire Twinkie into his mouth. Don't ask; the whole scene is kind of painful to watch.

Back in the library, Willow appears on the verge of an epiphany ("I can spend my life waiting for Xander to go out with every other girl in the world until he notices me, or I can just get on with my life"), although unfortunately her followthrough is still a ways off; Buffy and Giles realize that the mummy can suck the life out of people but still have no idea where to find her.

Said mummy is, of course, being charmed by Xander's knowledge of processed snack food products until they are rudely interrupted by Machete Dude, who attacks Xander and yells about how Xander stole the seal before noticing Fake!Ampata. "You!" he declares before ... rolling down the bleachers, which seems like it would be pretty difficult.

Back in the library, Fake!Ampata turns out to be weirdly knowledgeable about the seal, which somehow rouses nobody's suspicions. Xander I get, 'cause he's thinking with his dick, but none of the others think this is at all strange? Xander asks Fake!Ampata to the dance, pausing only to ask "You're not a preying mantis, are you?" and Machete Dude accosts Fake!Ampata in the girls' room. "The people you kill now, so that you may live ... they are innocent," he declares before attacking her, but she gets the drop on him and sucks him dry, and not in the good way.

While getting ready for the World Cultures Dance, Buffy discovers the men's underwear in Ampata's bags at roughly the same time as Fake!Ampata tries to open the drawer containing Buffy's stakes and holy water. Somehow the luggage, which was sent over by the bus company, contains both Real!Ampata's jockey shorts and Fake!Ampata's handy travel-sized mummified corpse. This is not really explained. (She chose to stuff Real!Ampata into his own luggage, meaning she had access to it at the bus station, but didn't take it with her? Why did she stuff him into the luggage at all instead of just chucking him behind a bush? Was there really that much extra room in the luggage Real!Ampata hauled with him from Peru?) Also unexplained is Xander's outfit that looks like a cross between various offensive Mexican stereotypes and the results of raiding the school drama department's costume closet, but that he claims is from a country called Leone located inside Italy, which even Google doesn't know anything about. Xander and Fake!Ampata head off to the dance, with Buffy still oblivious.

At the dance, Cordy shows up in a bikini and some flowers (a ... Hawaiian, I guess?) and snarks at Willow, who's clad from head to toe in furs as an Eskimo, and this is all pretty cringeworthy by modern standards, but that's neither here nor there. Sven is dressed in a Viking helmet and taking more abuse from Cordy, but another girl dressed as a Japanese geisha (oh, for fuck's sake) thinks he's cute and leads him off in the direction of the punch bowl. Luckily this parade of ethnic insensitivity is interrupted by ... some more teenage angst. Jesus.

Blah blah blah, angst and moping, and some more blah.

Giles shows up at Buffy's house with the news that Machete Dude has been found dead, and it finally occurs to Buffy that Fake!Ampata has been acting all squirrely. We return to the dance, where the camera is lingering on Seth Green playing lead guitar long enough for us to realize he's about to be Important, and Jesus fuck, what is with these costumes? Is that a pirate? And Heidi of the Swiss fucking Alps?

Seth Green beckons to his bandmate in the middle of a song to ask him who Nanook of the North is; he is completely enraptured by her, perhaps remembering their long-ago date back when her dad was banging an alien from the planet Cosine N to the 8th. (Hey, it makes as much sense as anything else so far.) There are lots of suddenly ominous shots of Fake!Ampata's and Xander's lips, but she runs away and tries to kill Jonathan instead. Xander shows up and ... cockblocks her? Whatever the fuck you want to call it ... and there's more moping and angst and terrible dialogue ("I am very happy ... and very sad!") and for the love of God when are Buffy and Giles going to get here and end this shitshow?

They start to kiss, she starts to mummify him, but abruptly changes her mind. Nanook of the North knocks over ... some kind of cheese castle? I don't fucking know anymore.



Finally Buffy shows up and tells her Xander's in horrible danger. Luckily for Xander, Ampata decided not to kill him; unluckily for Giles she has decided to head for the natural history museum and kill him instead. Buffy shows up just in time and fight fight fight, fight fight fight, the Itchy and Scratchy Shooowwwwwww!

