This episode is highly boring, so I don't have anything to write in this bit. I realized that I'm going to have to name the reviews of Angel something different. After all, they're set in LA, so I can't have them be called A Tour of Sunnydale.
Never Kill A Boy On The First Date is the fifth episode of the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It marks the first Buffy writing credit of both Dean Batali and Rob Des Hotel, who work together as a writing duo on all 5 of the episodes they are credited for. It's directed by David Semel, who'll go on to direct three more episodes of Buffy, including the disastrous Go Fish and the much beloved Lovers Walk, making him one of the most wildly fluctuating directors for the series. Never Kill A Boy On The First Date is ranked 122nd on The Phi Phenomenon, putting it exactly one season's worth of episodes away from the bottom of the list.
If there's a single episode out there that is the ultimate example of why the first season of Buffy is weaker than most of the rest of the show, it's Never Kill A Boy. It's the perfect example of all the things that drag it down, even more so than Teacher's Pet. In addition, where Teacher's Pet at least had the pulpy silly aspect to keep me entertained against my will, Never Kill A Boy is immensely, incredibly boring.
The biggest problem of Never Kill A Boy is the character of Owen, the boy Buffy crushes on (despite being in a critical moment in the season, 2 episodes away from the pivotal Angel, where Angel should be the only contender for her affections). He likes poetry 'cause he's so deep, and he's broody and dreamy, and he likes Buffy over Cordelia despite Buffy's constant weirdness and oh he is just so perfect...
He comes across as disingenuous wish fullfilment and somehow as an insufferable faux-deep try-hard at the same time. It'll become abundantly clear as the show goes on that Buffy has terrible taste in men, but Owen may be the very pits. He's nigh-on impossible to like, somehow combining excessive perfection with inoffensive blandness and irritating try-harding.
This'd be forgiveable if the rest of the episode had anything redeemeable in it, but no! The plot is a dull affair where Buffy runs around between Owen and Giles, fights a vampire, and... well, I wanted to write three things because rule of threes, but that's actually all that happens. The episode attempts to play this as this deep observation that Buffy is struggling to keep a balance between her life as the Slayer and her normal life, but hey, fuckwits, that's kind of been central to the show since Welcome to the Hellmouth, and will continue to be central until a little episode called Chosen. You're not pointing anything we hadn't noticed out, and you aren't commenting on the thing you're pointing out.
The entire episode is pointless. Other than a couple nice and amusing beats, like Giles' badass preparedness going into the morgue or Xander's pitch-perfect watch, basically everything fails here. The episode is a whole lot of nothing happening (other than the quick introduction of the Annointed at the very end, a character who'll continue to stick around), and the stuff to love about early Buffy is completely absent.
I hate Never Kill A Boy On The First Date. I'm pretty sure this thing is in my all 3 all-time least favorite episodes of Buffy, maybe even Buffy and Angel. It's bland naff that doesn't even manage to get the superficial good points of the show right. Characters are bland, nothing happens, fuck Owen.
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.
Ranking is once again an absolute breeze. Never Kill A Boy On The First Date drops like a pile of lead bricks to the bottom of the list, and is going to stay there for at least another season. Fuck this episode.
Ranked List
Rating: 1/10, yeah, this ain't beating 4 episodes of Buffy in terms of quality, yet alone 14.
Never Kill A Boy On The First Date is the fifth episode of the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It marks the first Buffy writing credit of both Dean Batali and Rob Des Hotel, who work together as a writing duo on all 5 of the episodes they are credited for. It's directed by David Semel, who'll go on to direct three more episodes of Buffy, including the disastrous Go Fish and the much beloved Lovers Walk, making him one of the most wildly fluctuating directors for the series. Never Kill A Boy On The First Date is ranked 122nd on The Phi Phenomenon, putting it exactly one season's worth of episodes away from the bottom of the list.
If there's a single episode out there that is the ultimate example of why the first season of Buffy is weaker than most of the rest of the show, it's Never Kill A Boy. It's the perfect example of all the things that drag it down, even more so than Teacher's Pet. In addition, where Teacher's Pet at least had the pulpy silly aspect to keep me entertained against my will, Never Kill A Boy is immensely, incredibly boring.
The biggest problem of Never Kill A Boy is the character of Owen, the boy Buffy crushes on (despite being in a critical moment in the season, 2 episodes away from the pivotal Angel, where Angel should be the only contender for her affections). He likes poetry 'cause he's so deep, and he's broody and dreamy, and he likes Buffy over Cordelia despite Buffy's constant weirdness and oh he is just so perfect...
He comes across as disingenuous wish fullfilment and somehow as an insufferable faux-deep try-hard at the same time. It'll become abundantly clear as the show goes on that Buffy has terrible taste in men, but Owen may be the very pits. He's nigh-on impossible to like, somehow combining excessive perfection with inoffensive blandness and irritating try-harding.
This'd be forgiveable if the rest of the episode had anything redeemeable in it, but no! The plot is a dull affair where Buffy runs around between Owen and Giles, fights a vampire, and... well, I wanted to write three things because rule of threes, but that's actually all that happens. The episode attempts to play this as this deep observation that Buffy is struggling to keep a balance between her life as the Slayer and her normal life, but hey, fuckwits, that's kind of been central to the show since Welcome to the Hellmouth, and will continue to be central until a little episode called Chosen. You're not pointing anything we hadn't noticed out, and you aren't commenting on the thing you're pointing out.
The entire episode is pointless. Other than a couple nice and amusing beats, like Giles' badass preparedness going into the morgue or Xander's pitch-perfect watch, basically everything fails here. The episode is a whole lot of nothing happening (other than the quick introduction of the Annointed at the very end, a character who'll continue to stick around), and the stuff to love about early Buffy is completely absent.
I hate Never Kill A Boy On The First Date. I'm pretty sure this thing is in my all 3 all-time least favorite episodes of Buffy, maybe even Buffy and Angel. It's bland naff that doesn't even manage to get the superficial good points of the show right. Characters are bland, nothing happens, fuck Owen.
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.
Ranking is once again an absolute breeze. Never Kill A Boy On The First Date drops like a pile of lead bricks to the bottom of the list, and is going to stay there for at least another season. Fuck this episode.
Ranked List
Rating: 1/10, yeah, this ain't beating 4 episodes of Buffy in terms of quality, yet alone 14.
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