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Stew’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer Retrospective: Season 3, Episodes 14 – 15
Image Credit: 20th Century Fox TV
Bad Girls Bad Girls, Whatchya Gonna Do? A BTVS Retrospective: S3 E14-15
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Episode 14
We start off hunting again! It’s Buffy and Faith out killing nondescript monsters and girl-talking. Faith is using Network TV Language to express shock that Buffy and Xander have never boned. Look, Faith, just because you have cripplingly bad taste in sexual partners, doesn’t mean… everyone in this… town…
Okay, fair enough. You got me there, Faith. I, too, am shocked the writers have not made Buffy and Xander bang considering he has been with everyone else. But they have come close-ish, like, 3 times.
Anyway, after killing genero-vamps, they find one dressed up for RenFair, and he has two swords! Faith offs him.
Trick and the Mayor talk about the RenFair vamp with the swords. It might impede the upcoming “dedication”, but the Mayor will NOT postpone it! It’s the last step towards his “ascension”. Ohhhh! Mystery words! Intrigue! And I’m supposed to care despite the fact that the show basically forgot these two characters existed for, like, ten episodes.
We are finally introduced to WESLEY! And I am excited because, despite having never seen more than five episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer in my life before this watch-through, I HAVE seen several episodes of Angel. And Wesley is fucking great and really goes through some shit there.
Anyway, Wesley is the slayers’ new Watcher. He is lecturing Giles about how he has faced vampires before (in a controlled environment). Wesley recognizes the RenFair vamp’s swords as marking him as an Acolyte Of Balthazar, who is a long-dead vampire lord or whatever. They must be after Balthazar’s amulet, which is OF COURSE buried in the ancient ruins of SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. This show, man.
Buffy goes to a tomb to fetch the amulet, but the Acolytes show up.
No, not them.
She ducks into a crypt to hide from them, and… am I mixing up the words “tomb” and “crypt”? Do they mean the same thing? One is the building, and the other is the big dead-people-holders inside, right? Well she ducks into the dead-people-holder. Whichever that one is.
The Acolytes make off with the amulet while she hides (“DAMN!”). Faith shows up and teases her for hiding. It’s time to FIGHT! She jumps into the sewer to follow them.
The two find the Acolytes and beat their asses to retrieve the amulet. Eliza Dushku (or her stunt double) remains AWFUL at fight choreography, with her big ol’ spin kicks missing by a solid foot. Does the director not realize they can do multiple takes until they get a shot right? Buffy admits she really enjoyed the fight, even though an Acolyte almost drowned her.
It’s time for The Big Chemistry Test that Buffy needs to pass to graduate, but she is too amped after last night’s fight. She won’t stop telling Xander and Willow about it, and I love that the teacher gave them a Chem Final and then said “You’re on the honor system” and just LEFT THE CLASS. Was it just my high school where cheating was rampant? If a teacher did this when I was in school, it would have been be a free-for-all.
Faith shows up and tells Buffy she found a vamp nest, so Buffy bails on her test to go have fun with Faith. Will there be repercussions to this? We were told she NEEDED to pass this test. Whatever; they’re all going to have bigger fish to fry shortly. But still.
Buffy and Faith slaughter the sleeping vamps and then end up at The Bronze dancing with a bunch of guys… and it suddenly dawns on me that I’ve seen THIS episode, too! Which makes sense-ish that two of the episodes I’ve seen before would be sequential.
We cut to a very alive Balthazar, who is a BIG FAT dude getting soaked in a tub, and yep. Definitely seen this episode before. He displays telekinetic powers. Buffy and Faith are outside the lair discovering him, too, but they have no weapons. Faith busts into a sporting goods store and convinces Buffy of her mantra: “Want. Take. Have.” or something. The cops come arrest them, though.
In the cop car, Faith again influences Buffy to escape the car. They cause a wreck in doing so, but Faith insists others heard it and already called paramedics in. The slayers flee into the night.
The Mayor has a photo op with some Boy Scouts, and as soon as he dismisses them, one of the Acolytes strikes! But Trick pretty easily subdues and KOs him. The Mayor wants to lock the Acolyte up for now instead of killing him.
Willow has prepared a protection charm so she can help Buffy more out in the field, but the slayer does not seem to care. Faith shows up to get Buffy to go after Balthazar with her, and Buffy tells Willow to stay behind. OH MAN, she just got Xandered! Does SHE get a whole episode about it? I bet not. I want to know what Willow is doing behind the scenes! Go get some donuts, Willow! Giles likes jelly!
Giles and Wesley, who have bickered most of the episode, are still bickering some more when some Acolytes show up to kidnap them.
Buffy and Faith take the fight to some Acolytes they find in the streets. Faith has stolen a bow and arrow, but has no idea how to use them, which I love! They are not intuitive tools and are MUCH harder than they look! God knows I’ve never successfully fired an arrow. They bump into another guy dressed in business attire, and Faith stakes him in the panic. But he’s just a dude! Faith killed a man! Buffy is in shock, but Faith pulls her away.
In Balthazar’s lair, Fatty is threatening the Watchers with intense pain and suffering if they don’t give him the amulet. My boy Wesley cracks like a god damn pizzelle. Man, don’t worry, Wes. It gets better for you. And by “better”, I actually mean “far, far worse”. But you take it all more like man!
Angel and Buffy show up and electrocute Balthazar to death. As he expires, he warns them something far worse than he is coming…
Which takes us to the Mayor chanting inside a penatgram. When he is done, they release the captured Acolyte who cuts Mayor’s head right down the middle. But he just Deadpools that shit away. He is now immortal until The Ascension comes.
No, not them.
