Buffy the Vampire Slayer becomes Buffy the Vampire Slayer with this episode.

Though the star-crossed lovers story is a very old story that has been done many, many times, it has been done many, many times for a reason: it works. And it works especially well for this series. In fact, for this series it makes perfect sense: here is a girl who has the weight of the world--literally--on her shoulders, and who has spent the previous six episodes yearning for the normal life, and the friendship and love that comes with it, that other people take for granted. Buffy herself is star-crossed; her whole life seems, to her at least, to be out of her control. Buffy is the Slayer, she’s doing what she’s destined to do, and she wishes she didn’t have to, and she thinks she got a raw deal. If that isn’t star-crossed, what is? She’s been attracted to Angel from the moment she first met him, but he’s aloof, out of reach; up until now she’s chalked that up to her bad luck. In "Angel", she finds out the real reason why he’s unattainable.

And Angel is unattainable: even though Buffy and Angel kiss in this episode, and realize they have feelings for each other, and their relationship begins in earnest, Angel’s curse will doom them eventually. I’m not certain if the “perfect happiness” curse was in the writers’ minds by this point (judging by how much Angel’s character evolved over the years, obviously due to the fact that the writers hadn’t yet worked out exactly what they wanted to do with him, I’m guessing no) or if it was a device they invented in season two specifically to bring on Angelus, but either way, Angel is cursed and he and Buffy just aren’t going to make it. Though it’s a brave and dramatically effective decision for these two characters, over seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and five seasons of Angel I don’t think we got one single successful romance and the doomed romance formula wore exceedingly thin for me over the years, as the writers went back to that well over and over and over again, long after it had dried up. If two characters were happy together for more than a season on one of these shows you just knew something bad was going to happen to one of them and it made the shows feel predictable. It also made me feel, many times, that I was being manipulated by the writers in the service of cheap stunts.

Sure, people being happy and content together doesn’t give us any conflict to work with and we all know the lesson of Moonlighting: once the romantic tension turns into actual romance, the fun can come to a screeching halt. But I would argue that the deaths and break-ups and betrayals and so forth that afflicted every single romantic relationship either Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Angel ever portrayed became hackneyed and tedious after awhile; there was a soap opera quality to the writers’ choices and it often seemed to me that ending these relationships, while appearing on the surface to be a brave decision (after all, it must be a risk when you break up a happy couple, right?), actually was the easiest and most craven decision the writers could have made in many cases. Portraying a happy, committed couple is a challenge on a dramatic show; it seemed to me that the writers just didn’t want to put the work in. Yes, bad things happen to good people and it wouldn’t be true to life for everyone to be happy all the time, and of course no drama can last long without, you know, drama? But good things do happen to good people too, and the unremitting bleakness that came with romance on these shows was most assuredly not true to life. It made the lives of these characters feel false, artificial. It made these characters feel like creations of writers who were looking for the next big surprise, rather than real people. Buffy and Angel, Angel and Cordelia, Angel and Darla, Buffy and Riley, Buffy and Spike, Spike and Drusilla, Willow and Oz, Willow and Tara, Willow and Xander, Xander and Cordelia, Xander and Anya, Giles and Jenny Calendar, Fred and Gunn, Fred and Wesley, Wesley and Lilah...none of these relationships lasted. They all ended badly, either with a bad break-up, a betrayal, or a death, or some combination. God save us all, the only romance I can think of that actually survived the shows was Willow and Kennedy, and what kind of a horrible world are we living in when that relationship lasts and the above-mentioned fifteen can’t? A bad, terrible, evil world, that’s what kind.

You know, if the writers had just let us keep Willow and Tara, I would have been able to live with them destroying everything else. But they didn’t...though that’s a rant for another time. And I will be getting to that rant. That rant has been scheduled.

