Some Assembly Required

Hey Laurel here...this episode is kind of a more gruesome take on weird science...Willow is friends with a smart kid a school, Chris, who's older brother, a HS football star,  has died tragically about a year earlier.  At the same time Buffy discovers an empty grave where a teenage girl has been dug up and taken.  When Angel creepily follows Cordelia in a dark parking lot, she gets sacred because she is being followed, fumbles her keys, and hops into a dumpster.  Why she doesn't realize by now that she shouldn't have her keys ready ahead of time before she wanders out into a dark parking lot is beyond me, but I digress.  In the dumpster she and Angel find a bunch of teen girl body parts.  It turns out they are all leftover parts from teenage girl grave robberies, with a few choice parts missing.

It turns out that Chris and his nerdy yearbook friend are trying to assemble the perfect girl body, out of dead girl body parts, so that Chris's brother who they brought back from the dead won't be lonely anymore.  But what will they do for the head?  They have to get a "fresh" head because formaldehyde kills brain cells.  The resurrected brother chooses Cordelia to be the head donor.

So at the big game on Friday, the boys try to abduct Cordelia in the deserted girl's locker room, where Cordelia inexplicably is hanging out by herself.  Buffy foils their abduction, but the boys don't give up easily and end up abducting Cordelia minutes later when she wanders into a dark corner under the bleachers at the big game.  How hard is it to not find yourself alone in a dark corner at a fucking high school football game Cordelia?!?  Anyway they haul her away to their weird secret laboratory where Buffy and the gang save the day again.  Chris's resurrected brother burns up in a fire that has started in the ruckus, and is dead again.  All is as it should be.  You shouldn't mess with the universe, teens!

Mark here...Laurel did a great job of summing up the episode.  It's sort of a teenage twist on the Frankenstein story.  It's not the most imaginative episode, although I will give them points for making it creepy and scary.  But yeah, why Cordelia, having grown up in Sunnydale, doesn't know at this point to watch her back?!?

There's also a subplot of Giles trying to work up the courage to ask Jenny Calendar out on a date.  She ends up doing the heavy lifting there.  I'm still not sold on Jenny Calendar but I think it plays out cute enough.  I guess my problem is more that the actress just doesn't fit the "technopagan" description.

Anyway, I think we both decided that this episode merits another 3 stakes.  It was actually a bit more entertaining than the last but still a fairly average monster-of-the-week episode.