Buffy The Vampire Slayer, “Witch” Review (1x03)

Brief Synopsis: “It's time for cheerleader tryouts, and Buffy can't resist! However, when the girls start getting knocked out of the competition by spontaneous combustion, sudden blindness, and other freak accidents, Buffy and the gang begin to suspect that someone may be behind these not-so-normal occurrences. Could someone be using dark magic in order to make the squad?”

"The Harvest" (1x02) quick link here                                                                                                   "Teacher's Pet" (1x04) quick link here


Before getting started on this review, here are a few notes about how these reviews will be formatted...

1) I will be reviewing the episodes in bullet point form. This is because it makes the reviews simple to read, and helps break up the vast amount of text.
2) I will be uploading a new review every one or two days, so be sure to check back often! Alternatively, you could subscribe to the blog via email to receive the reviews in your inbox (the subscription box is located to the right-hand side of this blog).
3) If you are watching the show for the first time along with these reviews, please be warned that there may be a few spoilers for things that haven’t happened yet.
4) If you are here from my Buffy The Vampire Slayer/Angel fan page from Facebook (located here :- www.facebook.com/BTVSFC), these reviews are similar to the rewatch reviews that I wrote for that page, only they are longer, more detailed, and in a much nicer format than Facebook allows (curse their lack of italics, bold, and underline!)
5) The basic layout for the review will be the review itself, the ‘quote of the episode’, and then the final score for the episode (out of ten). All of the final scores will also be placed on a separate tab so that you can refer to them easily.

With that being said, let’s get started, shall we?



 •    I’m about to give an unpopular opinion... I think “Witch” is vastly superior to either “Welcome To The Hellmouth” or “The Harvest”. This episode is classic sci-fi show material. An interesting plot, with a well built story, a twist in the middle of the episode, then a big twist towards the end! Just an all-round great episode.
•    This is the first episode of the Buffyverse where the monster-of-the-week is not a vampire. I think Joss wanted to establish early on that there is more to Sunnydale, and Buffy The Vampire Slayer, than just vampires.  In fact, this is one of only eight episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer that doesn’t feature a vampire in it at all (the other seven being “The Pack”, “I Robot...You Jane”, “The Puppet Show”, “Inca Mummy Girl”, “Living Conditions”, “Fear Itself”, and “Beer Bad”).
•    Oh Buffy, during my teenage years I had many a fantasy about you and that cheerleading outfit *swooooon*.
•    I love how Buffy is trying to be a cheerleader, not because she wants to be popular, but because she wants to fit in and be normal. She hasn’t decided to become a cheerleader to help disguise the fact that she’s the Slayer...she just wants to do something regular. How many of us on this blog can relate to that? It’s an extension to the two-part pilot episode. When Buffy first arrived in Sunnydale, she’d given up on being the Slayer and just wanted to be a regular teenage girl. Buffy never wanted the responsibilities of being the Slayer, and she’s having a hard time adjusting to her destiny. It’s completely understandable. She is only 16 years old, and the weight of the world has already been placed upon her shoulders. If I was Buffy, I’d want to run away from my responsibilities and be a normal teenager too.
•    One of the main themes of all seven seasons of Buffy The Vampire Slayer is Buffy trying to figure out how to balance both aspects of her life; her slaying responsibilities versus her desire to live like a normal person.  During the earlier seasons (the high school era in particular), Buffy resented being the Slayer most of the time. She wanted to be a normal teenager. As time goes on, Buffy starts to realise her calling makes her very special and very important to the world, so she grows to appreciate her power.

•    Buffy: “And you’ll be stopping me how?”
Giles: “Well...by appealing to your common sense...if such a creature exists.”
•    For those of you that are unaware, Charisma Carpenter really was a cheerleader for the San Diego chargers in 1991. She does all of her own dance moves in this episode. Such a talented woman!
•    I was not expecting Amber’s hands to suddenly catch fire, I must admit.
•    I feel sorry for Buffy so much in this episode. Not only is she trying to juggle her slaying life and her school life (she’s doing a pretty good job, all things considered), but she’s now feeling neglected by her mother too. Joyce is so preoccupied with the opening of her art gallery that she has very little time for Buffy in this episode. Joyce doesn’t even know what activity Buffy is trying out for, and Buffy is feeling a little unloved. It’s understandable that Joyce is preoccupied. Her art gallery is opening and she wants it to be successful. However, her daughter was recently expelled from school for burning down the gym! Perhaps Joyce should be keeping a more watchful eye on her daughter?
•    Bitchdelia (patent pending) is out in full force for this episode. She looked almost psychotic when she was threatening Amy in the locker room. It was an obvious red herring that was hinting at Cordelia being the perpetrator of the injuries being sustained by the cheerleading squad. Even though it was obvious that Cordelia wasn’t causing the injuries, it still made for a wonderful addition to the episode. Cordelia is only marginally less obsessed with being a successful cheerleader than Catherine Madison is! Cordelia wants to be successful because she wants to be popular and loved. Later on this season Cordelia explains that she has very few friends and that she tries so hard to be popular because it “beats being alone all by yourself”. This aspect of “Witch” is another one of those situations where you really have to have seen the entire season in order to fully appreciate it.

