FEATURE: Buffy the Vampire Slayer - The I in Team

Previously on Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Buffy's big secret is out and she's now working with the Initiative of which Riley is a part, as is Psychology professor Maggie Walsh. She's involved in something called 314 which has got the demon world a'rumbling. Elsewhere, Spike has discovered he can hit demons whilst Willow is embarking on a new friendship with fellow witch, Tara.

Right. Deep breath. 

Buffy has been spending a lot of time with the Initiative, training and basically beating them to a pulp within 28 seconds. Maggie Walsh is impressed, Riley's in love and the Scoobies are disappointed, especially Willow who feels disconnected from her best friend. Behind the door of 314, we find that Walsh is working on an impressive Frankendemon's monster, composed of tech and demon body parts. When Buffy starts asking a few too many questions about what's going on in the tin foil set below the ground, Walsh concludes she's a bit too dangerous and decides to have her killed off. There's also this weird bit where she watches Riley and Buffy have sex, thus sparking all kinds of odd Oedipal associations that the episode doesn't really need.

But wait, I'm not done with this plot summary - it continues! During one of their patrols, an Initiative team, led by Riley pals Graham and Forest, run across Spike. They fail to capture him, but do manage to shoot him with a tracer. Having recently spurned Giles' friendship following the demon incident, Spike is forced to return to the Scoobies for help and they flush the tracer down the loo. As part of Walsh's cunning plan to rid herself of the Buffster, she sends her down to the sewers, chasing two escaped demons, falsely described as pushovers and has her take a prototype combat camera. Rookie mistake! 

I'm still not done. Riley returns to the Initiative tin foil base under the ground to report a lack of Hostile 17 only to be confronted with a falsely tearful Maggie Walsh saying that Buffy has been killed. But what's this? Buffy's alive! And she's the conveniently placed combat cam to relay a message to Walsh stating that now you've pissed off a Slayer and that's a bad thing yada yada yada. Riley's angry and walks away to go be nice to Buffy. Walsh is all upset with that Oedipal thing, yelling after Riley and generally losing her cool a bit. Then she goes into 314 and gets skewered by the now awakened Frankendemon's monster, Adam. 

And breathe.

The big problem with this episode is, if you hadn't guessed from the above plot summary and my textual hypventilation, is that there is way too much going on. The season has mostly focused on individual episodes with a little ongoing arc thrown in, but The I in Team is all arc, all the time to get the season to the point where it needed to be and the Initiative acting as the enemies once again. As a consequence, everything is too rushed for the impact these things should have had to land properly and by the time Riley's dramatically storming away, we still don't really care that he is.

It does form a quasi-two parter with the next episode, Goodbye Iowa, but we needed even more threaded in. Buffy working with the Initiative, much like her relationship with Parker, is over in about five minutes, but the show wants it to have more of a consequence than the allotted screentime deserves. For it to truly work, we'd need Buffy working well within the Initiative as a reworked status quo, further fracturing her away from her gang and for a more permanent damage to be done.

However, there are some positives to take away from it, mainly in the clever way the title is used to explore the ongoing fracturing working throughout the series. Mostly, it has been on the Scoobies' inability to adapt to having more separate lives since the end of high school. Willow's feeling it particularly keenly, but Giles, Buffy and Xander have all had their own time in the isolation spotlight too. They're all working as that "I" in the team, operating individually unless forced by circumstances beyond their control to work together, but even then, it's often been as a split force.

The Scooby Gang aren't the only team fracturing under the pressure of Buffy and the Initiative. We've had grumblings from Forest before about the importance that Buffy has in Riley's life over his own as a best friend, but that's crossing into the professional line too when Riley picks his girlfriend as his number two and not Forest. Likewise, Walsh's individual ambitions are responsible for Riley breaking off from his work and disobeying a direct order for what appears to be the first time in his life.

So, much like Hush, it's a big episode, both on an individual basis and for the longer, ongoing arcs but, unlike Hush, it's not very good at doing it. The earlier episode also had the great narrative hook of taking place mostly in silence, but even had you replaced all the dialogue, the episode is excellent at spinning the complex plates that the writers have in the air at that point in the season. In The I in Team, it feels like they suddenly realised they needed to start wrapping the season up, but a bunch of stuff needed to happen in order for them to do that. 

