THE PUPPET SHOW
SEASON 1 EPISODE 9
This is another really cheesy episode, but it's in a good, Goosebumps kind of way. The whole evil dummy storyline has been done before, but this puts a nice twist on it (and it's way better than Pinocchio's Revenge, so that's a plus).
We start at everyone preparing for a talent show with Giles listening to Cordelia butcher "The Greatest Love of All". Buffy, Willow, and Xander stop by to make fun of him for getting such a lousy job, compliments of the new principal, Snyder. In a swift act of karma, Snyder overhears this and makes the three participate in the god-awful talent show. The smug reaction on Giles's face is priceless! The next act up is weirdo Morgan performing a stand-up act with his puppet Sid. The very next scene is a girl getting butchered in the locker room. Where could this be going?
Giles and Principal Snyder come into the theater talking, and it's obvious that Snyder is not the same touchy-feely guy as the last principal. He's really a great douchebag principal, right up there with Principal Strickland and Richard Vernon. So they find the girl, with her heart cut out. Kalima! They question a bunch of people, including saxophone girl, magic trick guy, tennis ball dude with crazy curly red hair...and Cordelia.
Cordelia: Emma was like, my BEST friend.
Xander: Emily.
Cordelia: All I can think is: it could have been me!
Xander: We can dream.
So Buffy starts to ask Morgan some questions, who's busy talking to his dummy. The show actually does a pretty good job making it not super obvious that the puppet is evil; Morgan is sufficiently creepy enough to sort of throw off suspicion from the dummy. He could just be completely crazy...like in Pinocchio's Revenge. Spoilers!
Okay fine, the dummy is real. And he sneaks into Buffy's room during the middle of the night. I think puppet's do have the ability to be creepy, although I can't really think of a time that it's been used really effectively. The next day the dummy is acting all creepy during class and Morgan is acting weird too in a spazzy kind of way. Xander snatches Sid from the classroom so Buffy can question Morgan without it. Most of the comedy in the episode comes from Xander playing with the puppet.
"Bye bye now, I'm completely inanimate. REDRUM! REDRUM!"
While Buffy is looking for Morgan and Willow and Giles are looking for what kind of monster Morgan or Sid could be, Xander is babysitting the dummy. There's a really cool shot in which Xander walks up closer to the camera and Sid disappears from the chair behind him as he walks back. Buffy finds Morgan dead and Sid scurrying around her, and they get in a fight. This is where the puppet looks really really silly; they try to edit around it but it doesn't quite work.
They chat afterwards and it turns out Sid is a good guy (although a bit of a horn dog); he used to be a demon hunter before he was cursed to a puppet's body who thought Buffy was the monster. So they team up and decide that the killer has to be someone in the talent show.
Buffy and Sid have a heart to heart; they actually seem to understand each other, minus Sid being made of far more wood than even a puppet should be. As Giles is helping Marc (the magic trick guy) he realizes that he's the demon. Giles seems to always be the one in trouble; he does nothing but walk into traps and get knocked out. The demon loads him into a guillotine (WOW why does the school have one of those?) as Buffy, Willow, and Xander head to help him.
Buffy shows up to punch the skin off of him, and Xander arrives just in time to keep the guillotine from chopping off Giles's head. The demon (which looks pretty bad) gets double-teamed by Buffy and Sid, and pushed onto the guillotine where it gets it's head chopped off. Sid kills the demon for good, freeing himself from the curse, and he dies (it's rather silly, it's hard to feel sorry for a puppet). Then the curtain rises to reveal the entire audience staring at them in confusion.
But wait, there's more! At the end of this one, we get a scene during the credits of Buffy, Willow, and Xander performing a scene from Oedipus Rex. I remember getting so excited when we read it in school because of this scene. It's easily one of the funniest moments of the first season.
Overall it's not a great episode; it's definitely cheesy and there's really no solid metaphor tying the episode together nor does it have any real character building moments. It's just a goofy episode with a puppet, but it's not bad at all.
**
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