Sigh. I think I’ll just review this episode now. Long story short, it was a great one. The doomed romance formula often seems cheap and lazy on these shows but it isn’t cheap and lazy here. Here, it’s appropriate. I said Buffy the Vampire Slayer becomes Buffy the Vampire Slayer with this episode and the reason why is, this episode is what the series (and Angel as well) will eventually be about. It all begins here. The conflict between what we want and what we can actually have, between doing what we’re called on to do and what we wish we could do, between destiny and free will, those things are what this series is about. Another thing this series is about is its own sprawling mythology, and that mythology really begins here: yes, we know there have been other Slayers before Buffy because the announcer tells us so in the intro, and we know the Master’s like, this really old (and yet inexplicably snarky) guy with a lot of followers? So that’s a certain amount of mythology. But those things didn’t really impact our characters’ lives in any meaningful way. Angel, and his history, will impact all our characters’ lives in a meaningful way.

We begin with the Master being grumpy: Buffy keeps killing his redshirts. He confides in the Annoying One, and the Annoying One’s advice? Annihilate her. Well, I can see why this kid’s gonna be such a major player in this series. That’s really clever advice. Annihilate Buffy? No one would have ever thought of trying that. Tease her, call her up and ask if she has Prince Albert in a can, ring her bell and run, write her phone number on the men’s room wall, ply her with presents, that stuff the Master’s goons would have thought of. But like, attacking her really, really hard? Wow. This kid is some kind of tactical genius. Anyway the Master decides to take the kid’s advice and sends three vampires after Buffy who he really should have sent in the first episode, or any of the episodes after, but didn’t because then Buffy would have died and the series would have been over: the Three. These guys are legitimate bad asses who are all a lot taller and meaner than Sarah Michelle Gellar and wear armor and don’t bother with snark or banter; in fact they’re impervious to it. Buffy tries both snark and banter when they walk right up to her, beat her up, grab her, hold her against a wall and are about to kill her, and it doesn’t work. Their armor is probably magical armor that repels snark and banter. The scene with Buffy against the Three is interesting because Buffy really does seem helpless against them. They take her down pretty effortlessly and her snarky jokes feel uncomfortably close to pleading on Buffy’s part. Two hold her against a wall while the other is about to bite her neck, and Buffy just closes her eyes. Luckily Angel shows up, but the Three are such bad asses that Buffy and Angel run from them once they get a chance.

They make it back to Buffy’s house, but Angel is wounded, and Buffy is happy because it’s a sexy wound. Angel takes his shirt off, and Buffy tends to his wound and basks in his torso, and the moment between Gellar and Boreanaz is very nicely played; you can feel the heat between them. Unfortunately Joyce comes home but Buffy keeps Angel in her room anyway because the Three are still out there somewhere and Angel is simply too sexy to allow to risk his life. Xander can leave school grounds when a giant praying mantis lady is after him if he wants but no way is Buffy letting Angel out of her sight, especially his chest and his shoulders.

Angel inexplicably stays in Buffy’s room all day the next day in the episode’s one bit of clunky plotting--obviously he needs to stay out of the daylight because he’s a vampire but Buffy doesn’t know he’s a vampire, so why is she letting him/making him stay there all day? Yes, the Three are still out there but they weren’t after him, they were after her. If she can leave the house to go to school why can’t he leave to go to...wherever cryptic information-giving guys go?  Probably he’s too hot for Buffy to allow to leave. In the library Giles has made with the researchy and identifies the Three, and also identifies their one weakness: super-dumbness. Or rather, the Master’s super-dumbness. The Three will offer their lives to the Master in repayment for having failed and the Master, because he prefers big, sweeping gestures (with snarky dialogue) to actual logical decision-making, kills them. Or in this case, he lets Darla do it. Which will bite Darla in the ass later when she’s fighting Buffy and Angel all by her lonesome in the Bronze; if she had the Three with her for backup I’m thinking Buffy and Angel become tasty snacks. It’s nearly clunky plotting; the Master bitched about how Buffy is killing all his best guys and so what does he do? He kills three of his best guys. And ends up losing Darla too, when Angel kills her. We don’t see her again until Angel season one: that’s three years without Darla, and I was sad for those three years.

