New Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony Review - Simply Brilliant

It's impossible to properly discuss New Danganronpa V3 without massively spoiling it. Even that right there consitutes a minor spoiler, but it's one I can't not have. As such, I'll divide this review into two sections: A general overview of why the game is good, and deeper discussion of its intricacies. I'll do my best to keep the first section spoiler-free, but I implore you, if you have even the slighest interest in this game, go play it, even before reading the first section, as even there I'll have to spoil some bare minimum things. Even if you don't, even if you haven't played the first two Danganronpa games, go do it. This might be the finest series in all of gaming, and I can't recommend them enough. Now, without further ado:

Section 1 - General Overview

New Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony is, as the title would suggest, the third installment in the Danganronpa series. As with the previous two, it follows a group of sixteen students who are trapped together - this time in a school again, back to series origins after Danganronpa 2's tropical island setting - and forced to participate in a killing game. If you kill someone, you're allowed to leave. The catch is, if you're caught, you're killed too. If you're not caught, everyone else gets killed instead. The player controls one of the students, who is forced to investigate the murders and become a prominent figure in the so-called Class Trials - group discussions where everyone puts their head together to try and figure out who the murderer is. Like previously, the students are all the best at some particular (and usually pretty obscure and specific) field, being called the "Ultimate" at that field. Talents in this game range from Ultimate Pianist, through Ultimate Entomologist to Ultimate Robot.

The gameplay loop is largely unchanged from the previous two games. The game is divided into chapters, with each chapter having three distinct parts - "Daily Life", where the story unfolds in typical visual novel style and the group learns more about the mysteries of the school, then "Deadly Life", where the player must roam the school investigating the murder and collecting clues, and finally the Class Trial itself, which resemble the trial sequences from the Ace Attorney games with an added element of action as you must point out contradictions in other people's reasoning, all while dealing with the changing mood in the room and navigating the situation accordingly.

Both Daily Life and Deadly Life contain walking about sections, where you navigate the school in first person. Much like the previous two games, they're both pretty scripted. Whilst there's often additional dialogue to be found if you roam about a little, there's only ever one place to move the story forward, and it's pretty obvious where. Following the formula for the hybrid detective/lawyer game that Ace Attorney proved works bizarrely well, there's no possibility of missing clues during the investigation sections either, which drains some of the charm away.

Still, the real trick here - as Ace Attorney proved - is that the writing has to be strong enough to make you forget this. The murders need to be set up in such a way that you constantly feel like you're discovering something significant as you're investigating, but there still need to be enough bizarre small clues that seem insignifcant but make no sense at the moment to make the big moments of realization in the trials work well. Danganronpa V3 mostly suceeds at this, though a couple cases (3 and 5 for me) become a little too obvious a little too fast, and it takes the characters a while to catch up.

The meat of the game as a game comes in the Class Trials though, and these are also pretty much unchanged from the previous two games. Most of your time will be step in what the game calls Nonstop Debate, where the characters talk at each other, presenting what they think happened in the murder. You've got a few pieces of evidence out of the ones you collected to choose from, and you must match them with highlighted statements in order to either contradict them or agree with them. This section is basically a much easier version of the cross-investigation sections of Ace Attorney - it works basically the same way, but you're only allowed to present a small portion of your evidence, and only at a few of the statements. The catch is people talk fast, and you have to respond quickly at the right statement (Otherwise you must wait for the whole conversation to loop again) as opposed to having unlimited time in Ace Attorney. It's overall considerably easier than Ace Attorney, but it makes the Trials feel much more fast paced and fluid, and puts more emphasis on the unfolding story.

This is backed up by a suite of minigames, which represent different occurences in the Trial. Someone takes particular offense at your line of reasoning? You enter a small minigame where you have to cut down their arguments with the correct piece of evidence like it's a sword duel. Hysteria overtakes the room? You have to listen to several people talk at once, and figure out who to focus on to find the statement you must contradict in order to calm everyone down. The room is split in half over a particularly contentious point of the murder? There's a minigame where you have to figure out how to best organize your side of the room to convince the others by matching the key words of their arguments to those of the opposition. Someone's out of arguments and they're just trying to shout you down? You play a rhythm game where you shoot down all their yelling. You have to think particularly hard about something? You either play a game where you're mining for the answer in your mind, one where you're creating a key word from scrambled letters, or one where you're driving a taxi through Vegas and picking up hookers with the right answers floating over their heads. That last one may be a bit weird.

These minigames have differing levels of effectiveness, but you'll rarely be playing any of them more than twice in the same trial, so even the worst ones (like the rhythm game) are pretty painless, whilst the best ones (like the newly introduced Debate Scrum, the one where the room is split in half) are really fun. In general, they help keep variety up in Trials, and do a good job of making you feel like you're using a big skillset in order to overcome more obstacles than just having to figure out who the murderer is. It really does lend a dynamic feel to the trial, and help give the other characters in the room personality as they feel their involvement in the trail is as important as yours. In a way, it's more of a lawyer game than Ace Attorney, as pure hard logic won't get you to the end of the trial - you've also got to be able to manage the people in the room with you. Like the two previous games, class trials are a joy to play, with the mysteries being cleverly written and full of twists, and fairly hard to guess before you get at least partially into the corresponding trial.

Also back is Free Time - the small choice you do have during Daily Life, where you're allowed to choose who to spend time with when the plot's not advancing, which has been slightly improved but is still as flawed as ever. The problems with it in previous games were twofold. First off, there were barely any instances of it, which cut players from seeing many of the various stories told by hanging out with a character several times. Also, certain characters wouldn't give you scenes for hanging out with them until a certain point in the story, but would let you try, which not only would waste a valuable Free Time chance with no warning, but would also be spoilerific, as not being able to hang out with a character yet was a sure indication that they were neither the victim nor the killer of that trial. The first of these two is alleviated - you now get five Free Times per chapter, up from the three from the previous games, which means you can exactly complete one characters' little story in a chapter by only spending time with them, without being interrupted by a massively long Trial and all the story that comes with that. The second is super not, and I managed to massively spoil one of the Trials for myself that way, as well as wasting several Free Time slots. I don't understand why that feature is still there, it seems like putting in added work just to make the game worse. Surely it'd be easier to just allow all Free Time to happen at once, unless there's a plot reason for it not to (like a character isn't talking to you, for instance). Still, Free Time is a welcome addition to the game, letting you learn a bit more about the characters you like the most, and helping mix in a bit of interacitivity to the largely uniteractive Daily Life sections, where all you do otherwise is walk to the next plot-relevant location.

