Welcome to Sunnydale!
And here's a closer look at the first two episodes. How well do you feel they stand up to the ::gulp:: eighteen years since they were filmed? What do you see in the characters when we first meet them which will become more obvious later? What, apart from the datedness of clothes and computer hardware, annoys you on a rewatch that you might not have noticed back then? If this was the premiere of a new show now, would you even watch it?
[Under the cut for a rambling and personal set of thoughts on the opening double bill.]
Welcome to the Hellmouth/The Harvest
The opening makes a real statement about the show - the familiar school setting at an unfamiliar time, the use of very restricted lighting to create an eerie atmosphere, the camera at eye-level so we travel through the corridor with it, into the biology lab, so the first thing we see in any detail is a skeleton and some other, probably icky, biology stuff. Then the crash, which makes the viewr jump, however much you expect it. The colours have been firmly nailed to the mast - horror, using all the familiar visual tropes of creepy films. And the nervous-looking blonde girlstanding behind the boy who is being all rough, violent, manly.
Joss says in the commentary, “Anybody who’s well-versed in horror movies knows what’s going to happen in this scene.” And then Darla changes and turns out to be way, way nastier than the young man, now her victim. “Nothing is as it seems”, the mission statement for the show.
We don’t see her again for a while, but presumably she then gets busy, during the credits, finishing her feed and dragging the corpse some distance, breaking into a locker room and then a locker (relocking it after herself too, which is impressive) in order to plant the body where it will have maximum impact. Which is exactly what vampires always do as they like to draw attention to themselves. Or not.
Buffy’s nightmare - according to Joss it’s all about being haunted by her past, but it’s all clips from later in the season.
Cut to very bright, sunny day, saturated in colour. The sharp contrast is another mission statement - the two worlds which contrast and mesh. And we see poor, doomed Principal Flutie, simultaneously inviting her to make free of the school and taping her transcript back together - the past does matter, after all.
First meetings - Xander makes an idiot of himself, but identifies a stake accurately, which is odd - but perhaps not in Sunnydale, which had a Hellmouth before Buffy ever arrived.
Cordelia and Buffy meet in a classroom. The bell goes as the teacher is actually asking a question and everyone immediately stands up, starts talking and moves. Anyone trying that in any classroom of mine, back when I was teaching, would have been dead for discourtesy. Just sayin’. Though a teacher who pays no attention to the time in planning a lesson possibly deserves rude pupils. It’s things like this, presumably intended to help create a familiar setting, which leap out at me. Are text books generally stored in the library? Where? Sunnydale High School mystifies me, and I’m never quite sure how much of it is the fiction taking short cuts and how much is just culture clash.
What does work for me, though, is the bitchiness and cliquishness exemplified by Cordelia and explained by Willow. Buffy has been one of the inner golden circle at her last school, before the pyromania, but now she is by definition an outsider. The hero is our representative here - we see the new school through her eyes and share her reactions.
Outside she accosts Willow and makes a positive choice to align herself with the unpopular crew. We see the foursome clearly intended to be the core of the show - Xander in an awful shirt, Willow in that pinafore dress, Jesse in screaming orange, offering Cordelia a shoulder to nibble on. Nibbling people - not such a good idea, pal. It seems like a prime spot to gather. Shouldn’t it be dominated by the cool crew? (Talking of which, there was a teeny tiny glimpse of Harmony in the school corridor.)
And Buffy goes to get text books from the library. (Is this really a thing in US high schools?) She meets an over-excited librarian with remarkably little concept of respecting a student's personal space. Perhaps that's his Watcher training?
Later, Buffy has only two dresses, gets both out then doesn’t change from what she was wearing anyway. According to the commentary, “enormous slut” was quite controversial with the network. How times have changed. And then Buffy meets Angel and Davis Boreanaz tries to act. You can’t even blame his inexperience, as half the scene was shot at the end of the season. He gives her a cross, so of course he can’t be a vampire, can he? (Thinky thoughts - is it just the cross that hurts or the chain too? Where did he get it from - and how?)
The Bronze. How we will grow to love it and its cockroaches. Willow is sweet and we marvel for the first time at the ease with which under-age customers get in, but never dream of drinking what they are not supposed to drink. Then Giles appears and is not at all creepy as he lectures Buffy. And she’s off, chasing a vamp, almost staking Cordy en route. And it turns out Cordy has a mobile (cell) phone. Little do we yet guess it will be the only one in Sunnydale for some years as she pulls out the aerial to telephone everyone she’s ever met.
And the heroine rushes to the rescue, staking seventies vamp in the nick of time. She does a powerful lot of running, that girl. But, oh horror, here is Luke, whose moves are almost as good as Buffy’s, and she is trapped in a coffin in which the body has decayed to skeletal form but the quilted satin has remained shiny. He bares his fangs…
TO BE CONTINUED…
*****
CONTINUED…
It turns out crosses and their chains hurt vampires. Either that or Luke is secretly a big wuss. Astonishingly easily, our heroine is able to run off. But woe indeed! Where is Jesse?
