Buffy the Vampire Slayer
was a show that seemed to arrive fully-formed; it had a clear idea of
what it wanted to do and where it wanted to go, the kinds of stories it
wanted to tell, and how those stories would serve as vehicles to
explore the writers’ chosen themes and develop the characters.
Certainly part of this can be attributed to the fact that the show was
picked up as a mid-season replacement and Joss Whedon and his writers
were therefore able to produce all twelve episodes before any of them
even aired, with minimal interference from the WB, a brand new network
that was willing to take risks and allow the show to carve out its own
identity. But most of the credit for the first season’s
unwavering focus has to go to Joss Whedon himself; he’d been
kicking this story around for awhile, after all--he’d already
tried it as a movie five years before, and was heartbroken when the
movie up on the screen ended up bearing little resemblance to the story
in his script--and by the time he got his second chance at it he was
ready to hit the ground running. And that really is the most apt way to
summarize season one of Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
it hit the ground running. Season one set up the characters, moved them
steadily forward and focused on the themes it wanted to explore, and by
the end of episode twelve, we’d been given a complete story: it
was a story about a lot of things, but mainly it was about duty, and
sacrifice; about the things we can have, and the things we can’t
have, and the process of coming to accept it.
The premiere episode, “Welcome to the Hellmouth”, is a good
indicator of how the season would be designed; it does everything it
sets out to do, economically and efficiently. It opens with Darla
turning the tables on us: a boy brings her to a creepy high school
after dark to make out, she hears a loud noise, he consoles her, she
thinks maybe there’s someone in the building, he assures her
they’re alone, and then she turns into a vampire and kills him
with a big smile on her face. Welcome to the Hellmouth, where nothing
can be taken for granted, and conventional assumptions about gender
roles--especially women relegated to damsels in distress--will not only
be challenged but shattered. The episode goes on to introduce our main
characters, as well as the supporting cast and the villains, and gives
each of the four main characters enough time, and enough deftly-written
moments, for us to immediately grasp who they are in broad strokes and
to grasp their emerging conflicts as well. When Buffy is introduced,
she’s having a prophetic dream, seeing the Hellmouth, and her
destiny. When her mother drops her off at her new school we learn that
she was kicked out of the last one and that it’s caused some
friction in their relationship. When she meets Giles he immediately
recognizes her as the Slayer, but Buffy pretends to have no idea of
what he’s talking about and bolts away. She doesn’t want to
be the Slayer. She just wants a normal life. Willow looks and acts like
a stereotypical wallflower but we quickly find out that there is more
to her than there appears on the surface, when she shows signs of
confidence by putting the moves on a guy at the Bronze, for what
we’re led to believe is probably the first time in her life,
based solely on Buffy mentioning to her that in life we should seize
the moment. Xander and Giles aren’t explored as deeply--their
best moments come in part two, and this episode is focused mainly on
Buffy and Willow--but we still get a good sense of them here, from
Xander’s goofy brand of courage, his deep friendship with Willow,
and his clumsy crush on Buffy to Giles’ just slightly pompous
disdain for California teenagers and American culture in general and
his determination to take responsibility for fighting whatever the
Hellmouth throws at him. Angel is cryptic yet intriguing and the
chemistry between Boreanaz and Gellar is palpable.
Part two, “The Harvest”, doesn’t work as well as part
one; it got bogged down in exposition and plot mechanics, a lot of it
fairly clunky and hard to reconcile, and it also featured a howlingly
contrived dispatching of Luke, the Master’s top lieutenant, at
the end. But the Master is fleshed out here, as well as Darla and Luke,
and although Darla would have to wait until Angel got his own show for
her character to really grow into something special, and Luke is an
arrogant buffoon right up until he dies, the Master is a breath of
fresh air: a villain who shatters stereotypes, constantly undercutting
his own aura of menace with snide, sarcastic ruminations that had me
smiling. Although part two was something of a let-down, Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
even at this early stage, is about its characters first and its plots
second, and by the end of the initial two-parter, the blueprint for the
show is set: we have our four main characters, committed to the fight.
