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 3, Episode 7 “Revelations”

So, this Willow and Xander thing continues to be disturbing and gross. The two of them have remained with their significant others but continue to be weird and panicky around each other because they still want to jump each other’s bones, and I hate it.

Meanwhile, Buffy is still hiding the fact that Angel’s back. And she and Faith are going out a-slaying by night together. So cute!! Giles attends to take notes, and then some other Brit shows up: this one a lady, who’s in the habit of wearing her cardigan draped over her shoulders like a cape. You know, as the Brits do. This is Gwendolyn Post, Faith’s new Watcher, and she’s super picky about everything. Nobody likes her, including Giles, who has gotten sloppy, according to Gwendolyn.

The Baddie of the Week, which Gwendolyn has come to warn them about, is ostensibly Lagos, a demon who wants a special evil glove called the Glove of Myhnegon, which you put it on and… I don’t know, bad things happen. Anyway, the point is, they don’t want any baddies to get this glove, and the way to destroy it is by making a Living Flame.

Meanwhile, though, Buffy’s got another wee distraction on her hands: Angel, who is hosting her for sweaty Tai Chi practice sessions while they pretend to be “just friends.” Naturally, this leads to them making out. Also naturally, Xander somehow ends up creeping on them while they do this. Xander handles this about as well as you’d expect, namely, in The Worst Way Possible. He, Willow, and Giles hold an intervention, while Xander acts extremely self-righteous considering that he and Willow totally just made out again behind Cordelia and Oz’s backs. Shut up, Xander! Plus, Angel is actually helping — he has found the Glove of Myhnegon for Buffy. But no one believes her. (Meanwhile, Willow tries to have a conversation with Buffy about how secrets are sexy, which Buffy doesn’t really agree with. Willow, EW. Even as a secret, Xander is not sexy.)

Faith and Buffy’s alliance, meanwhile has crumbled because Buffy didn’t want to have girltalk with Faith. So Faith ends up fighting Lagos on her own, but gets defeated. Then, when she finds out that there was a big intervention without her, she gets major FOMO. Poor Faith! She doesn’t realize that Giles just didn’t want Gwendolyn around to criticize him for letting Buffy fall in love with a vampire, which… fair. 

Unfortunately, Xander’s ridiculous toxic jealousy and Faith’s completely understandable feelings of abandonment unite to make two people very determined to kill Angel before he can put on the Glove of Myhnegon and kill everyone. Especially when they find Giles unconscious… not knowing that, DUN DUN DUN, it was Gwendolyn Post who clocked him over the head! She’s the real Baddie of the Week!

Soon enough, all these threads converge at Angel’s mansion. But first, a side note: Until I asked Janes about this in the process of writing this post I was VERY CONFUSED about locations in this whole storyline. I thought Angel was crashing in some kind of mausoleum where the whole Acathla thing happened. I did not realize the “mausoleum” was just a regular, if kinda gloomy even before it was destroyed by fire, mansion, OR that it was where Spike, Angel and Dru were living last season. What can I say? This show’s lighting is very poor sometimes!

Anyway, Angel is in this mansion trying to deactivate the glove with a Living Flame (which also involves reciting a spell in Latin, and let’s just say David Boreanaz makes a game attempt, but the Pope he ain’t). Gwendolyn arrives and pretends to be his friend just long enough to get him to tell her where the glove is. Faith arrives, intent on killing Angel rather than Gwendolyn. Once Buffy finds out from Xander that Faith was on her way, she too shows up to defend Angel (aww, he’s like a damsel in distress!). Then Willow and Xander (except really just Willow) figure out the spell for the Living Flame and show up to try to deactivate the glove.

The best part of all this is that Buffy and Faith proceed to have a knock-down drag-out fight–Faith trying to kill Angel, Buffy trying to defend him–and they’re both huge bad-asses so it’s very fun to watch. The second best part is how fucking useless Xander is. He gets knocked out early (when he tries to get between Buffy and Faith) and wakes up when it’s all over.

