A Tour of Sunnydale - Teacher's Pet

Do any of you have a fear of bugs? If so, it might be better for you to sit this one out. In fact, it's a decent idea to sit this one out even if you don't. The rest are welcome to join me on A Tour of Sunnydale.

Today we'll be dealing with Teacher's Pet. It marks the first appearance of David Greenwalt, this time in the first of his eight credits as writer on Buffy, but he'll also go on to direct four episodes, as well as being a significant presence on Angel. It's also the Buffy directorial debut of Bruce Seth Green, the first of his eight directorial credits on the show. According to The Phi Phenomenon this is the 141st most popular episode of Buffy online, putting it a mere 3 spots from the absolute bottom of the list, being the worst showing for both Greenwalt and Green.

This is it. This is the Season 1 that Buffy fans remember and feel somewhat resentful toward, the one that's full of cheese and bad special effects and whose episodic nature makes it unconducive to the ongoing storytelling that makes Buffy and Angel worthwhile. Teacher's Pet is exemplar of everything that consistently goes wrong in the first season: Weak and inconsistent characterization, confused tone, increased emphasis on weak monsters-of-the-week, and a tendency to introduce completely redundant plot lines.

Throughout the episode, Xander is decidedly terrible. His initial fantasy about saving Buffy is fair enough, but after that he seems to devolve into a ball of irritating clinginess, and then a hormonal asshat who after having spent two weeks fighting monsters on the Hellmouth thinks Buffy says a teacher is a praying mantis because of jealousy. The entire episode keeps repeating the one beat: Xander wants to fuck Ms French. Fine. We get it. Get on with it.

Other than that, the episode is just full to the brim with pretty objectively bad writing. I'll spend the next few paragraphs just listing examples in no particular order, because there's no neat way of progressing between these thoughts.

As soon as Ms French starts lecturing about mantises, the audience who's seen that the culprit behind Dr Gregory's death has chitinous hands, knows what and who the killer is. A hell of a lot of time (enough to rival the mantis plot) is spent on Buffy investigating the vampire with the fork hand, but ultimately all he does is make Buffy suspect French (which she would have done anyway when Ms French decided to turn her head 180 degrees in class for no apparent reason) and then lead the Scoobies to Ms French's house (which only happens after Buffy goes to the real Ms French's house, to learn the completely unimportant bit of information of the mantis having usurped the identity of a real teacher). For a subplot that's given about as much time in this episode as cheerleading was given in Witch, it accomplishes essentially nothing, and is completely uninteresting in any way.

There's a long bit where Principal Flutie talks to Buffy about how she needs counselling about the death of Dr Gregory, and then Buffy listens in to Cordelia in a counselling session. There's a couple amusing bits there, but it literally serves zero plot purpose other than having Buffy be late to class (which could have been achieved by giving her one line like "Ooops, I really should be getting to class, the bio lab is miles away, I'm going to be late, you keep doing the research thing" at the end of a library scene), and it goes on for almost two whole minutes. 

There's a joke where Buffy asks Giles about Ms French and he demonstrates himself to be horny, which is not a thing he would ever do in front of Buffy, especially not at this point. There's a point later on where Buffy suggests French is a mantis, and neither Giles nor Willow believe her. Why wouldn't they? They know shapeshifters exist. At one point Buffy is fighting the pointless fork vampire pointlessly in a graveyard and a bunch of policemen randomly show up looking for something causing the two to run away. Why does the vampire run from human police? What are the police doing in the middle of a graveyard at night? At the start and end Angel shows up to show up and he's no longer fun and snarky like in the pilot. This is the Angel I remember from early Buffy, one of my runners up for worst main character in the Buffyverse.

Beyond this, the episode's climax drags on for absolute ages: Xander is captured by Ms French and Buffy & Co are searching for him at the 25 minute mark of this 40 minute episode, and all that happens after that point is Xander and/or Buffy fighting the mantis. It just goes on and on and never ends and I want it to end please but still 5 more minutes oh goody. It's also got a cliffhanger ending that goes nowhere: In the bio lab a mantis egg cracks open... and then we never think about it again.

To be fair to Teacher's Pet, it's not completely inept. There are a few strong moments here, mostly to do with Dr Gregory, whose tough-but-fair no-nonsense attitude and fantastic teachering towards Buffy instantly endears him to the audience before his prompt demise. The scene after the discovery of his body the highlight of the episode, with all the Scoobies visibly shaken, with particularly strong performances from Sarah Michelle Gellar, who really sells the combination of Buffy's pain and rage, and Anthony Head, whose delivery of the line "He was a civilized man. I liked him" is incredibly powerful. Other than that, there's a number of effective comedic parts, like Willow and Buffy's half-amused half-exasperated treatment of Xander in the canteen, or Willow's pro-abstinence rant after Ms French is dealt with.

And, for all its faults, Teacher's Pet is highly enjoyable. Yes, it's cheesy, over the top, dumb, and pretty badly written, but that doesn't preclude it from being actively fun. I am more than willing to concede to the community that Teacher's Pet is a bad episode, but I still had a good amount of fun with it. Unlike the true bottom-of-the-barrel Buffy episodes, Teacher's Pet managed to at least keep me fully engaged all the way through. My fun with it comes a lot from a so-bad-it's-good place, but at least it's there.

Overall, Teacher's Pet is a pretty damn bad story: Badly written, badly directed, with weak grasp of the characters and a tonne of unfulfilling filler content. It's got a few bright spots surrounding the character of Dr Gregory, but it's basically universally awful otherwise. Fortunately, that doesn't need to prevent me from having fun with it.

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 supremely easy: Teacher's Pet is by far the absolute worst bit of Buffy so far. Even our last place entry thus far, Welcome to the Hellmouth, is miles ahead of it.

Ranked List

Rating: 1/10. Teacher's Pet is a shoe-in for this. I actually came up with a few episodes of Buffy I dislike more off the top of my head, but I really struggled making my way up to a total of 6 of them. Considering Teacher's Pet needs to beat at least 14 episodes to climb out of this score bracket, this seems about right. Fortunately for it, and unfortunately for me, the next episode is actually one of those 6 episodes I could come up with. Teacher's Pet is somehow not keeping its bottom of the list position for long. Urgh.