I didn’t want to have to watch this episode again. Not because it’s bad — in fact it’s pretty brilliant — but it’s so sad… I’d been keeping up with the american episodes while away, and had seen it before. Fred had died, and I’d kinda moved on. But then, I come back to Australia, and dear old Winifred Burkle is on the screen still, wandering around in her cute little skirts, with adorable smile and bouncy flowing hair, and I realised how very dead she was going to be, and I felt all sad.

So, anyhow, here’s the episode where it all went wrong — unless of course you count things ending so happily with ‘Smile Time’ that there was no way that events could possibly avoid a sudden tragic turn. For what is essentially a tragic, painful episode, it’s surprisingly well balanced. It’s tremendously funny — especially with the Cavemen/Astronauts argument, which even turns out to be all, y’know, thematic. There’s great character stuff — especially for Wesley and Fred, but also for Angel, Gunn, Lorne… well, pretty much everyone.

OK, Whedon, I’ve forgiven you a bit for ‘Chosen’. But not much.

While Gunn’s mysterious signed document was only introduced last week, the journey he’s been on has been leading to something like this happening. Even if, _a la _Buffy, he seems to be having the same character arc every season these days — ‘Am I just the muscle? Who am I? Can’t I be someone else?’. While I would’ve been happy to see him over that after ‘Players’, this does make for good drama.

Less smooth is the blatant recycling of one or two plot elements from last season. While it’s played out somewhat differently, here, it’s a bit disconcerting to be hearing about a beloved female character being slowly posessed, from the inside, by some awesome power from the dawn of time… again. Luckily, Connor isn’t around for Fred to be shagging any time soon. It remains to be seen at this point whether they’ll go a completely different direction or not, but it still feels like it could’ve been… rephrased or something.

The only bad thing about this episode really, is the fear that it’s developments will be handled boringly and unoriginally, and that we’ll fall back into Season Four again. Does it count as a spoiler if I tell you that we don’t?

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This entry was posted by the illustrious Tom Charman on Thursday, June 10th, 2004. It concerns such pressing issues as . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.