The fifteenth anniversary of Buffy’s very first episode got me nostalgic. Like I’ve said before, this show is very important to me as a feminist and a writer. I love Buffy so much that I’m tempted to write a post about the show every other Tuesday – a “Bi-Weekly Buffy” treat.
So, because this show is so near and dear to my heart and I love it almost as much as I love The Simpsons, I’m going to start my Bi-Weekly Buffy tradition by listing my 10 most overrated episodes of the series. (I’m weird like that.) These episodes are not necessarily ones that I dislike; in fact, I like some of them very much. I’m bringing them up because they all (in my opinion) have one or two glaring flaws that prevent me from embracing them the way popular opinion tells me I should. (Warning: I go into detailed comments about each episode without providing much context, so if you’re not a fan of the show, you might want to skip this post.)
10) “Superstar”
This episode has a lot of amusing little moments – Anya’s description of a world without shrimp, the opening credits with Jonathan inserted into the action, Xander speaking Latin in front of the books (and subsequently setting the book on fire), and let us not forget Spike stroking Buffy/Betty’s face and promising, “Oh, Slayer…one of these days.” But at least half of the episode is devoted to propping up Buffy/Riley as some kind of epic relationship that’s “really complicated” and interesting, when it is neither of those things. If I could take the lack of chemistry in the Buffy/Riley romance and put it into some kind of pill, I would cure insomnia around the globe. They’re that boring.
9) “Normal Again”
This episode is hailed as one of the shining moments in the terrible season six – except I liked season six a lot, and I don’t care for this episode. It’s not bad, and it’s a good acting showcase for Sarah Michelle Gellar, but I’ve never said to myself, “I’m in the mood to watch BtVS. Hey, I know! I’ll put on ‘Normal Again!’ ” It’s rather dreary, and bleak in a bad way (as opposed to “Dead Things,” which is bleak in a good way).
8) “Graduation Day, Part 1”
This is a very good story with one of the best fight scenes in all of BtVS history, but “I’m talking about watching my lover die” brings the episode down an entire letter grade. I do not know why I’m supposed to find the Council of Watchers unreasonable and terrible for saying, “Actually, no, we’re not going to break our backs trying to save the life of one of the worst vampires in history just because he has a soul now.” For the first and last time in BtVS history, I side with Wesley over Buffy and Giles. Yes, it’s great that Buffy stands up to the patriarchal Council, but she should have done that back in “Helpless,” not when the Council actually has a point.
7) “Angel”
Buffy’s in love with Angel after interacting with him…let’s see…*counts*…six or seven times, after having only one sorta-kinda honest conversation with him. I’m sorry, but Bella and Edward had a more believable setup. The Buffy/Angel relationship makes for some wonderful drama and tragedy in season two, but I find them insufferably boring in seasons one and three.
6) “Lie to Me”
I used to love this episode. Then a friend of mine described it as an after-school special targeted to people who wanted to become vampires: “If you or someone you know has ever wanted to become a vampire, call this number now! We have people who can help!” Since then, I can’t watch “Lie to Me” without having that in the back of my head. I still like little moments – Willow not understanding the meaning of “I Touch Myself,” the vampire wannabe who dresses exactly like Angel, Chanterelle having her vampire romanticism dashed in two seconds’ time – but overall, I think this ep is only okay. It doesn’t help that Angel is incredibly condescending to Buffy and coerces the “I love you” before he tells her, “Yeah, I tortured Drusilla and made her insane but I feel really bad about it!”
