So what exactly makes a bad episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

Buffy was a great show, but it had its share of clunkers. That’s not much of a criticism; I’m not sure there’s ever been a television show that produced a comparable number of episodes that didn’t drop the ball once in awhile. There are episodes most fans of Buffy agree are bad, such as “Teacher’s Pet”, or “Beer Bad”, but those two examples just highlight the problem of determining exactly what it is that causes an episode of Buffy to fail. Because, although I do think “Teacher’s Pet” is a rotten episode (nearly, but not quite, the worst the series ever produced), I actually really like “Beer Bad”. (Most of the fan base disagrees with me on that, but we can get into a debate when I start reviewing season four.) So what exactly makes an episode bad?

Well, a bunch of factors could play a role. Bad acting is always a possibility, though on Buffy, that never happened with the regular cast. They weren’t all equally talented--I always thought David Boreanaz and Nicholas Brendon were limited, and Boreanaz could be rather wooden at times--but the cast’s chemistry, and the brilliance of Sarah Michelle Gellar and Alyson Hannigan, made up for a lot of sins there and all the actors were at least competent. Bad writing is a more general term; it could manifest itself in a lot of ways. So far, having reviewed the first season of Buffy and starting in on the second, I would say bad writing has a tendency to manifest itself on this series as lazy shortcuts designed to get the characters from point A of the plot to point B: contrivances, plot holes. But as a general rule, the writers have always tried, thus far, to at least give us an interesting theme and some good character moments with each episode. Weak production values might be an indicator of a sub-par episode, and often on this series the production values (special effects, props, makeup, prosthetics, sets) aren’t going to look like a million bucks because the producers simply didn’t have the money to spend, but that’s simply a matter of budget and you either manage to overlook it or you watch some other series. Direction might be off; maybe a director doesn’t squeeze everything he or she can from the cast, or maybe the cinematography might be wanting. But those seem like minor concerns for this show and I don’t think the quality of the directing or the camerawork could ever really sink an episode of Buffy, simply because the series is so writer-driven. Stunt work is often just not good--not because the fights don’t look great but because the stuntwoman they use for Sarah doesn’t look anything like her, but that’s just something I grit my teeth and get through, and it could never sink an episode for me.

Okay. So what’s my criteria for deciding an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is lousy?

Well, there are a bunch of ways an episode could disappoint me: I don’t like plot contrivances because they reek of laziness and they take me out of the story, and the writers on this show--yes, even Whedon--have a tendency to resort to them. (There’s a doozy in the second half of the series premiere and another doozy at the end of season seven’s finale, both written by Whedon, so there you go: contrivance is a bad habit this series never really broke itself out of.) I also don’t like character moments that don’t feel true to me, but most of that stuff is far off yet; I won’t actively start being annoyed at these characters for making ridiculously wrong choices until season five or so. Oh, here’s something else I don’t like: being bored.

The worst thing an episode of Buffy--or really any television show, or any movie, or any book--can do, is bore me. If an episode annoys me because there’s some lazy plotting going on, but there’s enough other interesting stuff happening that I still want to watch to see how it turns out, then the episode might be flawed, but it’s not horrible either. “When She Was Bad” was a case in point. It featured a ridiculous contrivance near the end but everything else was still pretty fun. It wasn’t boring; I liked watching it.

But “Some Assembly Required” was boring, and I really didn’t like watching it. It wasn’t really offensive in any way; no one acted out of character (though Giles did veer dangerously close when he tried to get out of helping Buffy to go on a date with Jenny, but in fairness Buffy really is the one who’s supposed to be doing the work as far as he’s concerned), and although there was an annoying plot contrivance, it was relatively minor (at least, compared to some of the other contrivances this series expects us to swallow.) And there were a few good character moments too, which saved it from being my least favorite episode of the series. But it still just wasn’t any good, for the simple reason that I found myself not caring about it at all and wishing it would hurry up and end. Say what you want about “Beer Bad”? But it was entertaining. And in the end, that’s what this is about, right?

“Some Assembly Required” bored me for a lot of reasons; mostly, it just came up short, failing to really gel in a bunch of different areas. It was less than the sum of its parts. When I was gearing up to write this review, I forgot the name of the episode, and had to look it up, and I went on to repeatedly forget the name of the episode about every five minutes after that. That’s a sign that the episode really didn’t make an impression on me. I just didn’t care enough to remember it. It’s not detestable; it’s just completely forgettable.

The basic story is that Chris, a shy, sort of male version of Willow except unlike her he’s not interesting in the slightest, lost his older brother Daryl, a football star, when Daryl died in a rock-climbing accident. And since this is Sunnydale Chris decided to bring his brother back to life, with the help of his friend Eric, who is a creep. Now that FrankenDaryl is alive again he wants a girlfriend. So Chris and Eric steal girls’ bodies from their graves, cut them up, and reassemble them, and Buffy just thinks that’s gross and objectionable and deserving of a kick in the face. 

Right away, I have problems. First, the characters: Eric really is nothing more than a little creep; there’s nothing else to him. He’s introduced running around and getting in girls’ faces at school taking pictures of them--he photographs Willow, Cordy and Buffy--and he’s the one who first suggests graduating from using dead bodies for their experiments to capturing live ones, and killing them. He sings “My Girl” when he cuts the pictures up and pastes them together with other pictures of assorted body parts and he grins like a weasel when he does it and I wouldn’t have minded if he was tossed out of an airplane. Bad guys should inspire us to dislike them but they should be characters too, not caricatures, and there simply wasn’t anything to Eric other than creepiness. He wants to build Daryl a girl just because. He wants to kill girls to do it just because. Is he an ambitious scientist type who wants to create life to expand the boundaries of human knowledge? Is he an embittered guy who couldn’t get dates so he hates women now? Who knows? The writers don’t seem to care. There’s a hint in the dialogue that he isn’t very well-liked at school, but that’s not anywhere near enough of an explanation for his actions.

