Janes (a True Stan) and Nerdy Spice (a New Fan) are watching all of Buffy together and comparing notes. Warning: May contain spoilers for later episodes.

Season 2, Episode 16 “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”

It’s Valentine’s Day, so everyone is having love trouble. Xander gets dumped by Cordy, who can’t deal with the possibility of getting kicked out of the Plastics. Buffy is dealing with the worst kind of post-breakup Valentine’s, since she has to contend with not just loneliness, but an ex who is known to nail his girlfriends’ puppies to their doors. Even Giles is still giving Ms. Calendar the silent treatment after the Angel debacle. Only Willow and Oz are happy, because Oz is a treasure, and Xander almost f*cks it up!

Let’s start with Xander and Cordy, because Xander gets the A plot for the very first time (unless you count the times he was nearly raped by an animal/nearly raped someone else because he was possessed by an animal–it’s been a journey!). At the beginning of the episode, they are at their cutest. They’re getting along, he’s buying her tacky heart-shaped jewelry for Valentine’s Day. He’s still making the occasional passive-aggressive comment implying that he would drop Cordy if Buffy even glanced in his general direction, but you know–progress.

Cordelia seems to be happy enough in the relationship too, but since Xander is a “geek” (a term that they would never use now, because it confers too much coolness), Harmony is making a power play. She tries to take over the Cordettes and gets all of them to make fun of Cordelia for dating Xander. Cordelia becomes all conflicted, by Cordelia standards anyway, and even more so when Xander gives her the tacky necklace and makes a romantic speech (by Xander standards anyway): “Maybe that’s all we have here–tawdry teen lust. But maybe not. Maybe something in you, sees something special inside me. And vice versa. I mean, I think I do.” It’s not exactly eloquent, but he’s so nervous and bumbling that it’s almost charming. Then Cordelia, in her inimitable way, bluntly responds, “I want to break up.” He says bitterly, “You know what’s a good day to break up with someone? Any day but Valentine’s Day.” I mean, fair.

I’m almost on his side here, but then he quickly veers into terribleness. He catches Amy (the girl from “Witch,” whose mom is trapped inside that cheerleading statue) casting a spell on their teacher, so he blackmails her into casting a love spell on Cordelia. Not because he misses Cordelia (he remarks, “A man can only talk self-tanning lotion for so long before his head explodes,” because he’s sexist and the worst, in that order), but because he wants to “get revenge” and dump her on his terms. Charming. [I mean, I would argue it is actually slightly better than trying to get her to be his girlfriend again via a spell? But both are shitty –Nerdy Spice] Amy agrees to cast the spell, but needs a personal item of Cordelia’s. Xander goes to Cordy and demands the necklace he gave her–which is even tackier than the gift itself–and she snaps that it’s in her locker. He waits for her to retrieve it like a big creep, and we see that she’s using her locker door to hide that she’s actually wearing the necklace under her shirt! Awww!

Xander and Amy cast the spell, but Cordelia still acts hostile and condescending towards him. He figures that the spell didn’t work, and then–coincidentally–Buffy starts aggressively hitting on him. He’s ecstatic, and doesn’t see the connection until Amy and another rando blonde with crazy flipped 50’s hair start hitting on him too. He basically runs home, and finds Willow in his bed. She’s the most aggressive of all–she seductively asks him how long they’ve been friends, tells him “not to worry” about Oz, and starts biting his ear! Eek! 

Xander runs away from Willow, but then somehow thinks it’s a good idea to return to school. He causes a stir by just walking around (at one point he does a slo-mo walk through the hallway for a full sixty seconds, and it’s hilarious). He finds Giles and tells him that the spell must have backfired, and now every woman in Sunnydale wants to make him their “cuddle monkey” (ew). At that moment, Ms. Calendar walks in and earnestly tries to get back together with Giles, but then gets distracted by her lust for Xander. Giles pulls her away, and Xander tries to lock himself in the library by pushing a file cabinet in front of the doors, but they swing the other way (hee!), so Buffy walks in, wearing a long jacket and nothing else. She comes onto him again, but he gives this big speech about how he would love to have sex with her if she “had any clue what it would mean to [him],” but she doesn’t. I don’t like that his reasoning seems to be “this wouldn’t be real” as opposed to “this would be rape,” but still. It’s kind of sweet.

