Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Bring On the Night.

episode 132.
airdate: 17 Dec 2002.

Xander is fixing the house, again. "It's a loop, like the mummy hand." Buffy sees Joyce for the first time. The thing that's super haunting about the First Evil is that it's effectively dead people. It embodies the persona of people that have lived. It becomes them. When she's talking to what looks like her mother, it acts like her mother, talks like her mother, remembers everything her mother would remember. Everything. It is the PERFECT plot device for the last season of this show too because it means you get to see anyone that has died, anyone Buffy has killed, all the old villains, even any vampire is fair game since they're technically dead. Joyce tells Buffy to wake up. Joyce was in a dream instead of in person, apparently. Buffy keeps it a secret from Xander who was the one actually telling her to wake up. Spike is being taunted at the seal by himself, then Drusilla.

Anya and Dawn are still enjoying torturing Andrew, who is now unconscious. Xander calls the seal "Satanic man-hole cover" and "goat-heady badness". Buffy decides they should cover the seal (Spike wasn't there, by the way) and they shovel, like you WOULD shovel, not like Wood shovels. And they see him in the basement. They've all got shovels, attempting to explain why they all have shovels. Willow attempts to do a locating spell to see if they can find the First, but it embodies Willow and there's red lightning and it's super scary. Willow is pretty freaked out and B promises they won't use magic again until they know what they're dealing with. Buffy decides to go out willy-nilly to find the First by herself when she finds Giles at her door with three Potential Slayers. Giles tells them the First's plan is to kill Faith and Buffy and ALL the Potential Slayers so that another is never called ever again. Pretty straightforward evil. Giles took a bunch of books and files from the Council concerning the First before they got blowed up. He tells them the First can only appear as someone who has died.

*Foreboding note: Giles isn't touching anything. He always touches stuff. That's part of why Tony Head is such a compelling actor, because he uses props (eating, glasses, mugs) all the time as he talks, but he's just walking around with his hands in his pockets and no one even hugged him when he got there. This is so they can make you think he's the First in an episode or two. And they are actually not letting him touch anything. And we never saw how he got out of the whole ax-behind-the-back thing from a couple of eps ago. I'm paying super attention this time to see if he actually ever touches anything.

The Ubervamp is torturing Spike. I don't know why. Just for fun? Kennedy is flirting with Willow already. Giles and Buffy are investigating the Christmas tree lot where the Harbingers were camped out 4 years-ish ago when the First tried to get Angel to kill himself. B finds the Ubervamp. She stakes him but he doesn't dust. He's really strong, but not quite as strong as Glory. Buffy decides to run. The sun was coming up, so it recoils when it follows her above ground.

Buffy goes to work and Googles "manifestations of evil". Wood acts real suspicious. I guess the reason they're torturing Spike is to try to convince him to join their side. He won't, of course. The Ubervamp is beating him to death.

The Potentials are super worried about sundown. Giles is putting a lot of pressure on B. Annabelle, one of the Potentials, runs away and gets killed by the Ubervamp real quick. Buffy goes after her and finds her dead. Another Ubervamp fight ensues. He's beating the living tar out of our heroine. M keeps saying, "Level up, Buffy!" Xander, Giles, and Willow find Buffy under a bunch of rubble. Not sure why the Ubervamp didn't finish her off. Morale is real bad because Buffy is so badly beat up.

Buffy makes a rousing speech. "We just became an army."

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Welcome to the Hellmouth

I've decided, in order to occupy myself on sick days and other free time chunks of my life when I could be prone to too much self-analysis, to rewatch Buffy and write about it! Yeay: two of my favorite things: Buffy and academics!!

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Journal of an Obsession.

Entry #1- Welcome to the Hellmouth shownotes: I love how the show starts out with a seemingly innocent schoolgirl being lead through the highschool at night by a teenaged boy and you suspect the boy’s a vampire because the girl is acting all goody-goody, but she’s really, SHOCKER, naughty naughty. She’s the vampire. This is, of course, Joss Whedon’s (creator/head writer of Buffy) intentional gender role reversal from the very first scene of the very first episode of this seven season epicly-spectacular series. Scene two shows the protagonist as a cutesy short blonde girl who, if you didn’t know the premise of the show, doesn’t seem like she could slay anything. From the beginning, you are to suspend all your typical beliefs about how things appear, and this theme is paramount throughout the show.

It’s pretty hilarious that Xander’s introduction to the show is on a skateboard, as he’s never seen with one again.

What school checks their textbooks out in the library? If this is how they do it in Sunnydale, how come there’s never anyone in the damn library?

I like how Buffy immediately gives a disapproval face to Cordelia when she insults Willow’s nerdy dress, instantly aligning herself with the misfits.

Valley speak? Perhaps this was an homage to the movie? Regardless, I’m glad they abandoned that after episode 1.

Xander is hilarious from day one. *sigh* Xander is dreamy. He has that vague highschool boy sleaziness that only an adolescent in the mid-‘90s can bestow: Michael used to have this same style-effect back in the day.

Buffy is such a Watcher-backtalker! Yeow! Loves it!

The first Big Bad is introduced already: a classic Nosferatu-type vampire called The Master. He is summoned with incantations from a pool of blood, of course.

Oh, there’s Angel. He looks so pale and young! I used to hate his guts, but now I kind of like him. So broody! Velvet jacket, though? They so did not have his wardrobe worked out, yet! Ooh, mysterious Angel, didn’t even tell Buffy his name, yet he gave her a cross necklace. What a dweeb.

I heart the Bronze! It’s the coolest ‘90s adolescent hangout ever. I wish this place existed in Joplin when I was a sophomore in high school! Oh, cute, Willow’s eating a box of raisins.

I wonder if they had a different wardrobe designer at the beginning, because everyone looks terrible. Willow’s bad nerd-dress, Buffy looks like a mom or a typical Christian character...was this how we dressed in 1996?

One thing I really love about Buffy is that I grew up with her. When the show started, she was a sophomore in high school and I would have been a freshman, I think...maybe I was in 8th grade, either way we were almost the same age throughout the series. Buffy, with its diversity and subtexty-parallels-to-real-life-themes, was a good influence on me in my adolescence like GaGa and Glee are to kids now.

I actually didn’t start watching Buffy until season three when Faith arrived. A boyfriend forced me to watch it and I was incredibly resistant, because I liked the movie and thought the show would be stupid, not unlike thousands of people over the years have assumed, and then later watched one episode and been totally hooked. I loved the show right away and watched it through the season. We lost the WB network on local TV after that year, so I missed seasons 4 and 5, rejoining season 6 when it aired late at night on UPN. It was a shocker at the beginning of the 6th season, *spoiler alert!* because I had no idea Willow was gay now or that Buffy was dead.

Ah, getting ahead of myself! So, the first episode gets a lot of the main details out of the way, like a good first ep should. I’m glad they didn’t name it “Pilot”. I hate that.

to be continued...

Commentary (by Joss Whedon) notes added 5.22.13: Joss says the mission statement of the whole show is that "nothing is at it seems". Unfortunately, usually that means the girls kick ass when you don't think they will. When Joss cast Willow he wanted to make sure he didn't cast the "supermodel in the horn-rimmed glasses" type and get an actual quirky girl. Glad he pushed for someone like Alyson Hanigan.

The decision to make the vampires be in and out of vamp face was because Joss wanted the "villains" to not always be obvious, but he wanted them to be seen as villains when B kills them. He made them "dust" because he didn't want the good guys to have to clean up the bodies and for it to be plausible for the vampires to remain unseen by the general population.