"Everyone's getting spanked but me!"
This is it, then. The pivot around which the whole fourth season turns. We finally get confirmation that the Initiative are not fluffy bunnies after all, and that Professor Walsh is actually rather unpleasant beneath that pleasant exterior. The status quo has changed. Oh, and welcome back to the blog. It's now back properly.
Initially we look as though we're getting an episode about the friction between Buffy's old mates and Buffy's new mates and, well, we are, but we're led to expect that this is going to be a running thread. It isn't; there's one bit of misdirection. There's a nice scene early on in which it looks as though Buffy and Riley are about to get jiggy for the first time, but in fact Buffy is about to be inducted into the Initiative. It's very funny but, this being a Joss Whedon show, and with apologies for the pretentiousness, it's also something of a synecdoche. By far the biggest bit of misdirection, of course, is Walsh's speech at the end, which really plays on our expectations of her being the Big Bad. Naturally, she gets a suddenly killed by Adam, her, er, son.
Ah yes, Adam. Earlier in the show Buffy used to do nice little homages to horror tropes including, in Some Assembly Required. This episode not only returns to the Frankenstein meme and promotes it to season arc status, but also nods to a second Universal movie by featuring a monster which looks uncannily like the thing in The Creature from the Black Lagoon or, if you prefer, Go Fish.
Of course, the emotional heart of the episode is Walsh's attempts, for her own sinister reasons, to engineer Buffy's death, thereby causing Buffy and Riley against her. For Buffy, who is independent and used to questioning things, this is relatively straightforward. For Riley, who doesn't ask questions (this pretty much gets rammed down our throats and, it's heavily stressed, is not a good thing), it's going to mean a lot of angst. Personally, I'm fascinated by the montage of Buffy and Riley, in slow motion, alternately fighting the Creature and having metaphorical / flashback sex, and then having actual sex, really good sex by the look of it, in slow motion. The implication is that it's really great sex, but also linked to fighting, and thus purely about the physical. These two are going to have some great sex together, but they're not going to be together for too long.
Still, I like the scene where Buffy wakes up, momentarily thinks Riley's not there, then realises that not only is he lying next to her but they're lying in the pinkest, fluffiest, most romantic bedroom in the history of ever.
Speaking of romance, Willow and Tara continue to be the cutest couple ever, and I have to single out Amber Benson for particular praise. She's extraordinary at portraying the body language of someone who's been hurt, bullied, and possibly abused.
We end with the status quo changed entirely. What now?
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