Anyway, Gwendolyn gets the glove and tries to shoot fire at everyone, including Willow, who Angel heroically saves; but at the last minute Buffy cuts her arm off by throwing a piece of glass at her. Sure, that’s one way to solve the problem! Later, she makes up with Xander (who barely apologizes) and Willow, and tries to make up with Faith. But Faith is now even more low on trust, and totally rebuffs her (no pun intended…). It’s so sad!

–Nerdy Spice

Notes from a New Fan:

• So… are all Watchers British?
• Did we know there were 12 cemeteries in Sunnydale? As far as I can see there’s basically just one set with like, a single grave and one crypt… but when Faith and Buffy are out patrolling they say that there are 12. That’s a lot of work for one or even two Slayers!
• Omg what is happening? Buffy and Angel are doing, like, tantric tai chi… this is one of Buffy’s thirsty dreams right? Oh, no, it’s real. Wow. She calls it “training,” like what exactly are they training to do? Fight a vampire that only moves in slow motion?
• Xander gets up to give Buffy his seat right before the Vampire Love Intervention, even though there are other seats, so that he can appear to be a gentleman even though he just tattled on her and is about to make an incredibly rude remark about Buffy “giving [Angel] a happy.” What a hero you are, Xander.
• Why doesn’t Buffy tell everyone the spell worked before she killed Angel? I’m confused. I think that would really change people’s opinions of all of this.
• Correct usage of the word “brook” (as a verb) from Gwendolyn! I approve.
• Gwendolyn’s pickiness is annoying both if you sympathize with Faith and Buffy and Giles who keep getting criticized in her snooty voice, and also, in a different way, if you happen to think that competent women get kinda a bad rap on TV. 
• We make fun of Willow’s clothes a lot, but Buffy has seen fit to pair a strawberry-pink tank with an olive-green skirt, and it does NOT go.
  
• Why doesn’t this lady ever put her arms through her sweater? Also, she called Giles “confounding” and I’m concerned she has a crush. OH WAIT JUST AS I TYPED THAT SHE KNOCKED GILES OVER THE HEAD. Wow, I did not see that coming!!
• Willow makes a great audience as she uselessly watches Buffy slay the big scary demon. Followed by a geeky thumbs up. Heh.
• Didn’t think it was possible for David Boreanaz to seem dopier than he normally does, but somehow, reciting a Latin spell in an accent more “surfer” than “Flavian” is doing it.
• Well, that was graphic, Buffy cutting off his arm with sliced glass.
• I bet Xander feels a wee bit silly that Angel saved his secret cheating partner from the fire-throwing demon while he was knocked silly against a wall.

Notes from a True Stan:

• This opening scene where Buffy says she’s not “dating,” but she is “seeing someone,” and then Faith puts her arm around her, is classic Faith/Buffy hoyay!. I think this was one of the (many) scenes that fans used to convince Joss Whedon that there was lesbian subtext. 
• Buffy is wearing a black beanie with the word “bomb” written with rhinestones, and I’m kind of into it. Maybe because it hides the technicolor bangs.
• “Where is the actual library?” is a classic librarian neg.
• What is this tai chi scene. It’s so random and awkwardly edited, I always think it’s a fantasy. [Yeah I thought it was a Buffy thirst dream! –Nerdy Spice]
• Ew Xander and Willow. Ew, ew.
• Buffy is so mean to Faith! She just wants to have some girl talk!
• Why would Giles think that they should have a group intervention? Of course Buffy needs a talking-to, but he’s the adult in the room, he should know better.
• Xander would be wrong to slut-shame Buffy no matter what, but he’s slut-shaming her NOW? Really??
• Buffy to Xander: “Oh right, this is all about nobility, this has nothing to do with jealousy.” YES. Finally!
• I always laugh at Willow’s panicked “Giles, no one’s doing the ‘I’ statements!” 
• I’m sympathetic to Buffy here, but Giles’ rebuke is devastating. [Yeah that part was so good! –Nerdy Spice]
• “Faith, do you know who the Spartans were?” “Some guys from Spart?” LOL.
• Obviously Gwendolyn Post is evil incarnate, even before she’s actually evil, but her little scenes with Faith make me kind of wistful for the possibilities a woman Watcher would bring.
• “She says he’s clean.” “It’s not Angel’s style.” Why is angry-Xander suddenly talking like a cop in a Ben Affleck movie?
• Willow’s wincing and hand-flapping while Buffy is slaying are so cute and mom-ish.
• Buffy vs. Faith fights are the best-choreographed on the show, and it’s not even close.
• I also like that these slayer-on-slayer fights are the only times we ever see Buffy or Faith get real bruises. It’s a nice touch. [Ahh good point! I totally never noticed that before! –Nerdy Spice]

