I started this rewatch a few years ago, but picked up the pace inspired by tomalak301's thread. However, this thread will be full of spoilers (not just for the episodes being recapped, but for basically the entire rest of the series as well), so it's intended for people who either (a) have seen the entire series already, or (b) don't care.
Our adventure starts, of course, with ...
1x01: Welcome to the Hellmouth
We open with some good old-fashioned schmuck bait: a guy and a girl in a darkened high school, presumably sneaking off to play Hide the Salami in the cafeteria. One is a vaguely sinister-looking guy and the other is a pretty blonde girl, and anyone who has even the most passing familiarity with Joss Whedon can predict that she'll end up kicking his ass. What might not be as obvious is that he turns out to be the innocent one in all this, and she wants to wreak bloody death on him and everyone he knows. Which she proceeds to do.
(Vampification also makes your hair go all staticky.)
After the opening credits, we see pretty much your standard supernatural nightmare scene, whereupon Buffy is woken up by her mother, the caring-but-perpetually-oblivious Kristine Sutherland. Before dropping Buffy off for her first day of high school, she leaves her with these parting words: "Honey? Try not to get kicked out." Thanks, mom.
Sunnydale High School is a '90s cyclone of '90s semi-grunge music, girls with '90s bangs, and oh lord, '90s Xander Harris with his '90s shirt, '90s skateboard, and '90s parted-down-the-middle hair.
(Thought I was kidding, did you? Nope.)
Xander proceeds to get distracted by Buffy, specifically the rear half of Buffy, and takes a spectacular gainer into a handrail. This is followed by some banter with Willow, who we are promptly informed will be The Smart One in our eventual trio of Brains, Brawn and Heart, and don't think that metaphor won't get used over and over again for the next seven years.
Cut to Ken Lerner, who joins Kristine Sutherland in our pantheon of well-meaning-but-clueless authority figures, and also treats us to some pretty awkward line delivery. ("We're not interested in what it says on a piece of paper, even if it says ... whoa," he is supposed to say, but the "whoa" comes out as a sort of truncated "wuh," leading us to wonder if he's having a stroke.) Principal Flutie is basically a good guy but completely useless, is the message we're meant to take away from this scene.
Xander meets Buffy and proceeds to make an ass out of himself, in a scene that will be cringe-inducingly familiar to anyone who was ever an awkward teenager. ("Maybe I'll see you around. Maybe at school. Since we both go there.")
Buffy meets Cordelia, who is promptly revealed to be a bitch, and that's about all the character development she'll get for another year or so. Then she meets Giles, who tries to fulfill his role as Mr. Exposition, but fails when Buffy won't let him finish a sentence before fleeing the library as if it were on fire, which it will be eventually, so maybe she's just getting a head start.
Next we come to what is possibly the worst piece of dialogue in the entire series. After the first episode, Joss & Co. stopped trying to write how they imagined popular teenagers in southern California talking, and just made all the characters talk like the writers themselves. This was a good move, because here's what their attempts at teen dialect sounded like. I'm going to quote the whole damn thing so you can revel in the awfulness of it:
Whereupon we are mercifully spared from any more attempts by thirtysomething comedy writers to sound sixteen by the sudden appearance of Schmucky McSchmuckface's dead body falling out of Bitch #3's locker.
Outside, Buffy approaches Willow, who has some kind of inexplicable pin on her dress ...
(Seriously, what is that? A bowling pin next to a hand grenade?)
... and we get our first real taste of Willow's personality. Yes, there's the beaten-down-uncool-kid ("Willow?" "Why? I mean, hi!"), but there's also the sardonic wit that would later become one of her trademarks. ("Aren't you hanging out with Cordelia?" "I can't do both?" "Not legally.")
Xander comes up with his slightly-dorkier friend Jesse, and between Eric Balfour's absence from the main credits and the fact that they're spending an awful lot of time on this guy who is clearly meant to be part of the gang, it's obvious Jesse isn't long for this world. (Joss wanted to put him in the credits for just this reason, but time and money intervened. He would later get to give his sadism free rein in Season 6, but that's a story for another time.) Cordy shows up and is bitchy some more, albeit with better writing than the other popular girls ("Don't you have an elsewhere to be?"), and tells Buffy about the "extreme dead guy in the locker," whereupon Buffy runs off to investigate.