As a consequence, those plates spin off all over the place, whirling way too fast for us to really catch them as an audience (I started well with that allegory and promptly lost it by the end - I'm sure you all know me well enough by now to know what I mean).

Quote of the Week:

Buffy: You said it was big. You told me... but you never said it was huge!
Riley: I don't like to brag.
[They're talking about the Initiative tin foil base underground. Minds out of the gutter, guys.]

Inventive Kill: Adam uses the arm skewers, recently taken from the Polgara demons that Buffy helped to capture, to mercilessly murder Maggie Walsh.

Demonology 101: The episode marks the first appearance of Adam, who goes on to be the season's Big Bad. And we all thought it was gonna be our Maggie.

- Becky

You can read Becky's look at previous episode, A New Man, here.

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FEATURE: Angel - Expecting

Previously on Angel: Cordelia moved to LA to begin an acting career, but was stymied by her lack of talent and everything going a bit wrong. She's got the apartment down, but since Doyle's death, she's yet to get back on her dating game. And she's not dating Wesley. We know how that went down.

Cordelia's starting to get a hold of her LA life, gathering a group of friends and heading out on a hot date with Wilson Christopher, man about town and general studmuffin. She brings him back to her apartment, Phantom Dennis does the protective ghost bit and then she sleeps with Wilson. And then she wakes up to find she's pregnant. And not just a little bit pregnant. Full term, about to pop demon spawn pregnant. Wesley and Angel immediately spring into action to work out whether Wilson is a parasitic procreating demon or if something bigger turns out to be behind it. Meanwhile, Cordelia's maternal instinct kicks in and she decides she's going to her babies no matter what.

Originally, Tim Minear wanted to play the episode from a more comedic angle, but Whedon insisted on playing it straight so it goes for more of a body horror angle. It's basically the bit in The Fly when Geena Davis realises she could be giving birth to a weird human/fly hybrid and has the nightmare about giving birth to a giant larva manifested in one episode. They even manage to work an Alien reference in there with some floor-melting acid for amniotic fluid. It's also sort of where the episode doesn't quite work.

There's still a few bits in there that are played a little too silly to fit in with the straighter horror angle they were going for. Cordy drinking blood out of the fridge and grossing out Angel is still played for laughs when it could've been made a lot freakier. The actual gory horror of the episode, where you think the scares would take hold, is marginal, leaving it more to the audience's imagination and without anything majorly graphic. The thing is, with body horror, that graphic quality is what you need. You need to see the demonic babies inside Cordelia and freak out with Wesley. Normally I'd advocate the power of suggestion over most things, but it doesn't really work here.

There is one bit of the psychological horror aspect that does land and it's in the way in which the women are impregnated. The idea of a group of predatory males using their powers to seduce women is horrible (anyone who has ever been to a nightclub has seen this happen. I've even been circled before. Men are weird, guys). It's especially nasty in a world where pick-up artistry is a thing that has events and gathers men around to share secrets on how to seduce women. They're usually led by a vaguely demonic looking man too, so it's an idea that works all round.

There's also the idea of how invasive these men are within the lives of the women they sleep with. Cordy's despair at waking up to discover she's pregnant is heartbreaking, made even moreso by the knowledge that she's still only supposed to be 18/19 at this point. She's a character that's gone through a lot already and she's someone we no longer want to see suffer, such is the power of Charisma Carpenter's performance and the writing that took her on this journey. The scene isn't played with Cordelia's usual over-emotive hysteria either; it's just a simple, weighty despair.

Another mixed bag of an episode then and one which never quite knows which way it's supposed to be going. However, all is redeemed with that final scene in which Cordelia acknowledges that Wesley and Angel are the two people to whom she can trust her life. It's a really adorable moment, especially with how they're both fussing over her to make sure that she's ok, but it's also an important one. The characters really do feel settled and more like the family dynamic we're used to from Buffy; Wesley and Angel have their own little nerdy demon hunter dynamic going on now too.

Quote of the Week:

Wilson: You shouldn't sneak up on people like that in here. That's how accidents happen.
Angel: Speaking of accidents, I'm a friend of Cordelia Chase.
Wilson: This is a private club. Featured word: private.
Angel: Hey, you don't talk to me, I'll kick your ass. Featured word: ass.

LA Who's Who: You may recognise Ken Marino, Cordelia's baby daddy, from such things as Role Models and Wet Hot American Summer.

- Becky

You can read Becky's look at previous episode, Somnambulist, here.