Season 3, Episode 8 “Lover’s Walk”

Xander and Willow are still having the ickiest, least-sexy affair ever, and hiding it very badly. They are openly hitting on each other at school, trying to kiss each other’s earlobes (ew!), and scheduling double dates with their respective partners. It doesn’t help that said partners are both being incredibly sweet–Cordelia puts pictures of her and Xander up in her locker, Oz gives Willow a pez dispenser shaped like a witch (aw!)–which gives Willow a crisis of conscience. So she goes to a magic shop and buys ingredients for a “de-lusting spell,” and tries to cast it on herself and Xander. But before she can do it, Spike arrives, knocks him out, and kidnaps them.

Because–oh yeah–Spike is back! He barrels into town and, as a funny coda to his very first scene on the show, he drunk drives straight into the “Welcome to Sunnydale” sign and repeats his very first line, “Home sweet home.” But instead of sauntering elegantly out of his car with his leather trench coat, he drunkenly falls out of his car and delivers the line from the asphalt. He’s broken up about Drusilla, who apparently dumped him after they left Sunnydale in the season finale. When he hears Willow talking about her de-lusting spell, which has mostly the same ingredients as a love spell, he decides to drag her to the old burned-out factory and force her to perform a love spell on Drusilla. 

He threatens to kill her and Xander if she doesn’t comply, and is honestly very menacing–even more so because he’s drunk and sad and unstable. And yet he’s also very funny, especially when he describes his and Drusilla’s very prosaic breakup. “When we got to Brazil–she was just different… I found her making out with a chaos demon, and have you ever seen a chaos demon? They’re all slime and antlers–disgusting. She only did it to hurt me.” Willow’s all, “There, there.” Hee!

As a side note, Buffy gets her SAT scores, and they’re unexpectedly great. (I mean, I don’t really think they’re unexpected–she and Cordelia are both obviously low-key smart. But everyone around her is palpably shocked, to the point that I’m surprised she’s not a little offended.) At first, it looks like this will be an opportunity for Buffy’s annual mope session about her non-future, but now that Faith’s around, it leads to a lot of excited talk from Joyce and Giles about Buffy going to college far away from the Hellmouth. You would think Buffy would be ecstatic about the prospect of freedom, but instead she pulls a first-season Rory and mopes around about the prospect of leaving Angel. 

Speaking of Angel, he and Buffy are keeping up the fiction that they’re “just friends,” even though they spend all their time making googly eyes at each other, doing tantric tai chi, and occasionally making out. She tells him about the college talk in a very significant, allusive way, clearly trying to get him to ask her to stay, but he says that “as a friend,” she should take the opportunity to leave Sunnydale. She’s obviously hurt, and goes back to school to work out her rage, where she finds Oz and Cordelia panicking because they can’t find Xander and Willow. Buffy sends them to find Giles at a Watchers’ retreat nearby, while she gets a call from her mom and hears Spike in the background. Yikes! 

