Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Conversations with Dead People

“I mean, I was afraid to talk to you in high school. And now we’re, like, mortal enemies.”

Here we have it, then; a proper arc episode, which develops the mysterious Big Bad. Oddly, there’s no Xander, one of the main trio of characters (behind the scenes issues?) or Anya. But the focus on Buffy, Dawn and Willow all individually, their paths crossing only thematically, makes them all the more emotionally vulnerable for being alone.

Dawn and Willow both get visitations from the dead which seem designed to undermine themabd the team for the upcoming hi-jinks. Fortunately Willow realises she isn’t talking to Tara when the suggestion to never do magic again is extended to a suggestion of suicide, puncturing the illusion. Dawn has no such epiphany, enduring an episode of poltergeisty weirdness only to be told by “Joyce” that Buffy will turn against her. Oh, and Andrew and Jonathan return to Sunnyvale, with Andrew being encouraged by “Adam” to kill an unsuspecting Jonathan, who dies serene.

Buffy’s story is cleverer, as a recently resurrected vampire turns out to be an old acquaintance and psych major, which leads to reminiscing and psychoanalysis; I love the scene where Buffy uses a tomb as a psychiatrist’s couch. These are great character scenes, establishing both Buffy’s inevitable superiority complex and the guilt she feels about it. And, just to add extra dramatic spice, Spike is killing and siring people again. Some monsters are unexpectedly people, but those we think of as people can also turn out to be monsters.

A change of direction, then, getting the arc back on track. And a bloody good episode.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Help

"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.