beginning | blinding torment | boils | lies | making me bitter | evil compounds evil | blah blah bity blah

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The signs? Read me the signs! Tell me my fortune! You're so useful sitting here with all your books. You're really a lot of help!

 

 

season one  >  prophecy girl

 

The first of many apocalypses rears its ugly head in Sunnydale. [Actually, I think if you count The Harvest, I Robot, You Jane, and Nightmares, it's really the fourth. But if we kept count that way, our brains might explode. - SP]  This one, since it’s first season, involves the Master and a really horrible Spring Fling dress.  Giles, trying to justify the Annoying One’s existence, uncovers the first of many prophecies for this series.  Is it the first?  Oh hell, let’s just call it the first. [Well, there was the whole deal with the anointed one, but Giles screwed up that one pretty good, so this is, in any case, the first accurate prophecy in the series. - SP] This one details how the Slayer shall not know the Annoying One, and he shall lead her into hell. Oh yeah, and she dies.  Giles, understandably upset, calls Angel for some…comforting.  Angel trots over, stresses in his own monosyllabic way, and the two are caught by Buffy.  Sadly, their pants are not down.

 

Buffy, perturbed at the news that she’s going to die, goes into a beautiful tirade that blows away any other scene in this series.  Ever.  So I’m not going to rehash it.  Go watch it.  Declaring herself retired, Buffy attempts to leave town, but her ever-sensitive mother is having none of it.  None, I tell you.  So Buffy puts on a hideous dress and stares at herself in the mirror until Willow calls with the devastating news that vamps have been in the school.  Why this was more devastating to Willow than, say, having a computer robot boyfriend try to kill you, or a preying mantis biting off the heads of people at school, or the boys in the Pack eating the principle, or Xander kicking her ass in dodge ball, we may never know.  But she’s devastated.  So devastated, in fact, that she guilt trips Buffy into saving the world.

 

The part that gets me, though, is where Buffy is the Vampire Slayer. She's so little.

 

 

So, Buffy actually releases the Master rather than killing him, because prophecies are tricky things, she dies, Xander goes to get that fraidy cat Angel to show him where the Master lives, and saves her with some of the most spectacularly awful fake-CPR ever seen on national TV.  Buffy jumps back to life, feeling powerful.  We don’t know why.  We never know why.  She just does.  

 

She returns to the school, which turns out to be the oft-mentioned Hellmouth, and goes to the roof to fight the Master while her friends fight the lamest Hellmouth in creation.  Seriously, it’s worse than B-movie bad.  If you can’t make it scary folks, don’t show it.  Buffy sends the Master to hell, minus sending his own quip “prophecies are tricky things” back at him, which I’m sort of sad about, and then decides to go party.

 

Yeah.  Those last few moments did blow.  Too bad, too.  They had me up 'til "I should have known you wouldn't let that stop you."  But the rest of it rocked.  Okay, all but the cheesy montage of Buffy, Xander and Angel striding purposefully along to the theme song, rocked. That’s cheesy on a level even I can’t condone.

 

I may be dead, but I'm still pretty. Which is more than I can say for you.

 

 

 

 

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