Amy walks in while all of this is happening, and in a fit of jealousy, turns Buffy into a rat (!). And then Xander and Giles lose her! You had one job! 

Giles is disgusted by Xander’s behavior, understandably, so he sends him home before he causes more trouble. Of course, by sending him out into the world, he’s pretty much guaranteeing that Xander will cause more trouble (couldn’t someone have driven him?). Xander gets as far as the hallway before getting swarmed by increasingly violent mobs of teenage girls (and the lunch lady). He pulls them off of Cordelia, who’s getting beaten up for daring to break up with Xander, and carries her out of the school, where they find Willow with an axe! She sobs that she loves him too much to see him with Cordelia–and Alyson Hannigan really sells it. Scary Willow is scary!

Luckily, about half of the girls want to kill Xander and the other half want to save them, so they sort of cancel each other out. Xander and Cordelia slip away and run to Buffy’s house, which seems to be a refuge, until Joyce starts hitting on Xander! Yuck! They lock her out, but then Angel, who’s been tormenting Buffy with sinister Valentine’s gifts, pulls him out of Buffy’s bedroom window. He’s ready to eat him, but then a besotted Drusilla saves him and tries to turn him into a vampire. But then she’s interrupted by a horde of screaming girls and just sort of sulks away. Hee!

Xander and Cordy lock themselves in the basement while the horde of girls overruns the house. Cordy gives Xander a hard time for using the dark arts to get girls to like him, and he makes a comment about her “hide” being “too thick for magic to penetrate.” She gets all flattered that he was actually trying to spell her, which is wrong on so many levels, not the least of which that he didn’t actually care about getting back together with her. The girls get into the basement and swarm them, but then Giles and Amy reverse the spell just in time. (And turn Buffy back into a human, just before she’s eaten by a very cute black cat.) Continuing the Buffy tradition of egregiously flimsy excuses for supernatural occurrences, Cordelia says that was “the best scavenger hunt ever!” Hee.

Finally, Cordy has a change of heart, tells off Harmony, and gets back together with Xander–in public and everything. It’s a little sad, since despite Cordy being the one who did the dumping, Xander has actually given no indication that he actually wants to be with her (especially not if he could be with Buffy). But they’re super cute together, especially when they promise to fight a lot to maintain her reputation, so I’m happy anyway.

–Janes

Notes from a New Fan:

• Aww, everyone gives Ms. Calendar the cold shoulder. Kinda feel bad for her!
• Angel gives Dru a brain to munch on. “I found it in a quaint little shop-girl,” he says. Hee!
• Uh-oh, I get so nervous when Buffy gets up to open the door while alone with Joyce! Can Angel be uninvited across the threshold, or can he like, come in whenever he wants now? [ETA: We’ll find out in the next episode, I guess!]
• Xander’s romantic speech involves the words “Kissy here, kissy there.” Pacey Witter he’s not. [The use of the word “tawdry” is very Dawson though. –Janes]
•  Aww, Cordelia was wearing Xander’s necklace after breaking up with him! So cute.
•  Xander’s such an ass. Buffy invites him out for comfort and he asks for an effing lap dance?!
• The “sexy” slomo shot of Xander walking is hilarious.
• Maybe this will teach Xander a lesson about creeping on every girl he sees. Not so fun when it happens to you, IS IT, XANDER?
• And then he tries to barricade himself in by blocking a door that swings outward! I love this.
• “Your mom seemed to buy it,” Xander tells Buffy of the “scavenger hunt” cover story. Lol, yeah, because Joyce buys everything.
• Great episode! I pretty much just enjoyed watching Xander get his comeuppance. I don’t think Buffy needed to praise him to the skies for not touching her while she was on a love spell, because he pretty much seemed to be doing it for himself rather than for her. But whatever. The rest of it was great. (Fine, I’m just little-girl delighted that Cordy and Xander are openly together now! So cute!)