In rapid succession, Fake!Ampata shuts Buffy in a crypt, Fake!Ampata tries to kiss Willow, Xander intervenes and tells Fake!Ampata to kill him instead, Fake!Ampata shrugs and says "Oh, okay," Buffy forces her way out of the crypt, and Fake!Ampata's arms fall off. Short coda where Buffy muses that Fake!Ampata wasn't all that unlike Buffy herself, and this weird clusterfuck of an episode is finally at an end.

Casualties:

• Rodney
• Real!Ampata
• Machete dude
• Fake!Ampata
• Xander's dignity, again

After the shitshow that was Inca Mummy Girl, we now move to the shitshow that is ...

2x05: Reptile Boy

... in which Buffy faces off against some frat boys and a giant ... lizard ... penis ... thing.

As the episode opens, Buffy, Willow and Xander are watching a Bollywood movie on TV, the plot of which is helpfully explained by Willow thusly: "She's sad because her lover gave her twelve gold coins but then the wizard cut open the bag of salt and now the dancing minions have nowhere to put their big maple ... fish ... thing." Buffy and Xander are braiding Willow's hair and Willow is wearing overalls and drinking from a juice box, the sort of thing that from anyone else would be an annoying affectation, but Alyson Hannigan manages to pull it off. It's a quiet night in Sunnydale, and all is right with the world.

Except, of course, for the girl jumping off of a southern California stucco balcony and running frantically across a lawn, pursued by a bunch of guys who look like a cross between monks and jawas but are surprisingly nimble. She makes it all the way to the cemetery when she's intercepted by another Monk Dude who gives her a creepy grin and says "Where are you going? We were just getting started," whereupon she gets dragged back toward the stucco mansion by Brett, Tobin, PJ and Squee.

After the credits, Cordelia is telling a Non-Dialogue Extra how to get a man, which mostly entails a lot of fake laughing. Buffy, Willow and Xander kvetch about relationships for a while before Xander breaks off to snark at Cordy for a while. The Non-Dialogue Extra is still there, and her budget-imposed silence grows more awkward with every passing second, finally surpassing even the weirdness of all those random conn officers who just obediently tapped at the console and stared steely-eyed into the distance every time Picard said "lay in a course for blah-bitty-blah, ensign."



(At least the Cordette didn't have to wear spandex pajamas.)

In the library, Giles lectures Buffy about her responsibilities (and, yes, he says the word "hone" again) and instructs her not to dawdle with her friends after school. So naturally she does, and is thus able to witness Biff and Chad pulling up in a nice car to invite Cordelia to a party. Cordy laughs like she's having some combination of a stroke and a seizure, and is quite annoyed when Chad shows an intense interest in Buffy. Chad pisses Buffy off pretty much instantly, but Biff plays nice guy for just long enough to momentarily charm her. Xander's jealous kvetching actually makes sense for once; luckily, Buffy is sensible enough to recognize that going to this party would probably lead to roofies and turns him down.

That night, Buffy is on patrol when she finds half of a bracelet. Angel pops up out of nowhere to inform her that there's blood on the bracelet, which he knows because he could smell it. (By the way, lurky stalky Angel and NiceGuy!Xander are the positive examples of masculinity in this episode, which should give you an idea of the way things are headed.) Buffy kinda-sorta tries to ask Angel out, and things get mopey for a bit ("when you kiss me, I want to die") .

Actually, things get mopey for more than a bit, 'cause she's still moping the next day in school when Cordy explains that Chad Chaddington won't let her come to his party unless she brings Buffy because they need "a certain balance." Annnnd ... cut to a basement, where the Frat Boy/Monks are doing creepy ritual stuff with swords and shit. And yes, Chad Chaddington is their leader, and yes, when the ritual is done they start pounding back some "brewskis," and yes, they have a girl chained to the wall.

We do not, however, learn whether they have boofed yet.

In the library, Giles is practicing how to attack Buffy (it's not as creepy as it sounds, he's just smarting from her getting the best of him in their last training session), and when the trio enters, Xander and Giles start talking about Buffy in the third person, which naturally endears them to her. Buffy lies to Giles, telling him Joyce is sick and she has to stay home with her. Later, Cordy instructs Buffy on how to help her trap a rich frat boy and Xander throws some faintly misogynist jabs at her before informing Willow that he's going to go to the party "to keep an eye on Buffy," and again, as weird and creepy as this sounds, remember that he's actually the good guy in this shitshow.