Now for the part that those spoilers will force me to drastically cut down: The story is good. Once again, the sixteen students have wildly different personalities, full of cartoonish quirks, and there's plenty of goofing around to be done with them. Everyone gets a fully fleshed out and unique personality and look, even the people who die early on, which in addition to making the world feel more vibrant prevents one from metatextually figuring out who stays around for long. Danganronpa carries on its trademark combination of wacky humor with genuinely gruesome, disturbing and touching scenes, which only makes the mood feel that much more bizarre and unique. Once more, the game largely consists of a drip-feed of information about the larger plot which the characters slowly figure out whilst dealing with interpersonal drama and the constant string of murders, which are often tragically motivated.

This isn't the stuff that makes Danganronpa V3 truly precious (that I need to give myself the freedom of spoilers to discuss), but it is an integral part of making it a great experience. Everything works here. The gameplay, whilst simplistic, works fantastically in conjuction with the plot. Mysteries that you want to solve abound, both in the short scale in the form of the murders, and in the long scale in the form of what exactly is going on and why this death game is happening. Characters evolve and grow, jokes become crucial and sometimes legitimately disturbing plot points. Danganronpa V3, even without the stuff that truly makes it tick is an incredibly good game, with pretty fine-tuned gameplay and a hell of a fun story. I'd be recommending it even without the stuff that I'm going to explore in...

Section 2 - Spoilers

Last chance to leave! I mean it! Full on spoilers! You're robbing yourself of a great experience by reading this! If you want to play the game, go do it now. You should, by the way.



The original Danganronpa was, all in all, a fairly straightforward little story: A death game happened for mysterious reasons, you got information about why along the way, and at the very end it all clicked together in a satisfying way. On the way there it played with your expectations a little bit (especially in the victim of the first case, who was set up to be a major character), but it was largely exactly the type of thing you'd expect from a death game story. Then Super Danganronpa 2 came along, which was set up to be the same thing, except it played off your expectations from the first game, mysteriously mirroring certain parts of it to an uncanny extent, but pulling off curveballs at the last moment. The reveal at the end was all the more satisfying for it, because not only did it explain the mysterious events happening in Super Danganronpa 2, but it also worked on the level of a metatextual commentary on the first game. Super Danganronpa 2 had followed just enough of the plot beats from the first game to make you feel like you knew what was going on, only to pull the rug out from under you consistently.

New Danganronpa V3 does a similar thing, with the direct one-to-one comparisons to the first game gone, and a whole new level of meta insanity pushed on top. In the very first case it blows your expectations coming in from the first two games straight out of the water: The Ultimate ???, a talent that always represented a major character up until this point, is the very first to be killed, and your bloody player character is the one who did it. The entire game is built around subverting your expectations this way: Characters trick you into thinking they're going to be important only to suddenly die, all whilst seemingly side gag-characters survive till late in the game. Murders seem incredibly simple and with obvious solutions, only to have been much more complex.

The entire game is just a constant, unending subversion of your expectations in every single regard. Seemingly important clues to the nature of the story turn out to mean nothing, whilst off-handed comments made an hour into the game unravel the plot over thirty hours later.

But, most of all , Danganronpa V3 is beautiful because of its ending, a metatextual clusterfuck where the characters appear to become aware that they're fictional only for you to realize that they're not fictional in our universe, they're fictional within a fictional universe in which the events of the first two Danganronpa games may or may not also be fictional. As such, all the mysteries of the school that have been carefully and precisely built up over the last thirty hours are thrown out of the window. There's no solution, the mastermind was sowing the clues as they went along in order to create an intriguing story. Really, none of the clues were actually real. It's all fiction. The last couple hours of the game are spent investigating why people enjoy Danganronpa the way we do. Is it out of some sadistic wish to see innocent characters die? Is it out of a desire to watch people overcome overwhelming odds? Maybe a combination of the two? What's true is that it's a massive mindfuck, and a joy to read through as more and more insane levels of meta get added on top of each other, creating a joyful and fascinating little tangle. There's a lot here, from the aforementioned self-reflection to an ode to the power of fiction and even a notice that the series is, at the very least, going to take an extended break.

There's also the cockblock aspect. The characters get actively angry at the audience and refuse to give them a satisfying ending, just choosing to allow themselves to be killed to spite us. Between this and the mysteries of the school not being satisfied, the entire ending is designed to feel unfullfilling, and it does its job fantastically. Fortunately, the metatextual mindfuck of the entire thing does make it incredibly satisfying, but not in the way the large majority of the game made you expect it to be. Once again, a fantastic reversal of expectations.

Danganronpa V3 is many things. It's a fantastic death game story. It's a commentary on its own series, and on the risk of a series running its course without ending. It's a meditation on the difference between art and artist. It's a critcism of people's taste in art, and an ode to the power of that exact same art to make the world a better place. Most of all, it's an absolutely phenomenal game that works near perfectly from beginning to end: Great murder mysteries to solve, a phenomenal plotline, and the best character work in the entire Danganronpa series, along with possibly the greatest ending in all of gaming. Fucking play this thing. Please.

10/10, among the greatest games of all time.

A Tour of Sunnydale - Out Of Mind, Out Of Sight

Eerie flute music is a Sunnydale staple, so it'd be a crime not to listen to some as we take A Tour of Sunnydale.

Today, we're taking on Season 1 Episode 11 of Buffy, titled Out of Mind, Out of Sight. The second of the two Buffy scripts written by Ashley Gable & Thomas A. Swyden, Out of Mind, Out of Sight is directed by one-time Buffy director Reza Badiyi, and is ranked 97th on The Phi Phenomenon. The closest episode that's ranked above that we've seen so far is The Puppet Show at 94, and below is Never Kill A Boy On The First Date at 122. This is a marked improvement for Gable and Swyden, whose previous script, I Robot, You Jane, is the second lowest rated Buffy episode of all time, at number 143.

For once, I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with the way things pan out on the big Phi Phenomenon list. Out of Mind, Out of Sight is at the lower end of season 1, but decidedly above the crap episodes of the season. It's probably not going to be the lowest ranked episode that I like in the season, but it's close enough to be somewhat of a dividing line. Instead, this is (ironically enough) a forgettable but solid little episode of television.

