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Episode 3.08: Lover's Walk | Episode 3.10: Amends
Characters:
| Buffy | Angel | Xander |
| Willow | Giles | Cordelia |
| Oz | Anya |
Overall (9/10)
Buffy:
This episode is all about the importance of friends. Indeed, we start the episode with Buffy taking out a slimy demon with a little help from Willow and Xander. We even get a comparison with Faith, who has no friends as such.
To drive the point home even further, Buffy confronts Cordy outside of the Bronze and urges her to talk to somebody about the break-up with Xander. It's only because of the support of her friends that Buffy has been able to handle all the crazy Slaying stuff she deals with.
In the wish-world, Buffy never makes it to Sunnydale. We don't know much about what she's doing in Cleveland, but when she finally appears, we see an emotionally-hardened loner of a Slayer. She doesn't play well with others, as she tells Giles.
In the end, though, she's taken out fairly easily by the Master. This could, perhaps, be in part because of the Slayer death wish as described by Spike in S5's Fool for Love. Without friends and family, wish!Buffy doesn't have the will to live as our!Buffy does. So she gets killed with hardly a fight.
A couple other interesting things to note about wish!Buffy, she's amazingly unimpressed by Angel. I was halfway expecting them to play an innate romance thing (great love transcending realities or some such sap), and I was pleasantly surprised when they didn't. It points against the idea of fated love and shows us that true love is a victim of circumstance.
Additionally, without friends, wish!Buffy appears to have also lost her fashion sense. Wow.
Angel:
Anybody else find it a little funny that wish!Angel ends up in Sunnydale waiting to fulfill his destiny, but then Buffy no-shows on him? I don't know why. I guess because I saw his destiny thing as being so poorly executed in S2 (See my review of Becoming Pt. 1) that I'm a little cynical of it, so it's kinda fun to see it played out wrong.
Anyway, Angel is chained up and tortured. Woo hoo.
Xander:
Let's talk about our!Xander first. He is blaming everybody but himself for what happened to Cordelia. And, while he's been leaving her lots of messages, he doesn't seem to miss her very much.
It's easy to tell that those two are not going to get back together. Xander's barely making an effort.
Now in the wish-world, Xander is a vampire. Cause, ya know, Buffy never shows up to save him. He's an item with wish!Willow. It's amusing.
Whereas Xander isn't making an attempt with Cordy, Willow is trying so hard to get back together with Oz. This speaks to the actual affection she has for him.
Of course, he's not ready at this point. But points to her for continuing to try and for accepting the blame, neither of which Xander is doing.
In the wish-world we get wish!Willow, who's actually one of my favorite characters to watch. We get the famous line "Bored now" which pays off in a big way in S6's Villains.
And, while it's fun to watch wish!Willow in this episode, I love her even more when she returns in Doppelgangland.
We don't see Giles outside of the wish-world (Well, briefly at the end...). Wish!Giles is a Watcher without a Slayer. We see that even without a Slayer, though, Giles has done what he can to organize a resistance to the Master.
Now Giles, being the smart guy he is, surely must have thought to put the base of the White Hats in somebody's house so that vamps couldn't get in. Instead, they're in the library...a public area...not the smartest of ideas.
Anyway, this Giles is desperate. He's trying so hard to keep people from dying, but he doesn't have the means to stop it. When the option presents itself to change reality, Giles takes it without thinking twice.
That's actually pretty powerful stuff. The world Giles is in is so miserable that he'd rather chance another reality that he knows nothing about than stay in it. He has, literally, nothing worth living for in the wish-world.
We see the depths of Cordelia's emotional devastation in this episode. Miss Popular took a great risk to her social status in openly dating Xander. Then she gets cheated on by him. Her social standing is down the drain at this point. And, worse, the closest friends she'd had were the Scooby gang, who are all Xander's friends.
Buffy realizes this, of course, and offers to be there for Cordelia outside the Bronze. Things don't go well, though, and Cordelia, unsurprisingly, blames Buffy for everything.
