Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Beer Bad

"Nothing can defeat the penis!"

Oh dear. Things have been going so well. It feels like a long, long time since I've had to give a good, hard lambasting to an episode of Buffy, but it's that time again. Stand by to witness a spanking.

It's not that this episode, written by Tracey Forbes, a name I don't recognise, is all bad. It might be a rather so-so plot, and the dialogue, for Buffy, is rather lacking in sparkle. And there's some rather interesting character development stuff, which we'll come to in a bit. It's just that the subtext is deeply, deeply wrong, and dangerous. There's nothing big or clever about mindless Puritanism. Beer good. Excess bad.  And excess is bad in a much wider context than beer. Sending out the message that we should avoid things, rather than learn to use them responsibly, is appalling. Also, you know, I like beer. I drank rather a lot of it on Friday night. I had fun. And yet none of us turned into cavemen, we had quite a civilised if merry conversation, and a good time was had by all. That's sort of what usually tends to happen.

The episode plays a little trick which is clever, I suppose, but entirely missing the point. Xander, the working class person behind to bar, is the target of cruel, snobbish mockery from some upper middle class students, only for the tables to be turned as the beer slowly takes away their intelligence. And everything in the episode is telling us, rather heavy handedly, that it's the beer that's the problem here. And it isn't; it's social class, Bullingdon Club type snobbery and social inequality. In my own university days I had to put up with ex-public school rugby types who thought it was big and clever to sing loud drinking songs and thus ruin anyone else's conversations. But the problem was their arrogance and sense of entitlement, not the beer. After all, the other people in the bar were drinking beer, too, and we were just having perfectly civilised conversations, as the vast majority of beer drinkers tend to do.

Admittedly, there might be cultural differences here for me, an English country boy, dealing with American attitudes towards beer, which are certainly different. After all, in most of the US the legal drinking age is twenty-one. To me that's hard to imagine. My University life revolved around pubs, clubs and bars. Heck, there was a bar in every Hall. Oh, and we know Giles went to a British university. He really wouldn't give Xander such a hard time about serving beer to the eighteen-year-old Buffy. Yes, he should have stopped serving when she was clearly the worse for wear, but I don't think that's supposed to be the point.

Ahem. Elsewhere, it's nice to see Buffy quite clearly getting closure vis-à-vis the Parker situations. Whacking him with a pointy stick was rather an elegant solution, I thought. But  most concerning is the situation between Willow and Oz; who's this girl who seems to be obsessing him so, right in front of Willow, and causing him to neglect his studies? And then there's Willow's brilliant confrontation with Parker. It's almost as though she's starting to go off men entirely. Hmmm…