Buffy creeps into the locker room, and I'm pretty sure she wears a pushup bra through most of the first season, 'cause Sarah Michelle Gellar isn't actually built the way she looks here.
She finds the dead guy, finds the wounds that make him look like he was attacked with a barbecue fork, and runs off to find Giles, whereupon they engage in Dueling Exposition and we are introduced to the concept of the Hellmouth, which explains why all this weird shit keeps happening in Sunnydale, even though nobody ever notices.
The other thing nobody notices is the male faculty member getting into a weirdly intense conversation with a female sophomore in the hallway, to the point of putting his hand on the wall in front of her to keep her from getting away, but I guess Sunnydale's Weirdness Censor applies to more than just the supernatural.
(Boundaries! Boundaries!)
In between all this, Cordy invites Buffy to The Bronze, a nightclub with questionable carding policies, and we get our first of many mixed signals about just how big Sunnydale is. The Bronze, see, is in "the bad part of town ... about half a block from the good part of town; we don't have a lot of town here." And it is also, in Xander's words, "a one-Starbucks town." But it somehow manages to have two hospitals, a decent-sized regional airport, a natural history museum, a zoo, and a state university. Go figure.
After a brief and appropriately ominous introduction to this season's Big Bad, an ancient vampire known only as The Master, we see Buffy and her pushup bra picking an outfit for The Bronze. For a moment we think Joyce might actually engage in some parenting, when she asks Buffy if there will be boys there, but when Buffy snarks back with "No, mom, it's a nun club," all she can manage is "Well, just be careful." Thanks, mom.
Buffy heads to the club, but on the way there she meets David Boreanaz. This was before the acting lessons that made his later appearances more bearable, so the less said about this scene, the better.
At The Bronze, we get our first look at the Xander/Willow dynamic that will dominate the first two seasons (she wants him, he thinks of her as a friend, and if you've ever listened to a Taylor Swift song, you basically know the rest of it) -- and, oh look, there's Giles! This isn't inappropriate at all. Buffy goes up to him and points this out: "So, you like to party with the students? Isn't that kind of skanky?" He remains suitably square, and would certainly be horrified to know that he's leaning up against the very railing where Buffy will eventually spend her off-hours getting nailed from behind by James Marsters. When he challenges her to spot the vampire that is almost certainly in the crowd somewhere, she zeroes in on the only fashion disaster worse than Xander's unbuttoned flannels, and is horrified to realize he's talking to Willow, to whom she had just given a pep talk about "seizing the moment." Way to go, Buffster.
Buffy chases after them, almost stakes Cordy, blah blah blah, and now Jesse is chatting up Darla (the blonde vamp from the teaser), and we're back to The Master's lair, where The Master commands his lackey Luke to "bring me something ... young."
The guy-vamp from the club leads Willow to a crypt instead of the ice cream bar, and if this is her first romantic experience with a guy outside of Xander dismembering her Barbie when they were five, it's no wonder she hops on board the lesbo train as soon as she gets to college. Darla hauls an already-bitten Jesse into the crypt, then she and Disco Vamp menace Willow and Jesse for a while before Buffy and Xander burst in.
Buffy begins what will be a seven-year tradition of dispensing fashion advice in between good old-fashioned ass-kickings. She dusts the dude who was macking on Willow, then fights with Darla until Luke shows up, and we fade to black with Buffy on her back in a coffin and Luke about to send her to Vampsville.
Casualties:
Our adventure starts, of course, with ...
1x01: Welcome to the Hellmouth
We open with some good old-fashioned schmuck bait: a guy and a girl in a darkened high school, presumably sneaking off to play Hide the Salami in the cafeteria. One is a vaguely sinister-looking guy and the other is a pretty blonde girl, and anyone who has even the most passing familiarity with Joss Whedon can predict that she'll end up kicking his ass. What might not be as obvious is that he turns out to be the innocent one in all this, and she wants to wreak bloody death on him and everyone he knows. Which she proceeds to do.