I think the big problem with Out of Mind is precisely that. It's not got either any good or bad enough moments to be very entertaining. When watching these episodes I've been taking notes, just little thoughts that cross my mind as I go through. Some of them are realizations about what works or doesn't work in the episode at a larger scale, but most of them are just moments that do or do not work. These help me construct my review, as I'll usually stare at these notes for a couple minutes before starting to write, and look for patterns in them. An episode like The Pack had a lot of moments where I was amused, so that was a funny episode. The Puppet Show had notes on all sorts of things, most of them positive, and I had a lot of notes regarding clever manipulation of my expectation in the plot. Hell, even Never Kill A Boy had a bunch of notes about how nothing worked. All in all, it takes usually a side to a side and a half of paper per episode. Out of Mind took me a quarter of a side.

This doesn't mean that Out of Mind isn't good. It's competent in almost every respect. I stayed engaged the entire way through, and the few notes that I took are all positive. This is the episode that finally makes Cordelia make sense. We finally get to see her as more than the rich mean girl, and realize that she's also going through some stuff. Her bitchy facade is just that, and she's actually smart enough to understand how vapid she is and how unsubstantial her friendships are, but keeps being this way because of a crushing fear of loneliness. It's neat stuff, and it justifies Cordelia's presence in the show. Out of Mind is also kind of unique in how it just subtly puts out this feeling that Buffy is also lonely and kind of depressed, and doesn't neccesarily touch it, just getting it across through the cinematography and acting. It's also cool how the circumstances the characters find themselves in feel more deadly than ever before - particularly Willow, Xander and Giles in the boiler room being gassed.


There's legitimately great stuff in Out of Mind, Out of Sight, but there's just not enough of it. It has a strong central premise, and a fairly well constructed plot, a few decent character beats and that's really about it. In a way, Out of Mind, Out of Sight is a perfect representation of Season 1 as a whole. It's appropriate, with a few shining moments, but largely fairly disposable. When it does shine it's through unexpected character depth and a level of darkness that's surprising for network TV in the 90s.


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.

I start at last week's episode, Nightmares as a comparison. I think this is definitely better, since I wasn't bored for most of the run. Unlike Nightmares, I don't think Out of Mind, Out of Sight is flawed. I look at Angel, and I'm a bit stuck. On the one hand, Angel is more memorable and is legitimately pretty good. On the other, Out of Mind doesn't have the crutch of being pivotal, and it is very similar in quality. It's forgettable, sure, but it's also pretty competent. I think they have a similar amount of high points, but Out of Mind's are higher. As such, I think Out of Mind just edges it out.

Ranked List

Rating: 4/10 this whole block of episodes is roughly at the 4/10 rank, so that's what Out of Mind gets. 

A Tour of Sunnydale - Nightmares

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.

A Tour of Sunnydale - The Puppet Show

Sometimes, even the guide is surprised in the course of taking A Tour of Sunnydale

The Puppet Show is the ninth episode of the first season of Buffy. It's written by Dean Batali & Rob Des Hotel, who we last saw in the truly awful Never Kill A Boy On The First Date, and directed by Buffy newcomer Ellen S. Pressman, who'll leave the show after directing her next episode, the second season's Inca Mummy Girl. It's ranked 94th on The Phi Phenomenon, making it the second highest episode written by Batali & Des Hotel, just two spots under their most popular, the 92nd ranked Phases.

The Puppet Show might be one of the goofiest episodes of Buffy. Whilst not quite as silly as The Pack or something like Bad Eggs or Go Fish, it's weird in a way that the show doesn't really often dable in: through the camp and silliness of its central supernatural conceit: the ever cliche creepy talking puppet. As such, it's kind of a black sheep, since the monster of the week is oddly un-Buffy, which I find makes the community treat it with something approaching resentment. The Puppet Show is stupid in a way that can be pointed at to give Buffy a bad name that the show not only doesn't deserve, but that's not really earned by basically the entire rest of the show.

I'll admit I was guilty of that as well. I'd always thought of The Puppet Show as a solid but supremely silly episode of Buffy. I was wrong. The Puppet Show is legitimately a fantastic episode of television. The cold open alone is brilliant: An extended 5 minute sequence where we get some of the first truly Buffy-ish interactions between the main cast. For the first time in the entire run of the show, the four characters at its heart feel like a group of friends who genuinely enjoy spending time together. Yes, Buffy and co. goof on Giles the entire time, but it's fond poking fun at, and as such it's an absolute joy to behold. There's also the fantastic introduction of Principal Snyder, who is immediately completely present as the over-the-top monster he is. He's mean, he's petty, and he's incredibly fun to be around (at least as a member of the audience). He also gives us the best line of the episode "Kids needs understanding, kids are human beings... that's the kind of wooly-headed liberal thinking that leads to being eaten"

This intro also does a great job of setting up the talent show. Morgan and Sid's act is immediately impressive, and though it's obvious to anyone with a brain that Sid is going to be a living creature, it's set up in such a way that you don't blame the Scoobies for not immediately catching on. There's also the bumbling magician, who is subtly the only new student really introduced, but who spends his time far in the background and doesn't draw atention to himself, making the reveal of his identity as the demon surprisng but not an ass-pull. Also, Cordelia's act. Hilarious.

While the cold open is the real highlight of the episode, the rest of it is no slouch either. There's plenty of hilarious little moments, like the Scooby's investigation montage, and the running gag of the "cut to another character in another location answering the question that just got asked" constantly being interrupted by Cordelia's self-obssesed rambling made me giggle. There's plenty of fantastic lines through the episode, with more of Whedon's signature dialogue style than any other episode so far (even the ones he actually wrote!). I think this might be the funniest episode of Buffy thus far.

The characters are also on top form: Buffy effectively and admirably takes the lead, with Giles and Willow doing their job as investigators in perfect synergy, and Xander has a couple brilliant moments of initiative. The side characters also shine in this episode: Morgan is a brilliantly awkward and creepy character who serves very well to cast suspicion on Sid. When their relationship is revealed this casts Morgan in a positive light just in time for his sudden death to be surprisingly effecting. Sid himself is a great red herring: Of course you expect the creepy puppet to be evil, but it turns out he's good, which only serves to make the episode more confusing and interesting. His constant horniness could have been an instant turn-off from the character for me, but it's actually suprisingly downbeat, and you get the feeling he's saying these things more as a joke than to actually let his feelings be known. Sid becomes very likeable very quickly and, like Morgan, his death is actually a pretty effective moment.