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TV REVIEW: The X-Files - Founder's Mutation

After the breakneck, slightly maddening quasi-pilot that was last week's My Struggle, Founder's Mutation finds us in far more familiar, freak-of-the-week territory. Dr Sanjay, a scientist working for the DOD, finds himself plagued with a high pitched noise and, after an episode during a board meeting, he commits suicide by jamming a letter opener into his ear, but not before writing "Founder's Mutation" on his hand. Now Mulder and Scully are back on the X Files, they're sent to investigate. It seems like a routine suicide, but as they dig deeper, it seems they have stumbled on to a secretive mutation experiment and Mulder begins to hear a very high pitched noise.

X-Files vet James Wong is back on writing and directional duties for the episode and the old school feeling starts almost immediately alongside the narrative. The cold open with Sanjay's death is wonderfully familiar, an enigma of a scene that sets up the episode's central mystery with an eery atmosphere and some nastily graphic ear-piercing. It also acts as a settler for the current season. Mulder's ongoing 'project' theory lurks behind much of the narrative, but the focus remains on the mystery at hand and its effects on the returning FBI agents.

In getting back to episodic basics, Founder's Mutation is a huge step up in maintaining the balance between moving the season forward and capturing the factors that made the series so popular in the first place. The central mystery is not without its bumps, but it's a considerable step-up from the info dump that served as the first episode. Now that dynamics have been established, the show feels a little more settled. 

Like much of classic X-Files episodes, the horror resides very much in the real world as well as in the paranormal, playing on maternal fears, paranoid conspiracies and the horrible knowledge that a child has been born with a life-limiting mutation. Of course, it's not without some classic ickiness either. Exploding eyeballs, self-Caesarian sections and letter openers as suicide methods all make an appearance and there's a kind of glee in the goriness to it that sits nicely in the narrative. 

However, where the episode really flies is in its examination of the characters at the heart of The X-Files. Much of their dynamic in the first episode was based on their sudden reunion, Scully reluctantly drawn back in and Mulder recklessly jumping back into doing what he does best. Here, it's much on the toll that their work has taken on them, particularly in denying them the kind of life with their child that other people enjoy. Thwarted parenthood was a wider theme in the episode, but the scenes with Mulder and Scully talking about their own lost child was 

Their respective 'what if...' moments with their son, William, are the episode's best moments, a heartbreaking glimpse into what could have been. There's no one happy family unit still, but there are two parents getting to spend time with their child. It's interesting that the flashbacks still keep them separated, their different expectations of parenthood and their respective fears of how it could end are perfect for their characters. Anderson has always been fantastic at conveying Scully's loss with a simple flicker of emotion, but it's Duchovny who tugs at the heartstrings here, a man denied growing up with his sister and fearful of losing his son in the same way.

It may be a little rocky still, but there's no denying that everyone involved in The X-Files return still understand what is needed to make the show tick and that we're all a sucker from some tragic Mulder and Scully emoting.

- Becky

You can read Becky's review of previous episode, My Struggle, here.

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FILM REVIEW: Deadpool

Deadpool is a character that has been infamously ill-served by his previous onscreen incarnation during the disaster movie that was X-Men Origins: Wolverine. It's been a real fight to get him back in to the cinema and it's testament to the tenacity of the film-makers, star Ryan Reynolds (seizing his second Wade Wilson-based chance with aplomb) and the fans who loudly clamoured for the film to be made after test footage was "leaked." 

To try and describe the plot, even in summary, in a linear fashion defeats the purpose of the film somewhat, throwing you into the action almost immediately and allowing Deadpool to take over and tell you his story. Suffice to say, there's an origins story in there, a brief history of where Wade Wilson came from, how he got his skills and how he came to be the sort-of-hero-but-not-really Deadpool.

There's a curious tension at the heart of the film as Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick wrestle with the need to present a fairly standard origin story and to reflect the nature of Deadpool's metafictional existence within the comics. This is, after all, the character who decided to kill off the entire Marvel universe and then their fictional ancestors. Fortunately, Reese and Wernick find creative ways to combine the two, poking fun at just about everything and referencing everything else. The opening credits are the most inventive use I've seen of a movie standard for some time, encapsulating that central conflict between tradition and chaos instantly and setting the audience up for the kind of clever yet puerile humour the film thrives on.