Now I gotta say that Cordy usually strikes me as being somewhat smart. But she is fairly stupid in this episode. She wishes that the Slayer had never come to Sunnydale...and she's surprised when everything sucks?? And she doesn't even realize wish!Willow and wish!Xander are vamps until they go into vamp-face. Being dumped must have fried her brain.
And the final irony is, of course, that Cordelia, who made the wish, gets killed almost immediately. Not only that, but she gets killed by Willow and Xander, the two people that betrayed her in the real world.
Oz needs time to think. I've made mention before, but I'll do it again: Oz is so damn mature. He doesn't accuse Willow of anything. He tells her what he needs. Then he tells her again and explains that the guilt she's feeling isn't his problem to alleviate. And he's completely right.
In the wish-world, Oz is one of the White Hats. Too bad we don't get any info as to how that happened, but it's fitting. I especially liked Larry being part of the group as well. And, of course, wish!Oz dusts wish!Willow.
Let's note something important about Anya in this episode. She was only supposed to be a one-off character. Therefore, there are definitely inconsistencies in her character between this episode and when she becomes a regular. I'll not dwell on it too much, because I can understand the reasoning.
One of the biggest differences is actually the wishing itself. In this episode, the wishing seems to involve Anya giving her necklace to the wisher before the wish is granted. However, we'll see in S6 and S7 that Anya just needs the other person to make a wish.
We get the information here that Anya (Anyanka) is the patron saint of scorned women. She's a demon, and, at the end, her power center is destroyed and she becomes a human. Another interesting point is that they mention that when her power center is destroyed, all her wishes will be reversed. Consider that Anya's been around for some 1000-odd years. That's a lot of wishes. I'd be willing to bet they drop that part later on, as all those wish reversals would surely affect reality somehow.
Also, let's clarify something from the beginning. We find out in S7's Selfless that Anya was human before she became a demon (well, we knew that before then, but we finally get flashbacks in that episode). We also find out in that episode that vengeance demons have souls. This is pretty important, as it helps shed some light on the soul issue (Or muddy the waters, depending on how you look at it). Everything that Anya does in her 1000 years as a vengeance demon was done while she had a soul. So this isn't a case like Angel of her being evil, then getting a soul and being good. She's always had her soul, but she still did evil things.
This will be important when she joins the cast as we get into the integration of different characters into the Scooby gang and the inconsistency of forgiveness and acceptance that is shown (Okay, yeah, I'm talking about Spike here).
Cordelia stupidly wishes that Buffy never came to Sunnydale. We get a major case of "be careful what you wish for" as things kinda suck without Buffy.
Small issue I have. In the wish-world, Buffy makes it from Cleveland to Sunnydale pretty darn quickly.
Anya is the baddie here.
Not an arc episode. Hell, it's the episode that never was.
It's gutsy for a show to do an episode that never happens. It can either work tremendously well, or it can backfire. I think this one works. It shows us exactly how important Buffy's friends are and shows us the fascinating Buffy-less Sunnydale. It allows us to reflect on all that Buffy has done so far on the show.
Also, it introduces vamp!Willow, along with Anya. And I love both of them.
Special performance award goes to Charisma Carpenter for having both Alyson Hannigan and Nicholas Brendon suck on her neck. At the same time. Is this our first threesome scene on Buffy?
9 out of 10. Daring, emotionally affecting, and wonderfully entertaining.
The final fight scene in the wish-world where everybody gets killed. It's a surprisingly powerful scene.
I had this wallpaper in mind for quite a while. It plays on the idea of the Slayer's death wish as told to us by Spike in season 5. The main line of thinking here is that Buffy, without the friends and family she has in this universe, won't fight as hard to survive. Thus, she's defeated pretty darn easily by The Master. I like the wall. My blending's improved. Still needs some practice, though.
Credits:
Caps: Screencap Paradise
Textures: Shattered
Fonts: Reed (Link)
Brushes: None
Episode 3.08: Lover's Walk | Episode 3.10: Amends
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