Giles is exposition man. Xander has a green shirt with mushrooms on. Or clouds. Or spaceships. Buffy has a cold pack on her arm. Willow has an orange top and dungarees.
Jesse meets the master. Darla lisps. So do most of the other vamps in this episode. Jesse gets to be bait.
Willow has never heard of any sort of data protection laws. It makes life easier, but is this the first we see of her shaky ethics?
Giles leans over Willow. Inappropriately close? He wears tweed but a dark green shirt which is arguably a bit edgy.
Buffy has to argue with the Principal and then jump, backwards, from a standing start, over a very high gate. So she’s gone, and we see Willow and Xander worry until she can get to a mausoleum. Creepy music with screechy bits - nice and ominous. And Angel is behind her. How did he get into the space through a very sunny day? And they look deep into each other’s eyes. Joss in the commentary is very appreciative of rats as quality actors. As we shall see.
And Xander has followed Buffy. How did he get past Angel, one has to ask. They go through tunnels, of which Sunnydale already clearly has a lot.
Awww. Giles has a card catalogue. How sweet.
And Harmony and Cordy are rubbish at computing. So Willow fights back, subtly. The hardware really dates the show now, and I think I’m even more aware of it than the carbon-dated costumes. (Probably because I was never actually in the fashion in the 90s, so don’t really recognise it.)
Jesse turns out to have gone to the dark side, and suddenly Buffy struggles to push a door shut. Yet she can jump. There’s definitely a mismatch in degrees of strength she and various vampires show at different points in these two episodes. And Buffy and Xander escape into an electricity plant. Do we ever see it again? I doubt it.
More library, more pseudo-explanation of what is going on. Meanwhile, highly flammable vampires make with candles everywhere. And Luke sucks the Master off blood to fuse his (non-existent) soul with the Master’s.
Xander is upset at the death of Jesse. He kicks some furniture to show how sad he is. So that’s dealt with, then. Just as well, as no-one will ever talk about him again after this episode.
Joyce confronts Buffy. She is cluelessness personified about the slayage stuff, and takes her advice from tapes, it would seem. Buffy gets out a trunk of anti-vamp stuff. I’m not sure we ever see that again. Joss says it’s a metaphor for the layers of her character, teenage girl on top, Slayer underneath. I note she has garlic in there - do we ever see it actually used against a vampire, actually in a fight, I mean?
Jesse is now a sex magnet. He’s confident and broody now. Cordy likes being talked to rudely - is this really a feminist message here?
And the vamps invade The Bronze. Luke appears to have good lighting control - perhaps one of his minions was a techie in previous life? As he feeds the Master appears to be approaching orgasm. Good for him.
Buffy and the Cavalry arrive and she is in charge. The Master hams it up a bit - well, he has to shout now he’s all alone underground. Back in the club Buffy challenges Luke by throwing a stray minion at him. The (not-yet) Scoobies get most of the people out, but Jesse has time to almost-rape Cordy before Xander offs him - by accident. (And with a stake through the collar-bone by the look of it.)
And sunlight is not through the window Buffy breaks, but it distracts Luke enough that she dusts him. And all the eaten corpses vanish too. But Buffy looks really cool, so that's OK.
Final sequence - we see how keen Sunnydale people are to explain things away.
And the earth is doomed.
Thoughts on the double bill:
How young they look, and how badly-dressed. And how cheerful and lively too. Jesse dies, yet they are joking around in the final scene with Giles as if he’d never existed. Yet he was Xander’s best friend and clearly liked by Willow, if not by Cordelia. People who blame Xander for his reaction to the news of Anya’s death at the end of the series - it’s in his character from the first. In practical terms, the team cannot go through all the stages of grief and loss at the start of the first season, and there’s a heck of a lot of collateral damage in those first twelve episodes, so from a Doylist perspective it’s OK that Jesse is never mentioned again. But would it have hurt to have a couple of continuity shout-outs later?
Giles has an infectious excitement for all the things of the dark which we shall see again. And Willow, timid and shy as she may be presented, is still very eager to go outside with the strange vamp - for a snog at the very least, one must assume. She’s also ready to hack files - and does it improbably easily - and has no qualms in destroying Cordy’s work for her. Sweet, yes, but even at this stage not wholly innocent - and with a wonderful turn of words.
Lots of ideas here. The special effects are a little ropy. It was made in 1996, so they would be. The lighting is excellent and covers up a myriad of sins. Young DB was hellish sexy. So was Tony Head.
If it was on now, for the first time, I think I’d blench at the cheesiness. But I think I’d still be willing to give it another chance. And I’m very glad indeed that I gave it that chance a bit over fifteen years ago.
