Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Anne - S03E01 Review

ANNE
SEASON 3 EPISODE 1

It's Season 3 where the show really finds its footing in terms of tone and storytelling. While I do personally prefer the slight cheesiness of early Season 2, this season usually opts for a more somber feel and direction. Despite some crazy villains, it's probably one of the darker seasons of the show due to some pretty heavy episodes that deal with some serious issues like abuse in a relationship, manslaughter, and of course, giant snake demons.

We start up on a grave at night and a vamp rising from the dirt. As he fully arises, we see some legs from behind. Could it be...Willow?! She lays a bad line on him ("That's right big boy, come and get it") as Xander attacks him from behind and Oz jumps out from the bushes to help. Their plan goes somewhat awry though and he starts to get away so Oz throws a stake at the vamp...which flimsily bounces off a gravestone onto the ground. The whole scene is a great subversion of the classic Buffy fights a vamp fight that we've seen so many times and it gives a great reintroduction to all of the characters. It's interesting to note that Oz is wearing the "25 cent Peep Show" shirt that Xander wore at the end of Out of Mind, Out of Sight from Season 1. First time I've ever noticed that... School starts back tomorrow and everyone is excited except Oz, who supposedly graduated over the summer and seems hide-y. Willow ends the scene with wondering where in the world Buffy is.

We then get a dream sequence of Buffy and Angel standing on the beach together, and he's wearing his weird white button up shirt again! Oh well, she wakes up and we see that she's in a crappy apartment in LA all alone. The next day we see that she works at a diner and deals with nasty truck driver customers; still, she shows some restraint in not beating the crap out of them. She's going by the name "Anne" now, her middle name. I can't remember if it's been brought up on the show or not before but I'm thinking it hasn't. She waits on these junkie couple, and is briefly recognized by the girl and soon gets rattled by something the guy says.

Back at the library, which is actually busy for once, Giles warns Willow to be careful; Willow then runs into Cordy and the two seem to be full-on friends now. Cordy seems unnaturally human in this scene and really excited to see Xander before running off to find him. Willow then runs into Oz, who says that he didn't actually go to summer school and has to retake his senior year. While amidst an argument about that, Xander runs up looking for Cordy and runs off again. Larry pops up for a second, Will and Oz continue their conversation, and Cordy and Xander finally run into each other. They share awkward small talk and then run away from each other. It's a really great scene and it's all pretty much done in a huge one-shot. It's something that Joss does at least a couple more times and it's always interesting to see, and wonder how many takes that took to get right.

Meanwhile Buffy is off being poor and depressed. She sees an old woman on the street repeating "I'm no one" and it seems a bit odd. Maybe all hobos act this way. At the library, Giles gets a lead about a girl fighting vampires and heads out on a plane to check it out, hoping it's Buffy. Meanwhile Buffy runs into the girl from the diner, who turns out to be from Ford's vampire cult back in Lie to Me. It's a really weird callback; she's barely in that episode, but she does get a bigger role here and goes on to become a recurring character on Angel. They talk for a bit before a homeless guy walks into the street; Buffy tackles him out of the way from a truck and gets hit. I love that the guy in the truck pulls the "Jeez, I didn't see you" line. What, was he reading a book for the past mile? Maybe you don't need to take a driving test in California to get a license.

Buffy brushes off the whole being hit by a car thing and runs off, bumping into a guy named Ken who runs a shelter that takes care of street kids. The actor is one of Joss Whedon's "hat tricks" who have been on Buffy, Angel, and Firefly, playing different characters on each. Ken mentions that people "get old fast here"; interesting choice of words... Then we get the biggest misstep of the episode, which is just like a minute of showing poor kids with a tender Bronze song scoring it. It feels way too much like one of those depressing infomercials. At the Bronze, Xander, Willow, and Oz are depressed themselves and talking about slaying; Xander then gets a bright idea to use Cordy as bait.

Giles shows up at Joyce's after returning from the lead, Buffy-less. This is such a weird scene; Joyce blames Giles for Buffy's leaving, and I guess I get where she's coming from, but I almost never side with Joyce in any argument... take of that what you will. At the diner, Lily shows up saying her junkie boyfriend has gone missing and asks Buffy for help. They go to a blood bank where the couple often donate and talk to the nurse. She seems suspicious; she's very much like the nurse from Go Fish in Season 2. Nurses are never good in Buffy! Buffy checks some of their old hangouts and find an old man dead; however, she recognizes that it's indeed him due to a tattoo on his arm. She tells Lily the bad news, and she does not take it well. Buffy doesn't handle it too well either; she tells Lily to deal with the problem instead of hoping it goes away, which of course is exactly what she's been doing all summer. After Lily storms off, she's approached by Ken, who says Rickie is at the shelter and in fact, not dead at all. They both head off to the shelter and yep Ken's the bad guy. Shocker, eh?

Buffy breaks into the blood bank and finds out that they are giving the names of the healthy 'candidates' to Ken and threatens to beat up the evil nurse lady. Ken takes Lily to do this cleansing Baptism-esque thing and Buffy shows up to save her, attempting to lie her way past the guys at the front. It of course doesn't work because it's been established before that Buffy is the worst liar ever; she's quite good at taking things by force though. She breaks into the room and Lily gets sucked into the water. Buffy tackles Ken and they both fall in as well, and it acts as a portal. A portal...to hell! Or another Nine Inch Nails music video. Ken pulls his face off revealing himself to be a demon and in this hell dimension humans are pretty much slaves that work at an eviiiiil factory.

Meanwhile, Xander, Willow, Oz, and Cordy decide to have another go at the vamp from earlier, using Cordy as bait this time. Willow gets ambushed while Cordy and Xander bicker like an old couple, before everyone else comes to the rescue. Cordy attacks the vamp while Xander fights him off and the vamp ends up staked while the two end up on top of each other. And then their passion finally returns with the return of that swelling musical sting from Season 2 to punctuate it. Buffy and Lily awake in a cell to Ken explaining the rest of the plot. Basically 100 years in hell dimension equals a day on Earth, and once they're too old, Ken will just put them back on Earth to die alone and unwanted. The guards line everyone up and ask who they are, to which they must reply: "no one". Kind of sucks for the first guy who isn't really clear on the rules yet.

When it's Buffy's turn she pulls out her casual bubbly "I'm Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and you are..." and makes her stand against the weird Hellraiser-like guards. She pulls off her "end of opening credits pose" but is soon overwhelmed while Lily gets captured by Ken. Luckily though, Lily pushes Ken off a ledge while he's doing his speech. Buffy, Lily, and the rest make their escape but Ken catches up...so Buffy drops a gate on his legs and puts a spiked club through his face. Pretty brutal for Buffy, actually. But she earned it. Once they're out, the portal closes up, for some reason.

Buffy lets Lily have her crappy apartment and old job, and has decided to head back to Sunnydale. Lily asks if she can adopt the name Anne and as we'll see on Angel, that's the name she decides to stick with. Back at Joyce's she receives a knock on the door only to find Buffy waiting outside. They share a nice moment and a hug and the fairly depressing episode ends on a happy note.

Overall this is a solid episode; the contrast between Buffy's story and the gang's subplot shows how crappy of a situation Buffy is really in. Not everything works; I'm not a big fan of Ken or the hell dimension, or a lot of Buffy's portion of the episode, really. Thematically it works really well but the actual plot is pretty lacking. The stuff with the gang and Giles is all fantastic though, so it all equals out as a good episode; certainly an odd and somber opener though.

***1/2