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

 

 

 

 

 

 

season three   >  anne

 

Right. So getting off my lazy ass, though technically I am still sitting on it, I'm going to attempt to get the season three recapping on the ball. Who knows, maybe I'll find this motivating!

 

Or not. But I would like you all to know that I was wandering the hallowed halls of Target today and I came upon the Buffy Season Three DVDs on sale and I did not buy them. Woo! Two points for me! Maybe even three! Let's hear it for that thing called will power, huh folks?

 

Right. Back we go, to the years when Buffy wasn't quite so bitter, Xander got airtime, Willow was still likeable, Cordelia was a character that did not cause me to scream and throw things at the screen, Giles was not yet a prat and I barely survived the Buffy/Angel season-long angstathon from hell. Good times. Seriously. I'd give my left nut, if I had one, to return to those days. Hell, I'd even promise not to leave the room every time the evil strains of the Angel and Buffy necrophilia-is-romantic theme kicked in.

 

Okay, so, enough of that. Offering up all the left nuts I don't possess isn't going to bring it back. I'm not sure anything can.

 

So, for those of you who have managed to actually create your own lives and no longer obsess over or remember those of imaginary characters you watched 3 or 4 years ago, a quick summary of where everyone is at the onset of season three:

 

  • Buffy: ran away. Sulking in LA due to having to send her already dead boyfriend to hell. Experimenting with her hair. Eating spaghettios out of a can. Waitressing at a dive café on skid row. Allowing greasy skeezeballs to slap her ass.
  • Angel: sulking in hell. Who the hell cares what he's doing? He's in hell. Woo!
  • Willow: sulking in Sunnydale due to her best friend taking off on her without a word just when she needed her most. Dating Oz. Patrolling. Working on quipping and punning under pressure. Setting bedspreads on fire.
  • Xander: sulking in Sunnydale due to hot Slayer running away, his girlfriend going somewhere without him for summer vacation and Andrew Hoech being an undead cheater. Patrolling. Pining for the fjords Cordelia.
  • Oz: patrolling. Avoiding telling Willow that he failed 12th grade and will in fact be joining her at the loser table at lunch after all.
  • Giles: worrying in Sunnydale. Running off after every report of a girl that beats things up in the night. Pining for the library.
  • Joyce: worrying in Sunnydale after kicking Buffy out of the house. Blaming Rupert for her bad parenting. Making "friends" with Pat.

 

Everyone caught up? Great, then let's go.

 

We open on Willow standing all brave-like at the foot of a grave. A hand pops out and I once again find myself wondering about those poor people that have to push their way up through the dirt. And, really, I only wonder this because it reminds me of the scene in the Princess Bride when Wesley pulls himself and Buttercup out of the quicksand and I used to feel really sorry for them. See, I envisioned the actors being put in a hole and the crew pouring tons of sand on them and then they had to hurry up and shoot the scene before they couldn't hold their breath any longer. So every once in awhile, that same ole concern comes up for these poor red shirts of evil. But I digress. Willow makes a bad pun or maybe it's more like a quip, and then she realizes that she's dealing with a cranky vampire rather than a cute little puppy, and the boys come rushing in to stake it. Only they suck at it and Andrew cheats because he used to be a gymnast and then Oz throws a stake at the vamp's back. He misses, which is a touch I really liked. I mean, come on, if you could stake a vamp that way all the time, why doesn't Buffy just sort of stand back and take aim? It'd be like shooting monkeys in a barrel, or some other highly appropriate saying that I don't quite understand but find disturbing all the same, much like the shooting of monkeys in barrels. [I thought that was fish. I thought you shot monkeys in a cage at the zoo. Which you seriously should do. Monkeys are evil. -SP]

 

Once we hear them talk about Buffy and about how they have to talk about her like she's alive we cut to the Mopester herself, somewhere in some dingy apartment in a neighborhood that just screams spontaneous, uplifting musical number. If only Rick Moranis had been available when this episode was shot. Le sigh.

 

Credits, credits, credits, first day of school! Yay! Hustle and bustle and Giles back at home in the library and Willow checking out books in a fugly hat! It's all just so…so…I think I'm tearing up. Excuse me while I compose myself…Okay, Oz. Right. Oz attempts to get an option on cool as Willow deals with the info that she, the smartest girl in the known universe, is dating a flunkee. Xander geeks out over seeing Cordy, Cordy geeks out over seeing Xander, though predictably they do these things to the people they are not geeking out over and act distant when they do run into each other. Badda bing, badda bang. Such is young lust.

 

He didn't meet anybody over the summer, did he? No! Who's he gonna meet in Sunnydale? But monsters and stuff... but then again, he's always been attracted to monsters... How's my hair?

 

Buffy, being the truant that she is, would rather be having nightmares about her and Angel canoodling on a beach (well, it's really my nightmare) and being all downtrodden and wearing a crappy uniform and serve peach pie to ave rats and truckers who need a good ass kicking than going to school. We can tell Buffy's down trodden because she allows the skeezie truckers to smack her in the ass with nary an arm breaking or a quip. At this moment, the writers decide to bring back Chanterelle, the young blond lass from Lie to Me who loved vampires and thought they just needed a hug, only now they're calling her Lucy. I think they're calling her Lucy. I don't know. I have that *NSYNC song stuck in my head that is often referred to as "the Lucy song" amongst my circle, even though it has nothing to do with a Lucy, and damned if that might be clouding my judgment. [Which song would that be again?]

