Review: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 1

My rewatch of all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer isn’t exactly going at the steady clip I initially hoped it would, but hey – slow and steady wins the race. Furthermore, my fond memories of this show are very much based on the earlier rather than the later seasons, so it’s not like I’m in any hurry to leave the high school years.

First, the story of how I discovered Buffy in the first place. It’s not profoundly interesting, but the beginning is a very good place to start.

New Zealand television back in the nineties aired Xena Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the same night. That makes sense, since they’re simpatico in a myriad of ways, but the odd thing was that Xena aired first, as though it was considered the more family-friendly of the two shows, therefore obtaining the earliest time slot.

Whether it was or not is irrelevant, as my introduction to Buffy came due to the fact I would record Xena on VCR in order to rewatch the following day. One night (I forget the reason) the VCR kept recording until the tape ran out.

This meant that I had the first five or so minutes of that night’s Buffy episode, which happened to be the season two episode “Becoming Part II.” And if you’re familiar with that episode, you’ll immediately understand why it caught my attention. It was the season finale, and it left such an impression that when going camping with my family that summer, I was allowed to select a paperback tie-in novel from the franchise to take with me – something to read in the car (or at least during pitstops, since I got car sick).

It was The Angel Chronicles: Part III. There were two kinds of Buffy novels out there, the ones that told an original story and the ones that retold the episodes themselves; the one I’d picked was the latter. I have no clear memories of absorbing this specific book, but it filled me in on important details to the extent that when the new season started, the VCR was set up to record full episodes of Buffy along with Xena. It was at this point that I jumped on the bandwagon and never left.

In my second year of high school, I made friends with another Buffy fan, and he hooked me up with tapes of the show from its inception. Watching season one in retrospect gave it something of a “prequel” vibe, since I was already familiar with the characters and their dynamics, but part of the joy of prequels (when they’re done right) is feeling the little tingle at seeing how it all started, in knowing just what’s in store for the characters before they do.

***

This return to the very start of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was like meeting up with an old friend I hadn't seen in years, though of course, season one wasn’t strictly the beginning of Buffy’s story. In 1992, Joss Whedon and director Fran Rubel Kuzui released a comedy-horror film of the same name, starring Kristy Swanson and Donald Sutherland. It was a very different beast from the show that eventually followed it, and one that now languishes in the shadow of its much more popular progeny.

I’ve only seen it once, years ago, and have no strong impulse to revisit it. These days, it’s probably just as famous for containing very early (and tiny) roles for the likes of Hilary Swank, David Arquette and Ben Affleck. I suppose it could be described as a minor cult classic, but one that exists more as a herald of better things to come; a concept that had not yet come to full gestation. It contains the same underlying premise of the show: Buffy is a blonde teenager who is called by a Watcher to slay vampires, having been imbued with mystical strength and agility.

How much of the film’s backstory is kept for Sarah Michelle Gellar’s iteration of the character, and how much of what happens during its runtime remains as “canon” for the show, is not a question easily answered. The film isn’t essential viewing to understand the show – in fact, it’s probably better that you don’t watch it, as not everything matches up. In the film, the Slayer seems to be a single character whose spirit is reincarnated over the generations, while the show posits that being the Slayer is a calling that’s passed from one individual to another on the event of her predecessor’s death. And this is just the tip of the iceberg: everything from Buffy’s age, to the extent of vampiric abilities, to whether or not Buffy gets PMS pains when a vampire is in the vicinity, differs from film to show.

But the movie’s existence does lead to a creative choice in the show that might not have otherwise happened had the 1992 film not preceded it: that Buffy’s calling and induction into the world of the supernatural has already occurred before the show begins, and is therefore not dramatized on-screen.

Instead of the audience being gradually drawn into this paranormal underworld through Buffy, it’s her friends that largely act as the audience surrogates, which leads to the somewhat risky choice of depicting our heroine as an Experienced Protagonist. When we first see her, she’s already been fully immersed in darkness and horror and violence, and is now desperately trying to leave it all behind. We learn very little about her early Slayer days beyond the fact she burnt the school gym (which was full of vampires) down to the ground.

In fact, this is the reason for her move to Sunnydale in the first place, having been kicked out of her old school and forced to relocate with her recently-divorced mother, Joyce Summers.

The two-part premiere “Welcome to the Hellmouth” and “The Harvest” had a heck of a lot of work to do in establishing this world and its characters, and yet pulls it all off with aplomb: introducing us to core cast Buffy, Xander, Willow and Giles, supporting cast Angel, Cordelia and Joyce, the main Big Bad of the season (the Master and his bloodsucking minions, including Luke and Darla), the premise of Sunnydale being built on a nexus of supernatural energy (a literal mouth to hell), the role of both a Slayer and a Watcher, and the struggle that Buffy lives with on a daily basis: her desire to be a normal teenage girl while keeping her profound responsibilities a secret from the faculty, student body, and her mother.

And of course, obligatory action sequences, budding relationships, conflict both supernatural and mundane, and the witty banter that would soon become one of the show’s trademarks...

***

In writing up this review, I often dipped into the book Slayers & Vampires: The Complete Uncensored, Unauthorized, Oral History of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman, a collection of interviews from various members of the cast and crew, edited and rearranged into roughly chronological order as pertaining to all twelve seasons of both shows.

