Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Him

"Bollocks to the whole thing..."

I've made allowances for the fact I'm not hugely into teen relationship drama, and this is a poor episode. Sorry. But this is where I do that thing I often do with poor episodes of Buffy in pointing out how the dialogue, characterisation, acting and wit are nevertheless top notch as ever. Even a superior show like Buffy, with 22 episodes per season, has its turds. But, my God, it polishes them well.

This episode is all about Dawn getting an enormous teenage crush on a boy at school with a magic sports jacket thingy, the type that badly dressed American "jocks" always wear and somehow get the girls in spite of the fact that it's a truly awful look. So, yeah, the metaphor is a bit blunt here, and the whole thing is a bit of a clumsy flashback to the high school metaphors of old, using the convenient fact that Dawn is a convenient peg on which to hang such things. Nothing arc-wise happens either, so it's an eminently skippable episode. At least it's a Dawn episode in which Michelle Trachtenberg gets to genuinely shine.

So, anything to notice here? Well, firstly,once again we get one of the things I most dislike about late period Buffy; acting as though Willow is just straightforwardly gay. I know sexual orientation on telly was in a more basic phase 15 years ago, but retconning her past like this just erases bisexuality and treats sexual orientation as a binary thing. Secondly, we get the Breeders- yes, THE BREEDERS, playing at the Bronze, and no one even worships at their feet or anything, which is deeply wrong, as Kim and Kelley are goddesses.

So, yeah, worth it for the Breeders. The other scenes? Not so much. But a bad episode like this doesn't take away from Buffy being a truly great show; it simply means that 22 episodes a season is too bleeding many.