"That.s the worst attempt at pig slaughtering I've ever seen..."
So the big bad gets a name: the First, a one off baddie from way back in Season Two, which I blogged many years ago when I was single and childless. Something tells me this time round that snow and Christmas miracles may be in short supply.
This is a big arc episode with a job to do in moving the arc plot forward- the Scoobies need to learn who they’re up against, Andrew needs to become a comic relief prisoner of theirs (love the interrogations) and Spike needs to be captured by those monks for his blood to be used to resurrect that ancient vampire thing. All of this is achieved with some witty dialogue, a top comedy scene where Willow totally owns Andrew, and a lot of deep and superb dialogue between Buffy and Spike, who now knows self-loathing.
The cliffhanger with Giles isn’t resolved; we’re left hanging a while longer. But Quentin Travers and the WTchers’ Council appear, they’re hiding stuff from Buffy, and they’re off to Sunnydale to face the First. They all wear extremely old-fashioned, tweedy clothes that were last popular, pheasant-shooting types aside, with my grandparents’ generation, the ones who fought in the war. As late as 2003 this is a stereotype Americans have of the British, arguably much less so now.
Meanwhile, we get to see the Principal being cool but also see him discovering the body of The unsuccessfully sacrificed Jonathan, whom he buries. We now know there’s more to him than it seems... but what?
A very functional episode on what it has to do, then. But Buffy does functional with aplomb.
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