It’s pretty lightweight stuff, but it provides some intriguing insights and glimpses into the making of the shows, and certainly doesn’t stint on the breadth of contributors: not only nearly every single cast member, but also the likes of Kristy Swanson and Riff Regan (the original Buffy and Willow in the film and unaired pilot respectively). It’s a fun book to browse through, though reading between the lines of some of Charisma Carpenter’s comments are rough.

In any case, it reveals that Buffy as a show wasn’t even conceived by Joss Whedon himself. We have a woman to thank for that: Gail Berman, president and CEO of Sandollar Television, and producer of both Buffy and Angel in their time. (Most recently, she was one of the executive producers of Netflix’s Wednesday). Back in the nineties, she enjoyed the original film and saw the potential in it, leading to the WB (now the CW) pitching the concept to Joss Whedon as a television show. As he states: “I hadn’t thought of it until they brought it to me.” All this time, we’ve owed great a debt of gratitude to Gail Berman.

The book also reveals that episodes like “The Pack” and “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” were very early pitches to get across the tone and concept of the show, while things like the Amy/Catherine body-swap twist, the Angel-is-a-vampire reveal, the death of Principal Flutie, and Willow discovering the massacre in the AV room were considered “defining moments” of the first season. The whole season was filmed in its entirety before the pilot episode went to air, which gave the young cast a certain amount of breathing room to find their feet and do their jobs without the added pressure of what became a very devoted fanbase breathing down their necks.

That said, there was a chance this show could have ended with its first season (and these days, it probably would have, since it wasn’t a massive hit straight out the gate) and with that in mind, the writers made sure they completed a full story-arc while sowing narrative seeds for further exploration in any subsequent seasons. Everyone knew it was something of a risk, and so planned accordingly. In hindsight, it’s probably the most self-contained of all seven seasons.

For the same reason, the first season was significantly shorter than the ones that followed; exactly half the length of every other season. Twelve episodes is par for the course these days (if that!) but there’s no understating how important Buffy the Vampire Slayer was in establishing what we now call the Half-Arc Season and the Myth Arc in modern television (though The X-Files also played its part).

In fact, even good old TV Tropes, a staple part of this blog, began as a website specifically about Buffy before branching out to include all media, and is the Trope Namer for dozens of different pages: Big Bad, Buffy Speak, Insane Troll Logic, Butt-Monkey – even Badass Decay used to be called Spikeification. So much of our vocabulary in how we conceptualize and discuss pop-fiction stems from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

At a time where if a television show wasn’t adapting a preexisting story, most shows were committed to formulaic, standalone episodes, which allowed audiences to watch any story, at any point, and understand what was going on. With a few exceptions, there was little in the way of continuity or ongoing story-arcs, at least not ones that were structured in the way that Buffy was. In her case, some episodes would be singular stories with a beginning, middle and end, while others would be crucially important tentpole episodes that advanced the overarching plot.

(As an aside, Russell T. Davies explicitly credited Buffy with how he structured seasons of the rebooted Doctor Who, and for a long time this mingling of standalones with tentpoles was the standard way to write genre-television).

In season one, the overarching plot is comprised of “Welcome to the Hellmouth/The Harvest,” “Never Kill a Boy on the First Date,” “Angel,” and “Prophecy Girl,” which set up the existence of the Master and his predicament, his relationship to Angel and Darla, the coming of the Anointed One, and finally his defeat at Buffy’s hands.

And yet even the disposal episodes were important in their own way. “I Robot, You Jane,” introduced Jenny Calendar. “The Puppet Show” introduced Principal Snyder. “Witch” is best described as a proof-of-concept episode, demonstrating that not every episode was going to revolve around vampires, while “Nightmares” contained some solid character beats. “Invisible Girl” helps set up the finale by having Angel meet the Scoobies for the first time and provide Giles with an important manuscript. “Teacher’s Pet” is probably the only truly disposal episode of the whole bunch.

There are also character-focused episodes, which delve into some of the supporting cast: “I Robot, You Jane” for Willow, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” for Cordelia,” “Angel” for (duh) Angel, and “Teacher’s Pet” and “The Pack” for Xander. Giles would have to wait his turn for season two, but this is another formatting technique of long-running TV shows, keeping every cast member on a rotobasis and regularly giving each one A Day in the Limelight.

And of course, I’d be remiss if I left out the fact that Buffy herself was a feminist icon; a landmark in the way that female characters are portrayed in film and television. Following in the footsteps of Wonder Woman, Kitty Pryde, Sarah Connor, Ellen Ripley and the Bionic Woman, and in turn inspiring the likes of Veronica Mars, Sydney Bristow, Kara Thrace and Aeryn Sun, Buffy Summers exists alongside Xena Warrior Princess and Dana Scully as what I think of as the Big Three of feminist icons in the nineties. I’d like to believe she helped pave the way for the ubiquitousness of female protagonists these days – even if there’s still a long way to go in the way many such female characters are portrayed.