Arriving at the party, Cordelia rams some guy's car, which goes unnoticed. Cordy goes off with Chad Chaddington, Buffy mopes, Xander climbs in through a window, and frat pledges wander around wearing cocktail dresses and serving hors d'oeuvres. PJ and Squee make a drunken rush at Buffy but Biff "rescues" her and they dance. Xander is being enough of a dork that three frat boys, one of whom looks to be about 35, grab him and declare him to be a "new pledge," which is probably only going to be about the sixth most humiliating thing that's happened to him in the series thus far.

Buffy gets roofied while Willow realizes the bracelet she found belongs to a missing girl from a prep school just outside of town and Xander is forced to dance around in a bra. Buffy stumbles into a bedroom and apologizes to a statue of a winged horse. She passes out, Chad Chaddington eyes her and is about to go all Bill Cosby until Biff interrupts him. "She's not here for your fun, you pervert," he declares. Yay, Biff! But he continues: "She's here for the pleasure of the one we serve."

Oops. Maybe not.

We see that Cordy has been roofied too, and meanwhile, Willow finds out that high school girls have been mysteriously disappearing around the same time every year. In the basement, Chad, Biff, Brett, Tobin, PJ and Squee do some more creepy shit, and now Buffy and Cordy are chained to the wall alongside the missing girl (whose name is Callie). Candles are lit and chalices poured while the frat boys pay homage to Makita, the god of power tools.

Makita is the aforementioned giant lizard penis thing, and he rises from the depths to leer at Buffy, Cordelia and Callie like Roy Moore at the Gadsden Mall. Xander, having met up with Willow, Xander and Angel, lies his way into the house by dressing like a Jawa. Giant lizard penis thing is about to eat Cordy, but Buffy frees herself from her chains and her friends arrive on the scene just in time to see her go all Lorena Bobbitt with a sword.

You'd think this would be an empowering moment, but it's pretty much undercut by this exchange:

Buffy: I told one lie. I had one drink.
Giles: Yes, and you were very nearly devoured by a giant demon snake. The words "let that be a lesson" are a tad redundant.​

You're, um, supposed to be the good guy here, Giles. Not the creepy finger-waggling victim-blaming dude.

At the Bronze later on, Cordelia is abusing Jonathan (by the way, I think this might be the first time Danny Strong's character actually gets a name on screen) and declaring that young men are the only way to go. Xander reads in the paper that the entire fraternity has been sentenced to life in prison, because apparently the justice system works fast in Sunnydale. Also, ill fortune has suddenly fallen on a number of fraternity alums who had been serving as corporate executives and Supreme Court justices. Finally, there's some Bangel stuff that's kind of boring annnnd... the end.

Casualties:

• Makita the lizard penis demon
• Xander's dignity, again

Parent of the Year award:

• I'll give this one to Giles for his uncharacteristic cluelessness, although he does sort of redeem himself in the end.

Now that the far-too-uncomfortably-on-the-nose Reptile Boy is out of the way, it's time for a fun one:

2x06: Halloween

We open with a pretty standard scene -- Buffy beating the crap out of a vampire, although the fact that she's doing it in a pumpkin provides some nice color as opposed to the usual grays and browns of the cemetery. But wait -- there's another vamp, and he's lurking in the shadows with a video camera! Is he an entrepreneur trying to start the vampire version of Bum Fights? Is he making vampire snuff films? Only time will tell.

After the main titles, we cut to the Bronze. Cordy is trying to flirt with Angel, and Angel is so not interested, but Buffy -- arriving late -- mistakes his politeness for interest and gets all insecure. (The fact that she has insecurities like this -- and that they evolve over time -- is one of the things that makes Buffy such a great multidimensional heroine. Even if it is occasionally painful to watch.)

