Maybe I spent too much time girding
myself, but these episodes aren’t nearly as bad as I was led to believe. By no
stretch are they perfect, straining with budgets and how to adequately render
an action scene (good thing old Doctor adventures prepared me, because the
mantis would fit right in fighting the poor, budget-deprived Sixth), and there
are some embellishments and tones that don’t quite work (the pack is given a
bit more ominous slowmo than is strictly necessary). But they’re eminently
watchable such that they aren’t making me impatient. They’re a little
primitive, but fun and enjoyable.
Particularly primitive are Xander
and Willow. Xander’s early crush on Buffy, to my memory gets alluded to a few
times, but I’d never seen it in practice. As far as I’d seen, Xander was
entangled with Cordy or Faith or Anya, and an infatuation he had with Buffy was
a distant memory. Hol-ee shit is he obnoxious about it here in a transparent
and petty and frequently bitter way that I found really surprising, and helped
me understand why some segments of fandom always hated him. And that’s before
he sexually assaults her while high on hyena spirit (thematic territory the
show would have a spotty history navigating).
Willow is, well, very different and
much stranger. Given where I came into the show, not only was Willow not into
Xander, she was an out lesbian. The creators have always been quite open about
how that came about, how it wasn’t particularly planned from the start, and
even how they nearly decided Xander should be the one to come out, hence as we’ll
see later, it plays for the character as a late-blooming realization rather
than something you can comb through her past relationships looking for clues. Yet
her reluctance and distant pining, while congruent with her establishment as
shy and retreating, also do seem to foreshadow that later development—she can
safely yearn for him because it’s obviously never going to happen (in theory,
at least).
What gets on solid footing straight
away in these episodes, beyond Buffy’s characterization, is the relationship
between she and Giles. One of my speculations is that amid all the soapy storms
of everyone’s evolving love lives, the thing that kept both show and character
moored was Buffy’s relationship with Giles. And the fact that the first real
triumph of an episode, “Never Kill a Boy on the First Date,” really focuses on
them isn’t convincing me I’m wrong. While it would have been easy for the two
to lapse into churlish and short-sighted rebellion and block-headed
paternalism, they don’t. Buffy wants some semblance of a normal life, and Giles
wants her to keep her responsibilities in mind, and they both make what they
think a reasonable concessions to each other. Of course, those concessions
prove a bit unworkable, but they don’t lapse into petty recriminations—she values
and respects his knowledge and guidance, and which he is eager to provide. If
that was all that came from this era, it would more than justify its existence.
And the story of the Master
progresses as we meet the Anointed One, who will hold a key place in Buffy
lore, though probably not the one they had planned at the time.
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