What is clear immediately is how much fun Ryan Reynolds is having, getting to wisecrack, kick butt and generally make a nuisance of himself all the way through the film. As capable as he is at the comedic side of things, it's underpinned at all times by a sincerity that is needed to make the character work, something that could've fallen by the wayside in someone else's hands. The film needs the emotional beats of Wade Wilson to land alongside the one liners of Deadpool. Reynolds makes both look easy. I imagine it probably also helped to take a dig at his other, less successful comic book projects.

He's aided at all times by a supporting cast all in excellent form. Morena Baccarin sparks well with Reynolds as his love interest, Vanessa, capable of going toe-to-toe at all times with the charisma of her co-star. The X-Men he deals with, Colossus (voiced by Stefan Kapicic, who is adorable) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (a hilariously sullen Brianna Hildebrand) both provide excellent comic relief as well as acting as the representation of the wider X-universe. Gina Carano proves, once again, someone needs to give that woman an action franchise. The weak spot is probably Ed Skrein's villain, Ajax, feeling a bit like a budget Nicholas Hoult in his English-accented swaggering, but when Deadpool is both hero and anti-, it's not surprising that Ajax is a little two-dimensional.

Where the film really excels is in its glorious black humour, layered on thick at all times. Reese, Wernick, Reynolds and director Tim Miller utilise pretty much everything in the comic arsenal, from silly physical comedy, creative swearing to referential wisecracks and back again. It won't be for the faint of heart, but there's a little bit of everything in there, including Monty Python references (which, no, I wasn't expecting). There's also a solid appreciation of the audience in the jokes as well; whether you found the characters through comics or movies, there are nods there to cater for you. Some are more blatant than others but knowing there will be things you missed for laughing too hard guarantees it's a film requiring multiple viewings. Even the soundtrack is a joy.

If anything, and this is a small niggle, it could have gone further into the anarchic freedom that its comic-based counterpart enjoys. For the uninitiated audience, I understand why the origin story hallmarks have to be in place and the film manages to achieve the balance between familiarity and tearing up the rule book for the most part. Yet there are moments that are crying out to be undercut by a bit of fourth wall breaking or some ironic narration as the film strays too far into adhering the conventions its attempting to skewer. The middle section, Deadpool's origin, in particular suffers for this, slowing down the film's breakneck pace just enough to feel a little rougher than the rest of the film's central oxymoron of controlled chaos.

Currently smashing box office records all over the place and proving superhero fatigue is on the side of mythical, Deadpool manages to not only be the film we were expecting it to be (no mean feat in today's safety first blockbuster climate) but also leave fans hungry for more. 

- Becky

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TV REVIEW: The X-Files - My Struggle

This review contains spoilers...

Opening with a Mulder exposition of his own personal obsession and the history of alien conspiracy theories, the My Struggle once again asks the question of "are we truly alone?" Coupled with the unchanged opening credit sequence, it is a glorious statement of intent; it's a continuation of the story that we loved (and that infuriated us) with the characters we fell in love with. Mulder and Scully are separated and pursuing their own lives, but are dragged back in by an online talking head, Tad O'Malley, a conservative conspiracy nut who also happens to be a Mulder-Scully fanboy. As they begin to investigate, it appears that they're amongst something far bigger and more dangerous than they ever expected. Again.

The length of time since the end of the series and the last movie, I Want to Believe, is a big one, so it's natural that there's some strangeness to the relationships. They've shifted and changed, but the episode seems torn as to whether it wants to brave that rockiness or not. It's a new pilot episode, re-establishing the mythos, the relationships and the world in which it all operates, but in doing so, it's trying to do too much. In both trying to emphasise that displacement and trying to make the episode run as smoothly as possible, Carter creates something mightily uneven.

The scene with Mulder and Skinner in the old X Files office is the best example of this alongside the clash between Scully and Mulder on his porch; it's thudding exposition set-up for the new story whilst trying to recall the past. The personalities and the relationships should be enough, but Carter doesn't seem to have enough confidence that we all remember how these patterns work. A character shouldn't need to say "the truth is out there" for us to know that Mulder still wants to believe. 

A lot of the episode naturally gets by just through the sheer thrill of seeing Mulder and Scully back on screen together. Duchovny and Anderson slot back into their roles with ease, like pulling on a slightly irritating jumper and a sharp power suit respectively. Duchovny's sardonic humour is the same as ever, delivered with the lazy charm that he's made his own over the years, whilst Anderson starts utilising her full range of reaction faces almost immediately. Her expression after being mansplained by O'Malley was everything. The pair's chemistry is instantly present and correct too and though the episode is a little clunky in its explanations of their history between I Want to Believe and the present day, there's a weight to their every interaction that conveys a lot.