In the high school, Principal Quark is trying to get students to sign up for a volunteer safety program. He grabs a female student by the arm, which I'm pretty sure is a school-employee no-no, but this is Sunnydale so nobody cares. (By the way, even through the girl looks like Amy from The Witch, she isn't.) Apparently Principal Quark needs some high school students to take little kids trick-or-treating, and decides that Buffy, who he thinks of as a juvenile delinquent, is the perfect person to help protect them. (In fairness, the question of how much Principal Quark does or does not know about Buffy's secret identity is pretty up-in-the-air.)

In this scene we are introduced to one of the series' fun little pieces of worldbuilding: the idea that, contrary to what you might expect, vampires hate Halloween and always spend the night indoors. (It's later revealed that they find the whole idea deeply insulting.)

Also, Xander's manhood takes a major hit when a big jock comes up to him and starts making innuendos about Buffy. The Xan-man naturally wants to defend her (presumably in the back of his mind thinking that this will make her finally fall in love with him), but there are only two problems: the first is that Xander isn't very good at physical confrontations; the second is that Buffy is. She spots Xander about to get pummeled from across the room, and before the jock's fist can make contact with Xander's face, she has him in a wicked headlock and sends him on his way. Buffy's main takeaway is that slamming the jock into the soda machine netted her a free Diet Dr Pepper, so she's puzzled when Xander lashes out at her for making him lose face. "Poor Xander," Willow muses later. "Boys are so fragile." You know, I do have to feel sorry for Xander here. Sure, he's got a raging case of Nice Guy Syndrome, but I get the feeling it's mostly the result of immaturity combined with absorbed cultural messages, and besides, within the context of a high school in late 1997, he was really humiliated back there. So this time, his sulkiness gets a pass.

By the way, the jock's name is Larry. He will matter later, albeit in a sort of limited way.

Buffy has some angst of her own, having to do with Angel and Cordelia. She's jealous of Cordelia's femininity and feels that her own "I just went 10 rounds with a vampire in a pumpkin patch" brand of chic isn't up to the task of wooing a hunky 241-year-old. (Wow, that sounds wrong.) Willow assures her that Cordy isn't his type, but as Buffy correctly points out, she really has no frame of reference to know what Angel's type is.

Willow has the brilliant idea of sneaking into Giles' office to read about Angel in the Watcher Diaries. The best part of the ensuing scene is when Giles almost catches them and Buffy has to distract him from the sight of Willow creeping toward his office door. After trying unsuccessfully to feign interest in various pieces of vampire lore, she resorts to getting into his face and yelling "Miss Calendar said you were a babe!"

Willow shoots her a look, and in this look we can see shades of "I'm sorry, is this a discussion of the degree to which you stabbed me?" and every other Alyson Hannigan "are you a fucking idiot?" look from now to eternity.



In the Watcher Diaries, which one would think would be full of stories about Angel killing puppies and whatnot, Buffy instead fixates on a picture of a noblewoman from 1775. Buffy's insecurities multiply, and she muses dreamily about how nice it would have been to have servants and dresses and go to balls like a princess. "Still, I think I prefer being able to vote," says the ever-practical Willow. Also, there's the whole not-dying-of-cholera thing.

Cordy walks into the bathroom where Willow and Buffy are commiserating over their lack of princess-ness and we learn that she has somehow managed to go an entire year without tumbling to the fact that Angel is ... a little bit of undead:

Cordy: So what's his story? I mean, I never see him around.
Willow: Not during the day, anyway.
Cordy: Oh, please. Don't tell me he still lives at home. Like he has to wait for his dad to get back before he can take the car?
Buffy: Cordelia, I think his parents have been dead for a coupla hundred years.
Cordy: Oh good. I mean ... what?​

Buffy and Willow go to the Halloween store to pick out their costumes. Willow wants to dress from head to toe in a sheet -- no, not that way; she wants to be a ghost. Which is to say that, just like when she dressed as Nanook of the North for that weirdly insensitive multicultural ball, she wants to hide as much of her body from view as humanly possible. Buffy tries to convince her to get "sexy and wild," to which Willow replies "I don't get wild ... wild on me equals spaz." Xander comes up with a plastic gun that he plans to combine with surplus Army fatigues, and Buffy falls in love with a princess costume.