Notes from a True Stan:

• Why don’t more shows have Valentine’s Day episodes? They’re so fun!
• Did Buffy’s hair get five shades lighter all of a sudden?
• It’s a little shitty of Buffy to criticize Xander’s relationship with Cordelia the way she does. Everyone knows that when the dumpee moves on, you thank your lucky stars and keep your mouth shut (unless you want to keep them on your hook, which is kind of shitty!).
• I love when Cordelia says she’s wearing red and black so one of the Cordettes “needs to switch,” as if she invented Valentine’s Day herself.
• Kids start making fun of Xander for getting dumped by Cordelia, which seems strange. I know teenagers are monsters and all, but wouldn’t they just see this as the natural order of things? I feel like they would just keep making fun of Cordy for ever dating him.
• Ew, Xander makes a joke about Buffy giving him a lap dance to “comfort” him, before she’s even started hitting on him! That’s not an okay thing to say to a friend!
• Buffy’s “sexy look” is hilarious.
• Xander and Willow used to sleep in the same bed, but stopped around the same time they stopped wearing footsie pajamas. Dawson and Joey should take note.
• When Willow is biting Xander’s ear, he says, “I don’t want to use force,” and her face positively lights up as she says, “Force is okay!” Kinky!
• It’s so cute when Oz punches Xander, realizes mid-speech that he’s engaging in toxic and immature behavior, and then helps him up. I love Oz so much.
• Cordelia: “The only way you could get girls to like you, would be witchcraft.” Hee! 
• Xander goes to all the trouble to nail boards to the door, and then the girls just easily duck under them. Ha! He’s so bad at locking himself in rooms!
• Buffy says Xander “invoked the Great Roofie Spirit.” Dark, but–ha.
• Once again, I can’t really read the last scene between Buffy and Xander. Putting aside that we shouldn’t congratulate men for not raping their friends when they get the opportunity, this is like, the third scene this season that they’ve seemed weirdly intimate and flirtatious. Is it just some excess chemistry between SMG and Nicholas Brendan?

Season 2, Episode 17 “Passion”

Angel steps up his harassment of Buffy by leaving her a lovingly-drawn portrait of herself while she sleeps–and then leaving portraits of her sleeping friends. Spike is still wheeling around in a wheelchair for reasons unexplained and he has little patience for Angel’s tactics, but Angel is apparently convinced that he needs to drive Buffy crazy before killing her. Although honestly sometimes I suspect he actually just doesn’t want to kill Buffy and this whole “evil Angel” thing is some kind of long con. Janes, don’t tell me if I’m right!

Spooked by the drawings, Buffy asks Giles to figure out a way to reverse the “invitation” into her house, which apparently is permanent once it happens. Meanwhile, Jenny Calendar is trying to come up with a way to get Angel his soul back. This involves, I kid you not, writing a computer program that translates an untranslatable Romanian spell into English by “random sampling.” Cyberpagans, amirite? Willow’s very excited to be asked to sub in for Ms. Calendar while she’s off investigating all this, but (spoiler alert!) she’s not going to be so happy by the end when she’s subbing in.

Meanwhile, Buffy realizes she has to tell her mom something to keep Angel away from her, so she tells her that they had a bad breakup and Angel won’t leave her alone. This leads to one of my favorite Joyce moments, where she yells at Angel for “scaring” Buffy when he shows up outside their house. Angel, in his new incarnation that seems to think slut-shaming people is a fun and original way to upset them, tries to mess up Buffy’s life by telling her mom that they broke up after having sex, but Joyce keeps her anger where it belongs: on Angel. He tries to follow her inside, but Buffy reverses the spell just in time. Later, Joyce and Buffy have a lovely heart to heart. Buffy cries and says she made a mistake, but Joyce says Buffy can tell her anything, and that she will never stop caring about her. Aww!

In pursuit of her nonsensical computer spell, Ms. Calendar gets this magical Orb of Thessala from a magic shop that she needs to summon Angel’s soul and, when Buffy overcomes her anger enough to reach out and tell her that Giles misses her, she asks to meet up with Giles that night and hints that she might have good news. Late at night in the lab, she finishes the program and puts it on a floppy disk and then prints out the translation on that funny dot paper with holes on the sides. I love it!!

Unfortunately, before she can do the spell, Drusilla finds out about Ms. Calendar’s plan–and sends Angel over to the school. Angel’s not so excited about possibly getting his soul back. He smashes the orb, rips up the dot paper, and then destroys the computer. Good thing he was born in Victorian times and doesn’t understand about floppy disks! Unfortunately, he does succeed in killing Ms. Calendar by snapping her neck (yikes, cannot believe that really happened!), so no one knows about the disk. At the end, it falls in between the desk and the wall, noticed by no one.

