This installment of Watching ‘Buffy’ brings together my “virgin” view of the season four premiere with the re-view of Noel Kirkpatrick, who writes for Monsters of Television, This Was Television, and TV.com. You can find him on Twitter, where he frequently antagonizes me.
I understand that season four marks a clear shift in the show’s well of narrative possibilities: the Scooby Gang has moved from high school to college; Angel and Faith are both (ostensibly) gone, and, thus, their narrative expedience dissipates; and, for the moment, Spike is also out of the picture. So, in a sense, the show is starting from scratch, inventing new antagonisms to replace the ones that have “expired,” so to speak.
I also get that season premieres and finales serve particular functions that make them somewhat unwieldy. But nearly every note of the season four premiere rings false to me. From the first shot (in which a statue of an angel [Angelus?] fills the frame), Buffy is unsure of herself, awkward, and unskilled, which hearkens back to Giles’ stripping of her powers in season three, except now the diminishment is entirely “social.” This is immediately contrasted with another about-face: Willow’s sudden confidence. Now, she is assertive, forceful, whereas Buffy is reserved and tentative. Why is every other character apparently unshaken by the high school-to-college transition? Add in Giles’ aloof response to her needs (downing a scotch, wearing a bathrobe, entertaining a guest of the opposite sex, etc.), and it all seems very forced. Similarly, why would it be that, in an apparently small- to medium-sized city like Sunnydale, the college vampires would’ve had no prior encounter with Buffy, and why would she be intimidated and/or incapacitated by them? She’s killed, by that time, a Master, the Mayor, and countless demons. And wouldn’t they have heard/thought of her? If Tuesday (Katherine Towne) is that powerful, why hasn’t she come after Buffy, a slayer living in her town, before? It strikes me as odd that the greater world of Sunnydale doesn’t more overlap with UC-Sunnydale than the show permits, especially when we consider that The Bronze is apparently “all ages,” open to both high school and college kids. But again, premieres serve particular purposes, so I must overlook these matters. What most concerns me is that I simply don’t like meek, weak Buffy, which is what she seems to be in this episode, and, given that this is the premiere, I worry there might be more of this unappealing Buffy to come.
Noel’s take:
I recall broad outlines of Season 4, but very few specific episodes, and I’m sad to say that “The Freshmen” is one of those episodes. I say “sad” because it’s a really good episode! It is a combination of college cliches — especially the overly mean (media studies!!!) professor — but all those cliches really come together to dramatize the life transition of high school to college. Buffy had just achieved some measure of respect and value in the previous season, and now it’s all erased. She’s not the big fish in the little pond any longer, and she’s struggling with moving on as everyone else seems to be doing it with abandon (save for poor, poor Xander): Willow’s excited about EVERYTHING and has Oz; Giles is having sexy times; and Joyce has put crates of stuff in her room.
Episodes I remember of Season 4 that keep up that sort of thematic work — “Beer Bad” and “Where the Wild Things Are” spring to mind — tend to keep that momentum going. I just remember really not liking the mish-mash of a big seasonal arc, but more on that as we go, I guess.