On top of that, The Puppet Show tells a tightly paced and competently constructed whodunnit story, with a couple twists and turns along the way. Every plot beat flows effectively from the last, and the pace is just brisk enough to keep the audience engaged and just slightly staggering behind the line of reveals. My one big gripe is the final action scene, which drags on a bit too long and hinges on Giles acting very stupid right after the literal line "Well, Giles is pretty smart" becomes a crucial plot point. It's also kind of confusing and overwrought, with worse stuntwork than I'm used to even by Buffy's relatively low standards, and some poor camerawork that makes it difficult to follow.

I was completely blown away by The Puppet Show. What I remembered as a somewhat below-average but still competent episode of Buffy was an absolutely fantastic time, with very few negatives. This episode works on almost every level. It's not even like The Pack, where a portion of my enjoyment came from how silly the episode is. Everything that I liked about The Puppet Show was intentional, and there was a lot to like in this episode.

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 a lot easier than I thought it'd be, and puts the episode at a surprising spot. This is so far easily the best episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I enjoyed it even more than The Pack, but all my enjoyment was actually on purpose by the episode, which is something I can't be sure of for The Pack. The Puppet Show effortlessly slides in at number 1.

Ranked List

Rating: 6/10 Rating was kind of hell, though. I remember giving The Pack a 6/10. I did not look this up, as that's against the rules, but I'm pretty sure that was the rating. It feels like there's at least 14 episodes worth of quality differential between the two episodes, but giving The Puppet Show a 7/10 feels ridiculous. I ultimately decided to give it a 6/10, just in case I'm suffering from recency bias. Edited after checking: Yes, I did give The Pack a 6/10. I'm pretty sure I've at least been consistent thus far, which is good!

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.

A Tour of Sunnydale - Angel

You never quite know who to trust in Sunnydale. A lot of people here, they aren't quite what they first seem to be. I'm sure you'll learn that as we take A Tour of Sunnydale.

Angel (not to be confused with the eponymous character Angel or the spin-off show Angel) is the seventh episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It is written by David Greenwalt, the second of the eight episodes he'll be credited for writing on Buffy. We last saw his work with the rather sub-par but nonetheless enjoyable Teacher's Pet. Directing is Scott Brazil, in his one and only credit on the show. According to The Phi Phenomenon, Angel is the 24th most liked episode of Buffy, putting it well above our previous peak of Welcome to the Hellmouth at 40, and making it the second highest ranked episode of the first season.

Angel is one of those episodes that matters. It's the first episode of Buffy that's really for the fans, that's entirely based on previous material in the show and is pointless to the casual watcher. It's also the first episode with lasting, obvious consequences since the pilot, which doesn't really count since it's the set-up for the whole show. I don't think it's unfair to say that Angel is a foundational episode for the remaining 136 episodes worth of Buffy, and all 100 episodes of Angel (the show). It's also, as was mentioned in the introductory paragraph, a very well regarded episode of the series.

As such, I really do wish I could like Angel more than I do.

Ever since my first watch through of the show, Angel has been one of those episodes that I forget about. I usually can't really tell you what happens in it. I guess it's revealed that Angel is a vampire, and then... ummmm... yeah. Nothing of much consequence really happens. We mull about for a while, get in a fight, and then the episode ends.

I'm going to be plain here: The reveal that Angel is a vampire is fine. It provides a very effective moment, but the entire episode suffers as a result of the weight of having to make it happen. The most obvious way is how Buffy and Angel are suddenly completely, totally in love. There'd been indications previously that Buffy found Angel attractive, but come her conversation with Willow near the start of this episode and she's suddenly completely head-over-heels for the guy, when the most she'd said before was that he's hot. Conversely, there'd been absolutely no indication that Angel felt this way about Buffy at all, yet here he seems even more hopelessly in love with her than she is with him.

What's more, the entire episode feels pretty aimless. There's no driving force here, really, nothing anyone is working to accomplish. Characters just kind of drift from plot point to plot point in order to have the big reveal happen, and eventually they collide into each other in the big fight in the Bronze at the very end. Events happen that have no real relevance to this episode or any other, like the appearance and then almost immediate execution of The Three by the Master. For an episode as fundamental to the Buffy mythos as Angel is, an incredibly small amount of run-time is spent on things that actually matter, to this story or any other.

Angel is also full of beats that don't quite work, be they incosistencies with lore that's established in the future which are annoying to Buffyverse veterans (like The Master being fond of Angel when their relationship was actually very combative and unpleasant), or simply moments that come across as cheesy and contrived. Particularly notable is the contrivance of Buffy walking in on Angel in vamp face holding an unconscious Joyce. There's also tonnes of things that don't make any logical sense, like Willow and Xander then walking into Buffy's house for no apparent reason.

It's not like everything about Angel is poor. This is still Buffy, and the episode is full of a million and one great character moments. Today's "pick out of a bag" highlight is just how adorable Willow shipping Buffy and Angel even through the revelation that he's a vampire is. It's also got it's share of highlights that don't automatically come with being a Buffy episode, largely in the phenomenal performance by Julie Benz (Who I remembered being mediocre from previous watch throughs, but this time around I found very fun) and the absolutely fantastic final showdown in the Bronze. That is the point where the episode coheres for me. The cinematography becomes very striking, with everything cast in heavy shadows that allow the ensuing fights to take on a different character from usual, becoming more about deception and sneaking about than the usual straight up punch-outs Buffy and Angel tend to engage in. There's also the mixture between hilarity and genuine awesome that Darla just pulling out dual pistols brings about, perfectly walking the line between ridiculous and cool that Buffy basically thrives on

Here is also where we get the strongest moment of the episode, namely Angel's monologue. It's a very well written piece of dialogue, and it gets across just how evil Angelus was, and just how much suffering having a soul really brought about to him. It's admirable how punchy and to the point these lines are, and the incredible power they have for how little time they eat up. This little monologue, around 30 seconds in length, is one of the essential building blocks the entire show will hang on for the next three seasons.

Overall I just think Angel is a fairly standard, if unusually important, season 1 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's probably stronger than the average episode of season 1, but that's honestly not saying that much, and I don't think it deserves anywhere near as much praise as it gets. It's a seriously flawed episode, and the show is very lucky that the couple of moments that do work in it (the vampire reveal in Buffy's house and the monologue at the end) just happen to be the important ones. If Angel had faltered just a tiny bit more, Buffy would have been built on a broken base, and would have ultimately collapsed under its own weight. Angel works. It really works when it matters, but it's not exceptional except for its mythological significance.