(Vampification also makes your hair go all staticky.)
After the opening credits, we see pretty much your standard supernatural nightmare scene, whereupon Buffy is woken up by her mother, the caring-but-perpetually-oblivious Kristine Sutherland. Before dropping Buffy off for her first day of high school, she leaves her with these parting words: "Honey? Try not to get kicked out." Thanks, mom.
Sunnydale High School is a '90s cyclone of '90s semi-grunge music, girls with '90s bangs, and oh lord, '90s Xander Harris with his '90s shirt, '90s skateboard, and '90s parted-down-the-middle hair.
(Thought I was kidding, did you? Nope.)
Xander proceeds to get distracted by Buffy, specifically the rear half of Buffy, and takes a spectacular gainer into a handrail. This is followed by some banter with Willow, who we are promptly informed will be The Smart One in our eventual trio of Brains, Brawn and Heart, and don't think that metaphor won't get used over and over again for the next seven years.
Cut to Ken Lerner, who joins Kristine Sutherland in our pantheon of well-meaning-but-clueless authority figures, and also treats us to some pretty awkward line delivery. ("We're not interested in what it says on a piece of paper, even if it says ... whoa," he is supposed to say, but the "whoa" comes out as a sort of truncated "wuh," leading us to wonder if he's having a stroke.) Principal Flutie is basically a good guy but completely useless, is the message we're meant to take away from this scene.
Xander meets Buffy and proceeds to make an ass out of himself, in a scene that will be cringe-inducingly familiar to anyone who was ever an awkward teenager. ("Maybe I'll see you around. Maybe at school. Since we both go there.")
Buffy meets Cordelia, who is promptly revealed to be a bitch, and that's about all the character development she'll get for another year or so. Then she meets Giles, who tries to fulfill his role as Mr. Exposition, but fails when Buffy won't let him finish a sentence before fleeing the library as if it were on fire, which it will be eventually, so maybe she's just getting a head start.
Next we come to what is possibly the worst piece of dialogue in the entire series. After the first episode, Joss & Co. stopped trying to write how they imagined popular teenagers in southern California talking, and just made all the characters talk like the writers themselves. This was a good move, because here's what their attempts at teen dialect sounded like. I'm going to quote the whole damn thing so you can revel in the awfulness of it:
Bitch #1: "The new kid? She seems kind of weird to me. What kind of name is Buffy?"
Bitch #2: "Hey, Aphrodesia."
Bitch #1: "Oh, hey!"
Bitch #3: "Well, the chatter in the caf is that she got kicked out, and that's why her mom had to get a new job."
Bitch #1: "Neg!"
Bitch #3: "Pos! She was starting fights."
Bitch #1: "Neg-ly!"
Bitch #3: "Well, I heard from Blue, and she said --"
Bitch #2: "Hey, Aphrodesia."
Bitch #1: "Oh, hey!"
Bitch #3: "Well, the chatter in the caf is that she got kicked out, and that's why her mom had to get a new job."
Bitch #1: "Neg!"
Bitch #3: "Pos! She was starting fights."
Bitch #1: "Neg-ly!"
Bitch #3: "Well, I heard from Blue, and she said --"
Whereupon we are mercifully spared from any more attempts by thirtysomething comedy writers to sound sixteen by the sudden appearance of Schmucky McSchmuckface's dead body falling out of Bitch #3's locker.
Outside, Buffy approaches Willow, who has some kind of inexplicable pin on her dress ...
(Seriously, what is that? A bowling pin next to a hand grenade?)
... and we get our first real taste of Willow's personality. Yes, there's the beaten-down-uncool-kid ("Willow?" "Why? I mean, hi!"), but there's also the sardonic wit that would later become one of her trademarks. ("Aren't you hanging out with Cordelia?" "I can't do both?" "Not legally.")
