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.

Thoughts on the first episode of Life is Strange Before The Storm

Last year's Life is Strange was not only one of my favorite games of the year, but also one of my favorite games of all time. Despite some clear and glaring flaws, there was a solid emotional core to that game. It portrayed the late teenage years of its characters with all the nostalgic, wistful flair that they deserved, but didn't shy away from the genuinely horrid things that teenagers often going through, whether they be relentless bullying, genuine struggles with self-esteem and mental issues, or having to deal with broken family life. It also focused on an incredibly dark story-line involving a series of mysterious disappearances of high-school girls that made it pretty explicitly clear how terrible the stuff these girls went through really was.Through its gentle folksy-indie rock soundtrack and painterly watercolor aesthetic it made the often very fucked-up content of some of its harsher moments more shocking, but also ensured that a game that went to some very dark places didn't feel exhaustingly gloomy.

Of course, the two standout features of the original Life is Strange were its supernatural elements, whereupon our main character Max can mysteriously rewind time and has visions of a weird storm wiping out town in a week, and the truly heartfelt but nonetheless complex relationship between Max and her estranged childhood friend Chloe. The supernatural elements were sort of a mixed bag. On the one hand, the episodes that focus most strongly on them (1 and 5) are by far the weakest, which I'd argue is a direct result of said focus. On the other, they're responsible for a lot of the good puzzles, the two strongest sequences in the game (namely the ending of episode 2 and the stretch from the last scene of 3 to the end of the first hour of 4), and the key ability to see the short-term results of each branch of big choices before committing to one path that gave decision-making a dynamic unique to the rest of the genre.

Chloe, however, is phenomenal. A combination of great character writing, a fantastic voice performance by Ashly Burch and a big old ball of complicated hang-ups, Chloe Price is the real reason to play Life is Strange. I basically have nothing negative to say about her as a character. Much like The Walking Dead's Clementine, Chloe is the biggest reason I like one of my favorite games of all time.

Nonetheless, I was incredibly worried when Life is Strange: Before the Storm was announced. Chloe as the playable character seemed like a fairly terrible idea after seeing how that turned out for Clementine in the mediocre second season of The Walking Dead. The announcement that it would focus on her relationship with Rachel Amber, the girl whose disappearance kicks off the investigation that Max and Chloe carry out in the original game, was also somewhat disappointing. I just didn't really want to see that relationship. In Life is Strange, Rachel Amber was held up on a pedestal as basically a perfect human being. Everyone except Victoria loved her, and it was implied that her spirit was acting as a guide to Max from the other world. Rachel Amber was the symbol of everything that Max wanted and needed to become. Having a perfect character like that in your story is a tricky thing to do well, especially in a world where everyone is as messed up inside as they are in Arcadia Bay, and I didn't want the game to take that risk for no reason. The other option is making Rachel Amber yet another teenager in the fucked-up world of Blackwell Academy, with her own hang-ups and imperfections. This would certainly make her more interesting, but that would kind of undercut her place in the story of the previous game.

That second option is exactly what Life is Strange: Before the Storm does in its first episode. Below her perfect facade, Rachel Amber is yet another teenager with the same types of problems that everyone else does. I do honestly enjoy the way she's presented in this game. She's friendly, cool, and instantly likable in a way that completely justifies Chloe's complete and utter infatuation with her by the time the first game rolls about, but only until the shit hits the fan, at which point she becomes an unreasonable angry mess of a human being. You can see features Chloe displays in the original but is missing in Before the Storm in Rachel, and Chloe even begins to pick up some bad habits from Rachel near the end of the episode. Unfortunately, this does mean that my pre-release fear came to be. Rachel Amber is a good character in Life is Strange: Before the Storm. She also makes the first game weaker by the sole fact that we ever get to see her on screen. I'm glad she's well written, but I'd rather she was never written at all.

Another big worry was, as previously mentioned, the use of Chloe as the playable character. Back when The Walking Dead Season 2 came out, I was immensely disappointed in the use of Clementine as the playable character in that game. I thought it promising pre-release, but it turned out she was completely unfit to the role. Whilst the game attempted to chronicle her slide from the innocence and naivete that the first season's protagonist Lee was so keen on protecting, it came across as forced, with Clementine being put in absolutely horrible situations for no apparent reason other than to make the audience feel bad for her. It turned out that when it was the player that was doing the thinking and decision-making and not the character you couldn't really make the character properly change that way. My preconceptions of who Clementine was prevented me from seeing the changes in her, and my own desire to make her commit certain actions as a player resulted in a frustrating disconnect.