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.

I think this is the first time an episode comes in at neither the top nor the bottom of the list! My immediate point of comparison was Welcome to the Hellmouth, which was a similarly flawed arc episode. I think Angel is pretty easily better than Welcome to the Hellmouth, as it actually gets to play with the characters rather than spending the entire time introducing them. Above Welcome to the Hellmouth we have The Harvest, and I had a very hard time deciding between Angel and The Harvest. Ultimately, however, I think I like The Harvest more. Where I found myself pretty bored for long stretches of Angel, but enjoyed a few moments a lot, I was constantly engaged but never blown away by The Harvest. This, and the fact that it didn't have glaring flaws the way Angel does, puts it above Angel in my book. Therefore, Angel fits in at spot number 4 on my list, right between The Harvest and Welcome to the Hellmouth.

Ranked List

Rating: 4/10 This just feels right. I also went back and checked and this is what I rated The Harvest, so it feels appropriate. Rule for the future (and one I followed this time too): I'm not allowed to go back and check past ratings to decide on new ones. I can check a past rating once I've decided on a new one, though. That should have a fun effect on consistency.

A Tour of Sunnydale - The Pack

I hear there's been an infestation of wild dogs on the streets recently. Weird how I've never seen one, though. Still, we should look out as we take A Tour of Sunnydale.

The Pack is the sixth episode of Buffy's first season. Written by Matt Kiene & Joe Reinkemeyer, the same duo responsible also only for season 2's Inca Mummy Girl, and directed by Bruce Seth Green who we last saw doing an admirable job with terrible material in Teacher's Pet, this is an episode notable for two things: Being the first proper "character-centric" episode of the show (I don't count the aforementioned Teacher's Pet), starting off the tradition whereupon certain episodes will focus on one particular character (other than Buffy) more, and, more interestingly, being the third most polarizing episode of the show according to The Phi Phenomenon's polarizing episodes page. It also comes in at number 87 on the overall episode rank, meaning that even through the controversy it's on average considered to be in the bottom half in terms of quality.

I myself am one of those people that will defend The Pack to the death. On my first watch-through this was the point where the series first grabbed my attention (though Prophecy Girl was the real turning point), and on every subsequent walkthrough I've very much enjoyed The Pack.

The most striking thing about The Pack is that it's an unapologetically silly episode. In general, I feel like the silly episodes of Buffy are the most underrated ones (with a couple glaring exceptions), as the weak monster of the week often tends to make people forget the strong points, and the fact that The Pack's goofiness lands it in the bad graces of many fans may be the most obvious example. Yes, Xander and a bunch of kids getting possessed by hyenas is incredibly dumb, and a lot of what they get up to is overplayed, but there's also some absolutely fantastic character work here, not just for Xander but for Willow as well. I'd also argue that The Pack is the best directed episode so far, packed with clever but unintrusive camera work and beginning the shift towards the less pitch-black and artificial look of the later seasons. Most notable are Nicolas Brendon and Alyson Hannigan however, both of them putting in their absolute best performances in the series to date, absolutely knocking the material they've been given out of the park.

It's hard to pin down just what the point of The Pack is, and that's most likely among its weakest points. It's obviously centered around Xander, but seeing as how this isn't really Xander, we don't really get to learn much about him in this episode. It does highlight him as having a more dangerous side than the affable goofy kid he's been presented at, but it comes across so heavy-handedly that if that was the objective of the episode it fails miserably. Instead, I think the character we really learn about in this episode is Willow, through the way she reacts to Hyena!Xander's absolutely disgusting behaviour. She's obviously devastated, but she doesn't let it show until she's with Buffy, a friend whom she can trust, and she still stays strong when it becomes obvious she needs to in order to help Xander. Throughout the episode, Willow demonstrates incredible strength of spirit. It was in the Willow moments of this episode that I found the juicy character work, the subtle evolution of my understanding of just who this person is and how they relate to those around them that makes me love Buffy so much.

Despite those moments being unfortunately largely relegated to the sidelines, The Pack is such a well-crafted little monster-of-the-week story that it's relentessly entertaining all the way through. Through its silliness it manages to pack a surprising amount of emotional punch in all the right places: Even understanding exactly what's going on with Xander it's still immensely affecting to see him slowly become awful, and the moments where he so effectively destroys Willow are all incredibly powerful. There's a great amount of tension in the later half, as the Pack chases Willow around the school (and then proceeds to terrorize a family in their car) thanks to the fantastic camera-work emphasizing the malice within these kids. Of particular note is the scene where Principal Flutie gets eaten, which is genuinely unsettling and unpleasant to watch, and places this as the darkest episode of Buffy to date. Also fantastic is the scene where Willow tricks Hyena!Xander into thinking he's tricked her as he's in the book cage: A great piece of audience misdirection, and a demonstration of Willow's intelligence.

The Pack is full to the brim of effective little scenes like these, whether they be goofy in the style of The Pack walking over a table as a badass rock solo plays, or unsettling like their laughter as Lance runs away from them in terror. It's precisely this interplay between the silly and the genuinely effective that makes The Pack work so well for me. It's alternately stupid fun, clever, and scary, and it makes for a hell of a ride. The Pack is decidedly a Season 1 episode, but it represents the ideal version of Season 1, where the somewhat disconnected monsters of the week are all so much fun that I don't really need anything else to properly progress. The Pack is an absolute blast.

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 pretty simple. The only real contender is Witch. I believe the two episodes are about equal in terms of objective quality. In fact, I even am willing to concede that Witch may be an objectively better episode of Buffy than The Pack. Despite this, The Pack has always been one of my guilty pleasures, one of the absolute funnest times I have whilst watching Buffy. The Pack goes in above Witch, snagging the number one spot.

Ranked List

Rating: 6/10. The first really hard rating in the series. I initially went with 7/10, but it was so trivial coming up with 20 episodes I like better than The Pack that I felt I was massively overrating it. I now feel like I'm massively underrating it, but I've decided to stick with it here. The Pack may be a tonne of fun, but the best of Buffy is just as much fun and much better at keeping the story interconnected in the way that makes the show special. I think it's fair to say The Pack is the first hint at some of the greatest Buffy, but it's still severely flawed. Elevating it a whole 3 points above an episode as similarly good as Witch based just on the fact that its silliness makes me like it seems a tad generous.

