Season 3, Episode 2

Notes: Just so ya know, Sarah and I divided up the episodes, so it’s not just us alternating episodes anymore. Also, I am writing this under the influence of cold medicine because my lungs itch and there are tiny chickens in my head, laying eggs and eating my brain. So I apologize now if parts of this don’t make sense or are possibly written in a language unbeknownst to humans. I also apologize for the tardiness. My first draft sounded like this “Buffy goes out hunting. She runs into her friends. They fall down.” So I had to rewrite it this morning.

“Dead Man’s Party”

We start the episode off with Buffy unpacking her clothes. She goes into Joyce’s room to discover her putting an uber-creepy mask on the wall.

(Favorite Line) Buffy: It's angry at the room, Mom. It wants the room to suffer.

We see in their conversation that things are a bit awkward between Buffy and Joyce. Their dynamic has changed since Buffy ran away and Joyce found out that she’s the Slayer. This all goes back to this episodes theme, which we’ll get into in a bit.

Buffy goes out to find her friends, and discovers them hunting vampires. Their reunion is slightly awkward with everyone feeling a mix of emotions and not being able to express them. The best part that I laughed a little too hard at was when Buffy warns AX (Asshole Xander) about playing with pointy sticks and losing an eye. HA. If I wasn’t so angry at AX, I’d be sad, but right now, it’s hilarious.

The Scooby Gang decides to go visit Giles to show that Buffy has returned. And again, Giles reacts as I expect him to- with his British stoicism. He’s happy that Buffy is back but doesn’t get overly excited, he does what Englishmen are famous for; he bottles up his emotions and goes to make tea.

Now on to this show’s theme of repressing emotions and not communicating how you feel with each other. Everyone is of course glad Buffy is back, but they are keeping in their other feelings like how they are upset she left in the first place.  Buffy is holding back all of her feelings that she had that caused her to leave to begin with plus everything she is feeling upon her return. As we have seen time and time again, when you bottle up emotions, eventually they are going to explode.

Giles, however, is the exception. I think this has to do with 2 things. First, Giles has had years upon years of practice keeping his emotions in and learning how to deal with them being both a Watcher and British. But I think the biggest reason is the fact that Giles understands Buffy more than anyone else. Not only has he been exposed to the pressures of slaying and knowing about the supernatural evil in the world, he himself knows what it’s like to be a rebellious teenager. Later in this episode when he hot wires a car, I think that was to remind us that Giles wasn’t always prim and proper; he made mistakes too so he accepts that Buffy is going to mess up sometimes as well.

Moving on, Principal Snyder is a butt hole. He has a classic case of “little man syndrome” or “Napoleon Syndrome”.  Joyce and Buffy attempt to get her back in school, but just because Snyder is a little man with power, he uses that power to do whatever he wants, including keeping Buffy out of school just because he doesn’t like her. While on the subject of repressed emotions, can I mention how Snyder would probably be less cranky if he just got laid once in awhile? No? Ok then…

Back at home, Joyce tells Buffy how she invited all of her friends over for a nice, quiet dinner party. While getting the “company” plates out of the basement, a dead cat almost falls on Buffy. EWW and AWW. I need to point out however if you have ever smelled a dead animal, you know that there is no way that anyone didn’t smell that thing in there earlier. At least upon entering the basement you’d know that something “crawled in there and died” as the saying goes.

Joyce and Buffy have some mother-daughter bonding time burying the poor kitty in the backyard. Burying the dead and the dead rising up later is a great use of metaphor for burying your emotions because they are just going to rise up and come out anyway. Oh writers, you guys have come so far since Teacher’s Pet. I’m proud of you.

Buffy has another dream where she is wandering the school alone when Angel comes out and gives cryptic advice once again. I could analyze this for pages, just like we can give anyone’s dreams an in-depth analysis. In a nutshell, Buffy is still carrying the weight of what she did to Angel and is struggling with talking to her friends about anything.

Because of Joyce’s mask (Didn’t I tell you ancient artifacts are ALWAYS bad?) the cat comes back to life and the dead begin to rise all around Sunnydale. I particularly enjoy Joyce and Buffy calling Giles to come get the cat out of their house. He takes it back to the library to study it, but Buffy can’t come with since she is not allowed on school grounds.

The scene with the gang at the library is hilarious. I especially enjoy everyone referring to the cat as “Giles’s pet” until he gets upset and tells them “It’s not my cat!” Insert great Oz lines:

"I think you should call it Patches"

More along the lines of this episode’s theme, they are discussing Buffy’s party with absolutely no clue as to what Buffy herself could want. Everybody is looking at each other’s lives through their own experiences when they really have no idea how the other person feels. AX of course continues to be a…well… put every swear word on a dartboard; throw a dart, and whatever it lands on, that’s Xander. Again, Giles is the only one that actually somewhat understands Buffy. He points out that she probably wants a quiet dinner to settle back into her life, but the Scoobies veto that idea since they are all too busy judging Buffy instead of trying to think about how she feels.

At Buffy’s party… wait, was it a shindig? A hoedown? Oz, a little help here.

“Well a gathering is brie, mellow song stylings. Shindig, dip, less mellow song stylings, perhaps a large amount of malt beverage. And hootenanny, well, it's chock full of hoot, just a little bit of nanny.”