5) “The Zeppo”
Clearly, the BtVS writers wanted a special episode from Xander’s point of view so the audience could see how great he was. Wonderful! Except, I already knew that Xander was awesome, and I didn’t understand why, all of a sudden, the other characters were pushing him to the side and acting like having him in battle was a huge detriment and a threat to his safety. This is the boy who brought Buffy back to life in “Prophecy Girl,” helped her save Willow/Cordelia/Giles/Jenny in “When She Was Bad,” constantly patrolled with her throughout season two, pulled Cordelia out of a fire, and rescued Giles in “Becoming Part 2,” all without the aid of supernatural powers – and all of a sudden, he’s a useless drain on the Scooby gang whom they need to protect? They sacrifice character for the sake of a fairly weak parody that doesn’t actually become funny until the final act. The only reason I don’t hate this episode is the zombie frat boys who enjoy Walker, Texas Ranger, because that is some inspired silliness right there. “The Zeppo” was a good episode in theory but “meh” in execution – I would have preferred a parody episode that focused on an actual tertiary character like Larry or Harmony, or heck, even Cordelia once she separated herself from the Scooby gang.
4) “Homecoming”
SlayerFest ’98 is great. I love Mr. Pitt fromSeinfeld making an appearance, I love Buffy and Cordelia bonding, I love Faith asking Buffy to the dance (REPRESSED LESBIAN ALERT!), Cordelia talking down Lyle Gorch, and the first appearance of The Mayor. However, a certain scene between Xander and Willow makes me spit blood and ruins the rest of the episode for me. Xander and Cordelia were my favorite couple in the first three seasons, so just imagine how angry THAT SCENE makes me.
3) “The Wish”
I feel guilty putting this episode on the list because it’s very good. Strangely, I think that one of its biggest strengths is also one of its biggest weaknesses. It follows an It’s a Wonderful Life-esque alternate universe plot where one character wishes that another character had never been born. Usually, by the end of these stories, the first character realizes that the original world was better than the alternative and wishes it back to existence – but in this version, the character that made the wish is killed halfway through the story!
On one hand, this is a brilliant subversion of a familiar trope. It leaves the audience with a sense of dread and terror. “Oh no! They killed the wish character! How will they get back to the real world?!” On the other hand, this subversion guarantees that no character learns anything from this experience because none of them will remember it. In a way, this episode is nothing more than really good fanfiction. But I do like a lot of things about “The Wish” and I’m willing to be talked out of this opinion.
2) “Passion”
I don’t think this episode is grossly overrated or terrible. Most people would give it an A+ while I would give it an A-. Not a huge difference, really. There are so many wonderful things about this one – the use of La Boheme, everything having to do with Giles/Anthony Stewart Head, Angel looking through the window to watch Buffy cry, the drawings, the stalking, the un-invitation spell, “You can’t leave me! I can’t do this alone!”, and one of my all-time favorite Spike moments: “No fair going into the ring unless he tags you first.”
BUT. The voiceovers are cheesy and flatly delivered, Angel wearing his vamp-face when killing Jenny is a huge cop-out, and most of all, I cannot possibly take the death of Willow’s fish seriously. I know I’m supposed to find it TERRIFYING!!! that Angel would kill Willow’s pets, but come on. Her goldfish? I see those dead little fishies on a string, and all I can think of is the image of soulless Angel gleefully scooping those little fishies with a tiny net, and I crack up.
Still, “Passion” has a lot going for it, and it’s not nearly as overrated as the #1 overrated episode of the series…drumroll, please…
1) “The Body”
I like the first act of the episode that’s all about Buffy, and I even like the second act that’s all about Dawn, but you know what? I don’t care how Willow, Xander, and Anya feel about Buffy’s mom’s death. They barely knew her and she wasn’t their mother. I don’t care about Willow not finding the right clothes to wear, I don’t care about Xander convincing himself that the death was supernatural, I don’t care about Anya’s damn fruit punch. This is not the fault of any of the actors, as they all bring their A-game to that scene, but the writing seems so calculated and forced to me: “Let’s watch Willow’s big dramatic moment, and now let’s watch Xander’s big dramatic moment, and now let’s watch Anya’s big dramatic moment.” The only characters Joyce has interacted with when Buffy WASN’T present were Giles, Spike, and Faith, and all of a sudden we’re supposed to believe that she was a stand-in surrogate mother for Xander and Willow because she hosted a Christmas dinner for them that one time? Nope. Sorry, not buying it. I buy Tara’s quiet sadness and reflection on her own mother’s passing much more believable and moving, and I usually don’t care at all about Tara.