Side Note 1: Contains Giles Knockout Number 2
Side Note 2: The official story that Principal Flutie was eaten by a pack of wild dogs that snuck into the school (in the middle of a school day, and who were seen by no one) was so silly that it became a running joke between me and one of my friends to blame everything on wild dogs. It's one of my fondest memories of Buffy.
Side Note 3: I love that it's canon that Giles thinks this episode's concept is as dumb as the audience does.

A Tour of Sunnydale - Never Kill A Boy On The First Date

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.

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.

A Tour of Sunnydale - Witch

If you thought that vampires were the one threat that lurks in Sunnydale you were much mistaken. Werewolves, ghouls, and even witches... make sure you take care, as we take A Tour of Sunnydale.

Witch is the third episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It marks the first and only appearance of Dana Reston as writer and Stephen Cragg as director. According to The Phi Phenomenon, Witch averages out at 71st most liked episode of Buffy, placing it just above the average (ie the 72nd episode, which for those curious is Season 3's Faith, Hope & Trick).

In a way, one could make the argument that Witch is the first "real" episode of Buffy. After all, Hellmouth and Harvest were both the show's pilot and unusually arc-heavy episodes. The great majority of Buffy, is spent on episodes more akin to Witch than the pilot: episodic monster-of-the-week stories that develop the characters in subtle ways rather than plot-centric episodes. This becomes considerably less true as the seasons go on, but for now, in the first season, this argument is pretty much spot on. The problem with that line of thinking is that it dismisses a lot of what makes Witch - and by extension the good bits of season 1 - great.

Whilst the later seasons are very explicit about the characters and their relationships changing considerably episode by episode, season 1 tends to be more covert about this. Yes, this results in much more muted character growth, and I think is a worse approach to the type of story Buffy is trying to tell than what we get in season 2 onwards, but it's still there if you look for it. In Witch we have simple but logical and satisfying continuations to the character work we got in Hellmouth and Harvest. As soon as it becomes evident that there's a supernatural issue, Xander and Willow instantly jump in to help, stating that they're Buffy's team. Buffy and Joyce's relationship is initially strained in the episode, carrying on from Joyce's grounding of Buffy in Harvest. Both Xander's crush on Buffy and Willow's crush on Xander are in full swing here, both unreciprocated and hit by a line about how they're just "one of the guys/girls" from the object of their affection, which gives texture and context to these characters' relationships. We get to see the first of angry Giles at Amy's home: the first instance of his twee facade breaking down and revealing the harsher and more ruthless side of the character that later seasons play off, and also the first indication of his developing care and affection for Buffy.

These are all small character moments that are confidently written and not particularly pointed out, but that absolutely advance our understanding of the main cast. The sweeping interconnectedness of future Buffy is brilliant, but it's only made possible by the consistent inclusion of tiny character beats like these, that constantly force the audience to update their understanding of who these people are and why they're this way.

Witch envelops these satisfying character moments in what was, to me, a surprisingly solid and engaging little monster-of-the-week story. Both the writing and directing here are surprisingly crafty, and I'm saddened that neither Dana Reston nor Stephen Cragg make any more contributions to the show. I was particularly impressed by the scene in front of the trophy case in which we get Amy and her mother's backstory. Taken at face value, Amy is frustrated at not being as good as cheerleading as she wants, and she indicates that she admires her mother, and is grateful to her for her cheerleader training, maybe even a bit too much. She's also weirdly resentful of her dad. This comes across as odd but believable for a teenage girl. Very casually, in the middle of expositing, she says that her mother "never gained a pound". This speech only fires off alarm bells due to the nature of episodic television, and it doesn't actually give away that either Amy or her mother is the witch.

The genius bit comes later, when as soon as Amy is done talking and goes away, Willow pops in. She talks about how her and Amy used to be friends in middle school, and how whenever Amy's mom gained a pound she'd lock up the fridge and eat nothing but broth, and how Amy would come to Willow's house and go on brownie binges with her whenever this happened. To the careful viewer, this immediately indicates that something's amiss. Not only is it not true that her mother never gained a pound, but Amy was both very aware of this and actively working against her mother's wishes here, indicating a disregard for her desire to shape Amy into a cheerleader. This all went completely over my head the first three times I watched this episode, but that simple little one-two punch of exchanges is all you need to figure out everything that's going on.

Beyond that, Witch is just a really fun time. The various spells cast by Amy's mother are inventive and range from amusing to terrifying, and the way the Scoobies (or, as one of them calls the group at the start of the episode, the Slayerettes), work together to uncover the mystery is fairly satisfying to behold: They are quick on the uptake, demonstrate solid teamwork, and don't have critical intelligence failure in order to move the plot along the way they often will in the course of the first three seasons. Special props go to their casting of the spell, which has a wonderful "high-school magic chemistry" feel that gives it a very nice sense of physicality. I wish later seasons had kept it to a larger extent, rather than going more towards effortless "just speak the words and have CG lights appear" magic. Another highlight is the sequence involving Amy's mom walking down the corridor with an axe as Buffy and Giles are barricaded in the science lab, which is very tense for how simple it is.

Despite all that, there's definitely a few flaws: Xander's crush on Buffy, whilst important to his arc through the season, takes up way too much time in this episode and isn't relevant to the proceedings, for instance. There's a decent amount of scenes that go on for too long or feel out of place, like Cordelia's blind drivers' ed class, or the cat jumpscare in Amy's mother's lair. The episode obviously tries to play Joyce and Buffy's relationship off of the relationship between Amy and her mother, but it doesn't work as a mirror, largely due to way too few Joyce and Buffy scenes for that to be effective. It also starts a trend among Season 1 episodes of ending on an excessively dark or disturbing note, in this case the revelation of Amy's mother's consciousness stuck, in pain, in the cheerleading statue. It's truly horrifying, and it doesn't go anywhere. It's a very disturbing moment, and it's done well in that regard, but it just feels tonally incosistent with the otherwise light-hearted show.

I was surprised by just how much I liked Witch this time around. It's typically an episode that I think of as a middling Season 1 episode: Appropriate, but little more. You gotta get through it to get to the bad stretch of Season 1 starting next episode, and you gotta get through that to get to the good stretch of Season 1 starting at The Pack, and you gotta get through that to get to the real Buffy starting at Prophecy Girl. I found Witch very strong this time, full of strong, if subtle, character moments, and with one of the most entertaining and creative monsters-of-the-week of the first season. Witch is good Buffy, and I didn't expect to get to that quite this fast.

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.

