One’s initial impression of this episode is that it is remarkably similar to the previous four episodes, but on closer inspection it is easy to see that in fact it’s almost identical. Buffy continues stubbornly in her own direction, makes speeches and fails to do anything significant. Her fighting skills are average (She had trouble beating the demon girl even with Spike’s help) and she still mopes about thinking of Spike. Andrew continues to be useless but manages to break up the episode with geeky jokes. Anya says her one funny line in the episode and does nothing else. Xander, displaced from the position of loser by Andrew, is a bit lost in the middle of the group, like Dawn as mentioned a couple of episodes ago. Xander has dating trouble again but that’s the perils of living near the hellmouth.

It takes a lot of blood to open that seal to let out only one super vampire. The First should buy a herd of cows and keep it open. The First seems to taking things easy. There’s a small attempt to get Andrew back on side and set principal Wood against Spike. Hardly seems to be the actions of the First evil in my opinion. If the First was as effective as I thought it should be, I’d share Giles’ concerns about the lack of action and frequent dating in the face of an apocalypse. However the gang knows that an apocalypse isn’t the end of the world and so continues to do their own thing. Giles’ sensible concerns appear to be unfounded and are ignored. Still, souls are hardly a water tight prevention against evil acts.

And finally, Wood turns out not to be evil, despite my hope to the contrary. The gang could do with some more muscle and hopefully he’ll take down Spike so he could be useful. Plus it saves Buffy having to make excuses for missing work.

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This entry was posted by the illustrious Andy Cocker on Saturday, June 21st, 2003. 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.