And I haven’t even mentioned the fact that the paramedics show up, pronounce Joyce dead, and leave the dead body in the middle of the living room. I suspend a lot of disbelief for this show as I know the rules are different for fantasy/horror/sci-fi worlds, but this was supposed to be the Most Realistic Real Episode That Ever Realed, and they left the dead body in the middle of the living room. NO. BAD WRITING.
Now we’ve come to the end of this post, and if you’ve made it this far, you might be wondering, “Why is Lady T spending so much energy complaining about a show she supposedly loves?” Well, never fear. In two weeks I will write my top 10 list of the underrated episodes of the series and gush over the one-offs that other people think are bad. Stay tuned!
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I absolutely abhor “The Body.” My mother passed away the summer before this episode aired, and an autopsy was required by law due to the circumstances of her death. I was stunned at the end of the episode before “The Body” when Joyce died, but I could handle it. I could even handle watching Buffy try to wrap her mind around what was happening and not really being able to focus when the paramedics were there. But when they laid Joyce’s body out for the autopsy, I shut it off and walked away from the entire show. I didn’t go back and watch the rest of the series until after Season 7 was over.
There were a lot of things that they could have done surrounding Joyce’s death–even including the idea for the spell to bring her back, but the way it was handled was just unnecessarily cruel to the audience. Joss does a lot of things right, but he also regularly tortures his audience (and gets away with it.) As Namaah says so eloquently, “Here’s your puppy soup.” http://naamah-darling.dreamwidth.org/206168.html
Thank you for commenting and I’m so sorry for your loss.
Your perspective is one that I haven’t seen that often and I’m grateful for an alternate opinion. I know a lot of people who have experienced similar losses who love “The Body,” but I never really thought about how upsetting it might be for someone to watch the autopsy scene. It’s not something a regular Buffy viewer would be prepared to watch – you get scenes like that all the time on E.R., but not a sci-fi/fantasy show when staked vampires explode into dust.
>> but this was supposed to be the Most Realistic Real Episode That Ever Realed, and they left the dead body in the middle of the living room. NO. BAD WRITING.<<
SERIOUSLY. The whole scene is terrible, those guys show up and are like yeah are we supposed to revive this chic, or something? REALLY? Bored now, LATERS! We'll just leave that body here in a way that is unethical and illegal, and we'll act like it's normal so Joss can wring some emotion out of this totally not plausible in any reality, not even one made entirely of shrimp. Alias level JJ Abrams style dumb.
Yes Homecoming is so infuriating because it's a GREAT episode right up until this great Cordelia with Spatula, beating the tar out of rude boys thing is undermined entirely for some disgusting no chemistry relationship that barely even had a fan base AT ALL.
I will never get over the decision that Cordelia should go to Angel w/o Xander. And as much as I love Cordy, the way it immediately damaged Xander for me hurts way more. Cordelia still got to be Cordelia for most of the season (save the Zeppo obviously), and also for two years of Angel, but Xander is turned into an unsympathetic stooge from the second the clothes fluke happens. Thank god I missed the clothes fluke in real time S3 viewing and only had to deal with the fall out in Lover's Walk.
My list would probably be: Lie to Me, The Zeppo, The Body, Hush, The Wish, Passion, Who Are You, When She was Bad, and The Puppet Show (although at least I have great great affection for that one even if I think the fandom oversells it)
Yeah, the clothes fluke sets up some decent development for Willow but Xander is left in the dust and turns into a jerk, and the show prioritizing Willow’s development over Xander’s is OBVIOUSLY not something that I can get behind.
I think we’ve talked before about how my alternate version of “The Zeppo” has Xander saving Cordelia’s life instead of Faith’s, her forgiving him when he tells her how much he misses her, and them getting it on and getting back together, right? I love that version of the episode in my head.