Thanks Oz, at Buffy’s shindig, everyone is ignoring Buffy because instead of telling her how they feel, they all decide this is a much better option. The final straw is when Buffy overhears Joyce saying that in some ways, it’s worse with Buffy back so she goes upstairs and starts packing. Now don’t go judging Buffy, in moments of anger we’ve all said or started to do things out of being upset. When confronted, Buffy even admits to not knowing what she was doing. She was packing, not running, there’s a big difference people.

As I said earlier, bottling up how you feel only leads to those emotions exploding out of you. Everybody decides to play “gang up on Buffy” and I am so furious that I can barely write about it. Was running away the right thing for Buffy to do? Of course not. But she came back and I’m sure that’s an incredibly difficult thing to do; to come back to everything that caused you pain to begin with and admit that you were wrong. The biggest problem here is that everybody is so concerned with themselves, that they aren’t taking time to consider how each other is feeling. Nothing bothers me more than when people are being judgmental and not even attempting to understand where the other person is coming from. Funny enough, Cordelia is the only one to try to “step into Buffy’s shoes”, but again it’s Cordelia that does this so she does it very poorly. AX is the biggest (insert dartboard swearword) of them all to the point where Buffy and him almost get into a physical fight. Man I’d love to see Buffy kick his ass right now. But zombies attack!

The gang comes together to fight off the zombies. Remember to double tap guys! YOU ALWAYS DOUBLETAP! Joyce’s stupid friend gets killed, reanimated, and puts on the evil mask that is controlling the dead. Buffy is able to destroy her, and everyone rejoices.

Everyone is friends again, although they don’t address their argument, but I understand why they don’t need to. Once you have that emotion-explosion, you feel so much better that it doesn’t matter why you were upset anymore. Buffy and Willow are even able to kid about Buffy running away and talk more maturely about what is going on in their lives, although Buffy is still not able to talk about what happened between her and Angel.

Also, Giles physical threatens Snyder to get Buffy back into school. Seriously guys. Giles, with a smile on his face, pushes Snyder and “explains” to him how he is going to let Buffy back into school. 

GILES FOREVER.

Sarah's Notes

-Night hawk LOL

-Giles cares so much about her, it’s so adorable!

- (on how many vampires they were killing Willow: “9 out of 10" Oz: “*whispers* 6 out of 10" Willow: “6 out of 10!”

-Buffy and Angel “dream” scene reminds me of Dumbledore and Harry in DH. However, instead of being all encouraging and informative, Angel's just kind of a dick.

-“Buffy, you made some bad choices, you might just have to live with some of the circumstances”- Joyce. I'm sure our first instinct is to say Joyce isn't being fair and that she doesn't understand but here on this blog we're analyzing the crap out of these episodes and not just siding with the characters we love unless it's Willow. That being said, Joyce is totally right. Buffy made some stupid decisions. There are safe ways to say you need time and space and there are stupid ways and this was a stupid way. Obviously, telling everyone she needed time would have given them the opportunity to ask questions and not listen to what she said she needed but it would save her from needing to deal with these consequences after the fact. So, in conclusion, I understand why Buffy left but I don't think she behaved as a fully rationally adult which she isn't so she isn't really expected to. However, as her mother, Joyce had every right to say this to Buffy because it is the truth and Buffy is old enough that her mommy can't run to her rescue and make everything better. [/rant]

-“hootenanny- chock full of hoot with just a little bit of nanny”-Oz is amazing.

-The one page Giles doesn’t look at has the answer. That happens all the time whenever I study or am looking for an answer within a textbook; it sucks.

-Cordelia and Xander begin making everyone uncomfortable by making out in the middle of the party while talking with Buffy

Ew >.>

-Buffy starts packing after overhearing her mom say that having her around is “almost worse”

-“Party villa, can I rock you?”-Random Partier (Favorite Line!)

-Willow telling Buffy that she needed her. This is so sad and so unexpected both because of Willow's nature of being more soft spoken about issues that matter and her feelings and also the fact that we are repeatedly thrown into Buffy's shoes that we automatically are siding with her and understanding where she's coming from. Wow, that was one amazing run on sentence, wasn't it?!

-Joyce yelling at Buffy in the middle of the party, Xander joining in. This is turning into such a great party!

-Giles knows how to hot wire a car?! I know he has a past but whenever random stuff like this happens I get very thrown off by him not acting like a proper Englishman.

-“I’m Buffy, freak of nature, right?” “Cordelia, get out of my shoes.” lolz

-“Talking about it isn’t helping, we might as well try some violence *window breaks, zombies enter*…I was being sarcastic!”- Willow

-Zombie attack in the middle of the fight shows how much the main scoobies (Buffy, Willow, and Xander) completely suck at coping and dealing with their issues like grownups. They sort of skipped over the fighting and just went to the solution right after defeating the episode’s big bad. As we’ve seen previously, and will most definitely see more of later on, these characters have many strong points but dealing with issues maturely isn’t really one of them. They’re all very emotional and therefore have a hard time expressing their concerns/problems in a logical and rational way with others.

-“Would you like me to convince you?” – In which Giles is a badass.