In the abandoned factory, Spike and one of his minions are studying the video footage that the Voyeur Vamp shot in the cold open. Drusilla wanders around being crazy, and dreamily declares "Everything's switching ... outside to inside. It makes her weak." Spike realizes she's had a vision and tries to get more out of her; unfortunately, Drusilla has hopped back on the crazy train and moans "Do you know what I miss? Leeches." Also, Spike calls himself "Daddy," which isn't creepy at all.

Cut to a candle-filled room, where the costume shop owner is praying to the god of Chaos. Clearly something is afoot.

At the Summers residence, Buffy is getting dressed as a princess and Willow comes into the room dressed in the outfit Buffy has somehow convinced her to put on -- a midriff-revealing halter top and a skirt that's as short as it is tight.



(This is also a fun bit of Willow's arc, which we will revisit in Doppelgangland.)

"I can't wait for the boys to go nonverbal when they see you," Buffy declares, which of course terrifies Willow. Buffy runs downstairs to answer the doorbell, eagerly awaiting her chance to play yenta and finally get Xander off of her tits, but no such luck ... Willow has chickened out and put on her ghost costume after all.



By the way, it's amazing how much acting Alyson Hannigan can do when her eyes are the only thing that's visible. "Hey, Wil ... that's a fine 'boo' ya got there!" quoth Xander, and poor Willow is cockblocked again ... this time by herself.

In the school hallway, as everybody is getting ready to trick-or-treat with the munchkins, Oz and Cordy snark at each other (Oz clearly has no use for her, although to his credit, where Xander's insults for Cordy are largely gendered and center around implying that she's a slut, Oz just thinks she's a shallow jerk.) Cordy, by the way, is wearing a pair of cat ears. "Why can't I meet a nice girl like that?" he muses before running smack into Willow. (The writers in Season 2 were not exactly subtle with their foreshadowing.) They both apologize their asses off and are mutually spazzy in a very cute way, but the moment soon passes.

As trick-or-treating begins, the costume shop owner is still chanting in Latin in his candle-filled room. "Carpe noctem" is the only phrase that really jumps out. Also, maybe something about John Podesta. As his candles blow out, a creepy wind blows across Sunnydale. A child morphs into a demon and attacks an old lady; Willow valiantly tries to restore order until she appears to suffer a heart attack and keels over. Xander looks confused and starts brandishing a very real-looking machine gun; Willow arises spectrally from her sheet, dressed in her halter-and-miniskirt option from before, but now apparently noncorporeal. "Oh my god, I'm a real ghost," she says, and thank god they didn't decide to have our heroes bumble around for half the show before figuring this out, because that would have been painful to watch.

Ghost!Willow, luckily, retains the knowledge of who she is and what's going on; Soldier!Xander mostly just wants to run around shooting Demon!Children until Ghost!Willow orders him to stand down. (The fact that she does not appear to be in his chain of command does not occur to him.) They find Princess!Buffy and, being an eighteenth-century noblewoman dressed in a corset that's squeezing her internal organs up into her chest cavity, Princess!Buffy promptly faints.

Ghost!Willow leads them all to the Summers household, where Princess!Buffy finds a picture of herself. ("This could be me!" "It is you.") Princess!Buffy reveals herself to be pretty much useless, whereupon Willow rolls her eyes and asks "She couldn't have dressed up like Xena?" For the rest of the episode, Willow basically doesn't give a shit.

Soldier!Xander runs outside to rescue a screaming Cordelia, and an exasperated Ghost!Willow rattles off a quick orientation: "Okay, Your name is Cordelia, you're not a cat, you're in high school, and we're your friends. Well, sort of." Cordy snaps back, "That's nice, Willow. And you went mental when?" Cordy has not forgotten her identity and been transformed into her costume, which is good, because the last thing Ghost!Willow needs right now is a prom queen clawing up Joyce's furniture and pooping in her shoes.