 

 

LILY! That's it! Her name is Lily! Lily runs away a lot, see, and changes her name each time. Once she even ended up a Sister Sunshine. But we don't learn this until later, because right now she's in the skeezy diner with her boyfriend Ricky trying to order pie from Buffy. They can only afford pie because their homeless asses spent all their money on a truly hideous tattoo. Each of them has half a heart on the their forearm with the other's name in it, and when put together it forms a full heart. That description isn't even doing the hideousness or tackiness of it justice, I apologize. So Lily continues to not be the smartest apple in the barrel. Got it. Anyway, she sort of almost recognizes Buffy so Buffy takes off, ditching her tables on some other poor hapless waitress we will never, ever see again. Walking home she runs into that head dude who bosses around the girls from "She Spies" which is a cheesy show but totally worth it if you're up late on Saturday night and SNL is sucking ass, as it is wont to do. But here we'll just call him "Ken". Ken is a demon, but we don't know that yet, who preys on the helpless homeless kids. Because he's evil and, I think, standing in for society and its apathy as a whole, but I could be wrong here. I think I'm pretty close to the mark, considering he sucks them in by saying he's going to care for them and turn their life around and then sucks them into a magical pool where they end up in what appears to be a smelting factory, doomed to live a life of being a nobody who lives in a cell in rags and pushes random piles of rubble to random places, and peridocially gets beat up by people in bad demon masks and rapidly aging because time moves different there and when they're spit back out into the real world they're old and decrepit and have had the life sucked out of them and drinking bleach. So I'm pretty close. If that's not the metaphor this week, then it's probably got something to do with bleach and how it will kill you if you drink it. Either or.

 

We gave blood lots of times 'cause you get a few bucks. And they have cookies!

 

But we don't know any of this yet (actually, you should have a pretty decent handle on the bleach=death issue), we just learn that Ken knows Buffy's one of those lost souls and wonders who she's running from. Which then cues the cheery montage of street kids in various stages of urchin-chic. Which cuts to depressing night at the Bronze. We have Xander and Willow and Oz discussing shop, meaning the dusting of vampires, and Xander continues to obsess about Cordy, who then comes in and unwittingly volunteers to be bait-of the non-jail variety. That's Faith's job, and she's not quite ready yet. It takes awhile to travel from Boston to Sunnydale with all that baggage.

 

Oh geez, where the hell am I? Basically, Lily loses Ricky, who takes care of her because she doesn't know how to take care of herself, so she stalks Buffy and is all "hey, dude, I remember you. I'll take you to a party if you pay my cover." Buffy does not jump at this offer, but Lily won't leave her alone and comes to her for help the next day because Ricky's gone and Buffy knows how to take care of stuff. Buffy is all "not any more, leave me alone, I'm sad, dammit" but Lily will have none of it and, bless her heart, Buffy grudgingly caves. They go to the blood bank where ominous music plays and the nurse acts sketchy, and then Buffy later finds Ricky's extremely aged body next to a bottle of bleach (see! Bleach is bad, mmkay! Don't drink bleach!) so Buffy deduces along with the audience that there's something afoot. She goes back to the blood bank, talks about tea cozies and her desire to own one while threatening the nurse, and finds out that she needs to go see the man we're calling Ken.

 

Ken's been busy since bumping into Buffy-sending Ricky down the well, picking up Lily with the line "Ricky's been asking about you" and probably doing other really evil things that we didn't see. Lily gets sucked down, Buffy tackles Ken into the well and Ken gets all cranky at the bottom because Buffy caused his face to rip off. And it takes him a long time to get it on right. He sounds like my mom.

 

You know, I just, I woke up, and I looked in the mirror, and I thought, "Hey, what's with all this sin?" I need to change. I'm... I'm dirty. I'm bad, with the sex, and the envy, and that loud music us kids listen to nowadays. Oh, I just suck at undercover!

 

Buffy and Lily run until Buffy gets knocked out with a club to the face. They wake up in a cell, exchange pleasantries with Ken who goes on and on and on about how he chose them because they're nobodies that nobody will miss and who were running away from things anyway and wanted to disappear and hey, he's just helping them make that wish come true. Buffy reminds him he didn't choose her and then we're off to a line up where some really, really bad masks berate a group of young urchins, Buffy and Lily included, and forces them to admit they are nobody. Buffy, of course, introduces herself as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and starts fighting. Everyone decides to leave this metaphor for the hell that is nothingness and steel mills and follows Buffy. Buffy sends them ahead with Lily and gets into a pretty kick ass fight involving hammers and sickles and flashing lights and a pretty fantastic spin around a pole. (Sophia would never want for work in Vegas, that's all I'm sayin'). Ken grabs Lily and is all "people don't fight back. This is how it works" which I suppose is all about how we just sort of accept everything around us and never question it or fight back, and then Lily just sort of pushes him off the balcony, which probably is meant to show us that even the simplest, littlest thing can change everything, and then Buffy fights her way up, drops a gate on Ken, does a really bizarre impersonation of Ghandi bashing in Ken's head with a club, and then escapes just as the portal closes, leaving tons of nobodies behind to toil forever. Nice going there, Buff.

 

I suppose I should mention that the Scoobs got Andrew [Who? Oh, the vampire from the beginning? Totally forgot about that guy]. They used Cordy as bait. And Joyce and Giles had a little discussion where she blamed him for everything and for taking her daughter away from her when really she should be blaming the three random ancient Africans we saw in Get it Done. And that pretty much sums it up. Except for the part where Buffy gives her crappy apartment and canned food and crappy job to Lily who wants to know if she can be Anne now and I guess that one worked out for her because she was still Anne when she showed up on Angel, and the final scene where Buffy shows up on her mother's doorstep looking contrite and unsure. Aw.

 

 

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