Xander on Angel would have been interesting. BtVS did some interesting things with Xander’s development over the years and I do like some things about him in S3-7, but oh lord, I’m crying over the missed comic potential of Xander having to work for Angel while hating his guts.
As for your other choices – I’m not familiar with Dark City so I still like “Hush,” “Who Are You” is good but not great, I LOVE “When She Was Bad,” and “The Puppet Show” is a lot of fun but not my favorite from S1. “Prophecy Girl,” “The Pack,” “Nightmares,” and “Out of Mind, Out of Sight” are all better.
Since they clearly had no use for him on Buffy anymore (bastards! forever bitter!) they really ought to have brought Xander onto Angel starting in Season 3 instead of stupid, stupid effing Fred. If nothing else, it would have prevented the ridiculous Angel/Cordelia thing that ultimately completely destroyed her character.
There was no escaping Fred; Amy Acker is one of the actresses that Joss Whedon just LOVES and wants to cast in everything. I thought she was great on Dollhouse but Fred, like Tara, was just Willow without the interesting parts.
I can get behind all of these (more or less) except Lie to Me, The Zeppo, Passion, and The Body–so, I guess, behind just over half of them. A few contentious thoughts:
I like Lie to Me a lot just because it’s genuinely scary (maybe I have low fear standards, but damn, Drusilla in the cold open) and has good character beats (I know some disagree, but at least in the second season, I think there’s a lot of good development of Angel as a predatory figure that thematically foreshadows the his soul-loss arc without forcing the viewer to accept Angel/Buffy as a positive relationship), but more importantly, it’s probably the most fun Buffy (the show) ever has with morality. I know there’s a lot of love for Dead Things in that category, and while I think it’s a good episode too, the whole license-to-kill issue is a lot more remote than ideas like how a person should FEEL when confronted with ethical and personal betrayal and bad things done for basically sympathetic reasons. I think for me, that vampires don’t exist helps it escape the trappings of the after school special, in that those basically fail because the real world invades the show’s universe in a way that isn’t germane or tonally consistent, while here, the would-be real world element is drawn from the show’s universe.
I like The Zeppo and mostly dislike Xander. Interesting. I guess I find him more appealing here in that his charm lies in his being a basically regular person, meaning the less grandiose his heroism (i.e. the more he avoids the “badass normal” trope, as I believe TV Tropes describes it), the more sympathetic he becomes. (I also think The Zeppo is a very strong parody, especially with the interrupted Angel/Buffy scenes and unseen monster, and that it has some interesting reflections on the actual viewing of TV [or any visual narrative media, I guess].)
Not much to say about Passion, because what you like about it is mostly what I like about it. I actually really like Angel’s voiceover, though (“the clarity of hatred, the ecstasy of grief,” etc.), and Willow’s dead fish. I think both are effective at building up Angel as a sort of God figure, which makes his actual interactions with Buffy and Jenny creepier and more powerful. I think the absurd unimportance of the fish actually enhances the atmosphere of not feeling safe in one’s own home, though I can understand how that same unimportance might seem over-the-top.
I always feel weird talking about The Body, because as much as I like it, it doesn’t really represent the general strengths of the series at all, but whatever. I agree that the retcons (maybe too harsh a word) of all our main characters having loved Joyce is pretty contrived, but I think it allows them all to react to the immediacy and incomprehensible nature of death in general, which works for me. Honestly, I feel like I shouldn’t like the episode much anyway (I want to call it over-directed, although I can’t really bring myself to, just because of how effective some of the more gimmicky aspects are), but I think it’s really moving, so there you go. Last, it’s an incredibly physically effective episode–the cracking rib, the nauseating loudness of the outside world, the awful clumsiness of the final vampire fight without music–which is pretty impressive for a TV show. I guess you could say that “contrived, but it works” is pretty much how I feel about most of Buffy to begin with, so the extra contrivances here don’t hinder me from loving it a lot.