I'm surprised to announce that ranking was tough this week. The Harvest and Witch were very comparable in terms of quality, and after struggling with it for a bit... I decided I liked Witch more? That was unexpected, but I just found more enjoyment out of all the little vignettes created by the various spells in Witch than I did out of the typical Buffy vs Vampires setup of The Harvest. I also think Witch's plot is very subtly and cleverly written, and it furthered what I understand about these characters a surprising amount. So I guess The Harvest didn't get to keep its number 1 spot for even one week. Sorry I overpromised, Harvest. I still love you.

Ranked List

Rating: 4/10. Witch was close enough to Harvest in terms of quality that they deserve the same rating. Witch was very solid, and a good episode of Buffy, but there's a lot of very solid stuff yet to come that's good in ways much more ambitious and by extension effective than Witch is.

Side note 1: This includes the series very first ironic cutaway, where Buffy talking about having a normal life is interrupted so we can go to see Amy's mom cast a spell. That's the second best reason to argue this is the first real episode of Buffy. Get used to those.

Side note 2: This episode also includes the first instance of Giles being knocked out. That´s the best reason to argue this is the first real episode of Buffy. Also get used to that. I'm going to be keeping track of it.

A Tour of Sunnydale - The Harvest

For the first time, we delve into Sunnydale's extensive sewer system. I hope you like it, since we'll be spending a long time in here, as we explore this town. Welcome to A Tour of Sunnydale.

Today I'll be discussing The Harvest, the second episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The Harvest is the second part of the two-parter set up in Welcome to the Hellmouth, and is also written by showrunner Joss Whedon. It's one of the two episodes directed by John T. Kretchmer, along with Season 2's School Hard. According to The Phi Phenomenon it is ranked 67th best episode in the series as an average of lists around the Internet, putting it just slightly above average.

As I mentioned in my review of Welcome to the Hellmouth this leaves me somewhat confused, since The Harvest has always struck me as the more enjoyable of the first two episodes. Welcome to the Hellmouth is a lot of fun and it does a good job of introducing our cast, but it's somewhat bogged down by just how many characters there are to introduce, and how much backstory and lore is needed to understand what's going on. As a result, it was somewhat slow and uneventful. The Harvest can take advantage of the setup in Hellmouth, and is largely unencumbered by the nitty gritty details, allowing it to dive straight into a fun little adventure.

That said, the episodes begins very rocky. Welcome to the Hellmouth to The Harvest is the only complete cliffhanger in either Buffy or Angel, as we very literally freeze-frame on Luke attacking Buffy in a coffin. Buffy quickly fights him off thanks to the cross Angel gave her in the first episode. She catches up to Xander and Willow, whom she effortlessly saves. They realize Jesse is missing, and we cut to credits.

Now, was it really necessary to leave that for this episode's cold open? It feels like a perfectly fine way to end the previous episode, and just makes the cliffhanger feel completely cheap in every way. This is exacerbated when the first couple of scenes after credits are Giles expositing in the library in a much less cleverly concealed fashion than in Welcome to the Hellmouth and the vampires bringing Jesse to the Master.

It's not that these scenes are bad. Giles' exposition is actually pretty cool, setting up the unique backstory of the Buffyverse: Not a paradise gone wrong, but a hell that humans took over and made better. Similarly, Mark Metcalfe's Master carries his scene with decided aplomb, masterfully (forgive the pun) walking the line between affably camp and terrifying. They just feel out of place when we've started on action scenes that are directly involved with the plot, and it kills the episode's momentum.

That said, The Harvest feels completely like an early episode of Buffy in a way that Hellmouth didn't. We have all the things that make the show great here: Willow gets a brilliant character beat in the computer room, screwing Cordelia's program up through very simple manipulation, and Xander earns his spot within the roster, both displaying his stupidity and uselessness and the bravery, heart and emotional conection with his friends that make him indispensable to the team.

More importantly, The Harvest sets the blueprint that most of Buffy and Angel will follow all the way up until the end of their respective penultimate seasons: The cycle of Buffy (or Angel in Angel) going out, getting some info, coming back to discuss it with the rest of the gang, rinse, repeat with the stakes slightly upped each time. This is the beginning of the Scoobies as a team, and I absolutely adore the way The Harvest makes it natural for them to fall into their respective roles: It just makes sense for Willow to do the information gathering, Buffy to do the slaying, Giles to be the mentor figure and guiding hand and Xander... to be around, I guess? In that green mushroom shirt of his? Seriously, what even is that thing? I get it's the 90s and Xander is the dumbest creature ever but... yeesh.

The Harvest provides everything that you expect from a Buffy episode: There's a bunch of fairly mediocre action scenes underground that are made more effective by potent character beats (In this case, Jesse's betrayal hurting a surprising amount because of Xander's struggle with it), potent character beats around those action scenes, and dialogue that's delicious to the ear because of Whedon's trademark style. There's a few moments that I'm not sure if I think are awesome or hilarious, like the vampires rolling into the Bronze in slo-mo as a power ballad plays, Buffy's cymbal decapitation of that one vampire, and Xander's accidental dusting of Jesse, and a few moments that are decidedly one or the other, like the way Buffy tricks Luke into thinking the sun is up, or the way Willow is constantly on the edge of passing out in the library. It also ends absolutely perfectly, with the Scoobies preparing for the tide of monsters before taking the calm before the storm to relax, revealing themselves to be the same goofballs they have always been queueing Giles' signature, nigh-on perfect line "The Earth is doomed."

In many ways, The Harvest is the "vanilla" Buffy episode. It's just Buffy versus some vampires with a very simple plan, where Willow does the Willow thing, Giles does the Giles thing, and Xander does the Xander thing. Basically every monster-of-the-week episode from now on can be reasonably described as "The Harvest but...". As such, it's surprising just how engaging The Harvest is, thanks to its incredibly solid command of character and a serviceable plotline that proves a great starting point for the entire show.

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, for now, is still incredibly simple. I like The Harvest more than the one other episode on the list, so I'm putting it at Number 1, just above Welcome to the Hellmouth. Good job, The Harvest, and relish your position: You'll likely keep it for only a couple more episodes.

Ranked List

Rating: 4/10. This one was actually pretty tough, since The Harvest is actually a lot of fun, but I think liking up to 80 episodes of Buffy more than it is fairly likely for me, so it just drops into the 4/10 range. This is really a testament to the quality of Buffy as a show.