What it does to the mythology is a brave move and a pretty clever one too, utilising a War on Terror, post-Snowden/Wikileaks world to tap back into the atmosphere of distrust and paranoia that the series initially thrived on. As O'Malley and Mulder explain to Scully how it all fits together, the episode suddenly takes off and everything slots into place. It re-energises a mythology famously impossible to follow (I'm not sure we'll ever straighten everything out) and provides the new fight, the new struggle that brings Mulder and Scully back together. It's a big mess, of course, but what would The X-Files be with sense? 

The final scene with the infamous Cigarette Smoking Man (replete with the effects of his eponymous habit) is a cracking slice of dark humour to end My Struggle with. It's another echo of its pilot episode, but handled with more deftness than the rest of the episode combined. It's that scene that gives me hope for the rest of the series. The awkward reintroduction is now out of the way, we can get down to trusting no one.

- Becky

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FEATURE: Angel - Somnambulist

Previously on Angel: Angel is still haunted by the crimes he committed in his alter-ego state as the infamous vampire, Angelus. Wesley is now residing in LA after he was fired from the Watcher's Council and wishes to help out with Angel Investigations.

Angel's having nightmares about draining victims in LA and carving a Christian cross into their left cheek. It turns out that there just happens to be a serial killer doing the exact same thing and Kate is on the case. On his return to the office, Wesley notices the connection between the serial killer's modus operandi and that of the seventeenth century Angelus. Angel's spotted it too and upon realising that Angel is somehow committing the crimes in his sleep, they realise that it's the work of a vampire he sired back in the day, keen to relive their life of murderous crime together. With Kate on the case too, it's not long before she discovers the truth about Angel.

I feel like there needs to be some kind of health warning in any episodes where Angelus' Irish accent is deployed. Doubly so for this episode when Jeremy Renner is acting English. It's not quite on the Keanu Reeves in Dracula end of the Bad Accent spectrum, or indeed Angelus', but it's thankfully brief at its most potent and weirdly Transatlantic for the rest of the episode. He's a decent guest star, but nothing memorable, mainly because he's playing a caricature of Angelus, rather than a character of his own, which is kind of the point. I also like that he had no idea about Angel's curse, which suggests he was a pet project of Angelus' outside of the central crew of Darla, Drusilla and the Master, suffering an inferiority complex forever as a result.

After Parting Gifts, this episode becomes a reaffirmation of the show's structure. There's no mention of Doyle and the focus moves away from the team and back in on Angel himself. It's a key episode in terms of his relationship with Kate, transforming their relationship entirely now that she knows the truth. That's the big plot development here, but the episode suffers from treading over old ground too much in order to move the show on from the fairly big change that resulted from Doyle's death.

There have been a lot of references to Angelus throughout this series and in Angel's appearance on sister show Buffy in Amends when everyone keeps asking if he's evil again. There's a nice reminder of it here, not in the flashbacks, but in Kate's profile of the serial killer, overlaid with Angel wandering through LA trying to figure out how to stop Penn. Angelus is something he has to live with and something that becomes increasingly important to his fight across the five seasons of his own show.  But it's the same message we've had again and again throughout the season. 

It's here where the first season shows the cracks in its quality, never really having any thematic resonance beyond that. Even the idea that fuelled a couple of the early episodes, that the monsters of LA were the equivalent to the torment of being an adult, is a retread of the Buffy formula that quickly gets forgotten over the course of the episode. The Shanshu Prophecy is, of course, on the horizon and Wolfram & Hart are lurking in the background, but this is still a show searching for its own identity and not quite succeeding just yet.

Quote of the Week:

Wesley: No sign of any vampire attack... [gets grabbed by Penn] Which is maybe because he's here and has me by the throat. 

Inventive Kill: Kate bags her first vamp, stabbing a huge piece of wood through Angel, missing his heart but impaling Penn's. 

LA Who's Who: I can't not put Jeremy Renner in this little section. Since his brief appearance in Angel, he's gone on to an Oscar nomination, appearing as an Avenger and saying douchey sexist things to the press. So, that's nice. He also goes on to appear alongside Elizabeth Rohm (Kate) in American Hustle, playing husband and wife.

