“Seize the moment. 'Cuz tomorrow you might be dead.”
--Buffy Summers
And away we go.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer hit the ground running with a fast little
episode that was mostly set-up and exposition, but gave us just enough
deft character touches to introduce the cast and give us a sense of
each of them, and just enough little hints of greatness to show its
potential. This first episode is nowhere near what the show would
eventually become, but the pieces are all there. The dialogue shines,
the story is lean while still doing everything it needs to do, and most
of all, the cast brought their A-game. And they always would, episode
after episode, season after season; while the budget or occasionally
the choices made by the writers may have let the show down the acting
always held up. This cast never once mailed it in and their chemistry
is wonderful.
I’m
getting ahead of myself, talking about how the show would eventually
unfold, but it’s hard not to: I’ve seen every episode of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel multiple times and I was struck, now
that I’m re-watching these shows from the beginning, by just how
much these characters grew and changed over the years. Most of them
ended up in very different places from where they started out here.
Witness currently heterosexual Willow very cutely describing her
nervousness when talking to boys (“I can usually make a few vowel
sounds, and then I have to go away”), or Angel’s cryptic
cloak and dagger routine, which seems so out of character for the
dashing hero who in later years never seemed to have the patience for
that sort of thing, as the writers eventually zeroed in on who he was
and what his role would be, and look at Buffy, who would go on to
(grumpily) lead an army of (whiny) followers in season seven,
describing herself here as “retired”. Of course, for some of the
characters their evolution was rather a more subtle thing; Joyce is
clueless here (“I read all about the dangers of
over-nurturing”) and though the writers would treat the character
as less of a stereotypical foil for her daughter in later seasons,
Joyce never really came into her own for me until season five, when she
could simply be a mother to Dawn without being made to stand in her way.
Joss Whedon and
his writers weren’t always sure where they wanted to go with some
of these characters, and that really isn’t a bad thing at all.
They had a road map and a general idea of their destination, but they
made sure to occasionally stop to investigate interesting things as
they happened upon them. The character of Angel is a perfect case in
point. He was obviously being set up as Buffy’s love interest in
this episode, but the writers didn’t know how truly important he
would become. Instead, they allowed themselves to discover him. Joss
Whedon and his staff often became enamored of certain actors, and roles
that were meant to last for a few episodes were sometimes expanded, and
characters who weren’t meant to be important to the show became
absolutely indispensable. The writers enjoyed writing for certain
actors, they enjoyed the chemistry among the cast, and they allowed
themselves to play. From David Boreanaz eventually being spun off into
his own show, to Eliza Dushku’s supporting role being drastically
expanded as she stole practically every single scene she was in, to
James Marsters’ portrayal of Spike’s long, strange road to
redemption and into Buffy’s heart, these actors proved they could
surprise us, and they could surprise the writers too. If you’re
Joss Whedon and you have Eliza Dushku going off like a firecracker in
front of you in scene after scene, flinging out sparks of sheer star
power in every direction, what else can you do but embrace it and
expand her role, and bring her back again and again? If you’re
Joss Whedon and you suddenly realize that not only is James Marsters as
talented as anyone in your cast but that he also exudes magnetism and
sex appeal and has incredible chemistry with every single one of your
actors, and absolutely lights up the screen when he’s paired with
Sarah Michelle Gellar, what else can you do but make him part of the
regular cast?
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves...
This episode
starts with the
unfortunately-dorky-but-soon-to-be-replaced-by-Tony-Head
announcer’s voice giving us the “chosen one” speech and then cuts to Darla--another great example of an
actor Whedon would come back to again and again, and a character who
would end up in a very different place as the writers explored
her--turning the hoary old “scared girl out on a date with her
horny boyfriend in a creepy dark place” cliché on its ear.
Typically, the girl is scared of monsters. Typically, the girl herself
isn’t the monster. This isn’t a typical show. It was a
great little scene and the reason it was right there at the top of the
episode was that it was the mission statement: not only are things not
what they seem, not only aren’t they the safe clichés
we’re used to, but women aren’t either: they’re
strong. They can be the monsters. And the heroes.
After that we
have our lil’ Buffy--and Sarah Michelle Gellar was so cute at
that age she should have been a controlled substance--having a
prophetic dream in which she is sensing the great, looming threat of
this show’s pitifully small budget. Yes, those cheesy K-Mart
Halloween props running through your cute tortured Slayer psyche really
will bedevil you for the next seven years, Buffy, culminating in the
ultimate cheesiness of the goofy red Slayer axe (I mean
“scythe”) that looked like it was put together by whatever
company makes those plastic lightsabers you see in the toy stores. That
incredibly lame “Vampyr” book? It’s real, and it's
just the tip of the iceberg. You can scream now. Buffy wakes up to the
dulcet tones of Joyce doing the Mom thing: it’s time for school.