Even this show didn’t get it right all the time, but it was significant for characterizing Buffy not as a reactive survivor, but a proactive hero. There’s a big difference in those two character types, particularly in action-based stories, in which the woman is usually given the task of merely surviving whatever the plot throws at her, while the men are busy coming up with ways to solve the problem and combat the threat.

In this case, Buffy was notable for being both tough and feminine, but with a side helping of I Just Want To Be Normal, almost lending the show the tone of a superhero story (if nothing else, Buffy has to keep her superpowers a secret for the safety of herself, the cause she fights for, and her loved ones). As we see in the pilot episode, she’s introduced as someone who already has preternatural gifts, and who instinctively responds to threats as a hero would, almost against her will.

Perhaps this genre-crossing content was another reason the show was a success: it had horror, action, romance, coming-of-age narratives, high school dramas – take your pick, there’s a lot going on here!

Then there’s its subversive quality, starting from the reveal that it’s the nervous blonde and not the aggressive jock who turns out to be the real danger in the opening sequence, and concluding with the fact it’s the dorky friend, and not the broody love interest, who saves the heroine’s life in the finale. Whenever you think the show will zig, it zags. The creepy ventriloquist dummy is a heroic demon-hunter. The invisible girl isn't sent to rehabilitation, but assassin school. Jesse dies not because Xander gathers his courage and releases his friend from the curse of vampirism, but because a panicking student just pushes him straight into the stake he’s carrying.

These days, in which “clever twists” and elaborate deconstructions are par for the course, it’s important to realize that this was astounding stuff back in 1997.

What’s more, an interesting component that sets season one apart from everything that followed is that a surprising number of its one-shot villains aren’t “evil” per se, but rather the result of mystical Hellmouth energy interacting with banal human maliciousness. The reality-twisting shenanigans of “Nightmares” is the result of a traumatized child astral-projecting. Marcie Ross turns invisible because everyone simply ignores her. The giant praying mantis is just an animal, acting in accordance with its nature, as are the hyena-spirits that possess a group of students. The evil teenage witch is her own mother, who cast a body-swap spell on her daughter to relive her glory days.

It's difficult to imagine these types of threats fitting into the more grounded, sophisticated stories of later seasons, as there’s an almost fairy tale quality to some of the “monsters” featured here. At least four antagonists are just normal human beings: the zookeeper, the baseball coach, the invisible girl... even the witch is technically motivated by very human flaws and desires, as opposed to the straightforward bloodlust and plans for world domination that motivates the Master and his vampire minions.

A lot of the time, the gang are fighting what can be best described as “mystical Hellmouth energy” and the effect it has on the residents of Sunnydale. This was for two reasons: the first a simple case of Early Instalment Weirdness, in which the writers are clearly still experimenting with their premise, seeing what works and what doesn’t; the second being that more than any other season, this one leans into the concept of the supernatural being a metaphor for the adolescent experience. It’s all there in the show’s tagline: “high school is hell.”

Under that writing prerogative, a sexual predator becomes a praying mantis monster. A pack of bullies are possessed by hyena spirits. A demanding stage mother uses witchcraft to take over her daughter’s body. A girl who is ignored by everyone literally turns invisible. Some of it was rather on-the-nose, but the scripts were generally clever enough to take real teenage issues and give them a supernatural spin.

I think people tend to underestimate how alluring this concept was, and how it proved to be a solid basis for the show before the writing branched out into the more complex issues that came with growing up. This concept of “high school as a horror movie,” was also captured in how important supernatural threats and occurrences were often treated in an offhand way, while more trivial stuff was depicted as crucially important (this is best seen in “Never Kill a Boy On the First Date,” in which Buffy is annoyed at the prophetic rise of a dangerous vampire because it’s getting in the way of her date with a boy she likes).

Things like homework, dating and trying to fit in were given just as much attention as the supernatural stuff, to the point where the dual story elements couldn’t be extracted from one another; they were too inextricably combined. Because of course, teenagers think EVERYTHING is a life-or-death experience; every failure is the end of the world. And in this case – it’s true.

For Xander, being attacked by vampires is less terrifying than asking out a girl he likes, while the ongoing threats to Willow’s life are a walk in the park compared to her insecurity, low self-esteem and hapless crush. As for Buffy, she’s become a social pariah because of her calling, and now she’s numbered as one of the dorks, losers and outsiders of Sunnydale High, a quintessential Fallen Princess of the teenage social-strata.

The combination of these two narrative components is what set the show apart, and which gets a little bit lost after this season, when the straightforward high school metaphors became a bit more complex (though they never fully went away).

And of course, that title, which fully captures the mood and tone of the show. The network initially wanted it to be called just Slayer, which in many ways is better. But no, it had to be that juxtaposition of the mildly silly name of Buffy, alongside something as serious-sounding as “vampire slayer.” The entire vibe of the show is captured in that title, conveying its subversiveness, the feminist angle, the humour, the lead character and her purpose – it’s all right there. 

So what is it that makes season one, season one? Why is it so dear to my heart? Beyond being the introduction to Buffy and something of a dry run of the show’s premise, what makes it special? It always strikes me as a little disappointing that fandom regards the first season as one of the lesser Buffy offerings. Is it because the budget is visibly lower? Is it the more generic Monster of the Week filler episodes? That the Master is a rather generic Big Bad? That there are only twelve episodes? That Spike isn’t here, eating up every second of screentime?

