Becoming Parts 1 and 2

Mark here... well we made it!  The season finale of Buffy Season 2!  This was a really good episode!  It starts out kind of slow but sort of sums up the best of this season.  The season as a whole was a bit off and on for us watching again.  On the one hand there's some great stuff with exploring the history of the slayer and the introduction of Spike.  On the other hand, there's still Jenny Calendar and the awkward romance between Buffy and Angel.  It just felt off in retrospect.  I know this was the season Buffy became a thing based on that romance, but it still lacked chemistry for me and the age difference was unavoidable.  So you're 200 years old and your attracted to a 16 year old girl.  I get the appeal if you are 16, but now...yeeesh.

Anyway, Angel, Drusilla and Spike are plotting to unleash this awful hell demon and the gang must stop them.  But lo and behold, Spike is sick of evil Angel and doesn't want the end of the world.  So he strikes a bargain with Buffy.  In the meantime though, Drusilla attacks the Scoobies while Angel distracts Buffy. She captures Giles, wounds Willow and Xander, and kills a visiting Kendra the Vampire Slayer.  Kendra pretty much shows up to get knocked off, being an awful character and making way for a better one...next season!  Willow ends up hospitalized but pulls herself together to attempt re-ensouling Angel with a spell they found from Jenny Calendar.  Witch Willow is very much apparent and we get to see her finally taking charge and moving from the mousy friend to the tough character she will become.  Now if only she would dress better!  Seriously, coming out for Willow isn't just about admitting she's gay, it's about not dressing like someone who hates herself!

Buffy confronts Angel at his ritual and Spike betrays him and carts Drusilla off.  After a big fight, Buffy is forced to kill Angel to reverse the spell he started...but Willow has succeeded in re-ensouling him! It's a touching scene even as she's forced to stab him with a sword.

In the end Buffy is forced to leave town.  The police think she's killed Kendra because she's found with the body.  Also, Joyce throws her out after Buffy confesses to being the Slayer and tells her she has to leave.  Another great scene!  Buffy basically tells Joyce she's been in denial about everything that's been going on.

One final point...we get a hint of something bigger as Principal Synder calls the Mayor *who we've not seen) to express joy at Buffy leaving town and being expelled from school...

Hey Laurel here...I second Mark's emotion about Willow, it's nice to see her step up to the plate, now please stop dressing like you hate yourself!

The other thing I thought was interesting about this episode is that Joyce finally gets a clue, sort of.  She realizes she's been missing a huge issue that has been going on in her daughter's life for the last few years but she reacts so poorly when she discovers it.  She finally starts to understand that something profound is going on when Spike shows up at the house with Buffy, and Buffy evaporates a vampire right in front of her, but her reaction is like "young lady, you are grounded!"  and Buffy is like "I don't have time to be grounded I have to save the world!  Don't you get it by now you clueless woman!"  I am paraphrasing of course, but you get the jist.  Hopefully Joyce will get it together in the next season.

The episode ends with Buffy running away.  Where will she go?  What or who brings her back?  What will Angel be like now that he has a soul again?  Will Willow ever start dressing better?  Only time will tell...

We give this double episode a rare 5 stakes!  Good one Joss.

Go Fish

Hey guys Laurel here...I liked this episode too.  Like the last one it had a heavy 50s B movie quality that I think works well for the show, and it's a nice departure from all of the Vampire stuff, which at the time was new and interesting but now we are inundated with because of twilight...

SO the swim team is all of a sudden hot stuff at Sunnydale, the first athletic team there that has been any good in years and years.  It turns out they are good because the whole team is slowly actually turning into fishes!  Fish type monsters anyway.  Originally the gang thinks that the swim team boys are being eaten by a demon because they keep finding the boys' skins laying around, but it turns out they are actually turning into demons, and their skin is what's left behind.  All thanks to the glory hungry swim coach, who is dosing them with steroids via the steam room.

One of the things I like about this episode is that Xander actually gets to be kind of a stud.  He tries out for the swim team and makes it, because the good swimmers keep "disappearing".  When he first shows up in his speedo the girls are gaga for him (until they realize it's him).  But the cat's out of the bag...Xander is secretly hot!  He also gets to be the hero, pulling Buffy out the of depths of the sewer with one arm, just in time to keep her from being raped by all the fish dudes that are swimming around down there.  I'm sure his super strength is due to the steroids he was unknowingly inhaling in the steam room, but still...heroic nonetheless.  Way to go Xander!

Mark here... I agree with Laurel, this episode had a "Creature of the Black Lagoon" slash "I Was a Teenage Swamp Thing" B-movie vibe which worked well for it.  Also, we got to see Prison Break hottie Wentworth Miller in an early role.  He can't act his was out of a shoe but he's easy on the eyes! There's not too much else to say about the episode, it's clearly a filler episode in between the main season arc story of Buffy and Angel, but it's actually refreshing because we again get to see the core Scooby Gang in action and not worry about all the Buffy Angel drama, which is wearing thin on both of us, to be honest.

