Buffy 1x01, "Welcome to the Hellmouth"; 1x02, "The Harvest"
My contrarian determination never to watch an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was foiled by Chad's inviting Jennifer Ouellette, author of The Physics of the Buffyverse and another pop-science book, to speak at Union next week. Chad figured it would be good if he'd actually seen more than a half episode of Buffy here and there, so Netflix'ed the first two discs of Season One & borrowed Season Five from a pimping co-worker (who recommended episodes 5 & 12, FWIW). We watched the very first two episodes tonight.
I'd always said that I wasn't interested in Buffy because I didn't want to watch a show about high school, even the demons of high school literalized. I realize now that I forgot a much more salient objection:
I don't want to watch horror.
I realize to everyone else in the world, the things-that-go-bump (or boo) moments are very tame, but I react very badly to that kind of suspense, and just don't enjoy watching it. Which is actually a relief, because I was afraid I'd like it, and seven seasons of Buffy plus how many of Angel?, well, that's a really big time commitment.
Some specific comments about these two episodes, behind the cut. If you're going to spoil anything past these episodes, ROT13 it or enclose it in .
In no particular order:
- I liked that Buffy had already found out that she was a Slayer and was trying to ditch it. For some reason I expected the show to start with her discovery, but this was a lot more interesting.
- Willow is adorable.
- It's very weird watching the beginning when I have general ideas about what happens in the rest of the series from indiscriminately reading other people's spoiler comments.
- For instance, I'd never heard anyone talk about Jesse, so I was pretty sure he was toast. I don't know how it appeared to anyone watching for the first time.
- Though I think that Angel had big flashing "Warning! Major Character!" signs hanging all over him right from the start.
- Apparently Buffy's super-strength goes away when the plot requires it, because it should not have been that hard for her to shut the door underground after Jesse trapped them.
- Did your suburban hometown have a club where the teenagers hung out?
- And they're really sure that no-one ever goes in that library, huh? Did Giles put up an aversion spell or something?
- It's really hard to talk around spoilers for the rest of the show. I think I'll have to go suck down spoilers at Wikipedia or something.
ETA: Congratulations if you didn't find it scary. I did, I didn't enjoy it, you're not going to convince me otherwise.
Man, I knew this was going to happen if I posted this, but I thought my comments were sufficiently clear to avoid it.
ETA 2: See this conversation with pnh for an explanation of why I felt the previous ETA necessary.
ETA 3: Chad's comments.