Because I have a slightly skewered take when it comes to ranking the seasons. Like most, I regard seasons two and three as the show’s best (three for its consistent quality, but two for containing some of the best episodes, period) and season six as the worst. But I also enjoy season seven more than most, and feel a little lukewarm on the popular season five. As for season four, it has its ups and downs, but is mostly guilty of a very wonky underlying arc.

And season one, if nothing else, is the beginning of it all. You can’t just skip it, as it establishes some pretty crucial elements of the show’s lore and underlying mythos, from Angel’s background as a vampire with a soul, to the location of the Hellmouth under the school library, to important supporting characters such as Darla, Harmony, Jenny Calendar, Amy Madison and Principal Snyder. Some of those characters last for the show’s entire seven-year-run AND its spin-off!

Miscellaneous Observations:

Watching season one for the first time in so long, and in the context of the show in its entirety, there were some fun recollections and surprises to be had. Like, I had forgotten Harmony appeared as early as the second half of the show’s premiere, or that the Hellmouth’s exact location was initially kept as a big reveal for the final episode.

It was also cute to see certain precautions being taken early on that were forgotten about later, such as a sign being placed in the hall to keep people out of the library while Buffy trained, and other little quirks, like how “patrolling” was originally called “hunting.”

Certain characters – namely Angel, but also Joyce and Darla to a certain extent – had very different personalities when they first appeared. Because the writers didn’t know Angel was a vampire when the first few episodes were shot, he comes across as quite a smarmy dude, whose sole purpose was to give Buffy vague, rather unhelpful warnings about things. (Not coincidentally, this was characterization you see later with Whistler and Doyle, because they filled a similar role). Only later did he start to embody the broody, romantic, tortured vampire-with-a-soul archetype that defined him later.

(Though while we’re on the subject, Angel was tweaked even further once he got his own show. There’s not a single episode of Buffy in which he’s made fun of by the narrative; he’s moody and mysterious and adult. Once he was off on his own, they could be a bit more self-deprecating with him, like how he ends up being a terrible singer, or cringes over having to wear a pink safety helmet. There’s absolutely no way these gags would have fit in his role on Buffy).

And of course, how can I not mention the Technology Creep? In the show’s earliest seasons there were no cellphones or easy internet access; instead people had to rely on pagers and landlines. There was no Facebook or GroupChat or other social media, and it turns out that “I Robot, You Jane” was surprisingly ahead of its time in having Willow engage in a dangerous on-line romance with someone she’s never met, getting catfished into believing she’s talking to a peer instead of a much older man (or in this case, an actual demon).

This is one of only two seasons in which the Big Bad is a vampire (the other being season two’s Angelus, obviously). All things considered, the Master is not hugely memorable as a villain, though I think he serves his purpose as a physical and even psychological threat to a vulnerable teenage girl (albeit one with superpowers) and I liked the obvious homage to Nosferatu in his appearance. That said, his most important contribution to the series in its entirety is spawning the line of vampires which end up being the most significant in the show’s history: Darla, Angel, Drusilla and Spike.

Parents barely exist in this world, so for the record: we don’t see Willow’s mother until season three (and never her father), Xander’s parents don’t appear until season six, Cordelia’s parents are never seen at all, and there’s no sign of any parents belonging to the likes of Jesse, Billy Palmer or Marcie Ross, even though there technically should be. Perhaps to make up for it all, we get the sustained relationship between Buffy and Joyce, which is a rare depiction of a loving and supportive bond between mother and daughter (usually girls in these types of stories get paired with their fathers/father figures).

There are some details strewn across season one that eventually turn out to be continuity errors: that the Three’s hands manage to get through the threshold of Buffy’s door despite them not being invited in, Giles stating that he’s never cast a magic spell before, and his later assertion that a demon: “is a creature of pure evil.” They retcon all of this, as well as Jenny Calendar’s (admittedly light-on-detail) backstory as a technopagan.

Even stuff like Willow mentioning she can play the piano, Xander riding a skateboard, Buffy revealing she’s afraid of being turned into a vampire, and Angel’s irrelevant back tattoo end up feeling rather random. And for my money at least, this is the only featured apocalypse that got insane levels of ominous portents to herald its coming: earthquakes, boiling lakes, blood flowing from taps, cats giving birth to snakes... other apocalypses just didn't put the work in.

That said, this is also the only season that plays the theme music during an actual episode, as well as featuring the show’s only post-credits scene.

I kicked myself on realizing this, but Hellmouths are actually a real thing! Not real as in literally real, but they have a precedence in art and culture, such as here:

In a show this continuity heavy, I’m fascinated by the episodes that are never mentioned again, as they’re so few and far between. Xander references the She-Mantis at the end of “I Robot, You Jane,” and his hyena possession comes up a couple more times (the girls call him out on the fact he claimed he’d forgotten all about it, and a student shouts it out as an example of weird shit happening at Sunnydale High during “The Prom”). Likewise, Amy Madison from “Witch” becomes a semi-recurring character, and Marcie Ross from “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” is indirectly referenced much later on in the show’s run (Xander asks if Buffy has been feeling ignored when she turns invisible in season six, and Buffy notices a girl disappearing at school in season seven). Jenny is introduced in “I Robot, You Jane” and cites her contribution to defeating Moloch as a reason for Giles to trust her in “Prophecy Girl.”

