These Are Just 'thoughts I Had Watching The Episode' - Tumblr Posts
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.