Willow is coming out of her shell and finding her confidence, Giles is
starting to become a little less rigid while remaining deadly serious
about his responsibilities, Xander is making doomed plans to sweep
Buffy off her feet while insisting that he be allowed to be part of the
fight, and Buffy, for her part, is willing to be the Slayer for the
moment, as long as she has some wiggle room to fit her life in around
the edges.
Our characters are set by the end of the first two-parter, and so is
our overarching theme: Buffy wants to be a normal girl. She
doesn’t want to embrace her destiny as the Slayer because she
wasn’t consulted. She wants to choose her own life. Being the
Slayer causes friction between Buffy and her mother, isolates her from
her friends, makes her a social outcast at school, monopolizes her time
and makes her feel separate from the world--like she’s not a part
of it. If Buffy’s going to fight to save the world she wants to
be able to live in it like a person too, she wants to be able to have
the things a regular person has. At the end of “The
Harvest” Buffy is willing to fight, now that she has some new
friends in Willow and Xander and Giles, but she still insists that her
destiny meet her halfway. If she can’t live life by her own
rules, she’ll at least bend the rules that have been thrust upon
her, and sometimes break them outright.
From this point forward, the season one episodes do three things: they
tell a variety of stories featuring a variety of threats, to
ensure the viewer that we won’t simply be dealing with the Master
and his vampires week after week; they continue to develop the core
cast, giving Willow and Xander showcase episodes of their own, as well
as (slowly) developing supporting characters such as Joyce and
Cordelia, and, finally, they build upon the theme for season one: Buffy
doesn’t want this responsibility. She doesn’t want to die.
She doesn’t want the job of saving the world if it means not
being able to have the things every other teenage girl takes for
granted. Though she fights the varied threats the Hellmouth throws at
her, she’s constantly searching for ways to fit a normal life in
at the same time. The conflict between her duties as the Slayer and her
need to have the things the rest of us take for granted will come to a
head in the final episode of the season, though it won’t end
there; it will be the central conflict of the series.
The first episode after the two-part premiere was “The
Witch”, a great little episode which in hindsight can be seen as
a representation of the whole series in microcosm, because it does
everything that Buffy the Vampire Slayer
would go on to do: it features solid character development, further
exploring Giles, Willow and Xander, as well as beginning to flesh out
Joyce; it hits the main theme again when Buffy insists on trying out
for the cheerleading squad over Giles’ objections in her
continuing quest for a normal life; it introduces an interesting
supporting character in Amy Madison (unfortunately her great potential
would go largely untapped as the seasons went on) and it also presented
Buffy with a different kind of threat--witchcraft--and as the various
antagonists Buffy faced would go on to do for the rest of the series,
the antagonist here signfied something deeper.
The fact that Sunnydale was built on a Hellmouth, an area of
“mystical convergence”, gave the writers carte blanche to
come up with any sort of foe they could imagine, and they always made
sure to vary the threats Buffy faced--much as The X-Files
gave us “Monster of the Week” episodes to keep the series
from becoming too heavily focused on the ongoing
extraterrestrial/government conspiracy threat, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
made sure to provide antagonists other than vampires--and most
importantly, these threats served as metaphors, highlighting the
various emotional issues facing the characters week after week. So, in
“The Witch”, we have Amy Madison, who is trying to follow
in her domineering mother’s footsteps, eventually being forced to
switch bodies with her mother so that her mother can live her life
through her; in “The Pack”, Xander and a group of Sunnydale
High bullies are possessed by hyena spirits, which allow them to serve
as a vehicle to explore the ruthless pack mentality high school kids
can exhibit as they ostracize those they perceive as inferior; and in
“Out of Mind, Out of Sight”, a girl who is routinely
ignored by everyone at school eventually becomes invisible.
"The Witch" was followed by “Teacher’s Pet”, which
continued to diversify the threats our heroes will face, presenting us
this time with a woman who is actually a giant praying mantis.
