Buffy The Vampire Slayer, "Anne" Review (3x01)

Brief Synopsis: "It is the end of summer vacation, and Buffy is still missing. Willow, Xander, Oz, and Cordelia are attempting to keep the Sunnydale vampire population under control during Buffy's absence, however their success is limited. They miss having the Slayer around, but more than that they miss their friend. Meanwhile, Buffy has been working as a waitress in L.A., going by her middle name, ‘Anne’, and trying to forget her old life. But, of course, someone always needs the Slayer's help, and this time it’s someone from Buffy’s past...”



"Becoming Part One & Two" (2x21 & 2x22) quick link here                                         "Dead Man's Party" (3x02) quick link here

Two quick notes before we get started...

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 text.
2)    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.

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



• We’ve reached season three of the reviews. A season including The Mayor, another new Slayer, the introduction of Anya, the Wishverse, the only true Christmas episode of “Buffy The Vampire Slayer”, and the graduation of the Scoobies. Season three is my personal favourite Buffy season. I just adore it. It’s the closest you can get to television perfection. This is the only season where there isn’t a single episode that I find average or mildly boring. I love them all. I can’t think of another season of any television show that I have ever watched that can boast such a consistently high quality throughout an entire season. Perhaps ‘Sherlock’...but they’re only 3-episode seasons, so it’s much easier to accomplish.
• With that being said, this is one of my least favourite episodes of the season. Don’t get me wrong, I still think the episode is very good, I just prefer most of the others this season. I hold this episode in my least favourite four of the season, along with “Dead Man’s Party”, “Faith, Hope & Trick”, and “Choices”.
• Willow’s hair is shorter. I think it looks better this way than it did when it was really long. Willow looks like an entirely different person. Alyson actually cut her hair for her role of Michelle in the original American Pie film, but I think it works perfectly for Willow’s character growth this season as well. The shy, bullied, insecure Willow of the past two seasons disappears over the next 22 episodes. What emerges instead is a strong, confident, magic-possessing Willow. It’s not only Willow’s hair that supports this change in her personality. Her dress sense also changes dramatically. There’s more confidence this season in the clothes that Willow wears. Less dungarees, more brightly coloured clothes that will attract attention (which Willow tried to avoid like the plague previously). Like this little baby...

Sorry, sorry...I got distracted by all the leather. I am aware that this isn’t actually our Willow, but a vampire version from another universe.

• I think it’s safe to say that Oz won’t be winning any awards for his stake-throwing abilities any time soon. He missed vampire Andrew by such a wide mark that I can only assume he was intentionally trying to stake the bad headstone.
• As I’ve established previously, I am a fan of ‘Bangel’. However, Buffy’s dream sequences in this episode are so angsty and cheesy that I can’t help but laugh. I know I shouldn’t laugh, as it’s all tied up in Buffy’s mental state at having to kill Angel to save the world. Not only does Buffy feel guilty, but she also misses her former boyfriend. For a few seconds Buffy had the real Angel back. She had her boyfriend back. Then she had to make with the stabby-stab. I can empathise with her predicament. However...”If I was blind, I would see you”...someone hand me a tissue and a vomit bucket simultaneously. Cheesy like Sunday morning.

• Some of the shots of external Los Angeles that are used in this episode are later used again for the opening title sequence of ‘Angel’. It is L.A., so it’s perfectly acceptable to do so.
• New Buffy theme! Nerf Herder re-recorded the Buffy theme for season three so that it was tighter and smoother, as previously they went slightly off-beat during the middle section of the song. I prefer the older, grittier version myself.
• Was anyone else rooting for Buffy to slay the sleazy guy in the diner that slapped her ass? Misogynistic douchebag deserved to be slayed.
• Chanterelle is back! Chanterelle appeared in season two’s “Lie To Me”, where she was obsessed with vampires and wanted to become one. After seeing Spike and some other vampires in the flesh, she decided to change her ways. Chanterelle flees Sunnydale and starts a new life for herself in Los Angeles, where she goes by the name of ‘Lily’. Her new life isn’t going well at all. She’s homeless and living meal-to-meal with her boyfriend Ricky. By the end of this episode Ricky will be old news (see what I did there?) and Lily will have changed her name to Buffy’s middle name, ‘Anne’. Keep an eye out for ‘Anne’ in Angel’s second and fifth seasons. Also, Julia Lee is an absolutely amazing actress that really brings the role of Chanterelle/Lily/Anne to life.

