Buffy the Vampire Slayer returns for its second season with a pretty nice episode that falls short of greatness due to a major plot contrivance, but it does reestablish the template for the show: first and foremost, Buffy is about characters. Joss Whedon, who wrote this one, could have gone in a different direction with this story; he could have given us a rehash of season one’s two-part premiere, which introduced the cast and the Big Bad for that season, along with lots of sassy quips and a cool adventure that propelled us into the arc for the season, the battle against the Master. A lot of shows would have gone that route; television thrives on formula and to Whedon it must have looked like he had latched onto a winning formula after his little mid-season replacement got picked up for a full second season (though sadly, still with a pitifully small budget. The 16-millimeter film they shot on can be painful to watch; it’s so grainy that it almost looks like the DVD’s weren’t mastered properly. But nope, they used 16-millimeter, for some reason which escapes me. Did it really save them that much money? Or if it was an artistic choice it’s a curious one because certain scenes really do look bad, but I suppose the crystal clarity of DVD might be exacerbating it and the Buffy producers weren’t anticipating DVD releases in 1997.) Whedon could have simply repeated himself with this episode, but he chose not to. He does reintroduce the cast here, giving each of them, from Willow and Xander all the way down to Jenny and Snyder, an opportunity to show us where they are now, but instead of introducing the next Big Bad and looking ahead to season two’s big story (which wouldn’t even begin in earnest until episode thirteen) he looks back, showing us where we’ve been, and making us realize that there’s still some unfinished business to attend to, by giving us a compelling glimpse into Buffy’s fears, as the Anointed One and his vampire followers attempt to bring the Master back to life. In a way, this episode really would establish the Buffy “formula”, which would always be more than just what it appeared on the surface (one part drama + one part comedy + one part adventure + one part romance + one part angst, mix well and serve quippy): the inner lives of these characters would always be of far more concern to the writers than the threats that came from outside.

The premise of the episode is simple, and ingenious: Buffy may have defeated the Master at the end of last season but she’s still afraid. She died, and came back to life, and the experience was traumatic. The show went on hiatus during the summer, returning for the fall season as is the norm, and Buffy herself is just getting back from summer vacation too, as school is about to start. But she spent her summer trying to get as far away as possible from her life in Sunnydale, and her Slayer duties too; she spent the summer with her father, who is not yet a deadbeat Dad but will be eventually, in Los Angeles. As the episode opens Willow and Xander are wandering around, bored; when Buffy left she seemed to have taken all the fun with her. And all the vampires too, because Willow and Xander haven’t seen a single one all summer. Willow mentions that Buffy sent her a couple of postcards, but there was no contact after that. There’s a cute moment when Xander taps Willow’s nose with his ice cream cone, and nearly licks it off; he gently wipes it away with a napkin instead, and caresses Willow’s cheek, and nearly kisses her. Willow, big sap that she is, wants the kiss too, but since this is Sunnydale they happen to be wandering around near a graveyard, and a vampire interrupts the happy moment.

Luckily Buffy arrives in the nick of time, but the attentive viewer can already tell there’s something wrong: there’s something a bit too mannered about her confident pose after she dispatches the vampire, almost as if she’s trying to convince herself that she's confident. And when Willow and Xander point out the spot in the graveyard where they buried the Master’s bones over the summer, Buffy has a strange look in her eyes when she glances at it. Her conversation with Willow and Xander also seems slightly off; when Willow asks Buffy when she got back, Buffy replies, “Just now. Dad drove me down. And I figured you two losers would be getting into some kind of trouble.” Buffy was joking of course when she called them losers, but it’s not the kind of joke Buffy would make; it sounds like something Cordelia would say. When Willow asks Buffy if she’s seen Giles, Buffy replies, “Why would I do that? I’ll see him at school,” with an edge to her voice, as if the question is not only ridiculous but even annoying. In the next scene, when Buffy’s father is bringing her luggage back to her room, he talks to Joyce about how distant Buffy seemed all summer. “There was no connection,” Hank says. “The more time we spent together, the more I felt like she was nowhere to be seen.”

From this point on the episode reintroduces the cast, and allows Buffy to interact with them, and it becomes increasingly obvious as these scenes progress that something is wrong with Buffy. When Buffy and Willow and Xander run into Giles and Jenny at school the next day, Willow mentions the vampire Buffy killed and Giles wonders out loud why the vampires have suddenly returned. “You’re the Watcher,” Buffy says. “I just work here.” And Buffy is suddenly raring to get back to her training even though Giles is willing to give her a few days to settle in, which is very unlike her. During their training Buffy kicks the crap out of both Giles and a practice dummy, continuing to attack the dummy after Giles tells her to stop; when it finally breaks into pieces, Buffy, breathing hard, mutters, “I’m ready. Whatever they’ve got coming next, I’m ready. Yeah." But again, it sounds like she’s trying to convince herself of it.

