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Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Episode 101
Confession time: Until last night, I’d never seen a single episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’m pretty sure I saw the movie once upon a yesterday (I vaguely remember Rutger Hauer being in it), but the television series came and went and had absolutely no impact on my life. The name “Joss Whedon” wasn’t part of my entertainment vocabulary until some folks in the geeky Internet circles I frequent began wailing about Firefly (another Whedon show I wasn’t watching) being canceled. In some respects, I’ve led a very sheltered life.
Despite enjoying Firefly after a friend loaned me the DVD box set (the same friend who got me into a preview screening of Serenity), I wouldn’t call myself a die-hard Whedon fan. I liked Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, to be sure, but I didn’t bother with Dollhouse (except to poke a little fun at it). My only regret in being largely ambivalent about Whedon’s body of creative work is the gap in my pop culture encyclopedia between 1997 and 2003, a time I spent focused on my Prime Geek Passion, Star Wars.
Thanks to Overlord Miller I have an opportunity (in the form of the first several seasons on DVD) to begin closing that particular gap, so last night I took my first step into the Buffyverse.
Episode 101: “Welcome to the Hellmouth” (Original Air Date: 10 March 1997)
We open with a couple breaking in to the high school, presumably for a little romantic interlude. What does it say about a guy who thinks the ideal place to put the moves on his new lady-friend is anywhere in his old high school? I think what happens next may be Darwinism in action: the timid girl turns out to be a vampire and dispatches Mr. High School Hookup with all haste. Guys, you may have been the cock-of-the-walk in your Senior year, but once you’ve got that diploma the more you linger at the old alma mater, the more you look like a creepy skeeze. Unless you work there. Maybe.
Now that the bloodsucking has begun, it’s time to meet our heroine. Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) wakes from a nightmarish series of vampire-related images to face another nightmare: her first day at a new school. This works about how you’d expect it to: Buffy’s arrival at Sunnydale High causes distraction leading to skateboard chaos; Buffy meets with the principal who reveals hints of her unusual past; Buffy meets the cool, popular girl (Claudia, played by Charisma Carpenter. OMG, total bitch!) who advises her to stay away from the geeky, awkward girl (Willow, played by Alyson Hannigan. OMG, cute nerd!) if she values her social standing; Buffy meets the geeky guy (Xander; Nicholas Brendon) and the even-geekier guy (Jesse; Eric Balfour); Buffy meets the librarian (Rupert; Anthony Stewart Head), who turns out to be a Watcher;1 Buffy meets the corpse of Mr. High School Hookup, who turns out to be a vampire snack.
Evil’s afoot in Sunnydale, but Buffy wants nothing to do with it; she’s done killing bloodsuckers. In the library, she tells Rupert as much (unwittingly revealing herself as a vampire hunter to Xander in the process), but the Watcher isn’t buying it: Buffy’s the Slayer, after all; it’s her destiny to destroy the various forces of evil. Am not! Are too! Am not! Whatever!
Meanwhile, the vampires are busy trying to raise The Master,2 who is probably some sort of über-vampyre.3 Anytime you’ve got to jump through supernatural hoops to summon a master vampire, you can be sure of one things: he’s gonna have the munchies, the kind not even Snickers will satisfy.
After a rather trying first day, Buffy heads out for a night of clubbing.4 On her way, she encounters a Mysterious Stranger (David Boreanaz), who warns her that she needs to be ready for…The Harvest.5 Buffy isn’t interested in ominous warnings, she just wants to get her swerve on, so into the club she goes.
If I’ve learned anything from the Blade movies, it’s this: vampires love nightclubs. Maybe this wasn’t the case in the late twentieth century, but here in the twenty-first you can’t wave a crucifix on a dance floor without hitting an undead abomination. Long story short: Willow leaves the club with a vampire, but not before Buffy’s bloodsucker-sense starts tingling. Buffy (and Xander) follow Willow and her new friend to (where else?) the cemetery, where the vampires are making ready to turn the cute, nerdy girl into The Master’s Resuscitation Supper. Buffy arrives in the nick of time, staking the prettyboy vamp, but getting the fluff kicked out of her by Luke (perennial baddie Brian Thompson), and then…TO BE CONTINUED!
Yes, the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a cliffhanger. The nerdy girl has escaped, but our heroine is in Dire Peril! How will she ever escape the clutches of Sunnydale’s remarkably robust vampire population? Tune in next time!
“Welcome to the Hellmouth” is a decent beginning. The vampires are a bit too reminiscent of The Lost Boys for my liking (Brian Thompson looks downright uncomfortable with all those prosthetics pasted to his face), but other than that I have no real complaints. I’d say Buffy’s television debut rates a solid three and a half out of five stakes to the ventricle.
- Uatu? [↩]
- Derek Jacobi? [↩]
- nosferatus maximus [↩]
- A school night! Madness! [↩]
- Whole grain bread for everyone! [↩]
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Website: http://kjtoo.com/
About The Secret Lair
The Secret Lair is a podcast and blog which follows the real life adventures of Kris Johnson and Chris Miller. Together with their staff of contributors and countless minions, they seek to dominate the planet, or at least the tri-county area, using the twin weapons of Discussion and Overwhelming Opinion. And zombies. And maybe a Death Ray. Or two.
I ♥ Buffy. I’m man enough to admit it, I really loved watching the entire run of the show. I even own the CD for the musical episode “Once More With Feeling” and, to my wife’s dismay, know the lyrics well enough to sing it.
Don’t give up on it during Season 1! It suffers a bit of “Babylon 5 Season 1-ism” where the show is high on ideas and occasionally misfires on their execution. Season 2 introduces some of the best characters to be written in geek “genre” tv woven into a storyline that had to have inspired Twilight. There’s your warning of where most of my geek friends have gone astray. Keep going, it’s worth it!
I hope you’ll go on watching because “Buffy” becomes better with each season.
@Elena — That does seem to be the consensus. I’ll definitely be watching all of Season 1 and likely continuing with the remainder of the series. If there’s any shark-jumping in the latter seasons, I’m going to be miffed.
@RiverRatMatt — I’ve never seen Babylon 5 either (I know, my Geek Cred just took another hit), but most folks I know who are fans say it got a little rushed in Season 5 and suffered for it. Maybe after I’m done with Buffy I’ll move to Babylon.
I haven’t seen Buffy either, but I also want to watch Babylon 5.
@Kris Johnson I think the first season of “Bab5″ is on Hulu right now. Though I don’t want to distract you from Buffy.
“Rushed” isn’t quite the right word to describe its 5th season though… Maybe, “disjointed”. They actually filmed the final episodes during the 4th season because they didn’t know if they were going to get picked up for the 5th season.
Also, Buffy jumps the shark a few times but it always manages to turnaround and stake the shark through the heart as well.