• Larry: “This is our year!  I'm telling you, best football season ever. I'm so in shape, I'm a rock. It's all about egg whites. We got Garrity at running back, Dale at QB. If we can focus, keep disciplined…and not have quite as many mysterious deaths, Sunnydale is gonna rule!”

Good luck with having no mysterious deaths in Sunnydale, Larry. I’m sure it’ll work out perfectly for you. You’ll be swept off your feet with positivity by the end of the school year (give yourself 10 points if you get my pun-believable wit).

• I don’t recall ever seeing so many students in the library as there are during the first scene of this episode that takes place in the library. Does everybody need books for the new school year?
• I like the choice to have Oz fail his senior year (in a weird sort of way). It gives us the extremely convenient ability to keep him around the Scoobies for another year and strengthen his relationship with Willow. Let’s face it, Willow and Oz are easily the most adorable and stable relationship on the show in the first three seasons. Granted, they do break up temporarily after the ridiculous affair with Xander (Willow, not Oz), but we’ll gloss over that stupid decision for now.
• Xander and Cordelia are so damn awkward. They were never going to work as a couple. I do appreciate them as a couple, as it makes a certain amount of sense that they would be attracted to each other, but they were far too different at this time in their lives to ever work. Here’s a funny thing to consider...if the Cordelia of Angel season two/three met the Xander of Buffy season five/six, would they have worked? It’s a lot more likely. They both grow from characters that are immature and self-centred to being arguably the most noble, loyal person of their respective groups. It’s a shame that they never got to see how much the other one had grown.
• It’s such an interesting change of pace to have more than half an episode take place in somewhere other than Sunnydale. For the first two seasons we’ve never really ventured out of Sunnydale at all (except for flashbacks), as the show centres around the lives of the Scooby Gang, who all live in Sunnydale. This season instantly has a different feel to it due to the difference of location. After the events of “Becoming Part Two”, it should feel different. The whole dynamic of the show has changed. Buffy has grown up a lot mentally. She’s lost her innocence. The rest of the Scoobies have had to grow up (except Xander, but he’s always been a little behind the rest) in order to fight vampires and demons in Buffy’s absence. The fate of the world is resting on their shoulders whilst Buffy is away fixing her mental state.
• Carlos Jacott! Another fantastic actor. Interestingly, he’s the first person to appear in “Buffy The Vampire Slayer”, “Angel”, and “Firefly”. In all three shows he plays a nice guy that turns out to be a ‘bad guy’. What a chameleon.
• Bellylove’s song “Back To Freedom”, which plays at The Bronze when Willow and Xander are mopey, is a beautiful and terribly depressing song. Quite memorable though. I can’t overstate how much the music of “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” has affected my life. From the songs played at The Bronze, to the musical scores, to the songs that play in general, it always seems to work.

• Giles: “Joyce, you mustn’t blame yourself for her leaving.”
  Joyce: “I don’t, I blame you.”

Ouch. I completely understand Joyce’s point of view here. Joyce knows almost nothing about Buffy being the Slayer (as far as we’re aware), except what Buffy told her in “Becoming Part Two”. It’s not made apparent as to whether or not Giles has filled Joyce in on more of the details over the summer. Joyce is feeling betrayed in this episode. Her daughter has been living this secret second-life for years, and she was completely unaware. All of Buffy’s friends knew about it, and Joyce didn’t. She’s also angry at herself for not noticing that something so important was going on in her daughter’s life for all those years. If I were in Joyce’s shoes, I’d be looking for someone to blame too. However, as the viewers have all the facts, we know that Giles is in no way to blame for any of this. All he’s ever done is love Buffy and look out for Buffy. The interesting thing about this entire episode is that nobody is in the wrong here. It’s just a matter of circumstance. Is Joyce wrong for blaming Giles? I don’t think so. Is Buffy wrong for running away? Not really. “Anne” is basically just dealing with the repercussions of season two. Not just the finale, but the entire season that built up to it. “Dead Man’s Party” is the end of the repercussions being at the forefront of the show, and from “Faith, Hope & Trick” onwards, we look towards the future rather than the past. I think it was a great idea to take two episodes to deal with the repercussions. Everybody should be having a tough time. A lot of bad things happened last season. The characters needed time to grieve, argue, clear the air, and move on together. The same thing happens at the end of season four, after the Scoobies spend most of that year drifting apart.