Ghost!Willow runs off to get help and we get a brief shot of Spike enjoying the chaos; Angel shows up at the Summers home (without being invited in, that part of the lore having apparently been momentarily forgotten). Ghost!Willow shows up at the library and we get this priceless exchange:

Giles: So everybody became whatever they were masquerading as.
Willow: Right. Xander was a soldier, and Buffy was an eighteenth-century girl.
Giles: And, er ... and your costume?
Willow: I'm a ghost!
Giles (looking her up and down): Yes, but ... the ghost of what, exactly?​

Also, Ghost!Willow realizes that the non-transformed Cordelia said she got her costume at Party Town, while the others got theirs from a new place called Ethan's. A look of horrified recognition passes over Giles' face.

Out in the streets of Sunnydale, Cordelia, Angel and Soldier!Xander are hunting for a terrified and on-the-run Princess!Buffy; so is Spike, who looks totally in his element commanding a bunch of miniature demons. Giles and Ghost!Willow go to the costume shop, where we learn that Ethan is an old friend of Giles; Ethan greets him with "Hello, Ripper," and this is the beginning of some very interesting character stuff for Giles, who it turns out is a fucking badass. Princess!Buffy is menaced by Pirate!Larry, who wants to shiver her timbers, but Soldier!Xander rescues her and beats the crap out of Pirate!Larry, which Real!Xander would probably find very satisfying if he were aware of it.

Spike and a small army chase our heroes through the streets while Giles confronts his old friend. "It's quite a little act you've got going here, old man," Ethan declares. 'The Watcher? Sniveling, tweed-clad guardian of the Slayer and her kin? I think not. I know who you are, Rupert, and I know what you're capable of. But they don't, do they? They have no idea where you come from." Authors of Giles fanfics everywhere squee with delight.

And then Giles beats the shit out of him.

Spike is about to make Princess!Buffy into a nice little Slayer Capri Sun when Giles breaks the creepy statue to which Ethan had been praying, and everyone reverts back to their normal selves. Which means a bunch of terrified children, a befuddled Xander, and one pissed-off Slayer.



"Hi honey, I'm home," she taunts Spike before basically pummeling him into next week. Xander, Cordy, Buffy and Angel have a joyful reunion while basically ignoring all the crying children. Willow, meanwhile, has somehow been transported back to the place where her transformation took place, even though nobody else was, and wakes up inside her Casper costume again. This time, however, she smiles and tosses it to the side. Oz drives by in basically a creeper van, sees her, and reprises his line from the Inca Mummy episode: "Who is that girl?"

Back in her twentieth-century self, Buffy confesses to Angel that she wanted to be like the girls he liked when he was a teenager, and he assures her that he always found the eighteenth-century noblewomen mind-numbingly dull. They play kissy-face for a while, and we cut to the next day, when Giles is walking through the ruins of Ethan's shop. And Ethan has left him a message.



That's right, folks, Badass Giles is here to stay.

Casualties:

• The vamp Buffy stakes in the pumpkin patch
• Xander's dignity, again, though this time he sorta gets it back

Parent of the Year Award:

• All the parents who never noticed when their little demons failed to arrive home before dark as scheduled.

Well, if @Kyle can return to Enterprise, I guess I can return to recapping a series I actually like.

2x07: Lie to Me

This episode is, in many ways, a bright spot in a season full of irritating teenage angst. Yes, it's pretty angsty, but it's also a touching and compelling coming-of-age story.

In a playground, Drusilla is creepy. In a school hallway, Giles and Jenny are cute. Then Xander sums up the entire season:

Xander: You need cheering up and I know just the thing. Crazed dance party at the Bronze!
Buffy: I don't know.
Xander: Very calm dance party at the Bronze? ... Moping at the Bronze.​

Buffy's old school friend from LA shows up. Her old school friend from LA who she's mentioned exactly as many times as Willow and Xander have mentioned Jesse since his untimely demise. Ford, it turns out, is transferring to Sunnydale. Xander is, of course, threatened and jealous, which isn't getting old at all. Buffy is all angsty because she saw Angel talking to Drusilla after he stopped her from turning a little boy into the next Annoying One, but she pauses her angsting long enough to walk with Ford through the darkened Sunnydale streets, which is of course the cue for something to pop up that she has to kill. When Ford accidentally hears her kicking the crap out of some vampire, she unconvincingly explains:

Um, there was a cat. A cat, here. And, um, then there was another cat. And they fought. The cats. And then they left.​

But Ford reveals he knows her secret, and it shortly turns out he has a secret of his own. We don't know exactly what's going on just yet, but he's hanging out in some kind of creepy underground club with a guy in a sparkly blue cape and an eerie blonde girl and a vampire movie playing on a TV, so at the very least somebody's got a bad case of Dark Prince Envy.