Naturally the big tentpole episodes are brought up regularly, so that just leaves “Nightmares” and “The Puppet Show” as stories that – if memory serves – never get referenced again (though even in their case, the latter introduces Principal Snyder). Which somehow makes them deeply intriguing. Whenever big things happen and nobody ever mentions them again, it lends the episode in question a surreal sort of vibe.

Like, an internet demon took over a huge facility and turned dozens of people into drone workers over the course of several weeks, and Buffy met a sentient puppet that was friends with one of her predecessors decades ago, and everybody’s nightmares started coming true and nearly sucked all of Sunnydale into another dimension – I feel like these sorts of things should be talked about a lot more.

Despite being set in California, it’s one of the show’s lasting embarrassments that there are so few Black people in the cast (or indeed, people of colour, period). Off the top of my head, there are only a handful of prominent Black characters across the entire franchise: obviously Gunn (the only non-white person who made it to the opening credits on either show), Robin Wood, Mr Trick, Riley’s friend Forrest, Kendra, and... that’s all I’ve got.

In season one, it’s a short list of Blayne’s friend at the Bronze, Lisette the mouthless girl, Lisa the tuba player in the talent show, and Ms Miller the English literature teacher. Oh, and I think the bouncer that gets killed by Luke in the first episode? It’s pretty slim pickings, and I was interested to read that Joss Whedon originally wanted to cast a Black actress as Cordelia (Bianca Lawson was on the shortlist; she eventually went on to play Kendra). However, he was vetoed by the network, who was leery about potential bi-racial relationships.

You have to ask yourself, would Xander/Cordelia or Cordelia/Angel have happened if Bianca Lawson had been in the role? Forget the network, would fandom have tolerated it?

In my Tumblr reviews I often note the surprising lack of a police presence at various crime scenes, though there’s an obvious answer for this. The police are seldom involved in the stories simply because they would complicate matters far too much if they were. As it is, it’s almost jarring when they do turn up. I mean, they’re undergoing a sting operation in “Teacher’s Pet” but don’t bother investigating when a boy has his brain removed on campus in “The Puppet Show”?

The reason for this is a Doylist one: if they were more involved, Buffy would not only be unable to do her job, but their presence would open up too many questions and complications that the show would never have time to answer. Like, how much do the police know about what’s really going on in Sunnydale? Do they know Buffy exists? Do they have a file on her? She gets arrested at one point in season three (then escapes pretty quickly) so why do they not track her down? Who was in charge of the police force in Sunnydale? What kind of weird stuff did they see and how did they explain it do themselves?

If they were more involved, the cops would become yet another obstacle that Buffy has to work around, who would certainly notice someone like her turning up whenever things got weird. The only feasible solution is to keep them on the periphery.

(A similar thing happened on Angel, in which they did have a strong police presence in the early seasons – namely, Kate Lockley – only to realize it was becoming cumbersome and redundant in a show that was moving away from its initial detective procedural format, and introducing more world-threating antagonists).

This also explains the complete lack of Willow and Xander’s parents; without them, they’re freer to help Buffy, go out at night, disappear for days at a time – sometimes you have to sacrifice realism for the sake of just getting on with the story. It’s the same reason most child protagonists are orphans, because parents get in the way of the agency a protagonist needs to tell a good story. In the case of Sunnydale cops, you simply have to avoid questioning the logical reasoning as to why there’s no police presence in this show, by quietly accepting that they’re just not there for this particular tale to work.

Season one is the only season that makes heavy use of prophecy, a storytelling tool that ended up having more of an impact over on Angel, what with the Shanshu Prophecy and that whole “the father will kill the son” drama (I forget the particulars). In the case of Buffy, prophecies featured in two episodes: the one that foretold the coming of the Anointed One, and the one that predicted Buffy’s death at the hands of the Master.

As it happens, I’m a big fan of prophecies and how they’re used in narratives. I’ve found that the stories which utilize them usually aren’t that interested in who wrote them or why (here, we’re given the tantalizing detail that a vampire prophet called Aurelius foresaw the rise of the Anointed One, but nothing on who penned the Pergamum Codex) as they’re mostly used to galvanize the characters. Will they do what the prophecy says, even if it means disaster for themselves? Are they clever enough to find a loophole? If it’s a vague prophecy with inexplicable elements, how will it manage to come true? That sort of thing.

In this case, we’re prepped for disaster when it turns out that Buffy did not avert the Anointed One prophecy and that she unknowingly killed the wrong vampire – it wasn’t the convicted murderer, it was the kid! They figure out her mistake by the finale, just in time to realize it’s also prophesized that the Master will kill her (interestingly enough, she also dies at the Master’s hands in “The Wish,” the alternative-world version of the show's timeline).

Questions abound, such as – who wrote this one? How accurate was it meant to be? I mean, when Giles is reading the Codex prophecies, how does he even know that “the Slayer” referred to Buffy? What if it was one of the other girls in the Slayer line?