Buuut after the commercial break, it turns out Spike is just drinking hot cocoa with Joyce and talking her ear off about Dru’s affair with the chaos demon. Joyce is such a mom about it all, too, telling Spike soothingly, “Well, she sounds very unreasonable.” So cute. He’s in the midst of asking Joyce for more mini-marshmallows when Angel stops by (to apologize to Buffy, I guess? I actually have no idea why he would go to Buffy’s house) and violently tries to stop Spike from hurting Joyce. Only problem is, Joyce doesn’t know that Angel has a soul again, and he’s been uninvited from the house. Also Joyce is a little dim, and doesn’t really understand that Spike is a threat. So she tells Angel to leave, and Spike yells, “You’re a very bad man!” Hee. Then Buffy gets home and throttles Spike, but he tells her she needs him if she wants to find her friends. She snarks that he “probably just hid them in the factory,” but follows him anyway.

Spike leads them to the magic shop so they can get the remaining ingredients for the love spell, and whines about Dru a little more. Buffy, the only woman who can’t be forced to do his emotional labor, tells him he’s pathetic, and Angel weirdly taunts him about Drusilla being “fickle.” (I guess a reference to his implied affair with Dru when he was Angelus? Does he really want to brag about that in front of Buffy?) They have a sad little fight, and when Buffy defends Angel, Spike goes into a melodramatic-yet-kind-of-awesome monologue about how they’re kidding themselves if they think they’re “friends.” “You’ll fight, and you’ll shag, and you’ll hate each other until it makes you quiver, but you’ll never be friends.” Then he goes full Shonda Rhimes with: “Love isn’t brains, children, it’s blood–blood screaming at you to work its will. I may be love’s bitch, but at least I’m man enough to admit it.” Whew!

Of course, Buffy and Angel look at each other significantly as he says this–which like, whatever. I actually agree that they could never be friends, but not because their passion is so piping hot–it’s just that Angel has so little personality, I can’t imagine being friends with him for any reason other than his abs.

Anyway, they get embroiled in a fight with a bunch of vamps who have beef with Spike, and while fighting, Spike has an epiphany that he needs to torture Dru in order to get her to like him again. It’s not the worst logic I’ve ever heard. 

Meanwhile, Xander and Willow are facing impending death in the factory, and naturally start to make out. Unfortunately, Oz and Cordelia find them right at that moment because Oz like, smells Willow from a mile away (a super-secret werewolf power that’s never mentioned again, just go with it). Cordelia runs out crying, and as she runs up the stairs, the stairs give out under her. At first it seems like she’s okay, but then we see that she has a metal bar sticking out of her gut. This would actually be a very Whedonesque death, but instead, they show a funeral scene from far away, and just as you think Cordy really is dead, Buffy walks by and says, “So Cordelia’s going to be okay?” Ugh. I’m glad they didn’t kill Cordy, but the fake-out is SILLY. I hate it. 

By the end of the episode, Oz and Willow are in limbo, Cordelia unceremoniously dumps Xander in the hospital (YES.), and Buffy finally breaks up with Angel as a friend. She tells him that they’re not really friends, and that what she wants from him, she “can never really have.” He doesn’t want to accept it, so she tells him there’s one way they can still be friends: “Tell me you don’t love me.” And he can’t! Aw! This episode is so extra in the best way.

–Janes

Notes from a New Fan:

