Lie To Me Thoughts:

Lie to Me thoughts:

Drusilla: "My dear boy's gone all away, hasn't he? To her... The girl. The slayer." Writers, could you stop foreshadowing things you couldn't possibly know about for five minutes?

Another older romantic interest turns out to be untrustworthy. Writers, could you stop intentionally mirroring the Angel/Angelus arc for five minutes?

Ooh, it's The Most Important Character In The Buffyverse.

It's surprisingly nice to see Willow and Angel have a scene together. It might be the most open Angel's been with anybody so far - he talks to her about the century he spent doing basically nothing, and he manages to not mysteriously disappear for the whole conversation. I think it's that he's not trying to impress her - they're just friendly, and it's nice. (Aside from the moment of 'No, don't invite him in, that's going to be bad later in the season!')

(Honestly, it's always funs to see romantic interests outside their designated pairing. Tara's rare but oddly meaningful interactions with Buffy stand out, as do Spike's friendships with Joyce and Dawn. It's one reason Spike becomes way less fun in the last couple of seasons - he interacts way less with the non-Buffy castmembers.)

And we get an Angel/Xander/Willow teamup at the club. It's fun, though the treatment of The Most Important Character comes across a little weird - kind of hippie-bashing, though it doesn't land when her naivety relates specifically to a evil soulless monsters that doesn't actually exist.

And now Angel's actually communicating with Buffy! Yeah, he lied to her earlier, and what he's communicating about is the time he tortured a girl to insanity and then turned her into a vampire, but still, this is a big step forward for him. This episode is the closest Angel's come to being a functional person so far.

(Which also comes with him being undercut in the club by the vampire poser dressing just like him - it's a very Angel joke, and this feels much more like the Angel of Angel than the old Angel we saw in 'Angel'.)

That said, Angel asking if Buffy loves him, and her saying she does (albeit without trust) feels weird - they're barely in a relationship at this point? Kind of illustrates the immaturity of both characters. (Which, fair enough - she's a teenager, and he's a complete disaster. Though he is becoming less disaster-like by the episode - things are definitely looking up for this guy.)

The last scene with Giles is nice - the speech is iconic for a reason - and kind of mirrors Reptile Boy, with him giving her support that's less paternalistic but more paternal than his past Watcher-y role. With Halloween as last episode and The Dark Age as the next, these four episodes all have an underlying arc about Buffy's developing relationship with Giles; and there's kind of an ABAB structure, where this ep rhymes with Reptile Boy, and Dark Age rhymes with Halloween, in dealing with the Ripper of it all.

The Dark Age thoughts:

Willow, on Giles and Jenny: "Feel the Passion" no Willow don't say that that's the name of an episode you're doing forshadowing

The magic as drugs metaphor is embarrassingly on the nose and afterschool special-y. Thankfully, this is the last time in Buffy the Vampire Slayer this problem ever occurs

Buffy trusting Angel to take the box of blood to the hospital. You can see the gears in his head turning. "Am I seriously going to do this? Just because she asked? And, I guess, to be a good person? ... Goddamnit." Another decent showing for Angel being a vaguely functioning person.

Eyghon-Jenny better not awaken anything in m-- Wait, no. Already awakened. Forget I said anything.

'Ripper' really does basically amount to 'Giles was young once'. And he's going to continue feeling great shame over that fact for the rest of the series.

Look at Willow, taking charge! Sure, she didn't know her plan would work, and she risked Angel's life for it, but everything worked out, so it's fine.

GORCH! GORCH! GORCH! GORCH!

I like to think she joined the Order recently. She needed to a way to make some money after the divorce, and stumbled onto a demon bar looking for a job, and someone suggested she join as a joke. But she'd been thinking about getting a gun anyway, and thought What the hell, why not?

Soon, she's the Order's top assassin. Turns out, Demon Made Of Fire and Guy Who Invades Peoples Dreams just can't compete with her power of 'just shoot them with a gun'.

I love that the scariest assassin in What's My Line is just Woman With Gun. Like, the bug guy is spooky, but turning to bugs is actually a pretty innefficient assassination technique compared to Gun Lady's strategy of:

1) Find target and 2) Shoot them with gun

There’s like 12 different kinds of tension in this image.

Tector! NO!

GORCH! GORCH! GORCH! GORCH!