Unfortunately the episode is the one clunker of the season, and a
pretty bad one at that, with a contrived plot, a boring, obvious,
two-dimensional villain, and too many moments in which people had to
either act obtuse bordering on stupid (Xander) or make miraculous leaps
of deduction (Buffy) in order to further the story. There were a few
nice character moments for Buffy and Willow despite all this, but the
episode was meant to be a Xander story, and though it did deepen his
character, it really only served to highlight his stubbornness and his
refusal to see past his own feelings, and while these are valid
character traits, they aren’t exactly endearing, and my disdain
for Xander began with this episode. The Buffy and Willow moments save
this episode from being the worst the series produced, but it’s a
close shave.
“Never Kill a Boy On the First Date” brings us back to the
Master and his vampires, and sets the main story of the season in
motion, as the Master brings about the creation of the Anointed One by
causing the deaths of five innocent people. But the vampires are
incidental to the story, as it’s really a vehicle to further
explore Buffy’s attempts to carve out a normal life for herself;
this week, she does it by trying to go on a date. The date
doesn’t work out so well, but the fact that Giles almost gets
killed doing Buffy’s job when Buffy was trying to just have fun
serves to harden her resolve. She still wants a normal life, but she
knows she has responsibilities too, and she intends to live up to them.
“The Pack” was easily the most outrageous and disturbing
episode of the season and one of the most daring the series ever
produced; not only did they eat the principal, but Xander, under the
influence of a hyena spirit, tried to rape Buffy. Gutsy stuff, and
a good Xander-focused episode that makes up for “Teacher’s
Pet”, but although it gave us some great character moments with
Willow, revealing just how much damage Xander’s crush on Buffy
has done to Willow’s self-esteem, it took Xander’s
character in directions which I don’t think served him well.
Xander may have been possessed by a predatory spirit that affected his
judgment, but he was still Xander somewhere under there when he tried
to rape Buffy; his conversation with her during the scene reveals just
how jealous and resentful he is that Angel has her and he
doesn’t, and it makes the scene that much more disturbing, and
Xander himself that much darker.
Speaking of Angel, next up is “Angel”, which really set the
series on its course, revealing Angel’s story, fleshing out
Darla, further exploring the Master, giving us more insight into just
what makes Buffy tick, and hammering home the theme of the season: we
all have responsibilities, and sometimes they preclude us from being
able to have some of the things we want. Buffy wants Angel, and she
can’t have him: once she learns he’s a vampire they both
know it isn’t going to work. But Buffy is going to try anyway,
her responsibilities as the Slayer be damned. Because she loves Angel,
and she’s willing to risk everything for it, including her life.
Buffy knows what her destiny is, she knows what her responsibilities
are, but she’s going to do things her way. As a Slayer,
she’s a radical thinker, a revolutionary of sorts; not only will
she work within a group, but she’ll try to redeem her enemies,
and it will make her stronger.
The next block of episodes continue to vary the threats the gang will
face while further developing the core characters. “I Robot...You
Jane” gives us our first demon, as well as the delightful Jenny
Calendar, and also a pretty nice Willow episode that showed us how
lonely she is by having her fall prey to a demon who gives her the
attention (via internet chat) that Xander never has, while at the same
time showing that she possesses reserves of confidence and strength
which would serve her in good stead in the future, as she eventually
finds it within herself to reject the demon, and fight him. “The
Puppet Show” presents us with our most bizarre situation yet, as
Buffy has to help a demon hunter who was trapped in the body of a
puppet hunt down a demon who steals brains and hearts to take human
form, and also gave us a gem of a supporting character in Principal
Snyder, who, unlike the harmless Flutie, would prove to be a consistent
thorn in Buffy’s side and a significant threat, while “Out
of Mind, Out of Sight” pits Buffy against an invisible girl in
the most effective metaphor the show gave us all season.