We get a big clue about what’s bothering Buffy in the very next scene when she’s daydreaming in the school lounge and Willow and Xander show up, and then Giles joins them with a theory about the reason behind the new vampire activity. Up to this point it’s a scene that would have been right at home in any of the episodes that came before, but it takes a left turn in a hurry when Giles suddenly backhands Buffy and starts strangling her, as Willow and Xander watch, unconcerned. Whedon is fond of these sorts of moments, shocking the audience with something so beyond the pale that we never could have imagined seeing it, and this particular motif of his can be traced all the way back to the very first scene of the very first episode, when Darla, the lovely blonde-haired girl we think is going to be a victim, instead suddenly changes to a vampire and kills the boy she’s with. By the time Buffy and Angel had completed their runs these Whedon “Gotcha!” moments had become rather routine, to the point of nearly being trite (the moment in Angel's "A Hole in the World" when Fred suddenly coughed up blood and collapsed in the middle of singing “You Are My Sunshine” stands out to me as the one where Whedon officially went to the “Gotcha!” well one time too often.) As Buffy claws at Giles’ face, Giles suddenly changes: he becomes the Master. Obviously this is a dream, and Buffy does indeed wake up in her bed. But Buffy’s dreams have a way of coming true... 

By this point we know what Buffy is afraid of, if it wasn’t already obvious before, and that her swagger to this point has all been for show, and now Buffy’s fear begins to spill over; what started as out-of-character remarks and an awkward moment or two takes a definite turn for the bitchy when Buffy proceeds to alienate each and every one of her friends. When she wakes up in bed Angel is standing over her; for most girls I’d imagine it would be creepy when a guy sneaks into their bedroom through the window, but Buffy is used to creepiness and besides, Angel looks like David Boreanaz. “Is that it? Is that everything?” Buffy says dismissively, after he tries to warn her that the Annoying One is up to something. “Y’know, ’cuz you woke me up from a really good dream.” He tells her he missed her, and she doesn’t respond. By the time she whispers “I missed you,” he’s gone. Buffy is aloof with Joyce when Joyce takes her to school the next day, not even bothering to answer her when Joyce asks, “Is there the slightest chance that if I asked you what was wrong you would tell me?” When Cordelia sees Buffy with Willow and Xander in the hallway at school and actually tries to be nice, Buffy insults her. And then comes the worst moment: The Sexy Dance.

The Sexy Dance is rather notorious in Buffy fandom; it’s the moment when, at the Bronze, Buffy dances with Xander to make Angel jealous. (They dance to Cibo Matto, a Whedon band I like but whose appearance in the show was trumpeted by the characters as the greatest thing since sliced bread and which made the whole exercise feel like an awkward product placement of sorts, and it had the same effect on me as if all the characters were suddenly eating Nestle’s Crunch bars and saying, “Wow, these Nestle’s Crunch bars are great! Can’t get enough Nestle’s Crunch!” Cibo Matto’s cool, but they’re not U2 or the Rolling Stones, most people don’t know who they are in fact, and they’re certainly not visiting royalty either. The fact the show treated them as such just seemed rather desperate to me, as if the producers were really hoping Cibo Matto would somehow give them a ratings boost. Or maybe Whedon just really likes Cibo Matto. Anyway. Just wanted to get that off my chest.) So Buffy dances with Xander, and it’s bad for a whole bunch of reasons; first, Willow adorably dips her nose into her ice cream in a vain attempt to get Xander to kiss her, but no such luck, as they’re discussing why Buffy has been acting so bitchy lately and Xander is once again back into Buffy Obsessing Mode and he doesn’t take the bait. It would be nice if Willow would stop being a sap, especially after she told Xander to take a flying leap when he invited her to the prom as his second choice in the last episode of season one, but her backsliding here is understandable, as Buffy’s been gone all summer and Xander really did almost kiss her. And then Buffy acts callous and even cruel to Angel when he shows up asking her what she’s afraid of, telling him, “Could you contemplate getting over yourself for a second? There’s no ‘us’. Look, Angel, I’m sorry if I was supposed to spend the summer mooning over you, but I didn’t. I moved on. To the living.” Ouch. Her words were chosen specifically to hurt Angel and none of what she said is true, and it was probably the most intentionally cruel thing Buffy has ever done to this point on the series. But Buffy tops it immediately, asking Xander to dance, and teasing him as they dance, moving in slow circles around him, and rubbing her body against him, dancing with him the way she would dance with someone she was truly interested in romantically. Xander is noticeably uncomfortable the whole time: he’s dumb but not that dumb. He knows he’s being teased and it really is cruel on Buffy’s part. “Did I ever thank you for saving my life?” Buffy whispers sultrily. “No,” Xander responds, awkwardly. “Don’t you wish I would?” Buffy says, and saunters away from him, leaving him alone in the middle of the dance floor.