Buffy returns home from the library, and very cutely assumes Angel read her diary because it’s not where she usually keeps it and then tries to explain to him how “hunk” can mean bad things and when she wrote that he had penetrating eyes she actually meant “bulging” and furthermore “A” doesn’t even stand for him at all, it stands for Achmed, a charming foreign exchange student, and Buffy wins the cutest moment of the episode award. And then she and Angel kiss...and suddenly, his face assumes vampire form, and she screams, and he jumps out the window. Welcome to your romantic life, Buffy. It actually won’t get better. Bad stuff like this? Is gonna happen all the time. Should’ve dated that sassy Boston girl. I’m just sayin’ is all.

The mythology begins to take flight in this episode with the revelation that Angel is a vampire, but Darla will be a big part of the mythology too; she still isn’t the Darla we all know and love here but she’s getting closer. The scene in which she brazenly tells the Master that something has to be done about Buffy gives us a hint of the sauciness we would come to love in her, and I also enjoyed, as I always did, the father/daughter dynamic between the Master and Darla. Although he’s slightly annoyed at her tone he only lightly (and snarkily) rebukes her and you get the impression that she really is his favorite; his daughter. It’s not so much the dialogue as written but the way the actors play it that creates this dynamic and they did an excellent job. When the Master has a temper tantrum after losing Darla at the end of the episode it really feels like he’s lost someone he loves. Unfortunately he lost her to his own snarky, entertaining stupidity, but oh well.

Darla’s plan is to try to get Angel to help with the whole killing Buffy thing and she finds him in his rather-nifty-for-a-big-storage-room-down-in-the-electrical-tunnels apartment and tries to convince him to join the Dark Side of the Force. On the one hand, the fact that the Master’s gang is full of buffoons who could’ve and should’ve killed Buffy a long time ago but haven’t because they make dumb decisions is one strike against the Dark Side. But the Master’s snarkiness is fun. Plus, hey, there’s Darla, who is a big checkmark in the Pro Dark Side column. But then there’s the Annoying One, with his electronically altered voice, which actually had the opposite effect than what was (presumably) intended: if he sounded like a kid he would’ve been creepy because kids don’t usually talk about killing everyone, but he doesn’t sound like a kid. Instead he sounds like an electronically altered fake bad guy and is not creepy at all. So that's another strike against the Dark Side. Still, Darla makes up for a lot of sins and if I'm Angel I'm seriously considering joining the Dark Side. Darla drops some tantalizing hints about her past with Angel, going back all the way to the turn of the century (of course we know it dates back even further than that) and finally reveals why she’s wearing that schoolgirl uniform: to screw with Angel’s head. Because she knows he’s attracted to Buffy, and this is Darla’s way of belittling her. I thought that was a nice, clever touch on the writer’s part, especially since it really doesn’t seem to me like that’s actually why Darla has been wearing that outfit since the first episode. I may be wrong, but I got the impression Darla was reconceived for this episode. It seemed to me that they wanted to give Angel a link to his past and they saw that they had the marvelous Julie Benz and decided to use her. Whatever actually transpired to bring Darla that much closer to the Darla we all love, I applaud it, and Julie Benz always rose to the occasion whenever they gave her something really interesting to sink her teeth into. The heat between Boreanaz and Benz is every bit as powerful as it is between Boreanaz and Gellar.

