"You are strange and
off-putting. Go now."
A new season, then. There's no
need for things to get going immediately, so we need a fun episode to start
with, perhaps setting in motion a few minor plot arcs. At first sight these
seem to be the tension between Giles' need top return to Blighty and Buffy's
need for him to help her, again as Watcher, with her newfound suspicions of
"darkness" within her role as Slayer. Oh, and Buffy and Riley are
drifting apart; the pre-titles sequence confirms this in the blatant contrast
between the speedily shot scenes of her "hunting" and the slow, peaceful
scenes of her in bed with Riley. The subtext seems to be that he really isn't
her type.
There's another arc thing at the
very end, but… let's leave that for the moment.
So, Dracula. To show the most
famous vampire in all of fiction, and use the character to make loads of metatextual
points about the tropes of the vampire in fiction, is a sign that the show is
really riding high with confidence. Obviously, there are parallels with the
novel, and early twentieth century stage play but, in a nod to those early
episodes which homaged universal movies, the main influence is clearly Tod
Browning's Dracula, right down to
Xander as Renfield, although there are also nods to the Hammer version in the
ridiculously strong erotic charge to the scenes of Dracula feeding on Buffy.
Best of all, of course, is the fact that Buffy knows he always comes back and
makes sure she kills him properly; she's seen the movies.
There's also something else going
on, though: Dracula, with his slow, seductive sexual ways of sucking blood from
his invariably female victims almost seeming to imply that all other vampires
in Buffy are bloody awful lovers, his
unexplained turning into a bat, his three concubines, and his fancy home,
simply doesn't fit the definition of a Buffy
vampire. We're clearly intended to see him as a vampire from another
fictional set of rules (everyone is star struck, which hints at this, and is
funny to boot) and, I think, we're intended to see the influence of Anne Rice
as well as Bram Stoker. This is Buffy,
upholder of the old fashioned evil vampires, taking a dig at the whole vampire
romance genre that has since become so ubiquitous. I rather suspect that we're
supposed to agree with Spike. A show which mentions the Count from Sesame
Street is not a show which means to take
Dracula seriously…
So, it's an episode that had to
happen, and a rather entertaining bit of meta-textual, and really rather erotic,
fun. But what's this? Who's this young girl who everyone seems to think is
Buffy's sister…?
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