The scene is notorious because this isn’t Buffy: this isn’t the goofy, quippy, big-hearted girl we’ve all come to love. It’s also notorious because Sarah Michelle Gellar is incredibly sexy in this scene. I would pay a million dollars to have a Sexy Dance with Sarah Michelle Gellar (as long as she wasn’t mean to me.) But there’s more to the moment than there appears to be on the surface. It’s not just that Buffy is scared and she’s trying to make herself feel confident in her power, confident in her sexiness. She’s trying to distance herself from her friends, cut them all out of her life. She’s feels she’s separate from them; she’s the Slayer. And she’s trying to separate herself from them all now. It isn’t a concern for their safety that prompts Buffy’s behavior and it isn’t a death wish either. It’s simple arrogance, and it doesn’t stem from the events of this episode; it isn’t an aberration that will go away once this particular adventure is over. It’s part of who Buffy is. This character flaw--and it is a flaw--would be with her until the end of the series, and by season seven it would overwhelm her character; by then she had become so thoroughly self-absorbed that I found her nearly impossible to like. “I feel like I’m worse than anyone,” Buffy said to Holden, the psych major vampire in season seven's "Conversations With Dead People". “Honestly, I’m beneath them. My friends, my boyfriends. I feel like I’m not worthy of their love. ‘Cuz even though they love me, it doesn’t mean anything because their opinions don’t matter. They don’t know. They haven’t been through what I’ve been through. They’re not the Slayer. I am. Sometimes I feel...this is awful...I feel like I’m better than them. Superior.”

That point hasn’t arrived yet; I still like Buffy for now. And hey, the kid really does have it tough. And she is a kid, remember: she’s sixteen at the moment. But the seeds of who she will become are here in this episode; when Buffy found out she was meant to die in "Prophecy Girl", the last episode of the first season, something changed in her. She accepted her destiny, and thwarted it in a way, but Buffy still felt like she had been given a raw deal, that the effort she had put in to being the Slayer hadn’t been properly rewarded; she felt totally alone. It’s a hard thing, carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders, and as the series progressed, somewhere along the way--and it's already begun in this episode--Buffy decided she wouldn’t have time for other people’s feelings and that her own feelings would have to come first. Because she was superior to other people. Because that’s just the raw deal life gave her. (Forget the fact that Willow is actually more powerful than Buffy by season six; Buffy would think she’s superior to Superman. Because, y’know, he just doesn’t understand her burden. Do you see me sighing in annoyance?) Buffy’s feelings come first here, in this episode, and they’ll come first from this point forward. I submit that we lost Buffy when she died in "Prophecy Girl"; the Buffy who came back was changed to such a degree that she isn’t the same character. And I’m saying, here and now and for the record, that it was a mistake on the part of the writers. Yes, heroes have flaws, and they have problems, and they have to fight through them and make mistakes along the way. It’s how they grow. And bravo to Whedon for having the guts to really explore a flawed hero. But there comes a point, when you break something to see what makes it work, that you realize you can’t put it back together again. Watching this scene, watching Buffy dance with Xander, watching her use Xander and discard him, I saw the Buffy from season seven staring back at me, an evolution of the character that took her down the wrong path, that squandered her potential. 

