And to your left, Sunnydale's famed kiddy league team. Yes, kiddy league. We don't talk about the l-word league here. Prepare to learn about legal distinction as we take A Tour of Sunnydale.
Nightmares is the name of the tenth episode of Buffy's first season. It was written by David Greenwalt, who so far has written the bad but enjoyable Teacher's Pet and the mediocre but beloved and pivotal Angel, in the third of his eight writer's credits on Buffy. Directing is Bruce Seth Green, who we last saw directing The Pack, in the second of his eight directorial appearances on the show. The Phi Phenomenon ranks Nightmares as the 47th most popular episode of the show, making it the fourth best liked episode of the first season, only seven spots under Welcome to the Hellmouth at number 40.
Once upon a time, I would have roughly agreed with this. Since my very first watch-through of Buffy, I always thought of Nightmares as one of the most solid episodes of the first season. It doesn't feel very much like the thing the show would later become, but it's a good little story decently told. It's also got some depth, telling us more about these characters.
I think most of this is still true, but my God, did Nightmares need to be so goddamn boring? The episode is paced like a lazy turtle who's on a walk to the grocery store to buy milk for tomorrow's breakfast but has a couple hours to kill before it has to do anything anyway and also it's got a broken leg. Whilst the episode does have a few moments of legitimate thematic crunch, like Buffy and Giles' shared fear of her vampirification, and a host of moments that are fantastically emotionally affecting (The first Hank scene, Giles' constrained terror at losing the ability to read) or genuinely hilarious (Xander's nightmare, especially its culimination when he punches out the clown, accentuated by Nick Brendon being just on top of his game this episode), it just takes aaaaaages to get anywhere.
This isn't helped by the fact that, though most of the nightmare sequences are good (there's a few exceptions: Cordelia's one feels like a missed opportunity at some much needed depth, and Willow's one is too cliche to be amusing), the plot surrounding them is pretty thin at best. A spooky kid keeps appearing, and we need to figure out what's wrong. Oh, I guess he's in a comma and generic unspecified magic is happening because Hellmouth. Cool. It's not interesting, and my instinctive dislike for kids on screen makes me fairly annoyed at his "I'm so mystical" shtick: "we've got to hide, that's how it happens" x10. Urgh. The episode gestures at a sort of growth for him at the end: After watching Buffy defeat The Ugly Man in the dream, the kid wakes up, and scolds the coach who beat him into a comma for loosing at baseball, getting rid of his feelings of guilt about loosing a match. Feelings of guilt that we learn about one scene earlier, and which Buffy says a throwaway phrase at him to dispel, which he parots at the coach. There's no crunch there, the kid didn't arc, someone just told him it wasn't his fault and then he believed them.
I really don't have much to say about Nightmares. It's far from a bad episode: It has some of the funnest and most moving moments yet... but it's got an extremely thin plot that 45 minutes is simply too long a time for. As such, nothing actually happens in it for long stretches of time, and we just kind of spin our wheels talking in circles about issues the audience has figured out long ago. Add to that an annoying and cliche take on the creepy kid scenario, and Nightmares is actually kind of a bore to watch.
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.
The immediate comparison for ranking is Angel. It's another episode that I feel gets overrated. Unlike Angel, I originally also really liked Nightmares, and I think I can recognize why: The good bits really are very good. Unfortunately, the rest of it brings it down. I still think I enjoy Nightmares more overall, but it's a close shot. I'm forced to compare with The Harvest, which to me is the quintessential basic Buffy episode, and it's honestly just more tightly constructed and fun. The high points of The Harvest are lower than those of Nightmares, but the overall quality is higher. Nightmares slides into the list at number 5, right between The Harvest and Angel.
Ranked List
Rating: 4/10 just feels right. There's going to be a fairly significant number of worse episodes to come, but not anywhere near as many as I thought there was going to be.
Nightmares is the name of the tenth episode of Buffy's first season. It was written by David Greenwalt, who so far has written the bad but enjoyable Teacher's Pet and the mediocre but beloved and pivotal Angel, in the third of his eight writer's credits on Buffy. Directing is Bruce Seth Green, who we last saw directing The Pack, in the second of his eight directorial appearances on the show. The Phi Phenomenon ranks Nightmares as the 47th most popular episode of the show, making it the fourth best liked episode of the first season, only seven spots under Welcome to the Hellmouth at number 40.
Once upon a time, I would have roughly agreed with this. Since my very first watch-through of Buffy, I always thought of Nightmares as one of the most solid episodes of the first season. It doesn't feel very much like the thing the show would later become, but it's a good little story decently told. It's also got some depth, telling us more about these characters.
I think most of this is still true, but my God, did Nightmares need to be so goddamn boring? The episode is paced like a lazy turtle who's on a walk to the grocery store to buy milk for tomorrow's breakfast but has a couple hours to kill before it has to do anything anyway and also it's got a broken leg. Whilst the episode does have a few moments of legitimate thematic crunch, like Buffy and Giles' shared fear of her vampirification, and a host of moments that are fantastically emotionally affecting (The first Hank scene, Giles' constrained terror at losing the ability to read) or genuinely hilarious (Xander's nightmare, especially its culimination when he punches out the clown, accentuated by Nick Brendon being just on top of his game this episode), it just takes aaaaaages to get anywhere.
This isn't helped by the fact that, though most of the nightmare sequences are good (there's a few exceptions: Cordelia's one feels like a missed opportunity at some much needed depth, and Willow's one is too cliche to be amusing), the plot surrounding them is pretty thin at best. A spooky kid keeps appearing, and we need to figure out what's wrong. Oh, I guess he's in a comma and generic unspecified magic is happening because Hellmouth. Cool. It's not interesting, and my instinctive dislike for kids on screen makes me fairly annoyed at his "I'm so mystical" shtick: "we've got to hide, that's how it happens" x10. Urgh. The episode gestures at a sort of growth for him at the end: After watching Buffy defeat The Ugly Man in the dream, the kid wakes up, and scolds the coach who beat him into a comma for loosing at baseball, getting rid of his feelings of guilt about loosing a match. Feelings of guilt that we learn about one scene earlier, and which Buffy says a throwaway phrase at him to dispel, which he parots at the coach. There's no crunch there, the kid didn't arc, someone just told him it wasn't his fault and then he believed them.
I really don't have much to say about Nightmares. It's far from a bad episode: It has some of the funnest and most moving moments yet... but it's got an extremely thin plot that 45 minutes is simply too long a time for. As such, nothing actually happens in it for long stretches of time, and we just kind of spin our wheels talking in circles about issues the audience has figured out long ago. Add to that an annoying and cliche take on the creepy kid scenario, and Nightmares is actually kind of a bore to watch.
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.
The immediate comparison for ranking is Angel. It's another episode that I feel gets overrated. Unlike Angel, I originally also really liked Nightmares, and I think I can recognize why: The good bits really are very good. Unfortunately, the rest of it brings it down. I still think I enjoy Nightmares more overall, but it's a close shot. I'm forced to compare with The Harvest, which to me is the quintessential basic Buffy episode, and it's honestly just more tightly constructed and fun. The high points of The Harvest are lower than those of Nightmares, but the overall quality is higher. Nightmares slides into the list at number 5, right between The Harvest and Angel.
Ranked List
Rating: 4/10 just feels right. There's going to be a fairly significant number of worse episodes to come, but not anywhere near as many as I thought there was going to be.
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