Oh, and as for what I would put on this list: I don’t love some popular episodes like Halloween and Band Candy, but there are really only two I feel strongly about. Number two (counting down here) is Once More, With Feeling; it’s clearly a lot of fun, and the concept of musicals having characters admit things they wouldn’t otherwise say is clever, but the actual story is pretty weak (the Xander reveal is just incredibly lazy), and the big emotional resolution (sort of) in “Something to Sing About” strikes me as incredibly trite (like, the whole thing, not just the early platitudes). And number one is Pangs, which is absurdly racist and that’s all there is to say about it.
“Halloween” is a great episode for Willow and Giles, but Buffy is annoying as hell with a terrrrrrrible accent and it’s enough to bump it down to a B+. “Band Candy” is silly, enjoyable fun with some hilarious performances from the grown-up actors. I also just like Ethan Rayne.
I adore “Once More, With Feeling” because it manages to mock the musical genre while still showing affection for it. The Xander reveal IS lazy but I choose to look at it as another part of the satire, since musicals often resort to a deus ex machina when trying to resolve a poorly conceived plot.
As for “Pangs” – yeah, no argument there. I enjoy certain aspects of the episode, and I guess there’s some sort of point about the uselessness of white liberal guilt…but why does that point even have to be made? Yeah, twenty-first century white Americans are not responsible for the crimes of their forefathers and mothers, but we still benefit from that privilege hundreds of years later even if we weren’t the perpetrators of it, so why tell another story about native people being villains?
I think there’s a lot of good development of Angel as a predatory figure that thematically foreshadows the his soul-loss arc without forcing the viewer to accept Angel/Buffy as a positive relationship
That’s one of the biggest problems I have with the episode, because I honestly can’t tell if I’m supposed to see Buffy/Angel as a doomed romance where they’re soulmates separated by fate, or a relationship that spelled BAD NEWS for Buffy even before he lost his soul. If it’s the latter, I love it. If it’s the former, I HAVE PROBLEMS.
I agree that an interesting moral issue is at play in “Lie to Me,” but I’m not sure if it’s the same one the writers intended. The issue seems to be with Ford choosing to sacrifice innocent humans in order to secure his own immortality, and how that issue is muddled because he’s suffering from a terminal illness. But what I find more interesting, and more frustrating, is Buffy’s description of vampires, as a demon that sets up shop in a human body that walks and talks and has memories but isn’t anything like the actual person, even though BtVS has shown us time and time again that vampires have the same capacity for feeling as humans do. It seems so inconsistent with what the show is actually telling us about vampires.
I guess I find him more appealing here in that his charm lies in his being a basically regular person, meaning the less grandiose his heroism (i.e. the more he avoids the “badass normal” trope, as I believe TV Tropes describes it), the more sympathetic he becomes.
That’s just it, though – I never saw Xander as fulfilling the “badass normal” trope. In seasons one and two, he’s Buffy’s right-hand man more often than any other character, accompanying her on different stakeouts and helping her in battle, but rarely because he performs an act of over-the-top heroism. In “Prophecy Girl” he doesn’t save her because of a tough masculine stunt; he saves her because he can breathe and Angel can’t. That’s why I always loved Xander – even in his biggest acts of bravery and courage, I never forgot that he was the everyman normal guy without powers.
That’s why I found “The Zeppo” largely unnecessary. I also found it downright insulting. NEVER before this episode did Buffy and the Scooby gang intentionally exclude him “for his own good” because he was so useless and fumbling and unable to take care of himself – in fact, he was helpful and useful to others more often than he wasn’t.
Long story short – if this episode’s plot had Xander trying to get to Buffy while being waylaid and distracted by his own subplot, and if the characters had angrily wanted to know where the hell he was instead of being thankful that he was out of danger, I would enjoy “The Zeppo” a lot more.
