Episode One: Welcome to the Hellmouth

I didn't want to like Buffy, the show or the character. Not at all. Teen fodder, icky visuals with drippy slimy demons, trivializing evil, glorifying violence--those were my assumptions, and so I didn't start watching Buffy until about a year ago. I was sick in bed, too infirm to wrest the remote from my cultural missionary friend: "You've gotta watch this, you'll love it. It's not what you think," he insisted. If I had gotten a pneumonia shot like I was supposed to, I never would have discovered Buffy.

But the first season, maybe even into season two, it was a fun show, not an imperative. I watched those first couple seasons leisurely, not watching for a couple weeks, then hitting a couple on a spare evening. It was probably sometime in season four when I'd starting jones-ing if I didn't see it for two days, and by early summer, I was portioning out the last two seasons, dreading and relishing the coming last episode.

So when I decided to rewatch from the beginning and write about it, I'd forgotten things about the early seasons. I'd rewatched favorite episodes ("Once More With Feeling" ran on an endless loop for a week, in fact), but not much of the earliest shows.

Knowing what I know now,...wow. First, the beginning sets the hook for what is essentially the thesis statement of the show. Spooky music, high school at night, delicate scared blonde--the audience knows that the Slayer is Girl Power Personified, but the scared girl's not the Slayer. She's just a scared....no. So wrong. The vamp face comes, the scared girl becomes the scary girl, and the paradigm shifts. It's not just the Good Girls (aka Buffy, the Slayer) who wield power; the vamps can be cute, whispery blonds too. The world has shifted, and your sexist expectations are about to be shaken and poured as thoroughly as Yahtzee dice.

I'm not going to go scene by scene, but the first shots of Sunnydale High School in the light of day, vampire-free, caught me off guard. I'd been watching latter, darker seasons for so long that I was amazed by the John Hughes-esque feel of the high school. Whedon captured the upper-middle class teen comedy feel exactly, down to the hyper-realized cliques. Xander could be any Jon Cryer or Robert Downey Jr. character, and the school is populated by Molly Ringwald-wanna-bes. It's jarring to see that after wallowing in Spike's crypt for months on end.

But BtVS (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) doesn't stay there either. The suspenseful mood in the alley outside the Bronze, when Buffy meets Angel for the first time (and we don't know he's a vampire yet--glib lines--"I don't bite"--hint at it, but only in retrospect.) and the Yoda-like discussion between Buffy and Giles in the balcony of the Bronze are unlike anything in Hughes' teen comedies, and hint at the genre-shifting to come (note that the movie Ghost, blending romance, comedy, supernatural and thriller came out in 1990; audiences responded enthusiastically to the unpredictably of Ghost's formula-bending. BtVS, which premiered in 1997, may well have inherited that audience)

Why did people watch--and tell their friends to watch? The plot line is ok, the premise ok, but the dialogue is fun. In the first episode, the characters are templates yet, which is to be expected. We need first impressions of them; they can't spring like Athena completely nuanced and mature. Watching them make that leap is the reason people tune in. BUT, we know these characters. The actors know and like their characters. Bitchy Cordelia, brainy Willow, hovering Joyce--they are the backdrop of teen life.

What those characters have that real teens don't have is Joss Whedon writing for them. When Xander paints a picture of how provincial Sunnydale is, he calls it a "one Starbucks town." Cordy "compliments" Willow in the way of mean girls everywhere with a too-kind mention of Willow finding "the softer side of Sears." Cordelia asks Buffy "What's your childhood trauma," when Buffy nearly stakes Cordy in a dark corner, mistaking her for a vampire that Willow has left the Bronze with. Witty lines, cultural allusions, and pointed stereotyping draws in the smart, almost post-modern audience. The show isn't for everyone, and doesn't try to be, the sly word games imply. Even the "dumb" character, Xander, could ace the SAT with ease based on his vocabulary alone.

Here's the part I most want to mention, though. Whether Whedon and his merry band of wordsmiths carefully planned it or not, the issues and arcs leading to the very end of the series show up in episode one.

• Xander's first sentence in the series is to Willow: "You're very much the person I wanted to see," after wiping out on his skateboard after watching new girl Buffy walk up the stairs. In the last season, Xander is noted as "the one who sees" as his superpower, and he is blinded in one eye in one of the last episodes to symbolically punish him for seeing too much.
• Willow relates a vinette about she and Xander in kindergarten, underlining their long, close friendship--which parallels how Xander breaks through to Willow (who's gone totally evil) when she is on the verge of destoying the world (well, at least Sunnydale) at the climax of season 6.
• Giles' speech about having to guide Buffy is precient considering how he later leaves her, believing she needs to learn to stand alone, and then again in season 7 when he attempts to "train" her so that Spike, her best warrior, can be executed.
• And maybe most importantly, Buffy's speech to Giles about why she refuses to be the Slayer is almost a blueprint for season 7. She doesn't want to be "kicked out of school" (she ends up out of college and unable to re-register), "lose all her friends" (yep, and they even kick her out of her house, with Giles, Willow and Xander casting no confidence votes) and "spend all of my time fighting for my life and never tell anyone because it would endanger them." (all the people who know are endangered and suffer in one manner or another) She ends that speech with "Go ahead, prepare me," challenging him--and he knows she's right and lets her walk away.
  

There's more to say, but I've about run out of steam for the night. Just a quick mention, though, that Xander has already brought up manhoood as a recurring theme ("what do you look for in a man," he asks Buffy) and images of light and dark are already used symbolically, both in Buffy's bedroom as she has nightmares and in the crypt at the end as the vamp Luke is about to attack her.