Buffy Season One Episode Six

[koganbot]

This was the hyena episode. Thought the first half worked very well, with the cool guys walking the line between being normal bullies and being ferocious beasts. Something of a star turn for Nicholas Brandon; he gets to use his dark good looks for actual darkness. Ramps up the latent confidence that you know is in Xander if he's only able to access it. Also gives a sense of why Xander might not want to access it, why he might not want to be a handsome swaggering teen. Episode gets less interesting as the smirking teens become merely hungry animals, but that is what has to happen, I suppose.

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

this was an over-ambitious early ep in terms of available sfx budget really: the beasts-walk-among us idea is distractingly literally realised, and sags quite a bit when they're having to conjure up non human-form monsters

this is possibly a bit of a conceptuo-critical spoiler, but xander's role in buffy has given us ("us") the term "the xander" as a shorthand for any narrative's actual real central character, whose journey and growth is the real subject of the project, despite sleight-of-hand titling

viz: who is the xander in "the sopranos"? (ans = AJ)

Buffy And Her Friends

[koganbot]

Well, what I'm really assuming - the assumption based in part on your Voice review (which I'm carefully not rereading) - is that the narrative's real central "character" is the group and it's intraplay, how the characters help each other or fail to help each other, but how they all make it happen for each other. In the first few episodes, it's Buffy's concern for the others that forces her to have to embrace her destiny as vampire slayer, but she's not necessarily ready to accept their help. And their need to help is their need for purpose. So the questions that I want to have develop in the series would be: is she adequate to that? If she isn't, how does the group compensate? Think of how Jimmy Stewart and Hardy Krüger make their common project possible in the original Flight Of The Phoenix. It's Krüger who initiates the project but he's not a leader of men, hence his antagonist Stewart remains central. But also there's the theme (which maybe so far I'm projecting onto Buffy) that the cohesive character - that would be Buffy, no matter whose growth is actually central - never gets to quite feel comfortably in the group, even though without her there is no group. (See these two numbers from Rio Bravo (which aren't going to spoil anything significant if you haven't seen the movie yet); Robin Wood made the very good point that though the scene is basically there just to give the singing guest stars a chance to sing and the ladies and girls in the audience a chance to swoon, Hawks uses it to place the leader of the group, without whom they wouldn't be a group, outside the music, even if without him the music wouldn't be possible.)

So far in Buffy, Buffy's still the newbie; Xander and Willow have a connection and understanding with each other that Buffy doesn't have with either of them (though this episode gives Willow a chance to open up a little bit to Buffy about Xander). And so far Xander and especially Willow get most of the good jokes; being the titular hero, Buffy has to be mostly in earnest, and where she gets to be funny it's usually at the expense of Giles, who's deliberately an object of mirth (that is, it's not just that the script writers make him an object of mirth, they make him someone who chooses to be an object of mirth, which is his way into the group, helps to mitigate one of his other roles, that of being the person who provides adult perspective). Whereas Xander and Willow get to make cracks about everything. But interestingly Willow's first really really really key assertive moment in the series comes in this episode; not a comic moment - this episode is fairly short of wisecracks, seeing how Xander's character is at risk, and there really isn't much to laugh about - it's where she explains to Xander why she knew she had to be the one to guard him: she knows him well enough to know whether he's being the real Xander or the possessed Xander, whereas Buffy might get gulled.

[koganbot]

Actually they don't conjure up non-human-form monsters, they just cut away from the actual chomping.