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Last week, Kandis took us through the beginnings of several ill-advised apocalyptic romances! This week, we get reacquainted with The First Slayer’s Desert, but more importantly, Andrew gets a new smoking jacket.
Let’s drink to my LAST Buffy Rewatch post ever! I’ll miss terribly revisiting Sunnydale with all of you lovely and insightful dears. Cheers!
The Buffy Season Seven Drinking Game Rules
Drink once every time:
A vamp is dusted
A scene takes place in a cemetery
Someone uses a cell phone
The First gets up to its tricks
You love Andrew in spite of himself
Someone goes down to the creepy Sunnydale High basement
It’s obvious Spike has a soul again
Principal Wood seems shady
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There’s an extremely outdated pop culture reference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
You really miss Giles
A new Slayer shows up in Sunnydale
A new romance emerges (Who dates during the Apocalypse?)
Willow performs magic responsibly
Take a shot every time:
Someone says, “From beneath you it devours.”
Onto my last eps!
7.15 “Get It Done”
“Get It Done” is a pretty weirdly paced episode in which not much actually happens – a real wheel-spinner. It opens with Buffy having a nightmare in which one of the Potentials, Chloe, cries, then The First Slayer shows up and yells IT’S NOT ENOUGH. The next day, Buffy’s at work at Sunnydale High, and she and Principal Wood are comparing notes on all of the not-great stuff that’s happening on the Hellmouth lately. (Fights and absences? That feels more like regular high school stuff than Hellmouth territory, but what do I know?) In a nice moment of solidarity, Robin gifts Buffy his mother’s “emergency Slayer bag,” and asks to see Potential HQ.
Buffy takes him on a tour of the jam-packed Summers abode, where Andrew’s making funnel cake (!) and all of the Potentials are training in the backyard. Kennedy’s in charge, and kind of jokingly calls Chloe “maggot,” but everyone seems to be having a pretty nice time. Buffy’s clearly still concerned that they’re not ready, and then Robin reveals the real reason for his visit: “Show me the vampire.” Buffy takes him to the basement, where things are immediately tense between Spike and the principal. Later, Buffy and Dawn are having a cute sisterly chat (Dawn is honestly so great this season) when they walk into the bedroom to find Chloe hanging from the ceiling. It’s upsetting, obviously, especially when Chloe/The First tells Kennedy she killed herself because of the “maggot” comment, but it gets worse quickly when Buffy handles it about as badly as possible. She gives everyone in the house a reverse pep talk, saying Chloe was a coward and yelling at the Scoobies that they’re all useless. She seems to want Soulless Spike and Magic-Addicted Willow back, just to get a leg up on The First? Girl, no.
They all decide to open Robin’s mom’s Slayer bag together, and it includes a mysterious box filled with “shadowcasters,” according to Dawn who knows a lot more about all of this than I would. It’s these little puppet things that tell a story, and as they’re casting the shadows, a portal opens, and Buffy just jumps right in, to everyone’s horror. It takes her back to The First Slayer’s desert, where there’s a small tribe of native men waiting for her. It’s all very… questionable.
Meanwhile, back in our realm, a demon pops out of the portal and the whole house is fighting it. It almost kills Spike, and then everyone peer pressures Willow to do some magic to bring Buffy back while Spike recovers. After he gets his strength back, he follows the demon to Sunnydale High to kill it, and seems to find their epic battle very satisfying. All the while, Robin keeps appraising Spike meaningfully (but vaguely).
The men in the portal try to give Buffy the power of the demon that has strengthened every Slayer since the beginning of time, but she refuses it, saying she’ll fight The First on her own. So one of the men touches Buffy’s head and gives her a vision that obviously shakes her. Right then, Willow sucks all of the power out of Kennedy and Anya in order to strengthen her spell, and she yanks Buffy back out of the portal and closes it for good. Buffy apologizes for being a jerk to everyone, and Willow apologizes to a still very shaken Kennedy for sucking her power. Buffy and Willow have a nice lil talk at the end, where Buffy admits she should have accepted the demon’s power. Before we go into credits, we see the vision she was given: the earth being devoured by an army of Turok-Han. (The CGI is maybe less effective than it would have been back in 2003).
Oh yeah, and D’Hoffryn’s sending demons to try and kill Anya. She and Spike are having a friendly drink together (although Anya makes it clear to an uninterested Spike that she’d be fine with that friendly drink turning into a friends-with-benefits drink) when a demon shows up, and Spike fights it off until it runs away. (I told you this episode is weirdly paced!)
How many times do I have to take a drink?
13
Vamps Dusted
0
Andrew The Guestage
He refers to himself as a “guestage” when Buffy introduces him to Robin as their hostage. I love him.
Andrew: “Where the hell have you been? This funnel cake has been kicking my ass.”
Andrew’s Big Board
Have I mentioned that I love him?
The Truest Thing Anybody Said This Week
Willow about Principal Wood: “So much cooler than Snyder.” Indeed!
7.16 “Storyteller”
Ahh, “Storyteller.” For everything that didn’t happen in “Get It Done,” “Storyteller” more than makes up for it! It’s the rare gem of an episode that’s hilarious and gimmicky but also furthers the plot and lots of character/relationship development at the same time. And fair warning, it warrants a LOT of gifs. Like a lot a lot.
We open with Andrew in a beautiful study lined floor to ceiling with leather-bound volumes, sitting in a cozy armchair by a roaring fire. It’s a very Masterpiece Theatre-like scenario, with Andrew narrating something called “Buffy The Slayer of Vampyres” (he pronounces it “vamp-PYRE,” rather than the more traditional “VOM-peer”) – until we hear a knock, Anya opens the door, and we realize he’s just narrating into a small handheld camera while sitting on the toilet in the Summers bathroom.