Overall, 3 stakes.  We'd say 3 and a half, but we're not doing halves...:)

I Only Have Eyes For You

Mark here...Laurel and I are checking in for another episode of Buffy, Season 2.  This episode is called, "I Only Have Eyes For You".  We kind of intentionally flaked on a meal and are ordering take out because it's 900 degrees here in LA!

Anyway, I liked this episode.  It's sort of a cheesy, cliche idea but done well in the way Buffy does B-movie so well.  The premise is that Sunnydale High is being haunted by a poltergeist,  That being the ghost of a teenager who died in the 50s after killing his lover/teacher and then himself.  This ghost is possessing people in the school and causing all sorts of supernatural mayhem.  The gang decides to exorcise him and we gets to see more hints of Willow going witchy.  She leads the team and researches whats needed.  Giles is distracted by thinking, wishfully, that this is the ghost of Jenny Calendar.  In fact he and Buffy both have issues with this particular ghost and misidentifying.  Buffy claims to identify with the murdered woman and yet in the end is possessed herself by the male ghost who identifies with her.

Angel is drawn into the mix too to give us a final but of Buffy/Angel drama, although it feels a little forced.  The best parts of the episode are the scoobies playing ghostbusters in Sunnydale High.

Hey guys Laurel here. I liked this one too, it was fun and something a little different.  The poltergeist kept trying to re-enact the night of his death through other people, first a male student and his girlfriend, then a male janitor and a lady teacher.  So we think that Buffy is going in to get killed by some dude, but really she ends up playing the killer (the "dude" part) which I thought was a good twist.  Kind of bored by the angel part but whatevs.  I feel like it may have been more interesting if it was a normal high school boy that had been flirting with her or something.

4 stakes from us for this one!

Killed By Death

Hey Guys Laurel here...So this episode was another "filler" so nothing really epic happened but it was still pretty good.  It was sort or Freddy Kruger esque, except the killer was someone who only took children, and could only be seen by children who had come down with a specific sickness, a Sunnydale fever if you will.   So we don't know how but somehow Buffy got the fever (maybe because she is a young adult?) and saw him briefly in a fever dream...enough to convince her that this villain was real but not enough to fight him aside from in her fever dream state.  Anyway the gang figures out that this villain is going after kids with the fever and sucking the life out of them in order to keep himself alive.  After Buffy gets well and the gang learns more about the death villain she chooses to go back into the hospital and get the fever again (by drinking a vial of a fever sample out of the hospital fridge, how she got access to that is beyond me.)  Anyway she is about to down the whole vial, but thankfully Willow, ever the science nerd, is there to warn her that she should dilute it and only do a few drops.

Mark here.. so basically the episode is as Laurel described...  Buffy is fighting at the beginning of the episode, contracts a disease, sees demons and re-contracts herself with said disease to kill the demons.  Its not a classic episode but its sort of amusing.  We sort of kept referring to  future episode.  Suffice to say the writers and costumers were going to get way better.  Honestly, I liked this episode even though it was filler.  It's a bit cheesy Freddy Krueger B movie-esque, but whatever...

In any case, we give this episode 3 stakes...

Passion

Mark here...so we're on to the next episode of Buffy, "Passion"... this was a good episode but with a some caveats.  I know we are watching this episode years later so I have to temper my opinion....

First let me describe what happened...  Essentially this episode, we see Jenny Calendar trying to make up for her gypsy past.  We see her at the beginning of the episode trying to recreate the magic spell that gave Angel his soul. Unfortunately, psychic Drusilla sees this and Angel is on to Jenny.  He ends up cornering her in the school and breaking her neck.  What we see is that Jenny has found the spell and stored it on a floppy disk.  A disk that by the end of the episode has fallen between the desk and a file cabinet.  So the big drama of the episode is Angel killing Jenny!

On to my thoughts... So this episode was very dramatic when it aired.  A presumably major character just got killed by Angel.  Also it reveals that Angel is not going to just be "talked down" from being evil.  At the time I understand the drama of the episode. Watching it now... I hate Jenny Calendar, so good riddance.  Also, evil Angel is annoying.  Evil Angel on the show Angel serves a purpose.  Here,  he's also kind of annoying and given that I never bought the Buffy-Angel romance, I'm not so invested.  Honestly, the most dramatic moment comes at the end when Buffy rescues a vengeful Giles from attacking Angel.  I'll let Laurel go into that.

Essentially, I liked the episode but I also like getting rid of Jenny Calendar.  I recognize the drama of the episode in that it upped the stakes going forward for the series.  Unfortunately, watching it now, it didn't have the dramatic umph...

Hey Laurel here...I agree!  I would have been so much more into this episode if I gave any fucks about Jenny Calendar.  I know we are supposed to like her and we are supposed to be super effected by her death but neither me or Mark care about her at all...so good riddance!   Mark remembers everything that is coming up but I don't, so I am just hoping that her leaving the show makes room for somebody way more awesome.