Chloe is handled much better than Clementine, but playing as her still brings up a fair share of issues. The game puts a lot less choice on the player than Life is Strange did. There's only two major choices in the episode, and both of them seem to basically have all their consequences play out by the end of it. The less important general dialogue choices are also more tonal decisions than about actually affecting the flow of conversation. This means that Chloe is decidedly the same Chloe Price we met in Life is Strange, if somewhat younger and less cynical. This aspect of the game works pretty well, and it allows Chloe to go through a fairly satisfying little arc from the start of the episode to the end. Unfortunately, it also means that you don't really feel like you're properly controlling Chloe, or making any real decisions. Whilst the first Life is Strange was fairly linear in what you could do on the larger scale, you could push Max towards making drastically different choices at the local level. Take the beachside conversation with Frank in the fourth episode of Life is Strange, where you can have Max settle at anything from both Frank and his dog getting shot to everyone leaving the conversation having reconciled, and compare it to the argument with Rachel at the end of the first episode of Before the Storm, where no matter what you do the two of you make up and come to a mutual understanding.

Despite this, I still had a problem with understanding just how much this is the fucked-up punk-rock stoner Chloe we see through most of Life is Strange, and how much this is the naive happy girl with a fascination with pirates that we saw briefly in flashback near the end of the third episode. It's up to the player to some extent, and the moments where the game left this in my hands left me confused as to just how cynical and dark the Chloe I was playing as was, making me feel like I should be trying to role play this character I know rather than making my own decisions. The bits of the game that control Chloe for you (and the internal monologue she gives throughout) seem to be just as confused in this regard. I understand to some extent the point is that this is a Chloe that's not adopted the tough girl persona we see in Life is Strange, but one that is scarred by William's death and Max's perceived abandonment of her. This does often come across very effectively, with fantastic little lines of dialogue where Chloe seems to fluctuate between sadness and rage on the drop of a dime, but there's also a large part of the dialogue that just seems to indicate Chloe is totally one way before jarringly u-turning into the other mode after several minutes.

Despite these flaws, I'm excited to see where Before the Storm goes next. It's not much more flawed than the often cringe-worthy first episode of the original game, and it has some pretty high highs. It's inherited a lot of the strengths of the first game, and has interesting new twists on a lot of it. Getting to see a young and earnest Nathan Prescott, impotent to deal with the bullies that made him into the monster he is in the original, or a Victoria Chase who's not yet properly stepped into her alpha bitch role and hasn't learned to hide her inferiority complex is truly fascinating. The story of Rachel Amber and Chloe's friendship has some issues: It moves too fast and feels too important to the two of them way too soon, but it's nonetheless got some cool moments of genuine human connection that are up there with the very best scenes between Max and Chloe in the original. The new backtalk system is a cool mechanical replacement for the time-travel mechanic from Life is Strange, and is very appropriate to Chloe's character, especially in this period of her development. This feels like another Episode 1 of Life is Strange: Severely flawed and apparently a harbinger of a game that has deep-seeded issues niggling at a very strong core experience. The original managed to get rid of these issues as quickly as the very next episode. If the other two episodes of Before the Storm are as good as episodes 2 and 3 of Life is Strange, we might be in for something really great. It just needs to iron out the wrinkles as quickly and effectively as its predecessor.

Tamako Market - Delactable

A year or two ago, before I properly got into anime, I tried out Tamako Market. I found it incredibly boring, if admittedly well made, so I dropped it halfway through the third episode and went on to watch some generic shounen action show instead.

Upon getting into this stuff and becoming a raving lunatic who'll sing the praises of Kyoto Animation all day long and especially of director Naoko Yamada, I was rather surprised to find out that that rather mediocre show I dropped a while prior was made by the same person who'd made the frankly life-changing K-On!, the incredibly well-directed A Silent Voice, as well as the person who worked in the background on the incredibly solid Hibike! Euphonium. Naoko Yamada has quickly become one of my absolute favorite creatives alive, so I felt the need to go back and give Tamako Market a second chance.

What I found was a very solid, but somewhat unremarkable little slice-of-lifeish comedyyyyy fantasy? romance thing. Indeed, despite feeling fairly generic, Tamako Market is a show whose genre is hard to pin down. It focuses on the titular Tamako, who lives in the titular market, the daughter of a mochi shop owner. A talking bird with the power to become a projector in search for a bride for its prince suddenly shows up and winds up living with Tamako and getting incredibly fat.

