You know why? Because I'm sick of being pissed off by everything on the internet and I feel like writing about something I love. Obvious Spoiler Alert ahead for the whole show.
Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the greatest cultural touch stones in the world, and most people don't even know it. It takes the completely ridiculous premise of a cheerleader blonde SoCal girl slaying vampires, demons, and the legions of the undead and makes it the most engaging thing to be on an up and coming tv station with a teenage demographic at prime time. Buffy stands tall in story telling, paying homage to the medium of television as well as being a mishmash of genres.
The series hallmark is its ability to dip in and out of any contrivance and novelty with pure fluidity. It's allowed to go from a tear jerking death right into whimsical or outright silly within a line. I'm trying to keep it strictly to season 2 but it does it during the entire run of the series. And it does as much with a television budget as one can be asked. The '90s truly were an era of incredible television CG. It is stronger for its idiosyncrasies opposed to hampered by inconsistency because it maintains to be consistently likable.
Season 2 is where the show grows its fangs. It plays with being a campy monster of the week while each time chipping away at an overarching narrative in the B and sometimes C plots. The show's team tackled a lot in a one-hour time slot on the WB's New Tuesday, and right off the bat, we're shown what dying for the first time does to Buffy Summers. It then goes on to a deeper understanding of Angel, having both died in the same manner, and ramps up their romance and rivalry into intense metaphors that are layered and nuanced in thanks to a creative team that paid homage as it laid new ground.
The main cast also helps bring it home and delivers such powerful performances at the right moments, and are able to just nail a line. Quite a few of season 2's plentiful whatever'sville episodes, like in between When She was Bad till Halloween. It's in the background of these camp-fests meant to make you laugh, the bubbling darkness of the real story. Sandwiched between an episode about teenage boys reanimating a collection of fresh female bodies to build a girlfriend for one of their reanimated brother, and a Xander episode about a soul sucking mummy that seems to try and recreate the magic of Season 1's The Pack, but falls pretty short, we get introduced to Season 2's part A villains, Spike & Drusilla. Our punk mate, Spike, and his Lolita Gothic Vampire-Princess, Drusilla.
School Hard is the first time that Buffy's mom, Joyce Summers, encounters Buffy in her element. It's the metaphor of her world's clashing, juggling her three responsibilities of home, school & slaying. The interplay between her authority figures of her mother, Giles & Principal Snyder that would be the line Buffy continues to walk. Much like the line of Comedy, Horror & Teen Drama the show nimbly walked the intermingling of the supernatural encroaching upon the daily life of Sunnydale. Particularly in episodes like Lie To Me, where Buffy's old crush moves to Sunnydale to convince vampires to change him. It guest starred that weird looking dude who was '90s hot from Roswell. I don't feel like looking up his name.
That's what helped everything move so great in Season 2. Buffy trying to have a normal life as a sixteen year old girl, while she slays vampires is a theme that grows up during the show, but kinda goes away then comes back again, and always with consequences. Everything is over heightened by her being a teenager, only to have the responsibility of playing The Chosen One to fight back the Hellmouth. That theme culminates in the end of Season A with What's My Line parts 1 & 2.
The two parter throws the first issue where Buffy feels like running from it, as well as placing her relationship with Angel as a priority in his life. It plays very strongly on the relationship theme where everyone paired up in Season 2. And these relationships, Buffy/Angle, Xander/Cordelia, Giles/Jenny, and the ever romantic, but never OTP, Willow/Oz, are just set ups for your happiness to then rip out your heart. It leaves us with Drusilla returned to strength, and becomes Goth Queen with visions, while Spike ends up in a wheelchair.
We come back to the show with a John Ritter guest appearance in Ted, which shifts the story back into Buffy's home, illustrating that even her mom can't live a normal life independent of Buffy. Ted wasn't built by a villainous trio of mad scientists, nor a constructed body by an ancient corruption demon. Ted was the robot of a genius who also was obsessed with his wife to the point he built an android to keep marrying women to play out a fantasy life until they died. Willow says at the end of the episode that the police found a lot of bodies in the closet, so who knows what went on in the backstory there. But it's amazing how it happened in Sunnydale. What are the odds that someone who looked enough like Ted's ex wife would move to Sunnydale with enough frequency? Or would he hunt them down? Is it just blonde women, or any woman with wavy blonde hair and high cheek bones? There's a lot of unanswered questions in Ted.