Giles goes over to his house fully expecting to have The Sex with Ms. Calendar, but instead follows a trail of artfully placed roses left by Angel all the way up to his bed, where Ms. Calendar’s corpse is lying. Dark!! Giles totally loses his shit and, after the police question him, he takes his fancy weapons collection and goes to the factory to try to kill Angel by basically face-whipping him with a fiery torch. Angel struggles a bit, but he’s about to overpower Giles when Buffy leaps to the rescue. She beats Angel up and looks fully about to kill him, but then Giles is about to be burned up by the fire he set. So Buffy leaves Angel and drags Giles to safety. AND THEN SHE PUNCHES HIM IN THE FACE! It was awesome. She’s just mad that he put himself in danger, though.

Later, as they stand at Ms. Calendar’s grave, Buffy says she’s sorry that she didn’t kill Angel to begin with, but that she thinks she’s ready to do it next time she has the chance. That’s rough, knowing that if she’d done it, her mentor’s girlfriend would still be alive.

Great episode! Angel’s nasal voiceovers about “passion” are hilarious and embarrassing, but I guess you have to have some camp to go with the serious stuff. I know I’m about to say this like three times in this recap, but I canNOT believe Jenny Calendar just died like that! I’m used to shows really dragging out the deaths of characters. Buffy just kills them off willy-nilly.

–Nerdy Spice

Notes from a New Fan:

• Why is Buffy slow dancing with Xander?
• Giles finally answers my question from last episode: yes, now that Buffy invited him in once, Angel can get in whenever he wants. Is this a weird patriarchal metaphor for sex? Xander certainly thinks so. Thanks, Xander.
• I like how everyone thinks a spell to keep Angel out of Buffy’s house is going to protect Joyce. She has a job! Does Buffy think she doesn’t exist outside the house?
• Everyone is sitting in computer class with their screens completely blank. I know it’s the end of class, but… it’s kind of funny.
• “I’ve read all the parenting books. You can’t surprise me,” says Joyce confidently. Heh.
• Buffy’s only warning to Joyce is to not let Angel in, but like, it’s too late for that! Buffy already invited him in!
• Willow says Angel isn’t entirely different because Buffy is “still the only thing that he thinks about.” Ew! That is not romantic, Willow!
• Ms. Calendar is “working on a computer program to translate Romanian liturgy into English based on a random sampling of the text.” If she’d lived, she would have had a bright future in the twenty-aughts and teens as a person who spouted fancy-sounding gibberish about machine learning in order to get venture capital money. So many questions! Like, 1) People speak Romanian, so why can’t you just… translate? 2) What text are you sampling? Is it Romanian spells? Other Romanian stuff? English spells? 3) How would sampling any text, in Romanian or English, magically build you a translation of an already-existing text? 4) Do you think they figured as soon as they put “computer program” and “random sample” into the same sentence, the audience would immediately be so intimidated that they uncritically swallowed the rest of the gibberish? This is, in fact, the Magical Storekeeper’s response: “Yech. I hate computers.”
• Cordelia invited Angel into her car once and now he can get in to her car forever, so she… convinces her grandmother to switch cars with her. Heh.
• Oh, MAN! I can’t believe Angel really killed Ms. Calendar!
• Oof. I actually thought what Giles was going to see at the top of the stairs was going to be way more gruesome–like Jenny strung up on a cross or something. Thank god she’s just lying in the bed. I mean, sad, but… yeah.
• Angel’s little-boy voice continues to be hilarious as he narrates his thoughts about passion.
• Ew, Xander actually says I told you so about Angel. What is WRONG with this kid. Earlier in the episode he also makes a pervy joke about Buffy and Willow filming themselves having a sleepover… when the reason they’re having a sleepover is that they’re both being threatened by Buffy’s murderous ex. 
• Heh, I love when Buffy wraps Angel in a rope and then just whips him back and forth against the rails of the bridge like a sack of potatoes
• Then she punches Giles! Hee!
• What kind of high school lets the student fill in as a sub?! Weird!

