Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Graduation Day Part 1 - S03E21 Review

GRADUATION DAY PART 1
SEASON 3 EPISODE 21

Finally, the two-part finale of the third season has arrived and high school is drawing to a close.  There comes a time where every teen show must do this, but at least they don’t linger on high school too long like more inferior shows like Smallville (yep, I totally believe that Tom Welling is a fourteen year old freshman that just happens to be six foot three and have a twelve pack).  Buffy is determined to exit high school with a bang!

We start off with everybody getting a bit of graduation fever.  Xander and Cordy go from talking about graduation outfit color and casually seguing to dying horribly, Willow and Harmony have a bonding moment, and then Buffy calls her out on it, noticing that everyone is getting nostalgia except for her.  Don’t worry, Buffster, I didn’t have any nostalgia when I graduated either.  I was just ready to not have to wake up at 6AM every morning.  I totally agree that graduation is a fairly pointless ceremony and would rather just have my diploma and not have to endure the several hour borefest please.

Anyway, Xander drops by to announce that the Mayor is the graduation’s commencement speaker, so Buffy gots to go so she can kill him.  Cut to a really brutal and unpleasant scene of Faith murdering a college professor on the Mayor’s orders.  I forgot how uncomfortable that was.  The next day, Faith comes out in a sundress that the Mayor picked out for her for the big day.  She actually looks adorable.  The Mayor gives a speech about how proud he is of her, and scenes like these are the best part of the villains from this season.  There’s no way they were going to top Angelus, but this father/daughter dynamic is interesting enough to carry it, even though the Mayor himself isn’t a very interesting bad guy.  The only problem with that is that Faith is kind of too evil for me to care about her right now, so much of the backstory is kind of just “Alright... well she’s still a bitch, so I don’t really care”.

In class, Anya asks Xander out on a proper date, and aren’t these two adorable, folks?  Xander lets slip that the ascension is coming and it turns out that Anya has actually seen one.  She talks about how pure demons are something altogether different than any they’ve seen before.  Oh, so they’re Great Old Ones.  Also Giles and Wesley fence.  Buffy talks to Giles about not wanting to kill Faith because she doesn’t kill people.  This will come back in a certain episode in Season 5 where she kills several humans (and the show doesn’t even mention it – it’s weird).

Then the Mayor just shows up in the library to taunt everybody, especially Buffy.  Giles will have none of this, so he stabs him with a fencing sword.  This doesn’t kill him of course, but it’s pretty badass.  Anya then bails (and asks Xander to run away with her but he has a sense of honor, so he declines) because she’s not a fully-developed character yet, but don’t worry budding Anya fans, she shall return!  At Buffy’s, she packs her mom a bag and tells her to bail too.  She resists but eventually Buffy guilts her into it.  Seriously, she should just listen to Buffy at this point.

Willow and Oz get down to biz-nuss and have sex finally.  And that’s all three of the main kids down!  Finally got there, Will, good on you!  At the professor’s crime scene, Buffy is looking for something that would link him to the Mayor, and Angel stumbles in and trips a bit.  I’m not describing it very well, but it’s a really subtly funny scene.  Usually Angel is so sneaky, it’s just really nice to see that he can be clumsy sometimes too.  His excuse is pretty great too.

“I think they were mopping in the halls.”

They get some evidence to take back to Giles, but get into a bit of an argument on the street.  Then, out of nowhere, Angel gets shot in the shoulder with a poison arrow by... who else?  Xander!  Nah, it’s Faith.  They take him back to the library, where they learn that the professor was excavating a large carcass which turned out to be the same kind of demon the Mayor is going to becoming, meaning he can be killed in his demon form.  Which begs the question... why become a demon?  That sounds awful.  Just be an immortal and invulnerable human.  I don’t get the motivation to become a giant snake creature.  Then Angel collapses and it’s sweet to see how Buffy, Giles, and Wesley rally to help him out.

Wesley is unsuccessful in convincing the Council to help, so Buffy basically fires Wesley and quits the Council for good.  See you on Angel, Wesley!  Buffy learns that the only cure for the poison is... slayer blood!  DUN DUN DUN!  Buffy quickly decides that she’ll just kill Faith.  Good!  I don’t like the whole moral quandary of “Oh she’s a human, however could I kill her?  I don’t kill people!!!”  If she’s a bad person, and you have the power to kill her... then do it.  It’s not really different than killing a demon or vampire.  That’s also a big part of Batman’s persona recently.  Kill the villain.  It gives the audience satisfaction!

Buffy gets Faith’s apartment address, puts on her leather fightin’ outfit.  God, Faith says “wicked” a lot and it’s wicked annoying.  Now comes the Buffy vs. Faith showdown that the season has been building up to for like eighteen episodes.  It’s one of the shows better fight scenes, although like most fight scenes, it’s easy to spot the stunt doubles.  They crash through a window and out onto the balcony of the building.  Eventually Buffy guts Faith with her own knife but she falls off the building onto a moving truck so that she can’t save Angel.

And that’s Part 1!  While I feel like the build-up in this episode is pretty great, I’m not quite as fond of the actual payoff.  It’s certainly not bad, but I see this two-parter listed as some of the best episodes of the series and I don’t agree with that.  It’s great, but not top ten material.