A Tour of Sunnydale - I Robot, You Jane

And to your left you'll see CDR, Sunnydale's number one... national-scale computer business? We have several of those? Just how much do we have in this small town? I guess even the guide learns something when you take A Tour of Sunnydale.

Today we're looking at I Robot, You Jane, the eighth episode of the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Penned by Ashley Gable & Thomas A. Swyden, the duo that will depart Buffy after providing us with the late season 1 episode Out of Mind, Out of Sight and directed by one-timer Stephen L. Posey, I Robot, You Jane comes in at number 143 according to The Phi Phenomenon, making it the all-time second lowest rated episode of Buffy. Ouch.

I have this trilogy of episodes I always dread re-visiting in season 1. They're composed of Teacher's Pet, Never Kill A Boy On The First Date, and I Robot, You Jane. I see them as a trio of episodes with very similar problems: Weak monsters of the week not backed by the solid character writing that makes equally goofy but much better episodes like The Pack and The Puppet Show worth watching. I typically see Never Kill A Boy as the worst of them, and Teacher's Pet as the best one. Seeing how bad those episodes were on this watch through, I really didn't look forward to revisiting I Robot, You Jane.

Now, yes. I Robot, You Jane is bad. It's goofy, it's dumb, it's badly plotted, it's often terribly written. The character of Fritz is completely unbelievable and ridiculous, the way the story works out is utterly predictable, it seems like the writers expect us to not figure out things they've previously essentially outright told us, there's many moments when the core cast are bent out of shape bordering on outright breaking character, a lot of directorial choices are baffling, and the whole thing is built on 90s hysteria surrounding the Internet to the point where it comes across like an anvilicious PSA. If you've watched Buffy before, or even just watched I Robot, You Jane, you can name the myriad ways that this episode goes wrong and falls flat on its face.

I think it's more interesting to point out the stuff that works in I Robot, You Jane, because I was surprised to note just how much of this episode I fully enjoyed. I mean, yes, part of it was ironic enjoyment at how silly large swathes of this episode are, but there was also some genuinely great moments that stand out like a sore thumb when compared to the general clumsiness with which I Robot, You Jane executes most of its story.

The positives in I Robot, You Jane can mostly be summarized with four words: Jenny Calendar and Giles. This episodes marks the introduction of Jenny Calendar (called only Ms Calendar for now), the first significant new character to be introduced since the pilot, and, like many of the characters in the pilot, she seems to plop out of thin air fully formed as the character I've formed an attachment to. There's a certain affable sharpness to her, a quick, sardonic wit that Robia LaMorte manages to portray brilliantly as lacking any malice at all despite the many barbs she often throws out. Right from her very first line, Ms Calendar managed to make me like her and want to see more of her.

The best moments in the episode come from her interactions with Giles, which are in this odd but absolutely perfect middle point between cool professionalism, instinctual rivalry, and what I can only interpret as an already burgeoning mutual attraction. They're fun to watch banter, and the way they just naturally click into working together at the end of the episode is both satisfying and speaks to the fact that they're just compatible. The scenes involving Jenny and Giles are the only ones with anything resembling a proper thematic throughline, with the two of them obviously representing a modern and an antiquated approach to technology. A surface level reading of their conflict simply involves a conflict between romanticism and utilatarianism, but the final speech by Giles speaks to something slightly more interesting: The idea that knowledge, and the power that comes with it, needs to be tangibly earned, needs to be, as he puts it, "smelly". It's just barely touched on, but it's an interesting couple of plot beats that give the episode more depth and substance than one might otherwise expect, fitting in nicely with the PSA awareness-raising about the Internet.

Aside from all of this, much like Teacher's Pet, I found I Robot, You Jane tonnes of watch to fun despite all of its flaws. This time I was laughing at it much more, since the entire episode is so decidedly 90s and so desperately goofy and over the top, especially whenever Fritz shows up. Whilst I can't really argue this makes the episode better, it most definitely made me like it a whole lot more, even more than Teacher's Pet. I Robot, You Jane embarasses itself enough that I had a fantastic time pointing and laughing at it the entire way through. It felt a bit like picking on the dumb kid at school, but it was still fun.

That is honestly everything I have to say. I could go on and on and list the myriad and one ways the episode falls down, makes no sense and doesn't work on an emotional level, but anyone with half a brain can pick up on most of these watching the episode through just once.

Here's ranking and rating: The ranking is of all episodes of Buffy and Angel I've watched so far, with 1 being the best one, and the rating is out of ten in context of the quality of the show: I'm essentially trying to decide what 10% of quality of that particular show the episode belongs in. Because both shows are so good, this means negative ratings are not neccesarily a diss on the episode -  I just think it's one of the show's weaker ones.

To my surprise, I think there's a very easy place for I Robot, You Jane on my list: Immediately above Teacher's Pet. Whilst I've usually considered Teacher's Pet the superior episode of the two, and it's possible it objectively is, the joy that Jenny Calendar brought me, combined with the sheer amount of stupid, dumb, so-bad-it's-good that I Robot, You Jane instilled in me means it easily beats out Teacher's Pet. Currently right above Teacher's Pet is Welcome to the Hellmouth, which is an actual good episode, so there's no way that I Robot, You Jane beats that out.

Rating: 2/10. This is surprising to me, but I Robot, You Jane was entirely too enjoyable for me to expect to not be able to find 14 episodes worse than it. There's a lot of Buffy to go, and a decent amount of it is pretty bad (thank you, season 4) in very bad, non-enjoyable ways. I Robot, You Jane manages to avoid the dreaded bottom rating by bashing its head against a wall enough to make me laugh.