Xander comes up with his slightly-dorkier friend Jesse, and between Eric Balfour's absence from the main credits and the fact that they're spending an awful lot of time on this guy who is clearly meant to be part of the gang, it's obvious Jesse isn't long for this world. (Joss wanted to put him in the credits for just this reason, but time and money intervened. He would later get to give his sadism free rein in Season 6, but that's a story for another time.) Cordy shows up and is bitchy some more, albeit with better writing than the other popular girls ("Don't you have an elsewhere to be?"), and tells Buffy about the "extreme dead guy in the locker," whereupon Buffy runs off to investigate.
Buffy creeps into the locker room, and I'm pretty sure she wears a pushup bra through most of the first season, 'cause Sarah Michelle Gellar isn't actually built the way she looks here.
She finds the dead guy, finds the wounds that make him look like he was attacked with a barbecue fork, and runs off to find Giles, whereupon they engage in Dueling Exposition and we are introduced to the concept of the Hellmouth, which explains why all this weird shit keeps happening in Sunnydale, even though nobody ever notices.
The other thing nobody notices is the male faculty member getting into a weirdly intense conversation with a female sophomore in the hallway, to the point of putting his hand on the wall in front of her to keep her from getting away, but I guess Sunnydale's Weirdness Censor applies to more than just the supernatural.
(Boundaries! Boundaries!)
In between all this, Cordy invites Buffy to The Bronze, a nightclub with questionable carding policies, and we get our first of many mixed signals about just how big Sunnydale is. The Bronze, see, is in "the bad part of town ... about half a block from the good part of town; we don't have a lot of town here." And it is also, in Xander's words, "a one-Starbucks town." But it somehow manages to have two hospitals, a decent-sized regional airport, a natural history museum, a zoo, and a state university. Go figure.
After a brief and appropriately ominous introduction to this season's Big Bad, an ancient vampire known only as The Master, we see Buffy and her pushup bra picking an outfit for The Bronze. For a moment we think Joyce might actually engage in some parenting, when she asks Buffy if there will be boys there, but when Buffy snarks back with "No, mom, it's a nun club," all she can manage is "Well, just be careful." Thanks, mom.
Buffy heads to the club, but on the way there she meets David Boreanaz. This was before the acting lessons that made his later appearances more bearable, so the less said about this scene, the better.
At The Bronze, we get our first look at the Xander/Willow dynamic that will dominate the first two seasons (she wants him, he thinks of her as a friend, and if you've ever listened to a Taylor Swift song, you basically know the rest of it) -- and, oh look, there's Giles! This isn't inappropriate at all. Buffy goes up to him and points this out: "So, you like to party with the students? Isn't that kind of skanky?" He remains suitably square, and would certainly be horrified to know that he's leaning up against the very railing where Buffy will eventually spend her off-hours getting nailed from behind by James Marsters. When he challenges her to spot the vampire that is almost certainly in the crowd somewhere, she zeroes in on the only fashion disaster worse than Xander's unbuttoned flannels, and is horrified to realize he's talking to Willow, to whom she had just given a pep talk about "seizing the moment." Way to go, Buffster.
Buffy chases after them, almost stakes Cordy, blah blah blah, and now Jesse is chatting up Darla (the blonde vamp from the teaser), and we're back to The Master's lair, where The Master commands his lackey Luke to "bring me something ... young."
The guy-vamp from the club leads Willow to a crypt instead of the ice cream bar, and if this is her first romantic experience with a guy outside of Xander dismembering her Barbie when they were five, it's no wonder she hops on board the lesbo train as soon as she gets to college. Darla hauls an already-bitten Jesse into the crypt, then she and Disco Vamp menace Willow and Jesse for a while before Buffy and Xander burst in.
Buffy begins what will be a seven-year tradition of dispensing fashion advice in between good old-fashioned ass-kickings. She dusts the dude who was macking on Willow, then fights with Darla until Luke shows up, and we fade to black with Buffy on her back in a coffin and Luke about to send her to Vampsville.
Casualties:
- Schmucky McSchmuckface (killed by Darla)
- Jesse (killed by Darla, though we don't realize it yet)
- Thomas (Disco vamp dusted by Buffy)
- AWholeBigSuckingThing.com
- WhatIsYourChildhoodTrauma.com
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