So Andrew’s decided to create a documentary about Buffy, the Scoobs and the Potentials fighting The First Evil. Surprisingly, everyone seems to think this is a pretty fine idea except for Buffy (the “except for Buffy” part is not surprising). Mostly everyone’s on board because a) if they save the world, they want a document of it and b) Andrew’s really good at flattering everyone into participating. His big board makes a return appearance, and he does some very useful recapping of the season up until this point. Hey, leave it to the professionals, Andrew!
Some fun stuff that happens before everything gets serious:
Anya and Xander give an interview about their botched wedding, which apparently happened a year ago today. After a little typical prickliness, Andrew catches them admitting that they still and will always love each other, but they don’t know what that means for them. They end up having the inevitable post-breakup sex (fortunately, Andrew is NOT filming this part), and then they admit that it felt like “one last time” to them both. They know they’re over, and they’re okay with it. It’s beautiful and mature and if honestly nothing else happened in this episode, I’d still love it for just the Xander and Anya developments.
Also! There’s a great moment where Spike catches Andrew filming him, and he menaces him about getting that bloody camera out of his face, etc etc, when Andrew off-camera says, “The light’s actually better over there, Spike,” and then Spike does the whole scene over again, just playing it up for the camera. So good!
Also also! Andrew catches Willow and Kennedy making up VERY steamily from their energy-stealing awkwardness of the last episode. It’s occurring to me I might be the only FYA recapper who’s team Willow and Kennedy? I can’t help it, I like them together!
Also also also! Andrew gives the camera some of his own backstory as a supervillain, which cuts to a vision of him as a well-suited leader of the pack, with Warren and Jonathan as his nerdy minions. He also misremembers his tussle with Dark Willow, ending with him as the victor. Sure, bud.
But most importantly, THIS happens during the course of Andrew’s documentary (the first half of this clip is the episode opening, but the second half is the best part of the whole ep):
Okay, onto more plot thickening-type stuff. Buffy’s told the Potentials about her earth-ending vision, and everyone’s on board with taking this threat super seriously. At school, the Hellmouth stuff is getting SUPER wacky, since the seal’s been open for a long time now and it’s starting to activate some crazy shit. As Buffy puts it to Robin, having seen a lot of this stuff during her own time at high school (but not all at once like is happening here): “The way a thing feels, it kinda starts being that way.” So a shy girl goes invisible (drink for previous hijinks!), a stressed kid explodes, etc. It’s getting very scary there, so Robin and Buffy (between whom sparks are seriously flying, it must be said) take a closer look at the seal, which immediately possesses Robin, causing him to go all white-eyed and try to attack Buffy, calling her a “whore” for “screwing that vampire.” Yikes. She knocks him out of it, and they decide to talk to Andrew, since he was the one who opened the seal in the first place.
While they head back to HQ, a bunch of possessed kids start circling the seal and kneeling around it, generating even more bad-vibe energy for the high school. Robin and Buffy get Willow to hypnotize Andrew into remembering what happened with Jonathan, and we get a bittersweet little flashback to their time on the lam in Mexico. As Andrew remembers here and later with Buffy, we get a few different versions of what happened when he killed Jonathan, all of which sort of excuse him from responsibility, because he obviously can’t accept what he did. He tells them where he’s keeping the ceremonial knife he used (uhm, in the kitchen cutlery drawer, to everyone’s dismay), and Willow researches it until she and Buffy come up with an as-yet unnamed plan to close the seal.
Buffy, Andrew, Spike and Robin head back to the school, which is now a full-blown war zone. Buffy takes Andrew down to the seal while Robin and Spike fend off hordes of crazed, possessed high school students (and at one point, when Spike’s back is turned, Robin almost takes him out before he’s attacked by another kid), and then Buffy has to fight more crazed, possessed high school students down in the basement. Finally, it’s just her and Andrew, and she starts to come after him with the knife, and he realizes that his blood is required to close it. She gets him to admit he deserves this death, since he murdered his only friend, and he finally seems to come to terms with what he did, and starts to cry. Turns out, it was actually his tears that she needed to close the seal, not his blood, and they share a nice little moment when she promises that she never intended to kill him.
We end on a video confession of Andrew, unadorned with fancy language or fun visuals. Just sad, scared, remorseful Andrew.
How many times do I have to take a drink?
21
Vamps Dusted
2
Apocalypse of the Week
Anya tells Andrew, “Buffy seems to think this apocalypse is actually gonna be apocalyptic,” in a game attempt for the writers to convince us that this apocalypse is way worse than all the other apocalypses.
Andrew’s Idea of Living As Gods
When under hypnosis, he tells the Scoobs that he let Warren/The First convince him that if he killed Jonathan, The Trio would be able to live as gods forever, which in Andrew’s mind, apparently looks… like this.
Way Harsh, Andrew
Andrew: “I think it’s a good time to do introductions.”
Amanda: “I’m Amanda, and I grew up right here!”
Andrew: “No, not you, sweetheart. Sorry.”
None of Us Do, Andrew
Andrew, narrating: “Dawn used to be a key. I don’t really know what that means.”
That’s it for this week – and for my time recapping Buffy the Slayer of Vampyres Buffy the Vampire Slayer with you all! It’s been a time and a half – or in the words of the Slayer herself, “Right, of course. Death, carnage – it’s a Buffy party!” Questions for y’all: does anyone else out there like Kennedy, or am I on an island? How’d the Anya/Xander stuff hit you this episode? Do you agree that “Storyteller” is the best ep so far of Season 7? I’m so happy it’s the last one I recapped, instead of “Get it Done”!
Meet Stephanie here next Wednesday morning, as she covers “Lies My Parents Told Me” and “Dirty Girls.” Hellooo, Nathan Fillion!