And then, did Buffy manage to avert this prophecy? I mean, obviously, yes because she didn’t die, but did the seer who made it know she wouldn’t stay dead? Because as far as I’m aware, Buffy is never mentioned in any other prophecy after this one, so perhaps she’s something of an anomaly after her return to life. If Xander’s intervention was completely out of left-field in the eyes of “fate,” unforeseen by those that wrote these ancient tomes, then does this universe’s concept of predestination assume she died and stayed dead?

How do seers even “see” prophecies anyhow? Is it a bunch of visions? Dreams? Automatic writing?

These are the questions that keep me up at night.

How I Would’ve Done It:

It’s a bit early in the game for this sort of thing, as usually “how they should have done it” opinions come once the storylines and characters (and audience expectations) are more established, but there are a few things that could have improved season one – and maybe the show in its entirety.

The big thing that jumped out at me was that despite being the setting for the show from start to finish, we never really learn much about Sunnydale or its citizens. One of the more bemusing things about season one was getting little glimpses into everyday existence on the Hellmouth: the squabbling couple and their young son leaving the dinner party, the retired Miss French, the doctors at the local hospital... it just interests me to think about what their lives are like; normal people living on the verge of two worlds.

And of course, the Sunnydale High staff. Some of these teachers are amazing: Coach Harrold, who watches awestruck as the kids turn on each other during a dodgeball game, Doctor Gregory, a truly good person that’s killed off quickly, Mr Pole, Cordelia’s long-suffering driving instructor, and ones like Ms Miller and Mrs Jackson, who seem genuinely enthused about their jobs and students. A few of them become One-Scene Wonders, though it’s rare indeed to ever see any more than once.

It’s a shame the show didn’t have the foresight to pull together a group of actors who could have played a set of reoccurring teachers across the years – can you imagine what the staffroom would have been like? Or discussions between classes? Granted, this obviously wasn’t what the show was about, but dang those must have been some interesting times among the teachers: not only dealing with the horror of teenagers, but working in a school right on top of a Hellmouth. They must have seen some shit.

On that note, it’s obvious that in a show like this, people are going to die on a regular basis. But despite so many students dropping like flies in deeply disturbing circumstances, it’s always business as usual at the school. And yes, I understand that in order for the show to work, the school day has to keep chugging along. No one can ever talk about their anxiety or trauma, because that would get in the way of the stories.

And yet in season one alone, the student death count stands at ten: Jesse, Dave, Fritz, Morgan, Emily, Kevin and four others in the AV room. Doctor Gregory and Principal Flutie were also killed on campus, as was an ex-student who got stuffed in a school locker. That’s thirteen mysterious deaths connected to Sunnydale High in one school year. And it’s only the first season!

And there are never any funerals, grieving families, memorial services or shrines to the deceased – everyone just moves on. For my money, a deeper and more consistent portrayal of both Sunnydale and its citizens would have brought into focus was Buffy was actually fighting for. This is Buffy’s world, the one she’s charged to protect – and yet normal life, the very thing she’s trying to save on a daily basis, is never really explored as something worth saving.

In stories such as this one, the protagonist is risking her life every day, often getting called a weirdo or a freak as a result, and yet we never really get to see the goodness that arises from the sacrifices she makes: the people whose lives are saved, the normal lives that they get to enjoy because of her, the little pleasures that make up our collective existence. The emphasis is on defeating evil forces as opposed to protecting something good.

If you think about it, most good-versus-evil stories of this nature will always veer heavily towards one of two tones: the defeat of evil or the triumph of good. The former is naturally always going to feel darker in tone than the latter, and that’s the one that Buffy skews towards. She’s fighting against something, not so much fighting for something, and that heavily influences the show’s tone.

To compare, Spiderman very much exists in the same thankless “can’t get away with nothing” role as Buffy does: saving people on a regular basis and being treated like shit for it – but we get a vivid and loving depiction of New York, its people, Peter’s school, his family, everyone’s ordinary lives, to make up for it. We get a clear idea of why Peter Parker keeps doing what he’s doing despite the thanklessness of it all.

In Buffy’s case, the threats are so dire (literally world-ending) that she has to step up just to ensure the continuation of existence itself. She cannot say no to this calling. And obviously, you do have to fight evil, it’s the right thing to do, you cannot let the world crumble... but it’s nice to have an understanding of what all that work is going towards. That’s where a fuller portrayal of Sunnydale and its inhabitants would have gone a long way. Providing a deeper context to Buffy’s world is what I’m after, all while realizing there’s only so much you can do in forty-five minutes.

Having said all that, the show does do a lot in the way of reparations in “The Prom,” which depicts the student body honouring Buffy for the work she’s done over the years in protecting them all. And you can see the seeds of that being sown across season one: whenever something bad happens, Buffy is on the scene, asking questions and providing sympathy – and with such regularity that it would have been impossible for even Sunnydale residents not to have noticed.

The students see this, and eventually give her due credit, which is all the more heartwarming for being so unexpected. Although the speech is read out by Jonathan, it was written semi-anonymously by a student council that are never identified or even seen on-screen. But having watched season one, we can guess who they might have been: Blayne, who thanks Buffy for saving him from the She-Mantis. Owen, who I like to think put two-and-two together about her proclivities at some point. Laura, who Buffy visits in the hospital after she’s been assaulted. Wendell, Lance, Amber – the students she helps are noticing her, right from the start.

