Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Wild at Heart

" Giles, I've never seen her like this. It's like it hurts too much to form words."

This episode was utterly heart-wrenching to watch. There is nothing on this earth, nothing at all, which is more upsetting than seeing Willow crying and utterly, utterly wretched. Alyson Hannigan in so very good in this episode, perhaps too good. I cried, and I'm a flint-hearted bastard.

It's a testament to the script that you don't end up hating Oz, because there's no way around it: he's unfaithful to Willow, and then abandons her. There are no extenuating circumstances whatsoever to the unfaithfulness; his evasiveness makes it very clear that he's hiding things from Willow deliberately and, anyway, the whole werewolf thing is pretty much a metaphor for wild sexual urges. Oz may well be "not himself" when he has sex with Verruca (or so it's heavily implied), but so is any person who cheats on their partner and then instantly regrets it. The only reason we don't end up hating his guts is that he obviously realises what he's done, and seeks to make amends, and penance. But that only means we fall short of hating him, not that we forgive him. And his decision, in which Willow quite blatantly gets no say, is simultaneously abandonment. The character absolutely has to cease being a regular at this point; he's burned his bridges with the audience. Personally, I could never like him again. No one does that to my Willow. And that's twice that she's had her heart broken by a man. Buffy alludes to how long it took to recover when she felt the same about Angel, and the extreme reactions she took. We get a hint at the potential for some truly awful consequences as she almost uses a spell to curse Oz, but can't quite bring herself to do it. This does not bode well. What happens to poor Willow now?

At least Buffy shows herself to be a wonderful friend. And, it seems, she's beginning to do well academically, much to her own surprise. This reminds me so much of my own University experiences; I was twenty-three and worried about failure, having dropped out of another Uni after one term at eighteen. Would the disorganised habits of my younger self show themselves again? It was such a joy to gradually realise that I was, in fact, perfectly able to keep on top of the work, and I was over the Moon when one of my essays was awarded a First for the first time. Here's hoping that Buffy gets as much out of Higher Education as I eventually did.

Giles' mid-life crisis arc gathers pace, as he turns up at the Bronze to show that he's down wiv da kids, and is reduced to filling his hours with daytime television. He's overjoyed when Buffy turns up with a problem, bless him. One of these problems is a story arc problem, though; who are these mysterious soldier types who keep showing up on campus? Buffy is beginning to notice them.

Spike will certainly have noticed them. That pre-credits sequence was such gloriously metatextual fun. I rather suspect that the season's arc is about to start revealing itself…