Don’t want to be late for school. Nope, uh-uh. Especially since
you got kicked out of your last school.
Cue the credits,
and a quick aside here--you know Amy’s Mom, who appeared in "The Witch?" I just really don’t like that bit in the
season one credits where the music sting plays and Amy’s Mom is
reaching out toward the viewer doing some magical thing or other. For
some reason that little two second shot always annoyed me. Okay, glad I
got that off my chest. Onward. Buffy arrives at school determined to
fit in and enjoy her retirement from slaying and maybe even make the
cheerleading squad, and definitely not save the world from ancient
vampires, evil boyfriends, giant snakes, cyborgs, bitchy goddesses,
evil girlfriends or incorporeal annoyances, and she certainly
won’t be dating any vampires. Nosireebob. We’re
introduced to the skateboarding Xander Harris (nope, we’ll never
see it again) and Mom-dressed Willow--and by the way, I don’t
care how cutely nerdy a girl is, no high school girl in the history of
the world is going to publicly admit that her Mom picked out her
clothes, and okay, can I keep talking about how Willow is dressed for a
moment here? I’m sorry, but she wouldn’t wear that outfit.
No one would wear that outfit. I’m a guy and I’m not a
teenager but I know that it is not actually physically possible that a
teenage high school girl would willingly wear that outfit. Sometimes I
think that Whedon and his writers didn’t quite understand how
teenagers think; they had an occasional tendency to write them either
acting like straight-up adults (Buffy) or like pre-teens (Dawn). Buffy
was the most mature teenager in the world and Dawn, who was ostensibly
about fourteen or fifteen when she was introduced, usually acted like
she was about nine. And yes, we all love Joss Whedon’s dialogue
because it is actually against the law not to (it is. Really.) But
teenagers don’t talk like him and never have. Usually the
dialogue snaps crackles and pops on Buffy the Vampire Slayer but there
are the occasional lines that try too hard and fall flat and in this
episode it’s those two girls in the gym who found the dead body.
Saying “neg!” and “pos!” and
“neg-ly”? Uh, what? Joss, the way you talk is endlessly
entertaining but the English language is the English language for a
reason, and people don’t say “neg-ly”.
Buffy’s
just trying to get by at school and to her credit she sees through
Cordelia pretty quickly and buddies up to Willow as all right-thinking
people should. Buffy says it’s because she needs help to catch up
in her classes and Willow’s the resident brain but when Buffy
eyes that get-up some evil person has somehow managed to staple to
Willow’s body you can just see the wheels turning in
Buffy’s head and you know she’s thinking, “I am going
to rescue this girl from herself”. Buffy has a fun little moment
with poor, hyena-bait Principal Flutie who really is out of his depth
dealing with girls who burn down gyms, and she gives us some unnatural
dialogue she would never actually say, pretending to almost blurt out
that she burned down the gym at her last school because of vampires
when really she almost blurted that out because she has to get some
exposition out of the way and the viewer really needs to know about how
she burned down the gym because of vampires. A bit of a stretch, but
Sarah is always so entertaining when she delivers these “Buffy
talking goofy for no logical reason” lines that I just smile
anyway. And Whedon makes up for it with Xander’s klutzy
tour-de-force of ineptness as he tries to charm Buffy, informing her
that maybe he’ll see her around. At school. Because, you know,
they both go there. Cordelia, Faith, Anya...yup. All of them were
powerless before his charms. Powerless. You can tell by the way Sarah
plays the scene that Buffy isn’t attracted to Xander, but
that’s not going to stop him from attempting to use his
irresistible Xander powers on her. It didn’t work and never
would, though Joss Whedon was reportedly toying with the idea for
awhile, but hey, Xander got Faith eventually (okay, for seven minutes);
she’s a nifty consolation prize.
Things start to
heat up in Buffy’s scenes with Giles. We get some improbable
Giles dialogue in their first scene, in which Giles recognizes Buffy
and calls her by name and she agrees that, yes, she’s Buffy
Summers, and Giles knows she’s the Slayer, but then he thinks he
must have made a mistake when she walks out of the library after seeing
the Vampyr book. If Giles is a Watcher, and he knows this
perky, snarky, Whedon-dialogue-saying girl is Buffy Summers, and
she’s agreed with him that she is indeed Buffy Summers, and
he’s showed her the Vampyr book so obviously he knows that the
Slayer is Buffy Summers since you don’t show Vampyr books to,
say, Cordelia, how is it that Giles would suddenly think maybe
Buffy’s not the Slayer just because she walks out on him in a
huff? Doesn’t he realize it’s the cheesiness of the Vampyr book that’s scaring her away? Doesn’t
he realize that spelling vampire “vampyr” is just as goofy
and lame as spelling magic “magick”?