When Angel sort of maybe turns her down (he’s cryptic) Darla spies on Buffy in the school library while Willow is tutoring her in history. I like how Julie Benz played that moment; she had no dialogue, but you could see the jealousy in her eyes, and the sadness, and the anger, and the calculation; she’s lost Angel to Buffy and she wants him back. She doesn’t want to kill Buffy because Buffy’s the Slayer and she’s killing the Master’s redshirts; she wants to kill her because she took her man. Darla uses the schoolgirl outfit to swing an invitation to Buffy’s house after that, and she snacks on Joyce. Who, by the way, had a nice moment when she first met Angel in the scene when Buffy was treating Angel’s wounds; Buffy tries to get Joyce upstairs and out of the way with the promise of hot tea served to her in bed and Joyce sees right through her (“That’s sweet. What did you do?”)  and then Angel, who is two centuries too old to be dealing with teenybopper hijinks, just walks into the room (with his shirt back on) and Buffy hems and haws and comes up with a quasi-believable lie about Angel tutoring her. Joyce suggests that it’s a rather late hour for tutoring and says she’ll be heading upstairs. Joyce is becoming more natural with every episode. I only wish they gave Kristine Sutherland more to do; she was great and I always liked watching her. But, back to Julie Benz. I’m not sure if Darla meant to kill Joyce and maybe just lie in wait for Buffy afterwards, or if she knew Angel was following her and she planned to share Joyce with him, or if she intended to set him up and make it look to Buffy like he attacked her mother. The first possibility makes the most sense if she doesn’t plan on using Angel to help kill Buffy; the second makes the most sense if she does, but then she would have had to know Angel was following her. But Darla hands Joyce to Angel when he arrives a moment later, and he’s tempted to drink her blood...and doesn’t. He does go into vamp-face mode though, just in time for Buffy to find him and kick him through a window.

Buffy grabs a crossbow and heads out to the Bronze because Angel’s sort of always around there, and prepares for the showdown. The most interesting thing about Buffy and Angel in this episode is that Angel doesn’t immediately try to convince Buffy that he didn’t attack Joyce. After she kicks him out the window he keeps his face in vamp mode and silently slinks off. And then at the Bronze he actually attacks Buffy--though in a subdued way, more like he’s trying to make her angry--and then stands there and allows her to shoot him. She misses wide, when he changes back to human form; she just can’t resist that face. Or maybe she loves him. “Why didn't you just attack me when you had the chance?” she says. “Was it a joke? To make me feel for you, and then...?” Angel tells Buffy about his curse, though leaving out the part about perfect happiness because I’m pretty sure the writers hadn’t invented that part yet. “You have no idea what it's like to have done the things I've done...and to care,” he says.

As Angel walks out of the darkness toward Buffy, and tells her how he killed with a song in his heart, you can see the future of this show, of these characters, taking shape: not just Buffy and Angel, but everyone, every single character, would be affected by this moment: by what Buffy does, and doesn’t do. Angel admits that he wanted to drink Joyce, that he wanted to kill Buffy. That he might walk like a man, but he isn’t one. But Buffy doesn’t kill him. Instead, she puts down her crossbow, and offers him her neck, and shows that she loves him. She wants him to be able to prove to himself that he can be a man, the kind of man she can love--and she’s willing to risk her life to give him the chance. And that moment changes everything. Willow, Giles, Xander, Tara, Faith, Darla, Spike, Drusilla, Cordelia, Wesley, everyone--Buffy’s decision to let Angel live here, and more than that, to trust him with her own life, will set them all on the path they’ll follow. Starting with Darla: when she attacks Angel and Buffy in the Bronze (with guns, which is something we wouldn’t see vampires doing again--it’s just too Blade) Angel kills her. Which proves to Buffy that he loves her: Buffy knows Darla made Angel, and that they spent lifetimes together, because Darla tells her before she attacks them. “Do you know what the saddest thing in the world is?” Darla says, before she opens fire. “To love someone who used to love you.”

That won’t be a problem for Buffy and Angel. They didn’t say the words but they proved their love here, which is more important than saying the words. Buffy risked her life for Angel, when she offered him her neck to show him the kind of man he could be, and Angel died a little for Buffy, when he killed the woman who made him. Buffy and Angel would spend years risking their lives, and dying a little, for each other; even in the last episode of the series, by which time Buffy had literally died, and had sex with Spike, and done a lot of other really questionable things, when Angel arrives to (in a nice nod to his origins) bring her some cryptic information, she falls into his arms and kisses him. Seven years on, after everything they had been through--after Angelus, and Faith, and Spike--they still loved each other. But they were star-crossed.

“You are full of love,” the First Slayer would tell Buffy, someday. “You love with all of your soul.” That’s what Buffy did in this episode. And at the end of the day, that’s what Buffy the Vampire Slayer was really about: it was about love, and all the things it can drive us to.