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In last week’s recap, Sarah ushered us into the dark half of season six. After getting dumped, Willow finally figured out how to turn Amy the Rat back into a person, so she could have a magical playmate. They overdid it BIG TIME and Willow started acting like a drug addict. After endangering Dawn and facing some tough love from Buffy, she finally decided she needed to quit. The Spuffy relationship moved to the property damage level and we were left fully squicked out. And the Geek Trio stole a very large diamond for one of their nefarious schemes.
The Buffy Season Six Drinking Game Rules
Drink once every time:
A vamp is dusted
A scene takes place in a cemetery
Giles adjusts his glasses
Willow misuses magic
Tara gets upset at Willow misusing magic
Anya or Xander mention being engaged or their wedding
Spike and Buffy are the epitome of Bad Romance
Warren, specifically, is the worst
Drink twice every time:
There’s an extremely outdated pop culture reference
A vampire is invited into a house
There’s a callback to previous season shenanigans
Dawn steals something
Buffy emotes existential dread
The “Trio” makes a pop culture reference
You really miss Giles
Hope you’ve got your shot glass ready because the Trio and our Bad Romance are here to wreck your liver.
6.11 “Gone”
Buffy and Dawn are boxing up all of Willow’s witch supplies, including candles, which are apparently some kind of Wiccan gateway drug, in order to help her get through her magical detox. Buffy is wearing what is clearly a wig. The color isn’t quite right and it looks like when she came back from the dead, desperately in need of fresh highlights.
The Trio have used their stolen diamond to create some kind of freeze-ray gun that turns objects invisible. Warren thinks this will make them unstoppable. Really, you’ve got to envy the confidence.
Willow tries to make amends for putting Dawn in a cast by making her an omelet, but Dawn isn’t ready to forgive, and I don’t blame her. Hold out for baked goods, Dawn! Willow doesn’t understand why Dawn is taking her mood out on Buffy as well. Buffy thinks it’s because she let this happen, by not seeing that Willow needed help because she was too wrapped up in her own dumb life. Just at that moment, the dumb life she’s been wrapped up in barges in the back door, nearly on fire, using the lame excuse of a missing lighter to explain his broad daylight presence. After Willow leaves the kitchen, Spike starts feeling up Buffy and going on about how much he loves her hair. Xander walks in, appalled that Spike is still trying to mack on Buffy. He doesn’t understand why Spike can’t get it through his head that it’s never gonna happen because only a complete loser would sleep with Spike, or a simpleton like Harmony, or a nutcase like Drusilla. Buffy is obviously feeling the sting and rushes Xander to get Dawn out the door to school. On her doorstep, she finds a representative from Social Services, Mrs. Kroeger, with who Buffy completely forgot she had an appointment. Spike refuses to take a hint and parks himself in the living room while Buffy is trying to prove to Social Services that she’s a responsible guardian. Buffy repeatedly sticks her foot in her mouth, and between that, the box with magic weed in the living room, Buffy’s lack of employment, and Dawn’s frequent absences and falling grades, she’s not really making her case.
Mrs. Kroeger says she’s going to recommend Buffy be put on probation and closely monitored, and if there isn’t an improvement, she could be stripped of her guardianship. After she leaves, Spike tries to comfort Buffy, but she orders him to get out. He fishes his lighter out of her pocket, before storming off, calling her Goldilocks on his way out.
Buffy is so frustrated by it all that she takes a pair of scissors and starts whacking off her hair. Luckily, she goes to a salon to get it fixed and tells the stylist she just wants her to make Buffy different. I don’t think a haircut is going to fix your whole deal, girl, but who hasn’t been there? She ends up leaving the salon at the same time the Trio are out on the sidewalk, having picked the target for their ray gun. After spotting Buffy, Andrew and Jonathan fight over the gun because they both want to be invisible to hide from her, but they end up shooting Buffy instead. Invisible Buffy arrives at the Magic Box as Xander and Anya are arguing over their wedding seating chart. (Drink!) Buffy doesn’t know how she ended up invisible and doesn’t really seem to care, since she’s having too much fun playing around with it. She heads out, dumping the mystery-solving in their laps. They establish that no one would want to turn a Slayer invisible on purpose since that would just make her more lethal. Anya suggests that maybe it was a magical mistake of some kind without naming names. Xander heads over to the house to question Willow since he assumes she’s fallen off the wagon. She’s rightfully offended at the jumping to conclusions and walks out.
Buffy is out in the park, using her invisibility to mostly be a rude nuisance, criticizing people’s fashion choices, and then stealing a parking enforcement golf cart to drive to the Department of Social Services. Once there, she tortures poor Mrs. Kroeger, making the woman look like she’s losing her mind, simply for having had the nerve to be concerned about Dawn’s welfare and doing her job. After getting Dawn’s case reassigned, Buffy heads over to Spike’s crypt to surprise him. He thinks he’s being molested by a ghost before he figures out who it is and she drags him off to bed. Ick.
