"The school paper is edging on depressing. Have you guys noticed that?"
"I don't know. I always go straight to the obits."
You can see why they suspended the showing of this episode on its original American broadcast, one week after Columbine. Oz even gets a line describing school shootings, an acknowledged problem, as "almost trendy at this point." Of course, I'm hardly one to know about the political temperature regarding school shootings in late '90s America, but surely this sort of episode always stood a fair risk of not airing for any number of reasons? I suppose there are advantages to watching all of Buffy, in order, on DVD, many years later in another country.
The episode is bloody good, anyway, and wittier than most. Jane Espenson seems to be second only to Joss himself in that regard. Oz in particular is notably a much funnier character when she writes him. But it's not all about the humour.
This episode is essentially about two things: the effect on Buffy of being able to read minds, and a sort of semi-whodunnit. The first of these is extremely well done on the part of both the script and Sarah Michelle Gellar. Reading the minds of others would be a nightmare. You don't have to be a Freudian to appreciate the huge gulf between the self we present outwardly, the self we perceive ourselves to be, and the chaotic churn of unstructured desires and feelings that lie beneath all that unless, obviously, you happen to be Oz, thoughts are so very cool. Or, even better, Cordelia, who says exactly what she thinks. But the private thoughts or, worse, unconscious thoughts of others would horrify us. And so, conversely, would the horrible realisation that our innermost thoughts were no longer private. Buffy simultaneously drives away her friends and is driven away by them. It's a fairly common fantasy / sci-fi trope, I suppose, but always worth exploring. And it was a brilliant move to use the themes from Othello as a parallel.
Oh, and at last she finds out that Giles and her mother had sex on that police car. Twice. Ouch.
I think there's a metaphor I'm not getting, though, as Buffy is waiting for the taint of the demon to manifest itself earlier on and wondering whether the changes to her will mean she loses part of herself. Is this a metaphor for puberty, growing up, etc, and the changes it brings? I'm not at all sure but, this being Buffy, I'm sure it's a metaphor for something.
The semi-whodunnit aspect is rather neatly tied to all this, not only by Buffy's telepathic warning of the killer's intention but by the sense we're given as the school as a community. And the episode goes out of its way to present the school this way. The basketball game- featuring Willow's "pupil", Percy Hogan and, of course, Cordelia as a cheerleader- is presented as an important event for the school community in a way that, thankfully for your very unsporty blogger, never used to happen in my school. The main red herring is the rather likably subversive editor of the school newspaper, a community organ. And, of course, the dinner hall is a central focus, what with the intended murderer being the school dinner lady and all.
I say it's a semi-whodunnit mainly because the actual identity of the mere perpetrator (who was never really signalled to us) isn't important; Jonathan is far more relevant to the themes and the plot, although why anyone would need a massive gun with a sight just to shoot oneself is beyond me. The heart of the episode is Buffy's speech to him, having read the minds of the school community and realised that the pain, loneliness and anxiety that she and Jonathan feel is a universal part of the human condition and, especially, the teenage condition. I've said it before and I'll say it again: being a teenager is horrible.
Other stuff? There are still no clues as to what the Mayor's "Ascension" might involve. Giles and Wesley are continuing their one-sided, but amusing, tussle over who gets to be alpha male. Angel is particularly saintly in this episode. It isn't possible to read the minds of vampires, which cast no reflection. But this is pretty much a one-off episode, our first for weeks, and one which rather fails to fit any of those categories which I rather clumsily tried to outline in my last review.
It's probably all arc from here, though…
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