Buffy Season One Episode Ten

This was the Nightmares episode, packed with a lot of ideas, maybe too many. Most of the fears that were brought to life were too generic, so the scriptwriters lost the opportunity to use the fears to say something about Willow's and Buffy's and Xander's characters (Giles' fears were Giles-specific, and Cordelia's were Cordelia-specific too: having a bad-hair day!). That said, even if Buffy's worries were mostly way out of character (come on, she's not the sort whose deepest fears include being unprepared for an exam, and her dad and her issues with him were brought in out of the blue), Gellar did a fine job of being convincing in the moment: confused and heartbroken when she needed to be, and empathetic when that's what the plot called for. Also, I liked the bit at the beginning where a teacher (of some new-fangled subject) is instructing them in "Active Listening," since active listening is just what Buffy ends up doing when she attends to the unhappy Little League boy later in the episode. And also, listening is what the main characters have to do every episode, needing to be sensitive to when people's behavior is going off-kilter.

Although Xander's embodied nightmares were ho-hum, his reaction to them revealed something, which is that (assuming he carries this forward to the following episodes and seasons) he's the most flexible of the show's characters, the one least likely to be restricted by his habitual patterns of thinking about things or about himself. I was once again disappointed that the script didn't do something more interesting with Willow (though Willow does get the best wisecrack, deciding that Cordelia's hair weighs too heavy on her cerebrum). And, NO SPOILERS PLEASE, enough spoilers have already come my way for me to know that the show's got a lot in store for her; already it's clear that being recessive is not altogether who she is, it's just how she's used to coping.

April-May good stuff

Don't know when poptimists is going to do its month in pop thing for April and May, but I thought I'd get a jump on it by compiling my list now.

( New to me and relatively new to the world )

( Old to the world but new to me )