• Like Oz, I’ve been told my sarcastic voice far too closely resembles my serious voice. Keets has the same problem. It’s an affliction.
• Spike is back! I’m delighted.
• It’s weird that it surprises me that Spike is a drunk driver. I mean, he has no need to worry that he’ll die, and he certainly wouldn’t worry about killing others, so why not drive drunk, right? On the other hand, it’s so surprising because it’s like, such a trope that you only have someone on TV drive drunk if you want everyone to FUCKING HATE THEM. I feel like I’m confused about how to even interpret this trope because I’ve been so well trained — like knowing that smoking means someone is a secret villain, or that telling someone you’re really happy with how your life has turned out means that you’re gonna die in this episode.
• Ugh, Cordelia has Xander-and-Cordy couple pictures up in her locker AND agrees to bowl, and Oz give Willow a witch Pez dispenser… and meanwhile Willow and Xander are sneaking around behind everyone’s back. Break my heart!!
• Angel speaking Latin in the previous episode was amusing, but I’m pretty sure I have never laughed so hard at this show as I laughed when I saw Angel reading Sartre’s Nausea. Like… this role was woefully miscast if this was supposed to be believable in any way, on any level. 
• Spike just yells at Angel through what’s pretty clearly an open hole in the wall of the mansion. How does Angel not hear him? He’s too captivated by his French existentialism, I guess.
• Wait, why does Spike have to pour alcohol on his burn? Is infection a thing when you’re a vampire?
• I like that Willow thinks Xander is so stupid that she can feed him a potion while holding the spellbook open to a de-lusting spell, and he won’t figure out that she’s not just giving him regular, non-magic smart juice. His scores may have been low, but he’s still sentient!
• Also, not sure why she needs a de-lusting spell considering he leches on her with a FEATHER in the middle of what is supposedly a favor she’s doing. Shut up, Xander. You are your own de-lusting spell.
• It isn’t explained why Angel shows up at the house — I guess to creep on Buffy’s bedroom?
• Spike miming eating Mrs. Buffy behind her back to mess with Angle cracked me up. (Not as funny as Angel and Sartre, but what is?) But I also love that he stops by to get the book he needs and decides to take a few minutes to demand major emotional labor from Mrs. Buffy even though he also just did the same to Willow. Men, amirite?
• OK, am I a giant cheeseball if I loved Spike’s purple prose about love being a screaming in the blood? It just made me more interested to see him fall in love with Buffy.
• Wait… where’s Faith?
• Spike should probably have warned the others that there was a back entrance, which the vampires promptly try to use to break into the magic shop to kill Spike and Angel and Buffy. I guess he was too drunk.
• That funeral scene definitely faked me out. I thought maybe Cordelia was going to turn into a vampire or a zombie or something!
• Xander buys what looks like $100 worth of flowers (no way would a high school boy buy that) and then brings them to Cordy’s room WITHOUT A VASE like an idiot. Does he think she’s just keeping a few empty ones lying around in her hospital room pantry?

Notes from a True Stan:

• I love that both Xander and Willow’s partners are acting sweet and demonstrating their commitment, but only Willow feels at all bad about it. Xander is the living worst.
• The sun’s ability to burn vampires is wildly inconsistent. In some episodes, Buffy throws vampires into the sun and they literally disintegrate into ash, but here, the sun barely gives Spike more than a sunburn. 
• On rewatch, it’s super interesting how the writers develop Willow’s relationship to magic. Even here, she immediately turns to magic to solve her problems, instead of like, you know, just not making out with Xander, because he’s gross. 
• Why didn’t Buffy immediately uninvite Spike from her home? Why is she so bad at this? 
• I didn’t start watching in real time until the fifth season, so I don’t remember if people already thought that Spike had a thing for Buffy, but that line about their truce–“It was that truce with Buffy that did it… I told her it didn’t mean anything, I was thinking of her the whole time!” It’s played for laughs, but still–foreshadowing!
• Spike gets all vulnerable with Willow and mixes that up with hunger, which, honestly, I relate. I get every emotion mixed up with hunger.
• What exactly was Spike’s endgame here? Did he really think Buffy would come with him to the factory, wait patiently while Willow did the spell, and then let Spike go afterwards?
• Ha, Buffy stakes one of the vamps through another vamp. That’s a new one!
• Buffy to Spike: “I violently dislike you.” Famous last words. [Yes, according to the fanvideos I’ve seen, at some point that will change to violently liking him. And I do mean violently. –Nerdy Spice]

