"She was truly the finest of us."
"Way better than me."
"Much, much better"
I love this show. This isn't the first time I've banged on about the alternation of the funny episodes with the darker ones in a predictable but good way, but the extraordinary run of serious episodes we've experienced lately is followed by this, the most laugh-out-loud funny thing I've seen in, well, months. It's no surprise to realise this is both written and directed by Joss Whedon. Truly, the man is God.
At times like this it's always tempting just to quote the huge number of hilarious lines throughout the whole review, but I won't. That sort of thing might be fine for five minutes of uninspired pub chat but it won't do for blogging. I mean, of course I'm going to shoehorn some of that stuff in when I'm ostensibly taking about the character development, or how brilliant Alyson Hannigan is, but you can rely on me to be subtle.
So… Alyson Hannigan. I didn't think such a thing was possible, but my opinion of her acting has just got even higher. She's great at comedy, but we knew that. We didn't need that bored look from evil Willow at being lectured by Cordelia to tell us that, hilarious though that scene is. But seeing her playing two completely different characters (except, of course that "our" Willow is Totally Not Gay and this is in no way foreshadowing, right?) really hammers home how great she is. That scene with her playing "our" Willow pretending to be evil Willow is a tour de force.
Oh, and Evil Willow… mmm! Is it just me who thinks Alyson Hannigan should have her own show where she stars as a Goth dominatrix? Thought not.
It's great to have a sequel to The Wish for general reasons, of course, not least because it means more Evil Willow (although she's seemingly dead, sadly), but it's nice to have some sort of link between the two worlds. And it's also great to have Anya back; a 1,200 year old vengeance demon stuck in Sunnydale High is too good a character not to become a regular.
It's also good to have Oz back after a rather jarring absence, and Snyder, of course. It's been a while since this foreigner has made any comments about the otherness of American schooling, but to me the whole idea of artificially inflating someone's grades just because they're good at a sport is horrifyingly corrupt! Does this stuff really go on much?
Also in season arc news it's deeply worrying to see Faith still pretending to be one of the Scoobies while secretly working for her new sugar daddy, the Mayor, who's bought her a swanky new luxury flat, complete with PlayStation, which in 1999 was really something. It's very quickly established that there's going to be no hanky panky, which makes the Mayor a sort of father figure and so, I suppose, an evil parallel to Giles. That's interesting, as Buffy gets a lot of dialogue early on about how easily she could have turned out like Faith if things had been different. Of course, this also works as some pretty neat foreshadowing of the two Willows.
Cordelia still blatantly fancies Wesley, and this is getting increasingly foregrounded. I suspect this subplot is probably there to give us some light relief when the heavy stuff starts up again sometime soon. Also, it gives Wesley something to do, and the character would by now be redundant otherwise, it seems.
I somehow suspect next episode will be rather more heart-crushing than this one, just because this one was fun. Joss Whedon does that.
Incidentally, I've now finished The Bridge, which means it's all uninterrupted Buffy from now on, films aside, until the end of Season Four. Well, apart from Angel Season One, which is not far off. Unfortunately, The Bridge was being shown two episodes a week on BBC4, and I was forced to keep up, which led me to rather neglect Buffy. I don't think I'll watch anything being broadcast like that in the future, unless it's a new series of something I've already been blogging. Certainly, it's all Buffy and Angel (and films) for a good while now.
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