Out on Main Street, which is not The Only Street in Sunnydale we’ve previously seen. Xander finds Willow doing some old-fashioned investigative work, using spray paint to find other objects that were turned invisible at the same time as Buffy, and getting paint samples to help her find the black van that’s been following Buffy around. Xander takes an orange traffic cone that had also been turned invisible and then spray painted by Willow, back to the Magic Box. While he and Anya are digging through books, they realize that the cone is disintegrating and that the same thing may end up happening to Buffy.
Warren has figured out the same thing back at the geek lair since Buffy got hit with a large dose of radiation that eventually, her molecular makeup will start losing integrity. Jonathan is concerned that killing Buffy isn’t part of their plan, but Warren thinks it’s pretty convenient and it’s about time the other two got it through their heads that they’re supposed to be villains.
Xander goes to Spike’s crypt and barges into his bedroom to find Spike naked in bed… doing push-ups. The entire time Xander is explaining the situation to him, Buffy is messing with Spike, and somehow Xander doesn’t pick up on the very obvious, despite knowing Buffy is invisible. After Xander leaves, Spike calls her on the fact that she doesn’t seem too bothered by being invisible, and she admits that for the first time since she came back, she feels free. And I could see how it might be kind of freeing to not have any obligations, since, you know, no one can see you. Spike is right in the middle of giving a pretty good speech about how she’s got issues, and he doesn’t want her if he can’t have all of her, right before his eyes drop down and he tells her that’s cheating. Again, I say ICK.
Buffy walks home, kicking a can, bitching about how she can’t believe he threw her out. When she gets home, she freaks Dawn out with her new invisibility, and especially her lack of concern with fixing it. Since Xander and Anya are actually looking into it, and she’s too busy floating pizza boxes around and making jokes. Buffy finally checks the answering machine to find a message from Xander letting her know that if they can’t reverse it, she’ll be disappearing for good.
With only a paint chip to go on, Willow somehow manages to get into encrypted DMV files and locate the address for the black van that had previously followed Buffy around, and been at the scene when she was turned invisible. She sneaks into the geek lair and gets taken hostage by the newly invisible Trio. Warren calls Buffy and tells her to meet them at an arcade to get Willow back. Once there, he claims that he’ll use the gun to reverse the invisibility, so she won’t dissolve, but Willow notices that he has the gun on the wrong setting and is actually going to kill her. Warren knocks Willow out and Buffy fights the Trio until Willow comes to and uses the gun to turn them all visible, so Buffy now knows what the geeks look like who think they’re her arch-nemesis. The Trio gets away, not that Buffy seems to care that much. She and Willow sit out on the curb and talk about their day and how Willow is worn out from doing things the old-fashioned magic-free way but was glad to know she can do it, and how Buffy has decided she doesn’t want to die. It’s progress, I guess? But it’s still pretty damned dark.
How many times do I have to take a drink?
13
Vamps Dusted
0
Buffy’s New Haircut
There’s a lot of talk about how Buffy’s new bob is adorable. I mean, it’s fine, I guess? I’m not a huge fan of how they style it on her. And based on how quickly she starts wearing it up, I’m betting SMG didn’t love it either.
Objectification Corner
Good on you, Marsters.
6.12 “Doublemeat Palace”
Willow tells Anya and Xander all about the nerdy stuff she found in the geek Trio’s lair, which Anya somehow manages to turn into a lesson on the importance of capitalism. This all leads to Buffy debuting her new uniform for her first day at Doublemeat Palace. It’s unnecessarily terrible. She sits through a traumatizing orientation video before Manny the manager asks why she wants to work there. That is an excellent question, Manny. Surely, there are lots of other jobs that might have suited her better, like any number of the ones she performed in “Life Serial” sans some meddling geeks. I bet she’d make a great bouncer! But Buffy admits that she needs money and she needs it fast and this job didn’t require a lengthy interview process. She meets some of her other coworkers, both of whom seem kind of sketchy and out of it, and finds out that there’s a lot of turnover in the fast-food industry. But Manny assures her that if she puts in the work, in ten years, she could be where he is. Then he takes her on a tour of the kitchen and forces her to eat the signature burger, without disclosing what the secret ingredient is.
Buffy shadows another employee who tries to warn her about her unprofessional jokes, but she doesn’t seem interested in the advice, and then he leaves her alone on the register far too soon. When Dawn and her friends show up to support her new job, Buffy tells them her manager is really shady and she thinks something weird is going on around there, but they think she’s just imagining things and that all the staring off into space is normal for fast-food employees. When business gets slow that night, Spike walks in with his gross servicing double entendres. He makes a comment about her being a demon, which pisses her off and she tells him that even though she doesn’t know why he can hit her, she knows she’s not a demon. Spike thinks she chose this job to prove to herself that she can be just a normal girl with a normal job, and whoa, that’s some unexpected insight. He tells her that she’s too good for this place and should just walk out not before it kills her. It’s super irritating that he keeps going on about it, even after she tearfully asks him not to make this any harder than it already is. Meanwhile, Gary, the one normal coworker Buffy had, gets attacked by some monster out by the dumpsters. The next day, since Gary doesn’t show, Buffy learns how to work the grill from a super weird guy with the most bizarre way of pronouncing the word “process”.