I should add that all the screencaps I am using came from Pretty As A Picture, heir to the late lamented Screencap Paradise.
[Under the cut for a rambling and personal set of thoughts on the opening double bill.]
Welcome to the Hellmouth/The Harvest
The opening makes a real statement about the show - the familiar school setting at an unfamiliar time, the use of very restricted lighting to create an eerie atmosphere, the camera at eye-level so we travel through the corridor with it, into the biology lab, so the first thing we see in any detail is a skeleton and some other, probably icky, biology stuff. Then the crash, which makes the viewr jump, however much you expect it. The colours have been firmly nailed to the mast - horror, using all the familiar visual tropes of creepy films. And the nervous-looking blonde girlstanding behind the boy who is being all rough, violent, manly.
Joss says in the commentary, “Anybody who’s well-versed in horror movies knows what’s going to happen in this scene.” And then Darla changes and turns out to be way, way nastier than the young man, now her victim. “Nothing is as it seems”, the mission statement for the show.
We don’t see her again for a while, but presumably she then gets busy, during the credits, finishing her feed and dragging the corpse some distance, breaking into a locker room and then a locker (relocking it after herself too, which is impressive) in order to plant the body where it will have maximum impact. Which is exactly what vampires always do as they like to draw attention to themselves. Or not.
Buffy’s nightmare - according to Joss it’s all about being haunted by her past, but it’s all clips from later in the season.
Cut to very bright, sunny day, saturated in colour. The sharp contrast is another mission statement - the two worlds which contrast and mesh. And we see poor, doomed Principal Flutie, simultaneously inviting her to make free of the school and taping her transcript back together - the past does matter, after all.
First meetings - Xander makes an idiot of himself, but identifies a stake accurately, which is odd - but perhaps not in Sunnydale, which had a Hellmouth before Buffy ever arrived.
Cordelia and Buffy meet in a classroom. The bell goes as the teacher is actually asking a question and everyone immediately stands up, starts talking and moves. Anyone trying that in any classroom of mine, back when I was teaching, would have been dead for discourtesy. Just sayin’. Though a teacher who pays no attention to the time in planning a lesson possibly deserves rude pupils. It’s things like this, presumably intended to help create a familiar setting, which leap out at me. Are text books generally stored in the library? Where? Sunnydale High School mystifies me, and I’m never quite sure how much of it is the fiction taking short cuts and how much is just culture clash.
What does work for me, though, is the bitchiness and cliquishness exemplified by Cordelia and explained by Willow. Buffy has been one of the inner golden circle at her last school, before the pyromania, but now she is by definition an outsider. The hero is our representative here - we see the new school through her eyes and share her reactions.
Outside she accosts Willow and makes a positive choice to align herself with the unpopular crew. We see the foursome clearly intended to be the core of the show - Xander in an awful shirt, Willow in that pinafore dress, Jesse in screaming orange, offering Cordelia a shoulder to nibble on. Nibbling people - not such a good idea, pal. It seems like a prime spot to gather. Shouldn’t it be dominated by the cool crew? (Talking of which, there was a teeny tiny glimpse of Harmony in the school corridor.)
And Buffy goes to get text books from the library. (Is this really a thing in US high schools?) She meets an over-excited librarian with remarkably little concept of respecting a student's personal space. Perhaps that's his Watcher training?
Later, Buffy has only two dresses, gets both out then doesn’t change from what she was wearing anyway. According to the commentary, “enormous slut” was quite controversial with the network. How times have changed. And then Buffy meets Angel and Davis Boreanaz tries to act. You can’t even blame his inexperience, as half the scene was shot at the end of the season. He gives her a cross, so of course he can’t be a vampire, can he? (Thinky thoughts - is it just the cross that hurts or the chain too? Where did he get it from - and how?)
The Bronze. How we will grow to love it and its cockroaches. Willow is sweet and we marvel for the first time at the ease with which under-age customers get in, but never dream of drinking what they are not supposed to drink. Then Giles appears and is not at all creepy as he lectures Buffy. And she’s off, chasing a vamp, almost staking Cordy en route. And it turns out Cordy has a mobile (cell) phone. Little do we yet guess it will be the only one in Sunnydale for some years as she pulls out the aerial to telephone everyone she’s ever met.
And the heroine rushes to the rescue, staking seventies vamp in the nick of time. She does a powerful lot of running, that girl. But, oh horror, here is Luke, whose moves are almost as good as Buffy’s, and she is trapped in a coffin in which the body has decayed to skeletal form but the quilted satin has remained shiny. He bares his fangs…
TO BE CONTINUED…
*****
CONTINUED…
It turns out crosses and their chains hurt vampires. Either that or Luke is secretly a big wuss. Astonishingly easily, our heroine is able to run off. But woe indeed! Where is Jesse?
