ANOTHER TINGLE MOMENT
I'm gonna dive right in here and say that the third season of Buffy The Vampire Slayer is probably my favourite. There will be individual episodes and story developments later which hit deeper and harder, but taken as a whole, this one packs in everything I love about the show. There are a couple of hugely significant arrivals, a Big Bad who's both hilarious and menacing, and a farewell (for now) to Sunnydale High. There are some memorable done-in-ones accompanying a thrilling central story arc. And, despite the usual emotional upsets, betrayals and reverses, the roll call for this season is is one of the most effective iterations of the Scooby Gang.
Ironic, then, that it starts with Buffy on her own, having fled Sunnydale in grief after the conclusion of the previous season (stabbing her boyfriend (who'd just got his soul back) through the heart and plunging him into a Hell Dimension in order to save the world - come on, we've all been there). She's holed up in LA working as a waitress, making this one of the few episodes set outside its usual Sunnydale locale, albeit with cuts back to the rest of the Scoobies fighting vampires in a comedic manner, something they're often called on to do in season openers when Buffy's swanned off elsewhere or got herself killed or something - oh yeah, there might be some SPOILERS here, but let's face it, you've probably watched all of this too, possibly binging it all on All4 like I've recently done. Those Domino's ads, eh?
So anyway, this is one of those stories where a hero has turned their back on hero-ing, only to find themselves having to hero again and realising that hero-ing is their destiny. Buffy bumps into a minor character from the second season and ends up investigating mysterious disappearances amongst the neighbourhood's homeless community. What I think is interesting about this episode is that it's a rare acknowledgement in Buffy of people who aren't comfortably off; there's no evidence of poor people in Sunnydale, where, if anything, it's the various demons who drink in Willy's Bar who are the underclass. Incidentally, Angel, who it will surprise nobody to learn doesn't stay dead, later ends up in LA for his spin-off series. I tried rewatching the first episode the other day and it was proper shit. I'm aware that judging a show by one out of 110 episodes is unfair, but I'm happy to do it, if only for comic effect.
I'm not going to go deep into every episode of this season, but the next one celebrates Buffy's return with one of the regular trashings of her house. Her mum Joyce has brought home a mask from her gallery which turns out to be an evil artefact with the power to reanimate dead things. Oh Joyce, by this point in proceedings you really should have realised something like this was going to happen. Anyway, it results in a bunch of zombies storming the house while a welcome home party is in full wing. Hey, it makes a change from vampires! The day is saved, but Joyce's friend Pat ends up dead, never to be mentioned again. No wonder Joyce doesn't seem to have many friends.
I'M A FAMILY MAN. NOW, LET'S KILL YOUR LITTLE FRIEND.
So anyway, this season's lead antagonist is somewhat different from normal. After The Master and the Spike/Drusilla/Angelus triple pack, it seems like Joss Whedon fancied a change from villains of the fanged variety (at least as the evil in charge - he still employs Mr Trick and the standard bunch of befanged ne'er-do-wells to regularly come off worse when confronting the Slayer). Curious minds will have wondered for some time why Sunnydale's general populace seems largely unaware of the weekly supernatural threats faced by some of its citizens. Sure, vampires don't leave much more than a pile of dust once Buffy's staked them, but their victims are plentiful enough to suggest someone should have noticed certain wound profile trends in recent morgue admissions. Fresh vamps are forever erupting from Sunnydale's cemeteries with a thirst for blood and unaccountably advanced martial arts skills (that's a whole other issue), which must surely mean they've been through funeral homes and had Christian burials...
The idea of a conspiracy in the town's government is seeded as far back as early in the second season, when Principal Snyder (and how am I only mentioning him now?) tells the police chief to blame a high school vamp attack on a bunch of gang-bangers on PCP. Well, it turns out that the Mayor is actually an immortal with an evil plan to become a demon and, I dunno, take over the world or bring about the apocalypse or something. What elevates this character - who in less imaginative hands would have been portrayed as a standard corrupt politician - is his genial demeanour, more sitcom dad than Big Bad. He mostly maintains a light-hearted attitude to both his official role and his dark intentions, hates bad language, and talk a good talk in terms of good old fashioned family values. On the one hand, this makes sense - he's lived through the 20th Century and still cleaves to the ethics established before the 60s shook things up. And on the other, it's a pretty good takedown of the sort of double standards which had been prevalent in American politics throughout, at the very least, the lives of Buffy's cast. It also allows for a different kind of menace - there's a recognition here that sometimes a threat is all the scarier when it's hidden behind a facade of affable good humour.