Bad Eggs follows that question mark with a good ole body-snatcher story coupled with Buffy and Angle arguing about how they'll never be able to breed. It's a ridiculous episode featuring the first appearance of the Gorch Bros. I guess someone on the team just really wanted a couple of bumbling cowboy vampires on the show. But Buffy and Angle's relationship becomes more troubled as they talk out the difficulties of mating on top of the fact that Buffy's one job is to slay vampires, and just because Angle is good looking and has a soul, he gets a pass.
And that leads us to our mid act 2 reveal for season 2. Surprise has Buffy's 16th birthday, and to "Answer the question, 'What do you get the Slayer who has everything?'" Apparently she gets a severed arm of a big bad unkillable demon named The Judge. After his assembly and attack on Buffy and Angel directed by Spike and Drusilla, B&A have to run for their lives. In their brief respite, Buffy and Angel have the most tastefully cut night of romance and passion, leaving us instead on badass cliffhanger.
Innocence sees Buffy blossoming into womanhood after her deflowering. She has to reject and overcome the immediate feelings of having sex for the first time with her true teenage love who turns out to be the epitome of your sworn enemy. She has to grow up in that moment, because the childish thing would be to curl up and cry about how sad she is about it. Instead she rises to the occasion and kicks Angelus square in his evil vampire nards.
The next milestone of episodes after we find out Oz is a werewolf (and the only appearance of a. werewolf poachers and b. Wolf looking animatronic snout werewolves.) and a valentines episode that leads into an everybody loves Xander silly chase (also Buffy rats) is Passions. Passions shows Angel as his Angelus self in all the twisted glory the show can rain on one character. All of Angel's post-coital interactions are used to emotionally damage Buffy, leading up to the first truly Joss Whedon kill placed into the world.
Jenny Calendar was the first Agent Coleson, though Jenny stayed dead. She's one of those deaths where you don't really see how important she was to the core, and how likable she was. Never get attached to anyone who's whimsically likable in a Mutant Enemy Production. Ms. Calendar, Phil Coleson, Wash... never again. For being the kinda blossoming girlfriend of Rupert Giles, the effects of her death ripple through all of the Scooby Gang, from Willow taking over her class, to Giles being so taken aback and trying to ignore the loss of someone who challenged him romantically as an equal, Xander seeing it as a turning point to where Angel needs to die for what he did, and Buffy finally seeing the consequences of her one night of losing herself to passion.
But Buffy carries that weight. Even when she runs away, which is her number one answer for the first few seasons. When trouble rears its head, Buffy flees. In Prophecy Girl, she threatens to quit slaying when she finds out The Master will kill her. The beginning and end of the season is Buffy figuratively running away from her friends and attempting to isolate herself. While the first time she's trying to run away from memories of her own death, at the end of Becoming part 1 & 2, she's literally running away from her shattered life of expulsion from home and school, and the dissolution of her relationship with Angel... by killing him.
Before we close out the season, there's an episode that would be otherwise known as the, "DON'T WALK AWAY FROM ME BITCH!" episode if it wasn't so powerful and emotionally charged. I Only Have Eyes For You takes a monster of the week as a framing method to get Angel and Buffy in the room to say the things that they wanted to say to each other while possessed by poltergeists. It makes the two-part season finale even more powerful when it comes time for her to save the world from being sucked into hell.
The final moments of season two's climactic battle between Buffy and Angel comes to a halt once Willow completes the gypsy curse to restore his soul. Angel and Buffy's tender moment of pure, unadulterated, love holds with soft piano music as the portal into a hell dimension opened by Angel's blood appears behind his back, with only his blood to close it again. Choosing the world to her love like a dutiful slayer, Buffy kills the newly good and completely reformed Angel as she feeds his blood to the portal on the length of a sword.
Season 2 was a lot of things, and many of them happened all at once. The final word in vampire romance, a meditation on the power and position of women, and action mingled with tears. It proves that the quirky introduction from the mid-season replacement last season has enough emotional weight and engaging story hooks to make it a prime time slot holder. Buffy the Vampire Slayer has its cheesy moments, but they're around nuggets of true televised wonder.
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