(I also think The Zeppo is a very strong parody, especially with the interrupted Angel/Buffy scenes and unseen monster
I really WANT to like the interrupted Buffy/Angel scene, because I hate them all throughout season three, but I don’t find that scene effective at all. I understand what the writers are trying to do, and yet the dialogue is much less ridiculous than other B/A scenes played sincerely, and the music isn’t nearly loud enough. The melodramatic soundtrack should have been deafening and I barely heard it.
“the clarity of hatred, the ecstasy of grief,”
Oh yes, I liked THAT one. I remember three voiceovers in “Passion” and the second one is the one I liked. The ones at the beginning and the end of the episode, though, I think are pretty dull.
I think the absurd unimportance of the fish actually enhances the atmosphere of not feeling safe in one’s own home, though I can understand how that same unimportance might seem over-the-top.
Willow says that, for the first time, she’s glad her parents didn’t get her a puppy. I wish they HAD. The image of Angel breaking into Willow’s home when she isn’t around is truly creepy, but how else could he have killed her fish without scooping with that little net? I can’t take that action seriously from a person who’s supposed to be an ultimate villain.
Last, it’s an incredibly physically effective episode–the cracking rib, the nauseating loudness of the outside world, the awful clumsiness of the final vampire fight without music–which is pretty impressive for a TV show.
I like all of those moments that you mentioned – anything having to do with Buffy herself works very well for me. I just can’t get on board with the paramedics issue or the scene with Willow/Xander/Anya – I’m closer to some of my friends’ parents than they EVER were to Joyce and I doubt that I would react that strongly to such a death, and I’m a big crybaby.
I thought Buffy was ok, but it lost a lot after the first series. The vampire stopped being scary and became comical so no real threat. No enemies were really tough enough for her.Same for the first season of Angel, it was definitly scarier and had better writing, then it got more teenagery and boring, they did the same thing in BTVS, set up a huge powerful enemy then have it die in ten seconds at the end. And they kept the bleached teeth, model type actors in every scene, and everyone was under thirty, even though they were top laywers, top bankers, top doctors, and it was all white bread, the lesbian storyline when they did have it, was all about just getting two magazine models to kiss. Just like it is in regular movies, it is tittilation not equality. kind of negating any social commentary because of that. Is Whedon a feminist?. He puts women in lead roles, but i don’t think anything he does is any different than other shows that put women in lead roles.
Honestly, I can’t remember a time when the vampires were ever scary on the show. The vampire makeup in season one seemed deliberately B-movie monster makeup, not anything subtle or realistic.
I also can’t agree that Willow and Tara’s relationship was about getting “two magazine models to kiss” as they weren’t even allowed an onscreen kiss until almost a year after they got together. Once the show moved to a more permissive network, they showed more physical affection, but no more than Xander/Anya or Buffy/Spike.
I think that yes, Whedon is definitely a feminist. Not a perfect one by any means, but I think he’s committed to the cause even if some of his approaches are flawed.
Before I start, let me say that I know people who both love and hate The Body and who have strong opinions on just about every part of the show. I love hearing other opinions and just wanted to throw in mine.
The Body – The episode is not about how close they all are and how sad Willow/Xander/Anya are because they were soooo close to Joyce (because as you’ve said, that just isn’t true). It’s just an interpretation of how different people react to death. Buffy, who usually has it all together, has completely lost direction. I always love thinking about Buffy in Season 5 because I know she feels helpless. She can fight off demon after demon but can do nothing to prevent her mother’s sickness.. and that’s something completely new to her. She’s only the slayer – not an all-powerful being.
About the scene itself –
I don’t really have much to say about Xander in this scene – just that he tries to convince himself that Joyce’s death was completely out of his control – a method of dealing with grief.
I love that Willow throws herself into the smallest details of life to block out the sadness surrounding her. However, I don’t like that Tara and Willow’s first on-screen kiss happens here. It was a nice kiss, but I didn’t think it was a good distraction from the events, just a confusing one.
