"End of school rite of passage thingy…"
Yes, ok, let's get it out of the way: the hellhounds look awful. There. That's the one bad thing I have to say about this episode, so let's move straight on to the gushing.
We don't really have a great tradition of school proms here in the UK. I understand it's become much more of a thing for the young 'un's today, because of the influence of American pop culture stuff such as, well, Buffy. But I'm thirty-five, and I never went to one when I left school, which would have been back in '95. Neither did any of my friends. I mean, there was a sort of formal dance for people who liked that sort of thing, but there was no tradition attached, or any sense of it being any kind of rite of passage. I seem to recall that I saw a local band called Sckism that night.
As I've said a lot in my Buffy bloggings, although admittedly much more in the early days, American high school life seems to be punctuated by all sorts of events- proms, Homecoming, a tradition of school sports being supported by people who don't play them- which simply don't exist in Britain (or rather England, Scotland being an independent nation for educational purposes), or at least not in the sort or ordinary, if rather large, Midlands small town state comprehensive that I went to. There were classes, free periods, exams, coursework and… not much else, certainly no organised social events in the evenings. So it's fascinating to watch this and see the real cultural power of the school prom as a rite of passage. It's such a massive thing in people's lives, and I can understand why Wesley, a countryman of mine, alas, can't see what's so important about a "school dance". That'll be cultural differences. Of course, I suspect that Wesley's school life would have been just as different from mine as that of the Scoobies, no doubt involving such things as prefects, Matron and fagging.
And because the episode is about such a massive rite of passage, it's basically about the characters. I mean, yes, technically we get a supernatural antagonist in Tucker and his Hellhounds, but it's all rather perfunctory. In fact, the funniest scene in the episode (Tucker saying that he has his reasons, followed by a two second flashback of him asking a girl "Do you want to go to the prom with me?" and her saying "No") is basically just an amusingly metatextual commentary on this. It's not about the Hellhounds. It's about all the nasty things the Mayor was saying at the end of the last episode. He said some cruel things, but they were cruel because they were true.
In fact, arguably we know from the beginning of the episode that this is going to be the one when Buffy and Angel breaking up. Buffy starts talking about keeping stuff in Angel's home, and complaining about it not being "girl friendly", which implies a serious deepening of their relationship and therefore, this being a Joss Whedon show, pretty much telling us that the relationship ends now. It's not a surprise when Joyce turns up, and what she says shouldn't surprise us either. She's right. Angel can never age, can never have children and must never have an orgasm. There's only one was this can end, and it might as well be now. After the mayor's Ascension, he'll leave Sunnydale.
The Mayor knows it. We, the audience, know it. Angel knows it. Even Buffy accepts it, deep down, as she later admits to Willow. But that doesn't make it hurt any less. Buffy is utterly destroyed at Angel breaking up with her, and the scene is utterly, utterly heartbreaking. And she spends the rest of the episode being morose, a little dead inside, and far from her usual wisecracking self. Yet her pain becomes a determination that her friends should not have their Prom night ruined as hers has been. This says a lot about Buffy, and what a hero she is.
There are consolations, such as Willow being such a wonderful friend, and Giles' fatherly offer of support and ice cream, but this is devastating, and all the more so for being inevitable. Fortunately, though, there is some light relief in Anya, former vengeance demon, asking Xander to accompany her to the Prom with the immortal line "Men are Evil. Will you go with me?" Trouble is, her conversation turns out to bore the pants off him. The two of them will never last. Oh, and that thing between Cordelia and Wesley is still going on. That'll really never last.
It's also so very satisfying to see a resolution to the whole Cordelia / Xander thing. When Xander finds out that she's now poor, forced to work in a dead end job and unable to afford any of the universities that accepted her, courtesy of a naughty tax dodging father, the snarking stops. Instead, he keeps her secret and pays for her to have a dress for the Prom. That's a lovely gesture, and fitting recompense after he was such a git to her.
The ending, though, with Jonathan announcing that Buffy has won a special "Class Protector" award by popular demand, even made me cry, and I'm a right stone-hearted bastard. She's been through so much in this episode but now, at last, she realises that she is appreciated, and always has been. The Class of '99 has had the lowest mortality rate in Sunnydale history. Well, so far. Two episodes still to go…
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