•    Xander: “One of those girls hit me really hard! You should test for steroids. Okay, not only did you make the team, but you, Miss. Summers, are the first alternate, and Amy’s number three.”
How can Xander not know what an alternate is?...oh, Xander, bless you for trying to get Buffy attention and failing miserably.
•    Willow’s pen analogy to Xander remains one of the best things about season one.
•    Whilst on the subject of the pen conversation, Xander asks Willow to “not drive it through my head like a railroad spike”. The next time railroad spikes are mentioned it is for a much, much cooler reason...the debut of Spike, and how Spike earned his nickname.
•    Xander: “I gotta be a man and ask her out, you know. I’ve got to stop giving her ID bracelets, subtle innuendoes, taking polaroids outside of her bedroom window late at night...that last part is a joke to relieve the tension because here she comes...”

Even though it was established during “Welcome To The Hellmouth” that Xander has feelings for Buffy, this episode helps the audience truly appreciate just how deep those feelings are. It could be argued that Xander is obsessed with Buffy! She’s almost everything that he talks about during this episode!

•    Cordelia being cursed and having no pupils was the first semi-shocking moment of the episode. By the end of this episode, there are a few moments that you could consider ‘jump-inducing’.
•    Buffy, you are the most unsubtle person in the entire world when it comes to trying to sneakily check if Amy is the witch.
•    Xander has been checking out all the witchcraft books to look at all the semi-nude pictures. Teenage Xander and teenage Shangel are so similar...it’s like we shared a brain.
•    I adore Buffy high on magic. Can she be high on magic at least once during every episode? “You’re my Xander shaped friend”. It’s the first time we really get to see Buffy cut loose and be irresponsible. It’s a nice change of pace to see Buffy be a relatively responsibility-free teenager.
•    Buffy: “Do you have any idea why I love you so, Xander?”
Willow: “We’ve got to get her to a...”
Xander: “Let her speak!”
Buffy: “I’ll tell you, you’re not like other boys at all...”
Xander: “Well...”
Buffy: “You are totally and completely one of the girls!”

Friend-zone: Population, Xander.

•    Buffy briefly mentions to Joyce (when high on magic) that she is a vampire slayer. We learn in season six’s “Normal Again” that Joyce and Hank had Buffy evaluated at an asylum due to Buffy’s ‘delusions’ over thinking that she’s a vampire slayer...am I supposed to believe that Buffy saying she’s a vampire slayer here wouldn’t ring alarm bells for Joyce? Joyce just shrugs it off! I understand that Joss Whedon and the other writers hadn’t planned the “Normal Again” story by this point, but it makes for terrible continuity. Especially after Buffy makes a joke about saving the world from vampires in season two’s “Bag Eggs”.
•    This line was cut from the episode, but was on the original script. Giles gives the Scoobies an alternative way to test if Amy’s a witch...
“Yes, the ducking stool! We throw her in a pond. If she floats, she’s a witch; if she drowns, she’s innocent.....some of my texts are a bit outdated.”
They should have left that line in.
•    This is the first episode that doesn’t involve an appearance from Angel. I think the episode suffers a little from the lack of Angel. He brings a darker, sexier dynamic to the show, which doesn’t exist yet without his presence. I don’t think there is a reason why Angel is missing other than the fact that they didn’t know how to fit him in to the story of this episode. Until it gets revealed that Angel is a vampire, there’s only so many times that they can use him without it becoming obvious that he’s a vampire. The viewers might get a bit suspicious that Angel only shows up at night or in the shadows.