Notes from a True Stan:

• Oh, Angel’s “poetic” voiceovers about Passion. They’re cringey, and yet I love them.
• Yikes, that picture Angel draws of Buffy is terrifying. Also, he’s a pretty good artist!
• Hahaha love when Jonathan comes to the library and they’re like–what do you mean you came to the library to get books? So meta!
• Angel has been evil for a while. Buffy just thought about the danger to her mother now?
• Oh, Joyce. “I’ve read all the parenting books, you cannot surprise me” would be an obtuse thing to say even if Buffy weren’t the Slayer.
• Ah the fish! That always gets me!
• Why does the orb of Thesulah glow when Ms. Calendar and Angel hold it? Is that his soul in there already, before she’s even done the spell? This never made sense to me.
• Ew, Xander manages to make a pervy comment about Buffy and Willow’s dead fish “pajama party.” Willow just tried to axe-murder him for his teenage boy fuckery last week, can he desist for two seconds??
• Angel catches on super quick to Buffy’s stalker ex-boyfriend lie. It’s kind of impressive.
• While I think it’s unrealistic that Angel would wait so long to just start killing Buffy’s friends and family in favor of psychological torture, telling a sixteen-year-old’s mother that she’s having sex is diabolical.
• Joyce’s speech to Buffy after she finds out she had sex is so awful and slut-shamey. She asks so many wildly inappropriate questions–pretty much all of them except “were you careful?”–and then blames her minor daughter for getting involved with a dangerous older man. Like, maybe blame the older man who is stalking and threatening a teenage girl? And then she has the gall to complain that Buffy doesn’t tell her things! I love Joyce, but she’s really the worst. [Oh, I didn’t think it was that bad! Sleeping with a college guy is a terrible idea when you’re in high school even when he’s not a two-hundred-year-old vamp! -Nerdy Spice]
• Jenny’s death is so brutal, and so shocking. I’ve seen this so many times, and a part of me still always thinks she’s going to get away.
• And then when Giles finds her–ugh. Especially when the note from Jenny is obviously on the same paper Angel has been using for all of his “love notes” to Buffy. It’s just so awful. 
• I still get chills when Buffy and Willow get the call. Every time. I don’t even care about Jenny this much, why is this so sad??
• Ugh, I hate when Xander gloats that he “hated Angel before anyone else did.” as if he He wasn’t being more rational than everyone else–he was just jealous! He needs to shut up. 
• At the beginning, the dramatic voiceovers feel silly, but this episode is so sad that it feels kind of earned by the end.
• I love this episode. Definitely in my top ten.

Season 2, Episode 18 “Killed by Death”

Buffy has a bad flu, but after Ms. Calendar’s death, she still insists on patrolling and trying to fight Angel. She runs into Willow, Xander, and Cordelia, who are apparently covering for her, even though none of them have superpowers or any kind of combat training. (Which, now that I’m thinking about it, they should really be doing regardless. They’re in danger all the time!) 

They do happen to run into Angel, and since Buffy is very sick, he gets the better of her. Her friends save her at the last second, but she passes out and has to be hospitalized. She has to stay in the hospital for a few days, and she starts to freak out and try to pull out her IV. Joyce exposits that Buffy had a cousin who died in hospital, with whom Buffy was supposedly close but will never be mentioned again. 

While she’s heavily medicated and delirious from fever, Buffy starts to see a series of horror tropes–a little boy staring at her, a creepy security guard, a Freddy Krueger-type figure who passes by her hospital room and laughs. She also sees that one of the children, Tina, died of a mysterious illness, and a doctor arguing with a nurse about shady treatment methods for sick children. Then she runs into not one, but two creepy children–the ultimate horror trope–who tell her “death” comes for them at night, but the adults don’t see him. 

She tries to tell the Scoobies what she saw, but they all think she’s just projecting her fear of illness and natural death into some monster that she can actually fight. They’re really good friends though, so they still go through the motions of researching this mysterious monster that only children can see. Giles starts to think that the kids might be talking about the weird doctor–that they might be seeing his true, evil face. That theory is pretty swiftly disproven, though, when an invisible monster with big claws kills the doctor in the middle of the night. 

They learn that the doctor really was trying to help the kids, albeit with “experimental’ treatments that sound like complete nonsense, which is why the monster wanted him dead. After a little bit of research (and a very lucky accident involving Cordy closing a book at exactly the right moment), they figure out that it’s a German demon–whose name I can never remember, so I always call him “Kindergarten”–who feeds off of sick children and sucks the life force out of them. When Buffy finds out what the process looks like, she has a flashback to Celia’s death, and realizes that cousin Celia was killed by the same demon. (I guess it was in the same hospital? Whatever, I don’t really care.) 

Buffy also realizes that she could see the demon on her first night in the hospital because she was so sick, so she decides to make herself sick again. This is a terrible plan, but a surprisingly easy one to pull off, since the not-creepy doctor just left a bunch of viruses in the refrigerator in his office, where anyone could take them. She follows the demon to the basement, where the children are hiding after the creepy little boy stages a jailbreak. 