Season 3, Episode 9 “The Wish”

OK, so now everyone knows about Willow and Xander, and Oz has requested space from Willow and Cordelia won’t speak to Xander, but for some reason both Xander and Willow are completely focused on their exes and not even discussing the question of whether they should, you know, just be together since they already torched their existing relationships for each other. [I am always so confused by this! –Janes]

Cordelia tries to go back to being a popular girl, and her friends just torture her by pretending to set her up with Jonathan, the wee nerd who pops up every once in awhile and who I definitely wouldn’t even have registered as a recurring character if it weren’t for the fact that I loved him as Doyle on Gilmore Girls. And a second-tier dude rejects her… but only in public; he’s still willing to meet with her under the bleachers if she can be discreet. Very flattering! She goes to the Bronze one night to try to torture Xander by proving she’s over him, as Xander and Willow hang out on the couch like big nerds. Buffy is overtaken by a sudden access of sympathy for Cordelia, follows her out to try to offer friendship, and is interrupted by a vampire. Hey, it happens. She nimbly defeats the vamp, but in the process Cordelia gets tossed into a pile of trash just as all her popular friends walk by. Cordelia is pissed.

There’s a new, popular girl in school named Anya who hits it off instantly with Cordelia because they’re both major label whores (not that I judge, I troll Goodwill for designer castoffs all the time).  When she realizes that Cordelia’s upset about Xander, she gives her a special necklace. Uh-oh. Then when Cordelia wishes aloud that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale, Anya gets Demon Face and says, “Done.”

Suddenly Cordelia’s living in a nightmare alternative universe where she is indeed popular, but she can’t wear bright colors because the vampires will get her, and everyone has to be inside before sundown, and the only hope you have if you get trapped by vamps is for Giles and his team of non-Buffy, non-Slayer helpers — Oz included — to swing by with their van and drag you in. Speaking of vamps, Willow’s one. Xander too. And they’re keeping Angel locked up in the basement of the Bronze so they can play weird sadistic games like burning him with matches. (In case you’re wondering, vampires also don’t heal from match burns. The rules are pretty complicated. And by complicated, I mean they basically do not make sense.) To cap off the horror, the vampires have built a giant machine called the Plant that turns human bodies into, basically, wine taps. So they can all drink human blood fresh from the human but out of classy wine glasses. Smart!

Cordelia gets to Giles for long enough to tell him about her wish, so he calls Buffy’s Watcher and gets Buffy sent to town. Buffy shows up, but she’s sort of more of a Faith at this point: think lots of eyeliner and ‘tood. She defeats almost all the vampires, with the help of Angel, but then he unfortunately gets killed and turns into a poof of dust–not that Buffy particularly cares, since in this universe she has no idea who he is. Then the Master manages to get the better of Buffy and snap her neck.

But all hope is not gone: Giles has summoned Anya, who he knows is the patron saint of scorned women, to see if they can undo the wish. Unsurprisingly, Anya has no interest in helping Giles. But before she can kill him, he manages to smash her necklace.

Suddenly everything goes back to normal. Cordelia and Anya are back at school–and Cordelia has no memory of anything that happened in the alternate timeline! She just thinks she and Anya are riffing about how much they hate boys and Buffy. Anya also has no memory of the alternate universe, but somehow she does have a memory of being a Wish Demon, but somehow smashing her amulet in the other universe caused her to have no power in this universe. Sure, why not? The point is, everything is back to normal! Yay!

