Well, I gave Xander’s “growing up and out” episode a solo review, so I felt I had to do the same for Willow’s. Also, I absolutely love this episode. Of course, the weird thing here is that this isn’t a one-off, because there actually is arc development going on here, whereas The Zeppo was completely void of any of that. Of course, this episode has something up on The Zeppo: it’s written by Joss Whedon, AKA God. Which explains why it manages to beautifully interleave single episode story structure with ongoing arc elements.

But I’m gonna pretty much ignore the arc elements. It suffices to say: Faith bad, Mayor badder. On to Willow. Something about which I have had many a dream.

She finally realises that she’s boring. Well, she’s not actually boring; she’s a computer-hacking, witchcraft-performing, super-nerdy, super-sexy girl. Any one of those things on its own would mean she was not boring, and putting them all together is not a “two rights make a wrong” kind of situation. But anyway, she likes to think she’s boring and decides to be more dangerous. Which lead to her performing a funky time-folding spell with Anya, formerly the vengeance demon du jour for scorned women, that got messed up and led to her parallel world vamp version coming to in our world. And then the fun begins.

The jock whose homework was to be done by Willow get his ass womped, Willow gets to pretend to be a dominatrix psycho bitch, and last but not least we get our first overt clue to Willow’s future homosexuality. My personal views on homosexuality aren’t exactly as strict as Joss Whedon’s; for instance, just because you fall in love with a girl doesn’t mean you couldn’t also fall in love with a guy. Most people would stick to whatever side of the tracks they’re on, but if you’ve gone both ways before, you’re no longer bound to one side or the other. (To be fair, that might just be a part of my consistent delusion of hoping that Xander and Willow will end up together in the long run, because they’re perfect for each other)

There are so many school-boy-squealing, this-is-freaking-awesome moments in this episode but the best ones sums it up pretty well. Giles rushing like a little boy headed toward his mom to hug Willow. Nuff Said.

I like serialized television. Most of the shows I watch have some ongoing arc, and all of my favourite shows have highly serialized storylines. But that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy a good one-off episode. And when it comes to Buffy, the best one-offs are the Xander ones. We ended off last episode with Xander being unable to open up a jar of peanut butter, and though this is merely serendipity, the next episode, The Zeppo, is about Xander’s ongoing feelings of inadequacy and impotence, which are bound to occur when you work with a superpowered vampire slayer.

The episode is your standard episode: impending apocalypse and relationships in turmoil. The only difference being that Xander isn’t really a part of the gang here. They’re all too worried that Xander is putting himself in too much risk and shouldn’t be as involved in their escapades. So while they’re off saving the world from falling into hell, Xander is having all sorts of adventures. First he falls into some bad luck with a group of undead guys looking to blow shit up, and that’s all well and good until they want him to join their undead gang whose main prerequisite is… well, being undead.

Then, he gets to save the day, at least marginally, by slamming his car into an apocalypse demon whose plan is pushed into the background where it would normally be the foreground. But again, this episode is Xander’s which tends to shift the focus. Anyways, this momentary success leads to a sexually frustrated Faith and Xander’s first time. Then, as we can’t just make fun of Xander for a whole episode without some sort of personal growth or life lesson, he finally manages to save the day. The crazy zombies plans are thwarted when Xander chicken’s the main unman into defusing the bomb. And thus Xander is a hero, though no-one will ever know because Xander realises that showing off isn’t what heroes do.

Of course, really this whole episode is a massive adventure in cock-teasing because they show glimpses of a massive battle with a vicious demon, and even revel each other with the spectacular events of the previous night the following day, all without having to destroy their budget with heavy effects. Just a couple tentacles and and some strobing lights and they can simulate a season finale sized battle. Bastards. But God do I love them.

I’m not sure if the Angel spin-off had been decided on by the time Amends aired, but based on what I just saw, I’m betting it had. It’s a powerful story, and it brings a bit of resolution to the ongoing emotional struggle Buffy and Angel have had since Angel returned from hell. But one can’t help but see the writer’s establishing Angel’s story for the long run. We see Angel at various points in his life and death, as the First taunts him in various forms. The goals of this mental torture are the final destruction of Buffy by Angel.

When the show Angel begins, we’re treated to a new prophecy related to the ensouled vampire. The so-called Shanshu prophecy promised Angel the chance to be human after preventing the apocalypse. But the final story of Angel isn’t that Angel fights to give himself a better life. He fights because there are people worth fighting for. He fights because the world isn’t as it should be and he can do good. As Buffy says in the climactic scene “You have the power to do real good. To make amends.”

Angel doesn’t want to keep fighting. The memories of the things he’s done are so terrible and haunting that he doesn’t think life is still worth fighting for. He thinks the world would be better without him. He says to Buffy “I’m weak. That’s all I’ve ever been.” trying to convince her, and himself, that he can’t resist the temptations of the world and its inevitable that he’ll make the world a worse place. Buffy says “If you die now, all you ever were was a monster.”

