Alas, it looks like mid-season Buffy has once again fallen into a slump. There’s a lot of things wrong with this episode, making it one of the worst this season.

Often a new character freshens up the show and gives new angles to explore. Unfortunately, they’ve added a bunch of useless whingers in the form of potential slayers or just ‘potentials’. Currently their role seems to be to eat all of Buffy’s food. I’m surprised she can feed that many people with her salary. I guess Giles must pay for some stuff. It’d be amusing to have all my friends living at my house and spending all my money.[ftn] How could I possibly get sick of that? Bludgers.

The potentials’ worth can be easily explained with a little analogy. Potentials are much like leaf pikmin. They’re slow, weak, fall over often, are easily distracted and die by the hundreds. Losing Buffy is much like losing all your flower pikmin. Most of the potentials look very young and … what’s the word I’m thinking of … useless. You can still get the job done, it’s just going to take a damn lot more of them. As for the regular gang, they may be using the potentials as a plan B, but it’d be better if they had a plan A. Hopefully, the potentials will keep dying at this rate and we’ll be rid of them soon.

Matrix. Their one good point is their reaction to Buffy’s pep talks. They know she hasn’t got a plan and she’s just talking shit. Speaking of which, when does Buffy find the time to write her speeches? Unless she gets Willow to do them but perhaps Willow’s time would be better spent on thinking up plans. No wonder they rely on the Giles so much. Despite his brief absence, Buff still assumes that the others will find the answers and the bad guy’s weakness.

The plan to kill the vampire at the end was hardly a masterstroke. “How about I fight this vampire at someone else’s place so my stuff doesn’t get trashed and I think I’ll get the potentials to watch me so they can see my awe-inspiring fighting skills. Better get Willow to make up another speech. Those potentials really lap it up.” Not a skerrick on the actual killing part, which seemed to be the place that Buffy was having the most trouble with. She’d been badly beaten by the vamp previously yet was very confident that she’d win. I’ll stab him in the eye and cut his head off. Whoa, radical. Why didn’t you do that the first time.

It’s nice to see that Buffy’s fighting skills are as consistent as ever. The minions at the beginning were easily dealt with but she was badly beaten by the nasty vamp otherwise. Bus shelters are dangerous places. Go see the Matrix. It’s also nice to see Buffy making the most of her slayer healing powers. They seem to be pretty good, even if ‘the day after Buffy still had a bruise’. It’s not as if the vamp was tougher than anything else she’s fought, she just seemed afraid of it and it took her a couple of episodes to get over this fear. There didn’t appear to be any real source of her fear though unless she’s become too reliant on staking to solve a problem and when that didn’t work, she panicked. That sounded almost plausible. I’m getting the hang of this.

Since when could Buffy initiate telepathy? Or does Willow routinely scan everyone’s mind? She should check to make sure no-one’s keeping pointless secrets. Maybe Buffy gave her one of those ‘I want to talk to you telepathically’ looks.

Maybe I’m missing something but, what’s the danger from the first? It’s not directly causing any damage and it doesn’t seem to have any immediate plans. I wouldn’t worry about it yet. They’ve now killed its lackey so they can relax a bit. I’m sure it’s brewing something for the end of season but that’s eleven episodes away. There’s one thing easy thing that would foil most of its plans. A quick check to make sure everyone is corporeal. POKE! You’re real, let’s get on with this episode. Potential 1, poke not evil. Potential 2, poke — evil. Giles, poke — and so on. It’s not that hard.

This episode wasn’t a complete loss. There was some nice Anya character development. Sometimes she shows glimpses of being a better character. Andrew the nerd kept up his end with a few choice lines. He’s carrying the entire comic burden of the show with a little help from Xander.

Footnotes

1. Irony. Don’t take it as an invitation.

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This entry was posted by the illustrious Andy Cocker on Saturday, May 17th, 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.