There’s something else I wish they’d gotten into, especially when I cast my eyes forward to season seven, and that’s Slayer Lore. There was such a profound lack of it on the show, and I never really figured out why since it was such a core part of the underlying mythos. When it comes to the line of Slayers, I can only think of three significant things off the top of my head: the genesis of the First Slayer, the fact that Spike was renowned for killing two Slayers, and that we eventually meet the son of a Slayer: Robin Wood.

There is a scattering of other mentions here and there, but that’s pretty much it. For the most part, if the show is going to explore the topic of Slayer-hood, then it’ll be about the future, what with the arrival of Kendra, then Faith, and finally the Potentials. But again – SO MANY QUESTIONS.

How do the Watchers’ Council find Slayers once they’ve been activated? How do they know which girls are Potentials? How come the likes of Kendra was undergoing training before her calling, but Buffy wasn’t? Had she slipped their net somehow? Was she discovered later than usual? Who sent Giles to Sunnydale? Why’d he get picked to be Buffy’s Watcher? What about Faith? What was her relationship with the Watchers’ Council?

Why do they never offer the Slayer any monetary support, or try to direct her toward hotbeds of supernatural activity? Why is only one Watcher assigned to the single Slayer? You’d think someone of that much importance would have an entire committee flitting around her at all times.

How’d the Watchers’ Council get involved with the Slayers anyhow? It seems to have been something that was established well after the Slayer line began, so when and how did it begin? What about those female Guardians who were introduced at the very end of the show? What was their part to play? What mystical force is actually choosing these girls in the first place? Is it random or specific? Why isn’t anyone even asking these questions in the show??

I mean, there’s so much room for some fascinating lore and world-building that was simply never delved into. They only throw us little titbits, like how apparently Giles’s grandmother was a Watcher... and then it’s never elaborated on!

The earliest promotional material for Buffy the Vampire Slayer involved a lot of references to past Slayers that never gets picked up in the show itself, and to this day, it kind of blows my mind that we never find out who directly preceded Buffy in the Slayer line. (I believe it’s established in one of the tie-in novels, but come on!)

Because of course, the thing that makes Buffy so special and long-lived is that she has friends, in direct defiance of the Slayer creed that’s spoken at the start of every episode: “she alone will stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness.” This subversion of a trend would have felt more powerful if the show had taken the opportunity to show us that Buffy was unusual in her insistence on having a support group, by depicting how all those past Slayers operated singularly. It would have helped make her stand out in comparison, and drive home exactly what made her special: her bonds with other people.

Last but not least, there are plenty of minor characters whose introduction should have been foreshadowed better, or who show up again afterwards. Marcie Ross is the big one, who with a little dash of retconning, could have very easily been taken away by the Initiative (as we see on Angel, the Initiative was around long before season four of Buffy, so it wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch to have them involved with Sunnydale High this early in the show) and returned at a later date. My memories are vague, but didn’t the Initiative try to kill Buffy at one point? Marcie would have been the perfect assassin for that.

It also would have been cool to see the likes of Owen, Blayne, Wendell, Lance and other student guest-stars turn up for the “Graduation Day” two-parter, though there was a lot going on by that point, and we already had the likes of Jonathan, Larry, Percy, Harmony and Devon as semi-regulars to fill in those gaps. I also have this little plot-bunny about how one day Buffy coincidentally bumps into Billy (the “Nightmares” kid) and discovers that he’s thriving.

And of course – Hank Summers. Hank! How do you go from the supporting and clearly loving father that appears in “Nightmares” to the deadbeat dad who won’t even turn up for his ex-wife’s funeral to lend support to his daughters? And don’t say that the actor became unavailable, because Dean Butler appeared in the role all the way up to season six, as part of Buffy’s hallucinatory experience of being in a mental hospital. So he was clearly still on-call.

I really wish they’d done more with this character, if not just for Buffy’s sake, who clearly loved her father and deserved to have him in her life. But think of the potential involved – I mean, imagine the vibe between Hank and Giles, the biological and the surrogate dad! How would Hank have reacted when he discovers that this man has not only taken his place, but is sending his daughter out every night to fight demons?

Would he have been part of the spell that made everyone “remember” the existence of Dawn, or would it have been interesting for him to turn up and have no idea who she was? His presence in season six probably would have given Giles a better reason to leave Sunnydale knowing that she had her actual father back in her life, and there could have been another arc about Hank learning that the supernatural was real and his daughter was a part of it.

Perhaps it all would have been too much to bite off, but I think season six would have really benefited from his presence, if not just to give Buffy some financial aid! Then we could have been spared the awful Doublemeat Palace episodes. Heck, I have a whole arc imagined for him, starting from when he returns at the beginning of season six, and ending with him being the one to drive the school bus out of Sunnydale in the final episode.

It was a dynamic that was sadly never explored, which is weird since “Nightmares” establishes that losing him is one of Buffy’s greatest fears, something that she apparently just shrugs off in subsequent seasons. And I feel that abandonment issues stemming from one’s own father disappearing should have been a slightly bigger part of her psyche.