And then there’s Chris and Daryl. Chris didn’t annoy me particularly; his character was dutifully set up, his motivation was explored. He simply didn’t make an impression on me at all. Guest actors are important because they really do often carry the plot, and if you cast a mediocre one, it damages the episode. I thought the actor playing Chris sleepwalked through the episode and I never really believed his emotions. He didn’t seem like he was actually there in any of the scenes. Eric was a creep, but he was a convincing one at least; Chris was a non-entity. Daryl is a different problem. We’re told he was Cordy’s boyfriend and she was really depressed when he died, but frankly, the guy they cast is nowhere near Cordy’s league and I never believed for a second that she ever dated him. A worse problem is that the theme for the episode--we all need somebody, and no one wants to be alone--ultimately has to be carried by Daryl. He was brought back to life, without his consent (in fact, Chris says that Daryl told him it was a mistake to bring him back when he was first revived) and now that he’s here, he wants a girl. That’s fine. But the guy is an idiot jock, with no subtlety, no shading. He’s the guy we see in the background at keggers, not the guy who carries an episode and delivers on the theme for us. The actor did an okay job playing an idiot jock but the character should have been more than that. In the end, when he stayed in the burning lab, hugging the incomplete body of his intended FrankenGirlfriend and shouting “Mine!” I found it laughable, not poignant. I suppose they were going for a Frankenstein type with Daryl, someone primitive and powerful, but Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein was able to be primitive and powerful while at the same time showing us the gentle, tragic soul he carried inside him. Daryl simply doesn’t measure up.

And then we have the experiment itself, reanimating a body. This annoyed me to no end, because it’s simply not possible. If they were raising the body magically somehow I wouldn’t have objected--Hellmouth, area of mystical convergence, yadda yadda--but they’re doing it based on scientific principles which don’t actually exist. I’d call it a contrivance of the highest order that two high school kids would be capable of this, but since it’s the whole plot of the episode it really does go well beyond contrivance. I can ignore it--I guess I have to--but Buffy isn’t set in the 24th century. Buffy isn’t Star Trek. It’s set in the real world, with the addition of magic and vampires and demons. Not super-science. Unfortunately, the lab guys who built Moloch his robot body in “I Robot...You Jane” were the start of a trend on this series, so now Sunnydale is not only an area of mystical convergence but it’s also apparently the U.S.S. Enterprise. Willow’s line, when she learns what Chris and Eric are up to, just makes it worse: “I still don't get how Chris could do it,” she says. “I mean, arresting the cell deterioration is one thing, but...maybe an electrical current combined with an adrenaline boost...” Now not only are Chris and Eric capable, somehow, of doing the scientifically impossible, but Willow is coming up with theories explaining why it could happen. She’s doing that because the writers realized the idea of high school kids being able to reanimate the dead was about as ridiculous as high school kids permanently eliminating gravity from the universe and so they needed to make it a little more plausible by dragging Willow into it to point out that, yes, it’s far-fetched, but maybe...

Actually, maybe not, Willow. In fact, definitely not.

Speaking of contrivances, a not-fatal but still extremely annoying one is the fact that Chris and Eric just happen to leave smoking gun evidence of their activities in their lockers for the gang to find. Chris leaves books with titles like “Mortician's Desk Reference” and “Robicheaux's Guide to Muscles and Tendons”, as well as a newspaper folded over to the page featuring an article about the three girls whose bodies they stole. For his part Eric has a collage hung up of a woman made out of parts taken from different pictures. And these guys are smart enough to create new life? Maybe they could have just hung up a sign saying “We did it.”

Another problem I had with this episode is that it really isn’t about our cast. They’re dealing with an outside threat here, and while their own romantic lives impinge on the plot--Buffy and Angel trying to figure out where they go from here, Giles and Jenny just starting their journey, Cordy beginning to see Xander in a new way--it feels shoehorned in and it isn’t enough. Buffy and Angel and Giles and Jenny were the meat here and there was precious little of it and the story of Daryl and Chris simply bored me. I didn’t care about their family; I didn’t care that Daryl died young and Chris is depressed and his mother is an emotional wreck who watches videotapes of Daryl’s old football games all day. I didn’t care because the actor playing Chris never once moved me and Daryl’s character was essentially a big buffoon. The moments with Buffy and Angel and Giles and Jenny were like little bursts of oxygen to a drowning man.

So let’s see, what did I like? Well, Buffy and Angel talking abut the Sexy Dance was nice because it shows that the writers are committed to building their relationship credibly and not glossing over anything. I thought Jenny was delightful in all her scenes, especially when Giles fumblingly tries to ask her out but doesn’t quite manage it, and Jenny interrupts to just matter-of-factly ask him out. I like how Willow and Xander saw that Jenny and Giles were trying to enjoy their first date and so they decided to join them. The dialogue, in the Scooby scenes, was pretty good (Cordy had the best line of the episode when the gang invited her to help out: “Darn, I have cheerleader practice tonight. Boy, I wish I knew we were gonna be digging up dead people sooner. I would've canceled.”)

But it was all too little, too late, because the science was preposterous, the story of Daryl’s tragic family was boring, the actor playing Chris failed to make any of it remotely interesting, Eric was a one-dimensional moustache-twirling villain, Daryl was simply the wrong sort of character to explore the theme of loneliness, and the writers resorted to a plot contrivance to put the gang on the trail of the bad guys. The bottom line: I didn’t care about this. I was bored. There were a few nice character moments, but the episode simply failed to hold my interest at all and I really don’t want to ever see it again. Swing and a miss.