•    The body swap really creeped me out when I was younger. I first saw this episode when I was 9 years old, and the scene where Amy (in her mother’s body) explains what has happened to her gave me chills. Just the idea of a mother being so intent of recapturing her youth that she would steal her daughter’s youth is just troubling. It’s an interesting insight into the character of Amy as well. Amy has grown up in a home where she is obsessively controlled by her mother. Catherine treats Amy very poorly and is much more interested in her own life than her daughter’s life. This helps to explain why Amy turns out the way she does in the end (I’m talking about season seven’s “The Killer In Me” here). Once Amy is out of the clutches of her mother, she has freedom for the first time in her life, living with her father. This eventually leads to Amy’s experimentations with witchcraft. Amy’s experimentations with witchcraft wind up leaving her a rat for three years...so I guess sometimes over-controlling parents can be a good thing...
•    The reveal that Amy and her mother have switched bodies puts everything that has happened before the reveal in this episode into a new, creepier perspective. Catherine was looking at the statue of herself earlier in the episode! It was Catherine who was getting frustrated with not being as good at cheerleading as she once was! You have to watch this episode at least twice to truly appreciate it.
•    How great was the acting by Elizabeth Anne Allen and Robin Riker? They both manage to do a terrific job of playing two different parts each, with both parts being believable. They both manage to shift between the victim and the villain of the episode easily. Good job by both.

•    Giles saves the day by performing the spell to switch Amy and her mother back to their original bodies. I have two thoughts on this... 1) I cannot believe it took until halfway through season two before we got any substantial backstory on Giles! I was so confused after he did the spell in this episode! How does Giles know how to do that?! 2) Giles tells Buffy that this spell was his first casting...bullshit! We find out in season two’s “The Dark Age” that Giles and his friends used to often perform magic and summon the demon Eyghon. Either Giles was lying to Buffy because he wanted to forget about the darker periods of his past, or, much more realistically, the writers hadn’t created Giles’ backstory yet and this is just another example of terrible continuity.
•    So it turns out that after feeling neglected by Joyce in this episode, Buffy realises that she has an awesome mother. I guess sometimes it takes a body stealing witch in order to truly appreciate your parents.
•    The conversation at the end of the episode between Buffy and Joyce is beautiful. It was the first time where I started to really like Joyce and to really appreciate that she is a FANTASTIC mother. Does Joyce make parenting mistakes in seasons one and two? Absolutely!...but parenting is a learning curve, and by halfway through Buffy season three, Joyce has mastered it. In seasons four and five, Joyce is an absolutely amazing mother in every sense of the word. She really learns to understand her daughter (who, as the Slayer, is pretty difficult to understand).

•    Hello, creepy Catherine statue. We shall be seeing you again soon. The reveal at the end of the episode that Catherine is now stuck inside the cheerleading statue, is disturbing for two reasons. 1) Catherine is alive (to some degree), but stuck forever. Unable to move (except her eyes), unable to live properly, but still conscious. It’s almost like she’s Voldemort after attempting to kill Harry Potter, before he gets his body back. 2) Catherine had intended to do this to Buffy! Catherine’s spell was meant for Buffy, but Buffy managed to deflect it. Trying to recapture your youth is one thing, but acting on it, and trying to kill someone (in a sense) is another. Catherine was evil. Truly evil. This episode helps establish the point that it’s not just soulless creatures that are evil in the Buffyverse. Much like real life, there are human beings with souls that are capable of truly terrible things.
•    Catherine getting trapped inside a statue of herself is the very embodiment of karma.
•    I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the musical score in this episode too. I’m of the opinion that the musical scores on Buffy The Vampire Slayer (and Angel) are the best from any television show in history. The first two episodes of the show didn’t have overly memorable musical scores (nor were they bad), but they had live music at The Bronze to sustain them. This episode didn’t have that luxury, so it had to rely more on eerie musical scores. It certainly succeeded.
•    I only have one criticism of this episode; it holds very little relevance for anything that comes afterwards. There isn’t a great deal of information or interactions in this episode that are important further down the line. If you didn’t watch this episode, you wouldn’t miss very much. There isn’t a great deal of character development. As the show was still so new, I would have liked to see more character development in this episode, rather than a monster-of-the-week episode. It’s only a small criticism I have for the episode, because overall “Witch” was superb. It was tense, dramatic, and exciting! After the two-part pilot was out of the way, “Witch” was the first opportunity that Joss had to show the audience what Buffy The Vampire Slayer was going to be like on a weekly basis. The short answer is: it delivered.

Quote Of The Episode

Giles: “Why should someone want to harm Cordelia?”

Willow : “Maybe because they met her...did I just say that?”

I love sassy Willow just as much as sassy Buffy, but we get to see far less of sassy Willow. When we do see her, it’s usually at the expense of Cordelia.  


FINAL SCORE: 7/10

So what are your thoughts on "Witch"? Did you enjoy this episode? Dislike it? Let me know all your thoughts in the comments section below!

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