Angel shows up at Willow's house and she's all dorky and awkward about how she's not supposed to have boys in her room, a rare suggestion that Willow's parents actually have the slightest idea what she does with her time, or even that she exists. Angel wants Willow to check up on Ford, which leads her to discover that Ford isn't actually registered at Sunnydale. Weirdly, nobody at school the next day seems to care that the new kid appears nowhere on any rosters, but we've already established that authority figures in Sunnydale aren't very observant or attentive. Meanwhile, Buffy and Ford fight some vamps, and Buffy stakes hers, but Ford interrogates his for information and lets her get away.

Somehow Willow manages to associate Ford with the address of the creepy underground club -- how? Random Willow Internet Magic, I guess -- and she, Xander and Angel head there to investigate. It's full of weird vampire worshipers, who refer to vamps as "The Lonely Ones," but what's really important in this act is the discovery that Jenny took Giles to a monster truck rally. Also Buffy finds out who Drusilla is. And then a vamp rushes the library and steals one of Giles' books. And then Buffy realizes it's the one Ford said he killed. So at this point Buffy decides she can't trust anyone, and she mopes some about that.

Ford goes to Spike's lair, cementing the assumption that he's up to no good, and Buffy interrogates Angel about Drusilla. Oh, and Xander flips out about Angel having been in Willow's bedroom. Jesus, Xander, it's not like you didn't have a chance.

Back in the creepy club, Buffy bursts in on Ford discussing his plans with the vamp worshipers. She finds out that they're planning on getting a bunch of vampires to turn them, and she asserts that vampires are very picky about who they turn ... which is surprising, since vamps haven't shown much discernment up until this point. I mean, they turned Jesse, for fuck's sake. But this conceit allows Buffy to realize that they plan to give her to the vamps in exchange for being turned.

And yet there is a touching moment when Ford reveals his real secret: he has aggressive brain cancer and he's dying. She tries to convince him to turn back to the Light Side of the Force: "You have a choice. You don't have a good choice, but you have a choice." But it's to no avail, so instead she takes Drusilla hostage, forces Spike and friends into the basement, and locks Ford in there with them. It doesn't come across quite as mean as it sounds in print, mostly because Sarah Michelle Gellar's acting sells it.

Later, by Ford's grave, Buffy and Giles have this exchange:

Buffy: Nothing's ever simple any more. I'm constantly trying to work it out. Who to love or hate, who to trust. It's just like the more I know, the more confused I get.
Giles: Well, I believe that's called growing up.
Buffy: I'd like it to stop, then. OK?
Giles: I know the feeling.
Buffy: Does it ever get easy?
Giles: You mean life?
Buffy: Yeah. Does it get easy?
Giles: What do you want me to say?
Buffy: Lie to me.​

The Buffy Facebook groups don't like it when I say that the Buffy/Dawn relationship is my favorite relationship in the series, but the Buffy/Giles relationship is a close second, and this is one of its high points for Season 2.

Parent of the Year award:

• Ford's parents. Did they not notice when their terminally ill son bopped away from home for at least a week, judging by the number of times the scene switches from night to day?

Casualties:

• The vampire who isn't a cat
• The vampire who Buffy stakes while Ford is pretending to stake the other one
• Ford
• Buffy's remaining faith in humanity

Xander's freaking out about Angel being in Willow's bedroom is almost certainly jealousy, but probably also concern. Remember - Xander NEVER trusted that Angel wouldn't succumb to his vamp instincts and for him to be in Willow's room means she invited him in - and at this point, they have no idea how to rescind the invitation rule for vamps. So he's worried if Angel ever does go all evil-y, with the evil - Willow could be in serious danger.

Xander never trusted Angel because he’s always been jealous of Angel (because Buffy) and Angel wasn’t going to kiss Xander’s ass to gain his trust. It was not so much that Xander thought Angel would go evil. That was later.