One of the
strengths of Buffy is that the show always could turn on a dime,
cutting from humor to pathos to action and back again, and for me the
best single moment in the episode--besides every single one of the
Willow moments which are actually always the best single moments in
every Buffy episode except for season six when Willow was a magical
crack ho and season seven when she apparently got hit in the head very
hard and lost her mind and started dating Kennedy--was when Giles
was trying to get through to Buffy after Darla’s playdate’s
dead body was found, telling Buffy she needs to be ready for
what’s coming and it’s his job to prepare her, and Buffy
retorting that being the Slayer has already gotten her kicked out of
school and cost her all her friends. Sarah Michelle Gellar is a great
actress and she sells the moment perfectly. She was so effective as
Buffy over the years, not because she played strength so well (which
she did), but because she played vulnerability so well. We liked this
girl; we empathized with her. Yup, right through the end of season
six...
Anyway...where was I again? Right.
Buffy heads to
the Bronze for some hardcore relaxation because all this talk of
vampires is interfering with her retirement plan and making her grumpy,
and she soon realizes she's being followed. But
Buffy's still the Slayer even if she's currently retired and it's no
problem for her to ambush this mysterious stranger by waiting
perched upside down and suspended in the air in
a handstand on a pipe running across the alley above him, and swinging herself down and kicking him in the
back. But the mysterious stranger laughs about it, and gets right back up again...and damn
if he isn't rocking
that suede coat. And how does he get his hair to do that? Hmm. We can
tell there’s definitely more to this mysterious stranger than
meets the eye. More
to this actor, too. While I don’t think David Boreanaz was nearly as
good an actor as Gellar or Hannigan or Marsters or Dushku, he has
something. Charm, charisma, magnetism, call it what you want, but you
just want to watch the guy. Maybe even in his own show.
Angel’s introduction here was interesting; he was baiting Buffy,
testing her. Gellar and Boreanaz had chemistry from the get-go
and it was obvious long before Buffy told Giles how much she
“really didn’t like” Angel that they were going to be
a couple. What wasn’t obvious was precisely what Angel’s
role would be. He was the cryptic giver-of-information for awhile in
season one, and even when he eventually got in the game in season two
and got to throw some punches, he was clearly Buffy’s sidekick;
Boreanaz had leading man looks and charm and physicality, and the
writers were always careful not to let it overshadow the heroine (to
the point where Spike seemed tougher than Angel for awhile, in season
two. It wasn’t until season three, when they knew they were
going to be spinning Angel off into his own show, that he started showing
signs of the Angel he’d become.) After not being at all
afraid of Buffy some more the mysterious stranger walks off into the shadows. Angel tells Buffy he's a friend. But Buffy isn't
looking for a friend. Well, he didnt say he was hers...
Buffy eventually manages to banish her cryptic new friend who isn't actually her
friend and his awesome hair from her thoughts, and after arriving at
the Bronze and gaping at the spectacle of Willow’s sweater--and I
will now remind you all that it is against the physical laws of the
universe for a girl to wear that outfit to a nightclub--Buffy tells
Willow her motto (seize the moment, ’cuz tomorrow you might be
dead--in fact, who knows, you might die a couple of times, and maybe
date some people who are dead too) and then wanders off to another
snark session with Giles, who’s rather too archly British in this
episode, but he loosened up in time. And Willow puts the moves on a
DeBarge-outfit-wearing guy, proving that she may be shy and villainous
people might staple bad clothes to her body against her will sometimes,
but she can be brave when she has to be. Unfortunately the DeBarge guy
is a vampire, because, vampires? They so don’t know how to dress
(wait, does this mean Willow’s a vampire? I’m confused
now), and he promptly drags Willow back to a mausoleum to feed her to the
Master, the Big Bad of the first season, who isn’t so much
malevolent as cranky all the time, and surprisingly snarky as well for
someone who was born about six-hundred years before snark was invented.
That scene, in which Willow goes from talking about how Xander stole
her Barbie when she was five to suddenly hitting on a guy after hearing
Buffy’s motto, is telling; the Willow to come, the Willow who
runs around graveyards fighting monsters with a Slayer even though she
has no powers to speak of yet except for super-cuteness, the Willow who
took up magic and then brashly decided she could re-ensoul Angelus, the
Willow who wanted Oz and got him, the Willow who decided to bring Buffy
back from the dead no matter the cost, is peeking out at us there.
Buffy runs
around and nearly stakes Cordelia as she’s desperately trying to
locate Willow and her Undead American boyfriend (and remember, Willow isn’t
a vampire, even though she’s actually dressed as badly as he is)
and she eventually runs into Xander, who lets her know that he
overheard all her crazy talk in the library with Giles and
he refuses to believe that teenage girls say “neg-ly”.