But it was “Nightmares”, the best episode of the season,
that truly hit on all cylinders, achieving the hat trick of deepening
the characters, reinforcing the overall theme of the season, and giving
us an interestingly different kind of antagonist for the gang to deal
with: themselves. As a comatose boy’s psyche reaches out across
the world and plunges everyone into their own worst nightmares,
nightmares that will soon become reality if they aren’t stopped,
the episode allows us to see what Buffy is really afraid of: the
Slayer. She’s afraid being the Slayer isolates her, makes her an
outcast, a freak. Buffy and Giles both got to shine here, and seeing
their worst fears realized allowed us to learn a lot about both of
them, and to see exactly the kind of toll Buffy’s destiny takes
on her. The episode also managed to do something no other episode all
season could do, which is to be genuinely scary. “The Pack”
was disturbing because of Xander’s attempted rape of Buffy, but
when the Master is suddenly freed from his prison, walking the Earth
because it’s what Buffy fears, and he confronts Buffy and buries
her alive in a coffin, “Nightmares” is actually frightening.
It all comes to a head in “Prophecy Girl”, in which all the
plot threads are wrapped up and the characters are moved forward into
the next phase of their lives: Xander’s crush on Buffy, and the
pain it’s causing Willow, the Master’s plan to kill the
Slayer and finally free himself from his prison, and Buffy’s
refusal to embrace her destiny as the Slayer are all dealt with head-on
and given a satisfying resolution while leaving plenty of room for
future stories. First, Xander finally asks Buffy to the prom, and Buffy
rejects him. This then leads him to ask Willow to the prom as his
second choice, and Willow, tired of pining after someone who
can’t return her feelings, finally lets Xander go: she rejects
him too, and grows up a little, and finds a reservoir of strength and
confidence in herself in the process. And finally, Buffy finds out that
not only is she destined to die, but she’s destined to die now,
at the hands of the Master; and moreover, that destiny is unalterable.
Being the Slayer has taken nearly everything from her, and now she
finds out it demands her life as well, and it’s simply too much.
Faced with her own death, she quits. She lashes out at Giles and Angel,
and walks out. The moment when Buffy quits, the most important moment
and the best single scene of the season, is the kind of unflinchingly
honest, true-to-the-characters storytelling that would always be Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s strength.
Buffy quits, but that doesn’t last long; Willow discovers dead
bodies, the victims of a vampire attack, in the school itself, in a
room she visits every day, and is visibly shaken, realizing for the
first time that not only is she caught up in a war, but the good guys
are losing. Buffy consoles her, and in that moment she truly embraces
her destiny for the first time. She’s the Slayer; she’s the
only one who can do this. She’s the only one who can protect the
people she loves. And so she marches out to meet her destiny...and
because Buffy is a revolutionary, because she breaks the rules, she
dies but comes back to life: she fulfills the prophecy, but thwarts it
at the same time; she accepts her destiny, but changes it too.
If this were the end of the story, it would have been a great ending,
but luckily there was much more to come, and plenty of room for these
characters to grow, sometimes in startling directions. Buffy embraces
her destiny here, but trying to fit a normal life in around her duties
will be a constant area of concern; Xander realizes now that Buffy has
no interest in him romantically but that won’t stop him from
desiring her, and resenting Angel; Willow has found enough confidence
in herself to refuse to settle for being Xander’s second choice,
and she’s ready to move past him now; and Giles has realized that
his Slayer will require him to meet her halfway if they're going to be
able to work together, and although there will be occasional friction
between them due to their differing approaches to
problem-solving--Giles prefers an empirical approach, while Buffy makes
intuitive leaps--he will meet
her halfway. And of course we have Buffy’s burgeoning romance
with Angel now, as well as Cordelia finally showing signs of
personhood, Joyce beginning to set the empty platitudes aside when
dealing with her daughter, Jenny Calendar joining the gang, and
Principal Snyder looking for ways to cause trouble. There are
definitely more stories to tell here...
Buffy’s first season is remarkable in that it’s so assured,
it moves forward so confidently. It benefited from having a plan that
saw it through from the premiere to the last episode: stories it wanted
to tell, a theme it wanted to explore and definite directions it wanted
to take each of its characters in. While it’s not the best season
of the show--seasons two and three would reach much greater heights--it
set the tone, established the blueprint, and got its characters moving
forward while managing to tell some pretty good, and daring, and
thought-provoking stories at the same time, with a number of very good
episodes, at least one truly great episode, and only a single clunker
in the bunch. The acting was top-notch, the chemistry between the leads
was something special and the writers proved that they weren’t
interested in easy answers or trite observations. They wanted to get to
the heart of these people, not just the heroes but the villains too,
and they weren’t afraid of the dark. Not bad at all for a
midseason replacement based on a failed movie. And it would only get
better from here.