Giles is exposition man. Xander has a green shirt with mushrooms on. Or clouds. Or spaceships. Buffy has a cold pack on her arm. Willow has an orange top and dungarees.
Jesse meets the master. Darla lisps. So do most of the other vamps in this episode. Jesse gets to be bait.
Willow has never heard of any sort of data protection laws. It makes life easier, but is this the first we see of her shaky ethics?
Giles leans over Willow. Inappropriately close? He wears tweed but a dark green shirt which is arguably a bit edgy.
Buffy has to argue with the Principal and then jump, backwards, from a standing start, over a very high gate. So she’s gone, and we see Willow and Xander worry until she can get to a mausoleum. Creepy music with screechy bits - nice and ominous. And Angel is behind her. How did he get into the space through a very sunny day? And they look deep into each other’s eyes. Joss in the commentary is very appreciative of rats as quality actors. As we shall see.
And Xander has followed Buffy. How did he get past Angel, one has to ask. They go through tunnels, of which Sunnydale already clearly has a lot.
Awww. Giles has a card catalogue. How sweet.
And Harmony and Cordy are rubbish at computing. So Willow fights back, subtly. The hardware really dates the show now, and I think I’m even more aware of it than the carbon-dated costumes. (Probably because I was never actually in the fashion in the 90s, so don’t really recognise it.)
Jesse turns out to have gone to the dark side, and suddenly Buffy struggles to push a door shut. Yet she can jump. There’s definitely a mismatch in degrees of strength she and various vampires show at different points in these two episodes. And Buffy and Xander escape into an electricity plant. Do we ever see it again? I doubt it.
More library, more pseudo-explanation of what is going on. Meanwhile, highly flammable vampires make with candles everywhere. And Luke sucks the Master off blood to fuse his (non-existent) soul with the Master’s.
Xander is upset at the death of Jesse. He kicks some furniture to show how sad he is. So that’s dealt with, then. Just as well, as no-one will ever talk about him again after this episode.
Joyce confronts Buffy. She is cluelessness personified about the slayage stuff, and takes her advice from tapes, it would seem. Buffy gets out a trunk of anti-vamp stuff. I’m not sure we ever see that again. Joss says it’s a metaphor for the layers of her character, teenage girl on top, Slayer underneath. I note she has garlic in there - do we ever see it actually used against a vampire, actually in a fight, I mean?
Jesse is now a sex magnet. He’s confident and broody now. Cordy likes being talked to rudely - is this really a feminist message here?
And the vamps invade The Bronze. Luke appears to have good lighting control - perhaps one of his minions was a techie in previous life? As he feeds the Master appears to be approaching orgasm. Good for him.
Buffy and the Cavalry arrive and she is in charge. The Master hams it up a bit - well, he has to shout now he’s all alone underground. Back in the club Buffy challenges Luke by throwing a stray minion at him. The (not-yet) Scoobies get most of the people out, but Jesse has time to almost-rape Cordy before Xander offs him - by accident. (And with a stake through the collar-bone by the look of it.)
And sunlight is not through the window Buffy breaks, but it distracts Luke enough that she dusts him. And all the eaten corpses vanish too. But Buffy looks really cool, so that's OK.
Final sequence - we see how keen Sunnydale people are to explain things away.
And the earth is doomed.
Thoughts on the double bill:
How young they look, and how badly-dressed. And how cheerful and lively too. Jesse dies, yet they are joking around in the final scene with Giles as if he’d never existed. Yet he was Xander’s best friend and clearly liked by Willow, if not by Cordelia. People who blame Xander for his reaction to the news of Anya’s death at the end of the series - it’s in his character from the first. In practical terms, the team cannot go through all the stages of grief and loss at the start of the first season, and there’s a heck of a lot of collateral damage in those first twelve episodes, so from a Doylist perspective it’s OK that Jesse is never mentioned again. But would it have hurt to have a couple of continuity shout-outs later?
Giles has an infectious excitement for all the things of the dark which we shall see again. And Willow, timid and shy as she may be presented, is still very eager to go outside with the strange vamp - for a snog at the very least, one must assume. She’s also ready to hack files - and does it improbably easily - and has no qualms in destroying Cordy’s work for her. Sweet, yes, but even at this stage not wholly innocent - and with a wonderful turn of words.
Lots of ideas here. The special effects are a little ropy. It was made in 1996, so they would be. The lighting is excellent and covers up a myriad of sins. Young DB was hellish sexy. So was Tony Head.
If it was on now, for the first time, I think I’d blench at the cheesiness. But I think I’d still be willing to give it another chance. And I’m very glad indeed that I gave it that chance a bit over fifteen years ago.
I should add that all the screencaps I am using came from Pretty As A Picture, heir to the late lamented Screencap Paradise.