- Becky

You can read Becky's look at previous episode, Parting Gifts, here.

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FEATURE: Buffy the Vampire Slayer - A New Man

Previously on Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The group have all been dealing with their own respected adjustments after the destruction of Sunnydale High, some better than others. Willow has made friends with a fellow witch named Tara, Giles is unemployed whilst Spike has discovered that he can still hurt demons, just not humans.

It's Buffy's 19th birthday and Giles isn't coping with it very well feeling a little out of the loop. So badly in fact that he turns into a demon. Though that turns out to be more or less because Ethan Rayne showed back up, got Ripper blind drunk and cast a spell on him. Prior to that, he introduces himself to Maggie Walsh which doesn't go particularly well as she accuses him of not being a suitable male role model for. We all know that's absolute crap. I'm kinda glad she gets skewered. 

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Whilst Giles is coming to terms with Buffy growing up, dating one of the Initiative commandos and you know, being a demon, Buffy and the gang assume that the demon running round has kidnapped Giles, not realising that it's actually Giles himself until it's nearly too late. We also learn that the demon underworld is a'rumbling with the news of the Initiative and something called 314...

A New Man is one of those episodes that seems to get richer over time, particularly with the knowledge of where everything's going, not only in terms of the fourth season, but beyond too. Focusing in on it first, Giles turning into a demon is a very simple metaphor for his alienation from the group, manifested in some stunning make-up work allowing Anthony Head to give a great comic physical performance. His first few scenes as he gets used to his demonic visage are laugh-out-loud hysterical and later on too, chasing after Professor Walsh, growling at her and running after her down Main Street before getting back into the car with Spike as if nothing had happened. 

I had forgotten how funny Ethan's re-introduction is and indeed, all of the scenes between Ripper and Ethan, a masterclass in comic timing from both the sadly late Robin Sachs and Anthony Head. Ethan's one of Buffy's great antagonist, more memorable in four appearances than most foes get to be over several. Sadly, this is his final moment in the show, but it's an excellent episode to go out on. The drunken scene between him and Head is just brilliant: "Whilst you were in the restroom, I slipped a poison pellet in your drink. You'll be dead in an hour... Just kidding."

Jane Espenson wrote this episode, so obviously it's great and packed full of quotable lines (which makes picking one to highlight with you all an absolute nightmare). Expanding out to the episode's richness beyond just this story, there's a lot of thematic work going on here and plenty of foreshadowing too. Buffy and Giles' relationship will take some bigger knocks in later seasons, but here it proves to be pretty strong, Buffy knowing intuitively that it's him. 

There are also a lot of fault-lines weaving through this episode, mainly through the Scoobies themselves. Willow's lying about her burgeoning relationship with Tara, Buffy's swanning off with Riley all the time, Xander's dating Anya which no-one particularly cares for and Giles is still feeling out of the loop, all of which are ready to be exploited by Spike later on in the season. These ones I remembered. The one I didn't spot? Riley already feeling his masculinity impugned by Buffy's greater strength, skill and authority. It's all there very early on in their relationship, we (and they) just didn't spot it.

Another little cracker of an episode with hilarity, wit and pathos in spades, A New Man is an excellent slice of Buffy doing what Buffy does best, messing with our own knowledge of the characters to further their development. Plus, we don't often get Giles-centric episodes so they're always a joy when they come along, whether it's exploring his Ripper-based past or watching him try and come to terms with change, Anthony Head is marvellous without a doubt.

Quote of the Week:

Maggie Walsh: So, the Slayer?
Buffy: Yep, that's me.
Maggie Walsh: We thought you were a myth.
Buffy: ...Well you were myth-taken.

Inventive Kill: Slight variation on this week as there isn't any killing, but Riley proudly boasts to her of his 17 hostile takedowns. Some nice person over on the Buffy Wikia page for this episode worked out that Buffy has, as a modest estimate, taken down over 100 hostiles up to this point in the series. 106 to be exact, only counting those seen onscreen.

Let's Get Trivial: Anthony Head's previous experience playing Dr Frank N Further in The Rocky Horror Show proved to be invaluable when he had to perform the scene in which he ran after Maggie Walsh because he's extremely comfortable in high heels as a result.

- Becky

You can catch Becky's look at previous episode, Doomed, here.

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