Best Episodes
1. “Nightmares”
2. “Out of Mind, Out of Sight”
3. “The Witch”
Best Villains
1. Darla in “Angel”
2. The Master in “Nightmares”
3. Marcie Ross in “Out of Mind, Out of Sight”
Best Non-Villain Guest Characters
1. Amy Madison in “The Witch”
2. Sid the Dummy in “The Puppet Show”
3. Billy Palmer in “Nightmares”
Scenes To Replay Forever
1. Buffy
throws a temper tantrum--and some books--at Giles when she find out
she’s destined to die, and then decides to quit being the Slayer, in
“Prophecy Girl”
2. Buffy, Willow and Xander’s dramatic reading from Oedipus Rex for the talent show in “The Puppet Show”
3. Willow rejects Xander’s invitation to the prom in “Prophecy Girl”
4. The Master buries Buffy alive in "Nightmares"
5. Principal Snyder introduces himself to Buffy, Willow and Xander by informing them that although his predecessor, Mr. Flutie, may have gone in for all
that touchy-feely relating nonsense, he was eaten, and that they're all in his world now, in "The Puppet Show"
Buffy Slays Me When:
1. Buffy
offers her neck to Angel in order to give him a chance to prove to
himself that he can be more than just a monster in “Angel”
2. Buffy hides her face in shame when she realizes she has become a vampire in “Nightmares”
3. Buffy tells
the Master to “save the hypnosis crap for the tourists”
after being brought back to life in “Prophecy Girl”
4. Buffy dances through the kitchen in her cheerleading outfit singing "Macho Man" in “The Witch”
5. Buffy tells Giles his calculations of the exact moment the Anointed
One will arise are “bad calculations” because they’ll
interfere with her date with Owen in “Never Kill a Boy On the
First Date”
Willow is Just the Most Heartbreakingly Cute Person Ever When:
1. Willow
gives Moloch the Corrupter a smackdown with a fire extinguisher after
he toyed with her feelings in “I Robot...You Jane”
2. Willow
wonders if there might be nothing wrong with Xander at all, and perhaps
he's just gotten sick of her, and that's why he's suddenly being so
mean to her, in "The Pack"
3. Willow realizes that if it’s a human being who’s going
around stealing hearts then it could be anyone in the school--it might
even be her! (It isn’t though) in “The Puppet Show”
4. Willow
hypothesizes that one possible reason someone could want to magically
blind Cordelia is “Because they met her?” And then hastily adds, “Did I
say that?” in "The Witch"
5. Willow
agrees with Buffy that Ms. French's fashion sense screams "predator",
and that she probably is evil (“It’s the shoulder
pads”) in "Teacher's Pet"
This Season, Xander Really Annoyed The Hell Out Of Me When He:
1. Asked Willow to the prom after Buffy rejected him in “Prophecy Girl”
2. Tried to rape Buffy while whining about how she likes her men dangerous in "The Pack"
3. Refused to
believe Buffy and accused her of just being jealous when she told him,
straight out, that Ms. French is a giant insect in "Teacher's Pet"
4. Somehow managed to scare Angel with a cross in "Prophecy Girl"
5. Hung up on Willow after she rejected him, even though she was just calling to find out if he was okay, in "Prophecy Girl"
Cheesiest Special Effect: The giant praying mantis in “Teacher’s Pet”
Worst Episode: “Teacher’s Pet”
Worst Villain: Ms. French in “Teacher’s Pet”
Worst Non-Villain Guest Character: Owen in “Never Kill a Boy On the First Date”
Whedon Has Simply Gone Too Far: Killing Doctor Gregory in “Teacher's Pet”