• Buffy is cold to Lily during the scene where she explains that Ricky is dead. We’ve seen snippets of Buffy’s bitchy side before in the season two opener, “When She Was Bad”. Why is Buffy always so mean in the opener? Does the summer heat make her cranky? Buffy’s clearly still having major issues over killing Angel. When Buffy is telling Lily to move on because she has to face life without Ricky now, she’s also talking to herself. Buffy has to face the reality that Angel is gone and there’s nothing that she can do now except try to move past it. It’s a lesson that Buffy doesn’t truly learn until the end of “Faith, Hope & Trick”, which of course means that Angel returns right after. What’s life without a little emotional complexity, eh Whedon? It’s an interesting parallel to how Angel lives once he regains his soul (the first time). Buffy ran away from her life, cut herself off from society, and was just drifting through life. When Angel first regained his soul, he spent a hundred years cut-off from society, and just drifting through life. These two characters are a lot more similar than they are different. Both walk in two worlds but belong in neither. I think that’s why I don’t have trouble buying them as a romantic pairing. It seems like a natural fit.
• Buffy runs away from Sunnydale to escape her troubles. As the mission statement of this show is all about fighting through the rough times in life, trouble inevitably finds Buffy while she’s in Los Angeles. Enter Ken. He’s loathsome, he’s eerie...even his voice is creepy. I think it’s a realistic representation of Los Angeles to have someone who pretends to be kind and claims that they can change your life...only for them to turn out to be something different to what they claimed. I’m not trying to say that everyone in L.A. is like that, but it’s certainly true of some people.
• Cordelia: “Where do I hide?”
   Xander: “You don’t hide, you’re bait. Go act baity.”
• Buffy:  “I’m dirty. I’m bad...with the sex, and the envy, and that loud music us kids listen to nowadays.”
• I remember thinking when I first saw this episode....”Something’s weird about Ken. He’s clearly evil. An evil human...interesting...wait, wait, WAIT! HIS FACE JUST CAME OFF!”
• The set for Ken’s slave universe is spectacular. It’s dark, it’s flamey, and it’s beautiful. You can tell that the show had a bigger budget for season three. It’s not so darkly lit anymore, the CGI is better, and the overall quality has vastly improved.
• Xander and Cordy’s big kiss was probably my favourite moment of the episode. It was so funny. Xander stakes a vampire, which Cordelia was on top of. The vampire dusts, Cordelia lands on Xander, and flailing kiss ensues. Who said romance is dead.
• Ken: “He forgot you. It took him a long time. He remembered your name years after he’d forgotten his own, but in the end…”

For some reason I find that line so powerful. Caring about someone so much that you forget your entire identity before you forget theirs.

• Mean Villainy Dude: “Who are you?”
  Buffy: “I’m Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, and you are?”

This episode was totally worth it for that line alone. That’s the moment where Buffy found herself again after losing Angel. It’s such a big moment for her character. There’s a drastic change in her personality from this point on, and she is more like the Buffy that we all know and love. I think she realised just what a dark place she’d been in over the summer and decided that she needed to change in order to evolve.

• The fight between Buffy and Ken’s guards is one of the best that the show has done thus far. The set certainly helps, but the actual fighting itself looked much more realistic than it did during the first two seasons for the most part.
• Ken’s death was, erm, interesting. I’m going to go with ‘interesting’. Metal spikes through the legs, then Buffy’s impression of Gandhi...

Buffy: “Hey Ken, wanna see my impression of Gandhi?”
*splat*
Lily: “Gandhi?”
Buffy: “Well, ya know, if he was really pissed off.”

• I wonder if Buffy ever did call and check up on Lily/Anne? It would have been a nice touch of continuity for Anne to mention Buffy when she appears on ‘Angel’. Even if she didn’t mention her by name.
• Joyce’s face as she sees Buffy standing outside the front door...*tries to pick up the pieces of my shattered heart off the floor*. I can’t...I can’t piece it back together... 
• To sum up, this episode definitely worked as a season opener. I’m only ever looking for two big things in a season opener of a show... 1) Some form of emotional continuity from the end of the previous season. 2) A glimpse into where the show is going after the resolution of the previous season. This episode ticks both of those boxes. It’s one of the best openers of “Buffy The Vampire Slayer”.


Quote Of The Episode

Buffy: “I don't want any trouble. I just want to be alone and quiet, in a room with a chair, and a fireplace, and a tea cosy. I don’t even know what a tea cosy is, but I want one. Instead I keep getting trouble, which I am more than willing to share. What are you doing with these kids?”



Buffy mentioned a tea cosy twice. As an Englishman, I feel obligated to choose this quote as my “Quote Of The Episode” for the tea cosy alone.

FINAL SCORE: 7/10

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

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