Like Mark said the best moment of this episode is a small interaction between Buffy and Giles...Giles is no where to be found after Jenny's death, but the gang suspects that he has gone to "the factory" to exact revenge on Angelus for killing Jenny.  Buffy goes to check it out and low and behold, Giles is unconscious, about to die in a fire that has broken out there after a fist fight with Angel.  She kicks Angel's ass (just enough to distract him, of course) then drags Giles out of the fire.  Giles gets upset because Buffy put herself in danger for him but Buffy gets even more upset and slaps Giles in the face for going to the factory alone and putting himself in danger.  She tells him he can't put himself in danger like that because "she can't do this (be a slayer) without him".  It's a very tender moment where we realize how much these two care about each other.  We loved it, but it also made it even more crystal clear that we don't care at all about Jenny C because we were invested so much more in this 30 second clip than we were about any of the rest of this pivotal episode.

3 stakes!  Would have been more but we just can't muster any concern for Jenny C!

Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered

Hey guys Laurel here...so This episode was a little boring, especially compared with the last two, but still way better than any of the 90210 filler...

Despite the fact that Cordelia is dating Xander, she still thinks he is super annoying and geeky which she has no problem expressing to him at every turn.  And not afraid of doing it publicly.  So this episode she goes so far as to break up with him because the popular girls don't want to hang out with her anymore because she is dating such a geek.  Cut to Amy, a beginner teen witch that Mark had to remind me we met in the first season (because as you guys know I have a very bad short term memory.  And long term memory actually also).  Anyway he enlists the help of Amy to cast a spell to make Cordelia love him more, but since Amy is a just a beginning witch she botches the spell and instead it turns out every woman in Sunnydale EXCEPT for Cordelia falls madly in love with him, including Buffy and Willow which leads to some awkward moments.  The women of Sunnydale are so obsessed with him that his life is actually in danger because these women would rather see him dead that see him with someone else.  But Giles saves the day in the nick of time, he helps Amy reverse the spell just as the women of Sunnydale are closing in, and all's well that ends well.  In a way the backfired spell actually works because it makes Cordelia realize that she actually likes Xander.  At the end of the episode she ends up telling off the popular girls she had been trying to coddle to fuck off because they make fun of Xander.

Mark here... Laurel did a great job of summing up the episode.  It was certainly a fun and inoffensive episode, but a little blah. I think we got distracted a few times after we saw where it was going.  Yeah, Xander casts a love spell which includes Joyce and Drusilla.  So there's some humor there.  It's nice to see Amy again, I can't remember if we've seen her since her appearance last season, but I think not much if so.  We find out she's still dabbling in witchcraft.

We'd give this episode 2 stakes....not terrible but a little predictable.

Phases

Mark here... we're back after a long break!  It's been a while for us due to work and other commitments but here we are on to Buffy Season 2!  Laurel and I have just had the first part of our meal, Artichokes with butter and parmesan, yum!!

This episode is sort of Buffy's ode to "I was a teenage werewolf" and "teen wolf" and whatever other teen werewolf b-movie stories there are out there.  It was a good episode!  Any episode with more Seth Green is great and in this episode we find out Oz has become a werewolf.  I really like the way it's written.  He's not savagely attacked, instead his infant cousin has bitten him and he comes to find out the infant is a werewolf.  As he realizes this it's played against his burgeoning romance with Willow.  Willow herself is showing much more strength as a character, despite still being dressed like she's in elementary school.  Seriously at one point she is wearing bright yellow overalls.  Everyone else is appropriately 90s fashion but yeeesh, Willow's outfits are atrocious!

Anyway, there's a series of werewolf attacks, a random werewolf hunter and high school hijinks but it's pretty good over all.  There's a subplot with Larry, the school jock, coming out as gay to Xander when Xander questions him about being a werewolf (he's not).  It's pretty edgy stuff for the time and Laurel and I discussed how the show could get away with this stuff because it flew under the radar, being just a show for teenagers that adults didn't care about.  It's also nice to see that the gay stuff didn't make it "A Very Special Episode" and instead was treated like nothing.  The show will obviously delve deeper into gay subtext and text in the future without making a big deal of it.

Hey Laurel here...Mark did a pretty good job of wrapping it up, I'll just second his comment about coming out.  I didn't make any note of it watching it the first time as a "young adult" because it just seemed like the way it was supposed to be, but in hindsight the show was pretty groundbreaking in terms of how they include LGBT issues without making a huge thing out of it.  I guess if you extrapolate the show is making a comment on diversity in general, because you are allowed to be a werewolf, a vampire, a witch, a nerd, a cheerleader, etc and still just be part of the gang, but I especially appreciate the inclusion of LGBT characters when I'm rewatching the show as a grown adult.  Pretty forward thinking stuff for the time.

Also just wanted to give Cordelia some props because she did some serious stunt driving this episode!  We first meet the werewolf when Cordelia and Xander are making out in her car.  The werewolf pounces on top of the car and punches through the roof to try and eat them.  Cordelia has the where-with-all to throw the car in reverse, slam on the brakes to hurl the werewolf off the roof, and makes a clean getaway.  Way to go Cordelia!  You are not my favorite but I was not ready for you to die just yet!


In conclusion, we give this one 4 stakes!