So yeah, in broad terms, that’s what I would have liked from season one: a deeper look at Sunnydale and its people, a more consistent use of the high school staff and students, some return appearances from seemingly important characters, and across the course of the entire show, a clearer understanding of how this whole Slayer thing actually worked.

***

I’ve discussed this extensively in my review of the episode, but I firmly believe the scene in which Xander saves Buffy’s life with CPR is one of the most important moments of the whole show; the thesis statement of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in its entirety. It demonstrates so succinctly that the heart of this show isn’t romance but friendship, to the point where it’s the friend and not the love interest who will administer the life-saving “kiss” and bring the protagonist back from the dead.

To me, the dynamic between Buffy, Xander and Willow is the centrepiece of the show; the trifold relationship that makes up its beating heart. They are the only three characters to appear in every single episode (okay, Xander missed one in season seven) and in the very final shot of the show, Buffy isn’t being kissed or getting married – instead, she’s flanked by Willow and Xander, looking out onto the future together.

And the seeds of their collective story and individual character arcs start right here. For Buffy, it’s clear that her responsibilities as a Slayer are alleviated somewhat through her friendships. She discloses the truth about her calling to Willow and Xander, and in return gets a support system which provides her with downtime, pep talks, and a sense of acceptance and understanding. (Not to mention the pair of them saving her life on more than one occasion – it’s not a coincidence that Buffy has been bought back from the dead twice, and it was either Willow or Xander each time).

You can draw a straight line from the human connection that Buffy forges with her friends to her idea to activate the Potential Slayers in the final episode – sharing her burden, sharing her power.

At the same time, some of her weaknesses and fears are firmly established in season one as well: her fear of abandonment, isolation and rejection for example, which pop up time and time again across the course of the show. Naturally, the role of a Slayer sets her apart anyway (“she alone will fight...”) but this inevitably bleeds into her personal relationships. She’s no longer part of the popular crowd, she’s treated with suspicion and hostility by various authority figures, and her father Hank Summers is introduced, only to completely drop off the face of the planet.

It's never really discussed in any subsequent episodes, but his early departure from her life must have had an effect on her psyche, leading to her underlying assumption that (as the fear demon Gachnar eventually mocks her with) “they’re all going to abandon you.”

Willow is also rather fascinating to consider at this early stage of her development. Dorky, anxious, insecure – her first scene is being mercilessly bullied by Cordelia for her outfit, and she remains haplessly in love with Xander for the duration of the season. And yet for all of this, she’s already breaking laws when it comes to her computer hacking abilities, and grows in confidence thanks to her relationship with Buffy.

Despite her adorkable nature, Willow is never squeaky clean; her dark side is there, right from the start, and every now and then you can glimpse of the deep-seated rage that leads to Dark Willow in the sixth season finale. This early on she’s searching for something, some meaning in her life, a sense of specialness that will grant her the self-esteem she lacks. It will eventually become her pursuit and mastery of magical power, but at this stage it’s garnering Xander’s attention, or in siphoning a vicarious sense of purpose from Buffy’s calling (she’s the one that coins the term “Slayerettes”). But neither of these paths are about her, something that – subconsciously or not – rankles her.

Perhaps the only thing that kept her from being so dangerous this early on was her initial mediocrity, for she’s certainly the most timid and insecure of all three Scoobies when it comes to her self-image – and that obviously leads to a lot of internal problems. As the saying goes, Beware the Nice Ones.

And of course Xander, who is essentially one big crisis of masculinity. I think his arc is the shakiest of all three leads, and (as I’ve said before) I think Joss Whedon doomed him when he stated that Xander was the character most like him, but there is a decency and heart to the character that clearly eludes his creator. Xander’s story is not about accumulating power, but coming to peace with the fact that he has none, and that this fact doesn’t make him any less valuable.

In a similar strain, he will never end up in a romantic relationship with either Buffy or Willow, the two most important women in his life, but rather than complain he’s been relegated to “the friendzone,” he discovers (not accepts, but discovers) that this doesn’t make him any less loved by them, or incapable of loving them in return. His friendship with them isn’t just “enough,” it’s everything, a place where he's valued and respected for being who he is.

Because like I said, this trio embodies what I think is the hypothesis of the entire show: that ultimately, it’s your friends that will always be there for you. They will endure when romantic relationships do not. The lasting bond that existed between these three was the reason for the show’s success, and even after Giles left, even after all the storylines were eaten by Spike, it was the love that Buffy, Willow and Xander had for each other that kept me coming back.

To quote Sarah Michelle Gellar herself:

“What we did was take the concept of the movie of this sixteen-year-old aching that everyone felt in their adolescence. Am I an adult? Am I a child? And suddenly, [Buffy] has to save the world. Now she’s an outcast.  She doesn’t fit in. She doesn’t know if she wants to be a cheerleader or fight vampires, and that is what makes her interesting and believable. Buffy is a person who is lost, who doesn’t know where she belongs, and you can feel for her. Junior high was my time to feel that I didn’t know where I fit. I tried to be a jock. I tried to be cool. And I couldn’t find my place. I think that is what Willow, Xander and Buffy were all going through. That’s what made them such wonderful friends – they helped each other to get through this time.”