No, wait, what he refuses to believe is all that stuff Buffy said,
about vampires and slaying and so forth. But Buffy doesn’t have
time to screw around or even to think of any really
clever dialogue so she simply informs Xander that Willow is so
about to die if they don’t find her, but Xander points out that
Sunnydale only actually has two streets and one graveyard set, and
they’re already standing on one of the streets, so all they have
to do is check one more street and the graveyard and they’re
bound to find Willow.
Which they do, a
bit later, in a mausoleum in the graveyard. They find Jesse too, and
Darla, who took a bite out of Jesse even though he was supposed to be
Master Chow and the Master’s bound to get crotchety about it.
That’s the Darla I love, but unfortunately Buffy’s fight
with her a moment later is rather inappropriate when we consider the
character Darla would become; fighting seems somehow beneath Darla. But
Sarah’s performance was spot-on in this scene as she traded barbs
with Darla, not only showing us how Buffy is chafing against her
destiny but how part of her embraces it as well; she’s the Slayer
and she has complete confidence in her ability to destroy these
vampires (at least until the very large, scary Alien Bounty Hunter, I
mean Luke, shows up a moment later) and the quips are flying fast and
furious. And when Luke arrives we see Buffy’s vulnerability, too,
not because she’s being tossed around by a guy approximately
eight times her size but because we can see the fear on Sarah’s
face. The quips and the cocksure self-confidence are always a part of
who Buffy is and they’re breezy fun, but Buffy’s
vulnerability is what brings us back to the character again and again,
season after season. Her life is hard. Getting kicked out of school,
losing all your friends, risking your life every night when you know
Slayers die young--these things are hard, and we see that constant
struggle etched on Sarah’s face in this scene, not only during
the lopsided fight with Luke but during the conversation with Darla
too; as quippy as Buffy is in this scene, part of her would give
anything not to have to do this, not to have to be this person.
“You know, I just wanted to start over,” Buffy says.
“Be like everybody else.” And Buffy always would feel that
way; that regret would be with her from the first episode to the last.
As for the fight with Luke, it's always interesting for those of us
who have watched Buffy evolve over the years into a lean, mean
slaying machine to see her being tossed around by an enemy who
isn't an Official Big Bad, though Luke is indeed a towering presence when
matched against the petite Sarah Michelle Gellar. Though why exactly
Luke should wait a moment before tackling Buffy again after he throws
her in the tomb is beyond me, unless maybe he knew that the show was a
two-parter and he was posing for the freeze-frame? Yeah, that had to be
it...
"Welcome to the Hellmouth" is
a hint, a taste, of what’s to come. It doesn’t have
an inch of fat on it; every scene moves the story cleanly and
efficiently forward, bringing in the characters one by one, giving us a
sense of each of them through some wonderful dialogue (except
“neg-ly”) and then bouncing them off each other and letting
us see their exceptional chemistry. Giles doesn’t yet have the
depth he would later attain, Joyce is merely in Buffy’s way,
Cordelia is one-dimensional for the moment and “witness me
prowling” Jesse is cannon-fodder--a good thing, since he never
really seemed to fit with the gang to me--but Willow is already showing
much more depth than a stereotypical “nerd” character and
though Xander may be a good-natured dork, he’s already showing
his assertiveness and he has the makings of a hero.
But this was
Buffy’s episode, and Sarah Michelle Gellar carried it off
wonderfully, creating a character people wanted to root for, year after
year. Sarah has gotten a bad rap in the press the last few years over
her choice of movie roles and she’s also gotten a bad rap in some
fan circles for her perceived aloofness toward the show that made her a
star. It’s unfair: the show was such a phenomenon and her
performance in it was so good that it threatened to typecast her, and
no actor wants that; it means career death. We can’t blame her
for wanting to try new things, and yes, it would have been a nice treat
if she sat for a DVD commentary or two, but she’s always praised
the show and its legacy and more importantly, she’s already given
us a hell of a nice treat: seven years of one-hundred percent effort,
seven years of never once mailing it in even when she was reportedly
displeased with the direction the writers were choosing for her
character, seven years of grace and charm, snark and banter, strength
and determination, loneliness and isolation, warmth and humor, loves
gained and lost, destiny and the weight of the world, and most of all,
passion: Buffy's greatest sin was loving too much, and unwisely. This
character felt things keenly: she carried a burden and Sarah made sure
we could always see that burden; we always knew it was there, and we
all hoped we'd see the day she could finally be free of it, and simply
live her life with a smile on her face. And though season seven was a
disappointment to me, in the end, we got that smile. That's enough for
me. Here's to you, Buffy...and you too, Sarah.