Buffy shows up at Faith’s motel to talk about their having killed a man. Faith is really unbothered by the whole thing. She tells Buffy she dumped the body and that they are safe…
Episode 15
In the wake of MURDER, we start with Buffy in the middle of a dream sequence. She is drowning, and the man Faith (they?) killed is trying to drag her down. She escapes and surfaces, but no sooner does she break the edge of the water than Faith is there to push her back under. She wakes up!
It is revealed that the man they killed was The Deputy Mayor, and I bet the show thought I was supposed to know that from his grand total of 8 minutes of screen time this season. But the show is wrong!
Wesley wants the gang to investigate the murder of the Deputy Mayor despite the fact we have never seen these characters investigate a person-on-person murder EVER. Oh, plot convenience, you are so convenient! Cordelia comes into the library, and Wesley is SMITTEN. However, when he discovers she is a student and not a teacher, he withdraws. See? Wesley is the best! No one else on this series has shown to care about things like statutory rape.
The cops are investigating the murder scene, and it dawns on me that Ms. “I disposed of the body” is as meticulous at crime scene cleanup and body removal as she is at not killing human beings. Angel is spying on the cops and sees the blood, THEN REMEMBERS BUFFY HAD BLOOD ON HER HAND THE OTHER NIGHT. And just like that, he has put all the pieces together because, obviously, a vampire slayer could only have gotten blood from one place.
I can’t even be mad; to be fair, it’s been a solid ten-plus episodes since anyone on this show EFFORTLESSLYTM solved a mystery with exactly 20% of one clue to go on. That’s kind of spectacular restraint on the writers’ part.
At the Mayor’s office, our antagonist is shredding the Deputy Mayor’s documents. Trick reads the coroner’s report and realizes the slayers killed him, making The Mayor super happy.
Faith and Buffy break into the Deputy Mayor’s office at night to get some clues, I guess? They already killed the guy, now they want to rifle through his shit? They hear The Mayor and Trick together, so the cat is out of the bag that The Mayor is evil.
Buffy heads home, and there is a cop there because crimes are super easy to solve. So this is now the THIRD murder in the last, what… 18 months, that Buffy is wanted in connection for? SunnyDale cops occasionally have bonfires, see the black wispy stuff rising off of the fire, and think to themselves “What is this totally unrelated phenomena happening here?!”.
We get interspliced scenes of the same detective questioning Buffy and Faith. Their stories don’t quite match up, but they cover for each other.
A distraught Buffy heads to Willow’s house so they can reconcile Willow’s jealousy of Faith with Buffy’s recent assholery. Buffy spills her guts to Willow, who implores her to go to Giles.
And so she does… only to find that Faith has already talked to Giles and told him that BUFFY stabbed the DM. A seemingly furious Giles demands Buffy come into his office, I call “Bullshit” at my TV, but no worries: Giles tells Buffy right away he isn’t falling for Faith’s crap. He can tell she is spiraling, though, and that they need to handle her with kids’ gloves.
(Kids’ gloves? Or “Kid Gloves”. If only I were some kind of device connected to all of the information in the world and could search which it is.)
Giles, Buffy, Willow, and Xander discuss what to do about Faith, and Xander spills the beans, via Network TV Language of course, that they had sexual relations. He thinks he can get through to her. Buffy tells him she thinks the guys she sleeps with are jokes. Willow goes off to have herself a cry. Girl, you KNOW this guy, and you should know that he only ever thinks about sex. Loyalty isn’t even on his map. This is not brand new information. I can’t even by sympathetic to her. She’s just an idiot if she cares this hard. I could ALMOST see this reaction from Cordelia. But Willow?!
Xander shows up at Faith’s hotel where she is relaxing at home in her tight-ass leather pants (like you do). Xander offers to testify on her behalf in court. She starts toying with and belittling him, then full-on sexually assaults him. Just mounts him on her bed despite his protestations. She starts sexually choking him. Then she starts non-sexually choking him. But Angel rushes in and clobbers her.
Angel has an awakening Faith shackled up in his lair, and I love how many Lairs are just freely available in SunnyDale. Angel tells Buffy that Faith has the taste for mammal blood now, and it’s only a matter of time before she bites off the hand of some innocent army boy. Like Xander, actually.
(That might not be EXACTLY what he says)
But after Buffy leaves, Angel straight-up gives Faith the “We’re not so different, you and I” speech to try to get through to her. Before it can work, though, Wesley and some council goons show up, THROW A NET OVER ANGEL (this show is always at its best when it’s a cartoon!) and abscond with Faith.
Faith immediately escapes their clutches because the council refuses to display competency on this show.
Angel and Wesley fill in the story to the gang–with Wesley feeling particularly bad for his blunder–leading to Buffy taking a cue from something Faith said to her earlier. The rogue slayer is attempting to flee on a freighter. Trick and his minions attack, and Trick gets the upper-hand on Buffy. He is about to kill her when Faith realizes he is black and on this show, and that simply must not stand. So she stakes him.
Buffy has renewed faith in… uh… Faith. She was there when Buffy needed her! She can still be saved!
Then we cut to Faith showing up at The Mayor’s office and asking about the job opening Trick’s death left…
If I know my wrestling tropes–and I do–turning Eliza Dushku heel will make her about 300% hotter. So I’m here for this!
But I also don’t buy it. She did just save Buffy, so I’m calling that they had a conversation / come-to-Jesus moment that we aren’t privy to yet, and this job opening query is a long con on The Mayor.
What I DON’T get is why The Mayor would fall for it. He knows the slayers killed his Dungeon Master and rooted through the offices. Why would he be like “Oh, you want to be my new minion? Sure, that’s believable”.
There should be something like seven more episodes for this to all play out, though, so… we’ll see!