Then the show just kind of goes. For the most part, Tamako Market engages in the same kind of shenanigans as Naoko Yamada's other big show, K-On!, with most episodes being their own little self-contained stories that nonetheless form part of a larger overarching story (think monster of the week, if the monsters were things like making a new friend or participating in a school festival). The little vignettes that make up each episode are usually very effective. There's no episode of Tamako Market that isn't fun, and, whilst the show demonstrates a bit of propensity for forced drama, most of them contain at least one or two genuinely heartwarming moments. 

This is helped in large part by the show's large supporting cast. Tamako and her immediate group of friends and family are fairly well-fleshed out, but most of the show's cast are workers at the market where Tamako's dad's store is located. They all have incredibly one-note personalities, but the show leans very strongly into them by making that one note play at the exact right time, really helping to punctuate both serious moments and jokes. You'll never get a full episode dedicated to the record shop guy, but he's sure to have an amusingly out-of-nowhere pseudo-deep quote and the perfect record to put on when the moment is right. They've also got their own friendships and rivalries between themselves that are often only hinted at via visuals (The croquette lady and the flower shop owner are always hanging out together, for instance). As such, despite being transparently shallow and one-dimensional, these characters manage to become fairly endearing. Combine with this fact their visual designs are spot-on, and that there's a ridiculously large number of them, and the market becomes a lively, believable place, full of people we like enough to be willing to suspend our disbelief in.

However, this focus on the supporting cast (and the larger main cast) means that Tamako Market is nowhere near as in-depth of a character study as K-On!. We don't get to know Tamako and company as well as we do the members of Hokago Tea Time and the one or two other people that make up the central core of K-On!. This would be fine, since K-On! is an incredibly high bar to set, but there's also the problem that the main cast is mostly fairly bland, suffering the same "one trait" syndrome that the supporting cast has. We certainly get to know them better, and their personalities are more multifaceted, but everything they do tends to fit very neatly within their archetype. Tamako is the ditzy energetic protagonist, Yui Hirasawa without the nuance. Dela is the goofily pompous mascot character that always gets his comeuppance, Teddie minus the existential dread. Midori is the responsible normal friend, Kanna is the short deadpan friend (also best girl), Shiori is the shy and kind friend, Mochizou is the childhood friend with a crush on the main character and no idea how to express it, Anko is the bratty but deep down kind younger sister, etcetera.

These characters aren't bland enough to not be able to relate or become fond of them (I definitely have a soft spot in my heart for Tamako's dad and Kanna), but they are bland enough to make the show as a whole rather unremarkable. I see in Tamako Market what a lot of people purport to see in a lot of similar shows, including my beloved K-On!. It's mostly cute girls doing cute things, which is a nice thing to see. A lot of these cute things are very cute, and when the show wants it can be really genuinely heartwarming. It's well made: It looks good, the dialogue mostly works, and the overarching storyline is fairly satisfying. It's not even lacking an identity the way I thought something like Sansha Sanyou did: the market setting is uniquely well executed, and gives the show its own distinct energy and feel.

But that's kind of all I see in it. It's a really, really good one of these, one of the best, but that's all it is. I just can't go beyond "good" on this one, even when I honestly kind of want to. It's a solid story, well told, with its own distinct thing that makes watching it over the millions of similar shows worthwhile, but it never went beyond. It didn't have a couple of incredibly powerful moments that blew me away like something like Death Parade, but it also wasn't consistently beyond just good, like The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. It certainly wasn't both things, like is the case with my absolute favorites in K-On! and Cowboy Bebop. It was just baseline good, baseline really really solid the entire way throughout.

Possibly the most frustrating thing about it is that I feel like it's content to be that way. It never really tries to go beyond. The closest it comes is in episode 10, which happens to be the best episode of the entire series, where a plot point that's been foreshadowed since the start pays off and there's a bigger focus on the emotional climax than most other episodes. For the rest of its run time, Tamako Market is obviously content to just be good. That's a commendable thing. "Just" being good is fairly high praise in my book, it's a hard thing to achieve indeed. What makes it frustrating is knowing that Naoko Yamada is able to do so much more. This is by far her weakest work, and I get the feeling that it's that way due to a lack of ambition rather than a lack of talent. I should not feel as robbed by a show that I like as much as I do Tamako Market, but I suppose that's the curse of high expectations.

Final Score: 7/10

Tamako Market is a decidedly good show with tonnes of positives and very few failings, which definitely makes it worth a watch. Unfortunately, that's kind of all it is or ever aspires to be.