Every moment of this scene is replayed in the later years of Angel. And the most powerful moment is when Angel, begging Buffy to let the sunrise destroy him and end both his suffering and the threat he represents to the world, says “Just this once, let me be strong” to which Buffy replies “Strong is fighting. It’s hard and it’s painful and it’s every day. It’s what we have to do.” As a long time Angel fan, who on most days considers Angel to be the better show of the two, I can attest that this sentiment is at the absolute centre of what that show is about. So this episode, aside from being a great addition to the ongoing stories of Sunnydale, prepares the viewer to see Angel go through these struggles on his own in the coming years.

The Wish has always been one of my favourite Buffy episodes. But I have to admit, I had forgotten about it, much like many of the non-arc episodes from the early seasons. Not only does it introduce us to our favourite vengeance demon, but it brings into the world one of the hottest things the Buffyverse ever produced: Goth Vampire Willow. She was like a sane yet still hotly sadistic Drusilla-like vampire. Which is the hottest kind.

All joking aside, the episode is really great because it shows a truly hopeless world and, quite frankly, life without hope shows you what hope really is. By the end of the episode the world is… well, the world is over. Cordelia, who initiated the parallel universe in the first place, dies midway through the episode and you realise that, it doesn’t matter how it happened, this is the real world now. And the world just keeps getting worse until you arrive at the final moments and all the people we’ve grown to love and care for over the intervening years, however twisted they may be in this dreary world, dying by each other’s hands. Angel calls out for Buffy as he turns to dust, and though there is no history between them, the pain of the life lost to the ether reverberates through the moment.

Finally, we come to the end of the montage. Everyone is dead save Giles, who now knows how to reverse all of this. Just as he is to destroy Anyanka’s power centre, she asks of Giles “You trusting fool. How do you know the other world is any better than this?” and Giles replies with such pain in his voice “Because it has to be.”

As with season 1 of Buffy, there was a big annoying flaw. I have a feeling that each season has that one thing wrong with it. With season 2, Xander was at the root of the problem yet again. I he wasn’t so damned likable most of the time his annoying douche moments would make him a totally hated character. Before, it was his obsession with Buffy, and now it’s his relentless hatred toward Angel. Even when Angel still had his soul and was working with the Scooby gang all the time he hated him. And he actively encouraged Buffy to kill Angel even when he knew Willow was working to restore Angel’s soul, something for which he never really got any flack with the gang.

The plus side here is that all of this is a part of Xander’s growth. Xander’s hatred comes from Angel’s involvement with Buffy so it makes sense. That doesn’t make it less annoying or a more desirable storyline. Really, the only good thing about these annoying storylines is that they are a part of realistic character developments. Sometimes, you don’t like what kind of person someone was, but that doesn’t devalue who they have become.

Overall, the season was even better than the first, and the interesting thing is that it didn’t seem to follow the formula later seasons dictated. Later on in the series, the show settled into a form more like the first season, where the “Big Bad” of the season in introduced within the first couple episodes with trickles of arc development revealed each subsequent episode. The second season was much more casual with its arc development. The real Big Bad of the season wasn’t revealed until the middle of the season, when Angel lost his soul. The arc was still continuous but it seemed structured as three or four smaller arcs joined together through consequence.

If memory serves, season three is structured differently, and seeing as those two seasons are probably the strongest of the series, I’ll have to compare the two once I’m finished the third season, which should be in around twenty hours or so.

This episode is just… really amazing. The build up to the final moments where the doomed love affair from the past speak for the story of the present is really fantastic. James finally manages to have his happy ending, but Buffy must go on living through the horror of a broken heart. Not only that, but the scene where the two spirits reconcile, after James prepares to kill himself again through Buffy, when watched after seeing the season finale is so profoundly prophetic. You can really see the effort put into not only ensuring a cohesive arc for the season with excellent foreshadowing, but also in planting the seeds of how the dynamic between Buffy and Angel changes when he returns in the third season. I’d talk more but I’m trying to keep this marathon going at a steady pace. I’ll have to come back and write a more detailed review of my favourite episodes when I’m done.

When I was young and I watched Buffy, I just enjoyed it. Now, I’ve immersed myself in television and have become better at recognizing plot holes and seeing the things you’re not supposed to. The most glaring example of this is the fight sequences so far. During every fight so far, one of the battlers has been quite visible as a stunt double. Sarah Michelle Gellar will throw a punch and then from a reverse angle, a macho woman with a completely different hairstyle, if not completely different hair colour, lands a punch. It’s all quite noticeable in my more mature eyes.

And just now, I noticed a fairly glaring plot hole. In the episode “Innocence,” the Gypsy man talks to the person entering his room as though they were Jenny Calendar with Buffy, which is what we’re led to believe given the previous scene, but it turns out to be Angel who’s there to kill the guy. Now it’s entirely plausible that Angel Knocked on the door and the Gypsy guy said “Come in” without looking assuming it was Jenny, but you’d think they could’ve shown that. Without those two additional seconds the scene feels like a gaping hole left by the writer and not only that, but the mistake wasn’t picked up by anyone else on the staff.

And yet, as with all my issues related to Buffy, it’s a drop of sucky surrounded by oceans of awesomeness, so I can’t really complain about my own growing cynicism.