Cordelia is opening up as Buffy is shutting down: she gives Buffy some free advice (just before being kidnapped) after Buffy leaves the Bronze, telling her to get over whatever it is that’s bothering her before she loses all her friends (a group among which Cordy doesn’t count herself). It’s a nice moment for Cordy, who is now (yay!) an actual person (albeit still bitchy. But at least she’s believably bitchy, instead of a cartoon.) The next day Buffy tells the gang that she visited the Master's grave and his bones are gone. Oops. I wonder if this will make Buffy feel bitchy? “Look, this is Slayer stuff, okay? Could we have just a little less from the civilians, please?” Buffy barks at Willow when Willow tries to join the conversation. Okay, guess the answer’s yes. Later in the library when the gang is trying to put a plan together, a rock is tossed through the window, with a note wrapped around it and held in place by Cordy’s bracelet, instructing Buffy to come to the Bronze to save her. The gang wants to help, and Willow mentions that this is obviously a trap and maybe it isn’t such a good idea to do what the bad guys want you to do, and Buffy informs them all that she’s tired of having to fight and protect them at the same time and, basically, that they can all screw. She follows that up by picking a fight with Angel for the hell of it on the way to the Bronze, while Angel refuses to take the bait because he’s, y’know, a grownup? And, thankfully, we’ve gotten our full Buffy bitchiness quota for this episode. Actually the scene between Buffy and Angel here really does make Buffy come off as a childish, spoiled brat while Angel comes across as a responsible, caring adult. Gellar and Boreanaz still have their crackling chemistry, but the scene made me think, for the first time, that Buffy really is much too young and immature for him: she’s a girl. He’s a man.

As much as Buffy’s bitchiness was occasionally hard to watch I do applaud what this episode was trying to do; it was an honest exploration of Buffy’s fear, and her snotty, callous, self-absorbed behavior, while portraying her in an ugly light, was a valid, though bitchy, reaction to her feeling overwhelmed by her circumstances. Unfortunately Whedon proves he isn’t infallible by serving up a massive plot contrivance that really does damage the episode. The vampires want Buffy at the Bronze so they can kidnap the rest of the gang while she’s away, as they need the rest of the gang for the spell to revive the Master. Fine. But they leave one vampire there at the Bronze to laugh at Buffy about it, and Buffy has Angel guard the vamp while she runs back to the library to be bitched out by Xander, who has been smacked around by the vampires who took Willow and Giles (and Jenny, previously) while Buffy was gone. “I don’t know what your problem is, what your issues are,” Xander says. “But as of now, I officially don’t care. If you’d worked with us for five seconds, you could’ve stopped this.” I’m on Xander’s side here (for the moment, and don’t expect it to be a regular thing) but the boy really is a poor debater. Buffy’s whole point before was that the gang was deadweight that she had to constantly worry about protecting, and all Xander is doing by saying she should have stayed to protect them is proving her point for her. He also adds, “If they hurt Willow, I’ll kill you.” Which is a nice sentiment. Too bad he never thinks about Willow except when she’s in mortal danger. Anyway, time for the plot contrivance: the vampire the bad guys left in the Bronze for no reason except, I suppose, to laugh at Buffy, is interrogated by Buffy (Buffy shoves her cross into the vampire’s mouth and down its throat--pretty hardcore) and reveals where the ceremony to revive the Master is taking place. See the plot hole? There was no reason that vampire had to be at the Bronze. The vampire is there because the plot needs someone to tell Buffy where the ceremony is taking place. If the Annoying One had simply ordered all his vamps to lay low while the ceremony was being performed so Buffy couldn’t find any vamps anywhere in town who could tell her where it was happening, Willow, Giles, Jenny and Cordy would have been dead and the Master would be back. If they had to leave one vampire at the Bronze--to keep Buffy busy, perhaps, even though it only would’ve bought them about a minute, as that’s how long it would take Buffy to kill it--they could have, at the very least, not told that particular vampire where the ceremony was going to occur, so the vampire couldn’t be forced to tell Buffy. But, nope. The vamp spills the beans, Buffy and Angel arrive at the ceremony just in time, they make short work of the Annoying One’s redshirts, and Buffy smashes the Master’s bones to powder, and cries, and Angel hugs her...and it’s over.

But it isn’t. This episode not only reestablishes the template for Buffy but it establishes a new template for Buffy Summers: from here on in, her burden is going to weigh heavier and heavier upon her. She’ll have plenty of good days and she’ll save plenty of lives, and she’ll be cute and snarky and heroic too. But something is missing from her character now. We lost it, at the end of season one, and it’s not coming back. Next season Buffy will leave Faith to wither on the vine, because she just can’t be bothered to care: once again, she’ll be thinking about her own problems, not anyone else’s. And it will nearly be disastrous. And it will get worse from there.

Having said all that, looking at "When She Was Bad" in isolation and not judging it by what’s yet to come (which really wouldn’t be fair), it’s a solid episode that strikes out into uncharted territory with all the guts we’ve come to expect from Joss Whedon, and from this series. I do think the writers went too far into those dangerous waters here, and that in the end it caused us to lose more than we gained. And this episode could have been bumped up from solid to great if not for the massive plot contrivance. But at the end of the day, Buffy is about characters: like her or dislike her (I like her, for now) Buffy herself is a fascinating one to explore. "When She Was Bad" delves deep, and doesn’t shrink from what it finds.