"Have you Googled her yet?"
"Willow, she's seventeen!"
"It's a search engine!"
Even final seasons must have their stories of the week, and this one is textbook; there's some vaguely arc-relevant character stuff, which I'll get to later, but by Buffy standards this is pretty standalone.
So Cassie is a kid with precognitive abilities who knows she's destined to die next Friday, and the Scoobies try to work out to save her. It turns out that Cassie is to be the victim of some red-robed privileged white frat boy cultists who literally profit from the deaths of others (subtext much?), and is saved by Buffy, only to die of the heart arrhythmia that was always going to kill her. That's it.
Except it's all paced perfectly, well-acted, and all the more effective for being oddly un-Buffy in tone.In purely arc terms this is an eminently skippable episode, but that's no way to see things; time after time, the small, self-contained little tales are quietly better than big, over-promising epic stuff.
Other stuff happens too; the above exchange shocks you today with its implication that, a mere 15 years ago, search engines were not something it was safe to simply assume viewers knew about. Then there's the fact that Willow is back Scoobying (in a non-magic way) but, as Dawn says, she's "here" but not "part of the gang here". There's Dawn's continued fully-fledged Scoobying. There's Willow finally visiting Tara's grave, a symbolic act of proper grieving- and, in a nice Jewish touch, leaving a stone. And there's Buffy quietly being a pretty good counsellor. All quiet, undramatic suff, but it matters. Like this deceptively modest little episode.
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