At Xander and Anya’s place, he’s startled by a vengeance demon materializing in his living room and threatening to maim him. But it’s just Anya’s old friend and co-worker, Halfrek, who assumed she’d been summoned to wreak vengeance, but Anya just wanted to invite her to the wedding. Xander quickly makes an excuse to leave so they can catch up. Halfrek spends the entire time questioning why Anya would want to marry Xander and undermining her confidence in her relationship.
Buffy gets stuck working a double shift and learning things about the fryer that make you ready to swear off french fries forever. When she goes to take her break, she notices Spike skulking around outside, and next thing we know, they’re getting it on in the most unrealistic looking way out back next to the dumpsters. Buffy doesn’t look like she’s even enjoying it which is just so much yikes.
Amy stops by Willow’s room under the guise of asking for her old rat cage. She heard Willow was quitting magic cold turkey and wanted to know how it’s going. Willow claims it’s going well, but she’s obviously pretty twitchy. Amy is extremely unhelpful in her observations and then hits Willow with an unsolicited magic “gift” It crosses a pretty serious boundary and makes me decide that I really hate Amy.
Working the meat grinder, Buffy comes across a human finger and storms into Manny’s office demanding to know what’s up. He admits there might have been a meat grinder accident six weeks ago, but Buffy points out this finger is fresh. He suggests that maybe the missing Gary came in early and had an accident and went to the hospital or something, but he’s so shifty about it that Buffy doesn’t believe him. She runs out into the dining room, grabbing everyone’s food and screaming that they can’t eat it because it’s people. It’s a full-on meltdown that would have been pretty awesome to witness at a restaurant, though possibly vomit-inducing. Manny and a couple of other employees drag Buffy to the back, but she fights them off and Manny tells her she’s fired.
At the Magic Box, Buffy enlists the gang’s help figuring out what’s going on at the Doublemeat Palace. Before she can finish explaining the finger and what she thinks is in the burger, Xander eats the evidence. Luckily, Willow thinks she can still use the wrapper to analyze what’s in the burger while Buffy heads back to the closed restaurant to investigate. Dawn tells Xander that her friend’s sister is a lawyer, and Buffy is never going to be anything like that. Xander says being the Slayer means she saves the whole world, which is a much bigger deal. But what Dawn is getting at is that because of that, Buffy is probably destined to work crap jobs making minimum wage forever. I’m not quite sure why that’s the conclusion she draws. Can a Slayer not have a 9 to 5 job as a software engineer or something? That seems like it would be super-efficient for hunting vampires at night. Willow uses chemistry to analyze the meat from the Doublemeat Palace only to find that it’s not actually meat all.
At the restaurant, Buffy quite literally stumbles upon Manny. Or, pieces of him anyway, before she runs into the nice old lady who comes in every day for fried cherry pie. Except she’s not so much a nice old lady as a demon with a terrifying snake-like appendage that comes up out of her head, screams, and spits a paralyzing agent that disables Buffy. She crawls around, trying to get away from the lady when Willow comes up the drive-thru to holler inside to let Buffy know the secret ingredient in Doublemeat burgers is processed vegetables. While Willow is also confessing that Amy zapped her with magic, she hears the sounds of a struggle and breaks in, just in time to save Buffy from the demon that’s started chomping on her shoulder. Willow cuts off its head and tosses it in the meat grinder and “Ew” say we all.
The next day, Amy comes to the door, but Willow won’t let her in and tells her they can’t hang out anymore. Amy really doesn’t get that she crossed a line and is really ugly about it. Willow pretty much has to threaten her to get her to leave. I wish that was the last we’ll see of Amy the Rat.
Buffy goes back to the restaurant to return her uniform to the new manager, Lorraine. The story around the Palace is that Manny just disappeared. Lorraine heard about the scene Buffy caused but is still nice to her, and when Buffy springs it on her that she knows the Doublemeat Medley isn’t made with meat, Lorraine is pretty agreeable to giving Buffy her job back to keep that fact a secret.
How many times do I have to take a drink?
5. Until the dumpster boinking, when I just went ahead and finished the whole bottle.
Vamps Dusted
0. Remember when they used to kill vampires on this show?
Monster Of The Week
Why with the snake-like thing again?!
Bloody Good Snark
Spike: “Damn florescent lights. Make me look dead.”
I find “Gone” mostly forgettable. It’s really just the Buffy haircut episode. On the surface, “Doublemeat Palace” is a regular Monster of the Week edition. Is it supposed to be funny? I think maybe it is, but I mostly just find it to be a major bummer. They’ve put Buffy in this desperate position, where she takes this job she hates because she needs the money, but then they make fun of everyone else who works there, who are in that same position. It’s kind of gross, and that’s before you get to the cat burger jokes, dumpster sex, and creepy demon. What about you? Where do these episodes rank in your list?
Don’t forget to join us in the comments and we’ll see you back here next week when Meredith will be covering the chilling “Dead Things” and another terrible Buffy birthday, “Older and Far Away.”