–Nerdy Spice

Notes from a New Fan:

• Buffy is kind of a downer all the time, isn’t she? We get it! You loved Angel! Then he lost his soul! Then he got it back but you killed him! Then he came back but now you can’t be together! Yeah, it’s sad, but does she have to bring it up every time anything bad happens to anyone else? Even Joey Potter didn’t talk about her dead mom this much.
• Xander and Willow sit uncomfortably on the couch… but somehow, Xander still manages to manspread all over the place. I guess he’s not that uncomfortable.
• Emma Caulfield plays Anya! I loved her in I Want to Marry Ryan Banks, this random Lifetime-channel romantic comedy that was like Unreal meets… well, Lifetime before the era of Unreal, I guess? Emma Caulfield is the only down-to-earth girl in a lineup of a marriage reality show, and she falls in love with the producer instead of the bachelor, and the producer is… Bradley Cooper. Seriously. It’s great. I think it’s now on Amazon as The Reality of Love. You should all watch it.
• I love seeing Alyson Hannigan having fun as the bad-ass vamp. I do not love that I’m suddenly slightly attracted to Xander now that he’s put on this leather jacket (and stopped acting like, well, Xander). It’s very unsettling.
• Giles totally has a different red-headed nerd helping him defend Sunnydale, like a Willow replacement!
• This book cage really can’t contain anyone! They keep a literal ax in it!
• You know in this world Buffy’s Gone Through Some Shit and Gotten Tough because of the quantity of her eyeliner.
• Yeah… uh… what did Giles think was going to happen when he summoned Anya, the demon of scorned women? Did he think she was just going to be like, “Sure, you’re a man, but I’ll give you your wish anyway?” Cause that’s how demons roll.
• It’s pretty satisfying watching Buffy beat up Xander.
• Poor Cordelia! She’s really getting her lumps this season. Although she seems pretty resilient.

Notes from a True Stan:

• Aw, Cordelia has the nude-face-of-depression and burns pictures of Xander and Willow at home, then piles on the dark-makeup-of-rage for school. Respect.
• Poor Jonathan. Always a punchline.
• So has Cordelia just not talked to any of her popular friends all this time? No wonder she didn’t win Homecoming Queen.
• Oz’s “I’m sorry this is hard for you, but I told you what I need” is like, the most emotionally mature way anyone’s ever dealt with cheating on TV. Maybe the most emotionally mature way anyone’s dealt with infidelity ever. Oz and Cordelia are winning this breakup.
• “I don’t wish, I act.” Cordelia is awesome, and also kind of a bad candidate for a vengeance demon. 
• I love that Buffy and Willow say, very mildly and non-judgmentally, that they don’t want to gang up on Cordy, who has every reason to be upset, and Xander’s like, “What do you want me to do, flagellate myself? Wear a hair shirt for the rest of my life?” As if being considerate to your ex whom you cheated on is like, a medieval form of punishment. Fuck this guy.
• Cordelia is rocking her bright-colored revenge fashion. She could give Meghan Markle a run for her money.
  
  
• It’s Whitney from Bring It On! Why isn’t she always a Cordette?
• I like that in this parallel-universe Sunnydale, the anti-vampire precautions are supposed to be so extreme, but like–shouldn’t Sunnydale have a curfew? And don’t they already have enough student deaths for a monthly memorial?
• Okay, it was a little misleading for Harmony to say that Willow and Xander are “dead.”
• Is the “vampires are attracted to bright colors” thing supposed to be a funny myth that people made up because they’re paranoid, a metaphor for victim-blaming, or both? Either way, it’s delightful.
• So… now Giles just recruits ordinary kids with no superpowers to fight vampires? He couldn’t recruit any adults?
• “Yes, I’m aware there’s a lot of demonic activity in Cleveland.” Ha!
• Vamp Willow is… fun. There should have been more female villains.
• I also like Buffy’s scar, and her heavy-eyeliner-of-world-weariness.
• It’s interesting that Buffy dies in this reality, right after she refuses to work with anyone else. While many have criticized the show for its inherently individualistic premise, the writers tell us over and over again that Buffy outlives ostensibly “tougher” Slayers, like Kendra, because of her capacity for joy and her connections to other people.
• “The humans have brought us a truly demonic concept: mass production!” Hee.
• Aw, bye Whitney! Only white girls can be Cordettes, I guess.