A Tour of Sunnydale - Welcome to the Hellmouth

I like Buffy the Vampire Slayer a whole lot. I want to watch it again, and I like writing about it, so why not do a series of reviews on each episode? Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to A Tour of Sunnydale.

The very first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - ignoring the unaired pilot episode that it shares most of its plot with and the terrible original movie - is Welcome to the Hellmouth. It is the first part of a two-parter along with the next episode The Harvest, and is written by showrunner Joss Whedon, and is the only directorial contribution of Charles Martin Smith to the series. According to The Phi Phenomenon, Welcome to the Hellmouth is on average considered the 40th best episode of the show, placing it comfortably within the top third of episodes in terms of quality. Due to the importance of... well, a first episode, the length of this review is likely to be significantly above-average, especially as I discuss a lot more specific character stuff.

From its opening moments, one thing is abundantly clear about Welcome to the Hellmouth: This is decidedly, unavoidably the 90s. The opening scene whereupon a hapless girl and a dangerous-looking boy sneak into a school and the boy reassures the nervous girl that they're all alone seems straight out of a cheesy PSA. That is, right until the girl turns out to be a vampire and murders him.

It's decidedly a bold statement right out of the gate, and it works as both a nice little moment of subversion in its own right and as a punchy, to-the-point mission statement for the entire show, but it's ultimately of so little consequence that it feels like a waste of something as momentously important as the first scene in what will become a 244 episode epic spanning 2 different shows.

But we've got more important things to do, as our protagonist lays in a bed and sees freaky visions: Weird monsters, a demon who looks like he'd be unsettingly comfortable invading the Internet, and a particularly distinctive vampire. It's clear they're prophetic, and we wonder why the girl is having them, and also why we're lingering so unbearably long on this scene. Later on we'll learn the girl is the titular Buffy, and that she's the Slayer, the one girl in all the world chosen to stand against the vampires and other forces of evil (mostly other forces of evil, as it'll turn out)

I was surprised by how immediately present Buffy was in Welcome to the Hellmouth something I'll be saying a lot throughout this review. Practically from her very first line she's just there, fully formed as the character I've grown to love so much. She's obviously green: this is season 1 Buffy, the child who wants to leave her duty behind and simply live a normal life. She knows how to slay vampires: Throughout the episode she displays admirable initiative, knowledge and general effectiveness at her job, be it in her quick assessment of the situation with the dead boy in the locker, the decisive action she takes at the Bronze, or the cocky swagger she puts on to taunt the vampires into attacking her in the final showdown in the mausoleum.

A character who definitely doesn't just materialize as impressively fully-formed as Buffy is Xander, who is introduced to us being cool on a skateboard before failing completely because of horniness, and who we are to understand is a loser. In the first season Xander will have plenty of opporunity to demonstrate he is both an idiot and a complete loser, but in this episode he's actually presented as funny, good looking, perceptive and surprisingly cool, which makes it seem like his only social flaw is hanging out with Willow and Jesse. We'll talk about Willow later, but Jesse's entire role in this episode appears to be being exactly Xander but creepily horny all the time. He's not well done, and whilst in the whirlwind of everything that's happening it may not be obvious what his fate is, it certainly is evident on a rewatch in the minimal amount of effort put towards giving him a personality.

The other character who just appears to poof into existence fully formed is Willow, who is exactly the early-season Willow Rosenberg I adore so much. She's a pushover and a shy wallflower, but she's kind-hearted and gentle and willing to help complete strangers. There's a couple plot beats that don't work very well, mostly in the scene in the Bronze: It's already evident even this early on that Willow digs Xander big time, but yet she says she can't talk around boys she likes, and it's awkward how quickly her shy attitude goes away upon hearing Buffy's advice, but both of these come across as oversights rather than intended character traits.

To round of the original four Scoobies is Giles, the librarian and Buffy's Watcher, who is introduced as a more exageratedly British and twee version of himself than we'll grow to know. It's honestly kind of annoying at this point, and he comes across as a much more one-note character than he is, essentially just a less creepy Merrick from the original movie. Still, I respect the clever way he is used to seamlessly merge exposition into the show: What Buffy doesn't know he explains for obvious reasons, whilst her backstory is a constant source of beffudelment to him, which he explains as much to himself as to Buffy or the audience. It works surprisingly well, and it actually took me a while to realize I was being exposited to.

Another major character introduced in the episode is Angel, who is basically a completely different person from what he quickly morphs into. He's got the mysterious and handsome part pat down, but otherwise he's got a mysterious trickster vibe to him, and you get the feeling he's warning Buffy of an impending threat as much for his own amusement as any other reason. He's snarky, funny and likeable: A more handsome, grown up, mysterious Xander. He's decidedly not the Angel I remember from early Buffy: I actually want to see more of this character.

To round of this massive dump of new characters is Cordelia, who is just as one dimensional as she'll remain until the third season, but who is introduced brillianty: Initially appearing as a nice girl who helps Buffy out and who has a genuinely fantastic scene of bonding with her over fashion, she's soon revealed to be a terrible bully to poor innocent Willow who has the cutest and most heart-breaking reaction in the history of television, firmly cementing the until just moments ago sympathetic  Cordelia as thoroughly unlikeable. It's effective television, and may in fact be my favorite moment in this first episode.

Beyond this run-down of character introductions there's actually surprisingly little to say about Welcome to the Hellmouth. Very little actually happens: Buffy moves into a new school, meets some people, doesn't want to be the Slayer, gets some cryptic advice, then has to rescue Willow. This is why I typically consider The Harvest the stronger part of the opening two - parter (Which is why it surprised me that it's number 67 on The Phi Phenomenon, considerably lower than Welcome to the Hellmouth), since Hellmouth is the setup for the actual plot happening in Harvest. That said, Welcome to the Hellmouth is a strong opening to the series. It's very effective at setting the tone the series will maintain for most of its first two seasons, and it has a lot of strong scenes (Buffy's meeting with Principal Flutie is fantastic, and there's some absolutely phenomenal mother-daughter dialogue between her and Joyce), as well as Joss Whedon's trademark witty dialogue. It's also masterful at making the large amount of exposition it presents go down very easily thanks to clever writing. Unfortunately, like a lot of the weaker first season, it really doesn't stand up to later Buffy and Angel, and feels somewhat disappointing as a result. Welcome to the Hellmouth is an appropriate introduction to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but that's kind of all it is.

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.

Ranked List

Rating: 3/10. I can't see liking many episodes of Buffy less than this one, but there's definitely a decent amount that are weaker.