I'M FIVE BY FIVE
If the Mayor's eventual appearance is rather low-key, the same can't be said for another new character. You might recall that Buffy's death, which didn't stick beyond a few seconds, triggered the calling of a new Slayer in Kendra. And you might also think that whoever was in charge of such things could have recognised their mistake and, after Kendra's demise, stuck with just the one Slayer, particularly as we had another five seasons' worth of episodes which would start with Giles intoning "Into every generation a slayer is born: one girl in all the world, a chosen one. She alone will wield the strength and skill to fight the vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness..." But they didn't, and so: Faith.
What with her sassiness, trouble with authority figures and ability to kick the (un)living shit out of all those vampires, demons, etc, I'd never previously considered Buffy Summers to be a goody-goody. Faith changes all that by being very much the anti-Buffy. Unashamedly angst-free, happy to admit that fisticuffs give her a sexual thrill and perhaps over-fond of using the word 'wicked' when 'very' would do just fine, her loose cannon persona brings a different kind of energy to proceedings, even luring Buffy into something of a life of crime, just like that bad influence every teenager gets warned about at some point. True, she's kind of an archetype, and a few episodes in I admit to feeling that maybe either the character or Eliza Dushku's portrayal thereof were bordering on the two-dimensional, but both pick up when Faith goes off the rails after accidentally killing a civilian, revealing a hitherto-unseen vulnerability. This leads to a weirdly touching side to her alliance with the Mayor, as they fall into a strange father-daughter relationship that is played as entirely genuine.
Before those developments, we get some great standalone episodes. After his Halloween hijinks in Season 2, Ethan Rayne returns to distribute some candy that makes its adult consumers revert to their teenage selves, providing the show's actual teenagers with the nightmarish vision of their parents and teachers larging it in The Bronze, something I imagine could be replicated in the here and now if Orbital or Underworld were booked to play NASS or one of those other youth-centric dance festivals. Giles and Joyce take a fancy to each other, leading to an offscreen copping off which will be humourously referenced aplenty in later episodes, while Principal Snyder's rather sad attempts to hang out with the cool kids provide a subtle explanation of why he might have turned into such a grouchy, child-hating shit by middle age.
WELL, LOOK AT ME. I'M ALL FUZZY.
Now, everyone loves an alternate timeline story, right? Both the X-Men (in the classic comic storyline Days Of Future Past) and, post-Buffy, Heroes have used them to kill off swathes of characters for shits and giggles. Buffy got to indulge in a similar manner in The Wish, which takes place after Oz and Cordelia discovered their respective loves Willow and Xander sharing a smooch. While Oz stoically gets on with gradually forgiving Willow over a number of episodes, Cordy's rather more volatile personality leads to her accidentally summoning vengeance demon Anyanka and, blaming events more on Buffy than on hapless Xander, wishes for a world where the Slayer never came to Sunnydale. Yikes!
Wish granted, Cordy finds herself and her intact memory in a town overrun by vampires, led by The Master (who evidently made less of a hash of things with his Season 1 plans with no meaningful opposition). Xander and Willow are his leather-clad lieutenants (cue Cordy: "I wish us into bizarro land and you guys are still together? I cannot win!"). Slayerless Watcher Giles has assembled a small group of "white hats" including Oz and Larry, and a girlfriendless Angel is The Master's prisoner. Cordy gets killed by Xander and Willow, though not before trying to explain to bizarro land Giles about Buffy, who it turns out is in Cleveland for some reason. When she shows up, the Slayer is cold and jaded, implicitly showing that without a Scooby Gang she'd end up with substantially less sparkle. Not sure why she's got a scar on her face, mind - do those Slayer healing powers not work in Clevo?
Anyway, the inevitable massive scrap happens and, let's see... Xander kills Angel, Buffy kills Xander, Oz and Larry kill Willow and The Master snaps Buffy's neck (mostly in slow motion, like the end of Blackadder Goes Forth or something). Luckily, Giles has figured out how to reverse Anyanka's spell, by summoning her and smashing her amulet, and everything reverts to normal, except Anyanka is now no longer a vengeance demon but trapped - the horror! - as a teenage girl at Sunnydale High. Do you think we'll see her again?