Now that we can see him, he really does look like a Freddy Krueger rip-off, but it’s still pretty scary. He has a hooked goblin nose and crazy bottom fangs, and the little boy actor looks genuinely terrified when the monster approaches him (I would be, too!). Then–and I will never forget this, because it’s so gross–the Kindergarten monster’s eyes turn into suckers that dangle out of their sockets and attach onto the boy’s forehead. GAHHHHH. 

Buffy saves the boy at the last second, and utters what is possibly her campiest one-liner yet: “You make me sick.” (Uh–good one?) She’s off her game, given her super high fever and all, and he almost does the sucker thing to her! Nooo!! Then she breaks his neck fairly easily, the little boy sends her a hilariously graphic drawing that disturbs her mother, and all is right with the world.

There’s also a little subplot where Buffy’s friends are worried that Angel will attack Buffy while she’s weakened in the hospital, and–yeah, that would be a great strategy. But when Angel comes, instead of just going to Buffy’s room and killing her, he gets into a dick-measuring contest with Xander. He taunts that he “got there first” (ew) and Xander’s manhood gets all offended so he says, “You’re gonna die–and I’m gonna watch.” Shut up Xander. He has no soul, what’s your excuse?

Luckily, we have Cordelia around to call him on his white knight BS. She complains about his “obsession” with protecting Buffy: “Have I told you how attractive that’s not?” Hee! Then, she calls him out for supposedly wanting to watch Buffy’s “back,” AKA her butt. She just gets him.

–Janes

Notes from a New Fan:

• Aaaaand Angel is thwarted in killing Buffy by his desire to boast and lean in real slow before killing her. The villains on this show never learn!
• What’s on Buffy’s face?! Cordelia keeps saying there’s a thing on her face, is that just totally made up?
• Angel tells Xander, “It must just eat you up that I got there first.” Uh, ew. She’s not a planet that you staked your flag on. But you just know Xander does think that way.
• I can’t believe Xander yells at Cordelia for getting “gropey” when she just SAVED HIS ASS by flirting with someone she clearly didn’t want to. Ugh.
• “Well, I was using the phrase ‘watch her back’ as a euphemism for looking at her butt,” Cordelia explains to Xander. Hee! 
• Did the camera have to close up on the back of Cordelia’s thighs like that when she brought donuts to Xander? Pervs.
• I hope Joyce has really good insurance, because Buffy lying to get another overnight in the hospital could cost her like ten thousand dollars.
• Aww, Cordelia tells Xander to be careful standing guard outside Buffy’s room. They wuv each other!
• These little kids are even better than Cordelia at screaming their heads off. When the death monster comes to get them they all just let go with the most dramatic shrieking. I bet they were all having a blast filming this.
• Ewwww! This is one of the grossest monsters. Its eyeballs turn into things that basically look like those slimy hand toys you get at Halloween. Although, again, if he didn’t spend so much time making scary faces at his victims, he might’ve had time to kill the kid before Buffy came along and ruined it.
• Shouldn’t they be a little more sure this thing is dead before they walk away? Buffy just breaks his neck and then kind of saunters off. I have concerns.

Notes from a True Stan:

• Aren’t the doctors at all curious why Buffy has several broken bones when she’s been hospitalized for the flu?
• Am I supposed to understand the significance of the clock? It turns 2:27am when Buffy hallucinates Freddy the first time, then it turns 2:27 again when she sees the doctor. Does that mean that everything in the first 2:27 was a hallucination? Unclear.
• “Tact is just not saying true stuff. I’ll pass.” Love Cordy so much.
• Willow announces in front of Giles that she did all of Buffy’s homework for her, and Giles doesn’t even bat an eye. Being sick really is the best.
• Hee I love when Giles whines about getting stuck with Cordelia. 
• And then when Cordelia calls Buffy with the correct demon, Buffy is confused and asks her to put Giles on the phone. Poor Cordy! No one appreciates her.
• Did anyone else sort of hope that there was no monster, and Buffy was just projecting about her fear of illness and death? Even Mulder and Scully occasionally ran into hoaxes.
• I never understood this last scene where both Willow and Xander are treating Joyce like their maid. I think we’re supposed to think it’s funny, but it’s just dickish.