Anya, of course, is my favorite. She says so plainly what everyone else is trying to wrap their heads around. Everyone feels like Anya does, but no one knows how to say it. Anya is the only one who CAN say it because she doesn’t understand it. And we don’t understand it either. That’s why her monologue is so beautiful. Why can’t Joyce just wake up? Why can’t she come back? We don’t know. She’s dead. It sucks.
A few years ago, I was so depressed after the death of a family member that I almost failed out of college. The interesting thing is that I wasn’t close to this person until the last years of their life, and I was never very close at all. The thing that tore me up inside was death itself and my father’s reaction to this person dying. I couldn’t stand to see him in such grief. It’s understandable that Buffy’s friends would feel the same way towards her. Joyce’s death is something normal that the gang might be able to help Buffy overcome, but they find themselves unequipped to do so.
I totally agree with you about the ambulance guys, though.
By the way, first time commenting on your blog, been reading for a few months. Love it!
Thanks for the compliments! Feel free to comment more often, too.
All of what you’re saying about “The Body’ makes sense to me, and I agree with you about what the writers were going for, but it just didn’t work for me. The fact that the Scoobs have dealt with so much death on a weekly basis over five years made it impossible for me to believe that they’d get THIS worked up about their friend’s mother when they barely knew her. I guess I can believe that Willow would make the situation all about her, but everything about the scene seems calculated to me, like each character is patiently waiting for one of the other characters to finish his/her teary dramatic speech so each actor gets a clip for the Emmy reel.
I’m happy you and many others found something meaningful in this episode – it just didn’t work for me except for the Buffy and Dawn bits.
So far, I don’t remember what episode it was, but one of my favorite tiny subplots is when the hyena band eat the first principle and the second principle (god I loved that guy) brings it up a couple times. “The last guy got eaten!” I don’t know why but the absurdity of it all made me laugh so hard.
I don’t really like Anya. I just don’t really buy her character, or her and Xander together. I just don’t feel it. Also I miss Cordelia. Guess I should watch Angel.
I also didn’t really get the Zeppo episode. It didn’t really help any of the characters and made me resent the rest of the gang on behalf o Xander. Otherwise I like most of the episodes you list, though I see you like them as well they are just overrated. I am not familiar enough with the fandom to know how deserving of praise they are compared to others. On season 5 now and I am finally relieved that they didn’t just expect us to accept surprise-sister-who-was-there-the-whole-time because I was really starting to worry. I am not sure if I like it still, but a lot of the characters are annoying to me right now so I just hope they re-balance out soon.
“The Puppet Show” is the episode where they bring in Principal Snyder, and he is HILARIOUS. I love him. “The Pack,” the hyena episode, is one of my all-time favorites.
I like Anya well enough, but she’s no Cordelia. Piece of advice, though: if you’re a Cordelia fan, don’t watch past season 2 of Angel. I’m serious. Even S2 is not that great for a Cordelia fan, but the other stuff in it is so good that it’s worth watching.
I agree with most of these, especially ‘The Body.’ Part of my dislike for ‘The Body’ is that it was on at one point shortly after my mother had had to have surgery to determine that she did not have cancer, and seeing Buffy’s mom die so soon after I had to deal with the idea of my mom potentially dying just… was hard for me. Part of it, though, was that I just found all the responses outside of Buffy’s, Dawn’s, and Giles’s really trying. I felt like they covered the ‘stupid things that go through your head’ and the ‘if only I had just’ well with Buffy, but they dropped the ball with her friends. *shrug*
I do disagree about ‘The Wish,’ though – it gave us Anya (who did remember everything, though she learned no real lesson from it other than “keep a tight hold on your valuables”) and vampire Willow, and I love them both.
I’m glad you didn’t aim at the frequently targeted OMWF,Restless and Hush. The article is well written and you raised good points for each episode. I kinda agree with the points about and share your views on THE BODY except the conclusion that it’s overrated.It’s not a favorite or one I would recommend as the best but other than the scoobies reaction and Anya’s contrived breakdown,i think it’s an excellent episode