Well, of course, albeit only after the mysterious First Evil tries to get Angel to kill himself (in a Christmas episode, no less), Hansel and Gretel turn up and the townsfolk nearly burn Buffy, Willow and Amy at the stake, Xander accidentally has a night out with a bunch of dead LADS!LADS!LADS! (in an episode where I finally start to like the guy), Giles loses his official Watcher job and gets replaced by a stiff called Wesley, and some of that Faith stuff I was on about earlier happens.
So anyway, Anyanka, now just going by Anya, tricks Willow into casting a spell to try and retrieve her amulet and regain her vengeance demon mojo. Accidentally, the pair summon Vampire Willow, transported from the point where she about to be slain by Oz. Superstition has it that seeing your own double is bad luck...but, hey it's great news for Willow fans! Alyson Hannigan gets to play not just Willow and Vampire Willow, but also Willow pretending to be Vampire Willow, and Vampire Willow having to wear Willow's clothes. This won't be the last time Buffy engages with a little double trouble: there's the Season 5 episode where Xander gets split into two different parts of his personality, Buffy and the Buffy-bot, and The First Evil has a thing for appearing as Spike to Spike (and, eventually, as Buffy to Buffy). And there'll be an identity crisis of a different kind for Buffy and Faith, but we'll get to that another time...
There's more fun with switcheroos in the following episode, where Angel's soul is (apparently) removed once again by the Mayor and Faith, while Earshot could almost be a throwaway Sunnydale High-centric episode, but for the fact that it involves Buffy talking Jonathan down from killing himself. Speaking of school, there's a prom to get through before Graduation Day, and (having prevented three hellhounds from killing everyone), there's a sweet moment for Buffy when it's revealed that her classmates aren't as dozy as it's seemed, recognising the many occasions she's saved them all with a special 'Class Protector' award (presented by Jonathan, natch).
ONE OF US IS VERY CONFUSED
Around all of this, there have been romantic sub-plots a-bubblin'. In the first step towards her becoming a key cast member, Anya asks Xander to the prom, while Wesley and Cordelia enjoy a classic opposites-attract flirtation after he initially mistakes her for a member of staff at the school. I'm not sure whether this was intended as an in-joke, as Charisma Carpenter was, by this point, in her late 20s and visibly too old to be playing an 18-year-old (Terrifyingly, as I write this, she's 50). It's hardly a surprise, but the majority of the supposedly teenage cast were in fact into their 20s even by Season 1; Nicholas Brendon was born in 1971, while Alyson Hannigan and Seth Green would have been in the year above me in school. Of the core original cast, only Sarah Michelle Gellar would have still been a teenager when the first episode of Buffy premiered in the US. (Side-note: Alexis Denisof, who played Wesley, would end up being the real-life Mr Alyson Hannigan, while Wes would return as a regular cast member on Angel).
OH MY GOD. HE'S GOING TO DO THE ENTIRE SPEECH.
The first episode of the two-part season finale concludes with a brilliant scrap between Buffy and Faith. It's easy to forget how effective Buffy can be as pure action, despite (or because of) the fight scenes that are in nearly every episode, sometimes a little shoehorned in as if there was a quota to fill. There's a physicality to the choreography, even when it's just Buffy vs a random vampire, and even more so when the combatants are well-matched, as with Angelus at the end of Season 2 or, especially, when Buffy and Faith square off in the latter's apartment for what feels very much like a fight to the death (and very nearly is). Obviously a certain amount of the heavy lifting here is being done by stunt doubles, but even allowing for that, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Eliza Dushku deserve props for being utterly convincing here.
The actual end of Season 3 is equally satisfying, with the Scooby Gang recruiting their entire school year to fight against the Mayor (transformed into a demon in some very dated CGI) and his vampire goons, with cameo roles from many of the supporting characters who've been established over the previous three years. In the endgame of the plan to kill the Mayor (now trading, however briefly, as the demon Olvikan) comes a move which is so obviously symbolic it transcends metaphor, the High School being blown to absolute smithereens. In the aftermath, having broken up with Buffy for her own good a couple of episodes previously, Angel silently grumps off to enjoy headlining his own spin-off, and, though nobody knows it yet and it's barely ever mentioned in the future, Cordelia will be off to LA too.
Big changes afoot next time, with a new location, new characters, new directions for old characters and a very different sort of foe, as well as the use of Cher's Believe as a plot device, drunk Buffy and, well... Shhh.
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