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Episode 4.05: Beer Bad | Episode 4.07: The Initiative
Characters:
| Buffy | Xander | Willow |
| Giles | Oz | Spike |
| Riley |
Overall (7/10)
Buffy:
Here's a twist. Buffy gets to play the supportive best friend in this episode. That's normally a role reserved for Willow.
She tries very hard to comfort Willow while at the same time taking care of the Slayer side of things.
But this episode isn't about her.
Xander:
Xander is called upon in this episode to give his guy's perspective on the Oz situation. This is something that he does again in S5's Into the Woods. However, just like that time, he's completely off the mark here.
What he says makes sense. But it doesn't match the reality of the situation. I think what we're seeing is Xander's sympathy for the guy in the relationship and his automatic assumption that the guy must be innocent. Therefore, when giving advice to Willow here, he assumes that Oz is not fooling around with another girl.
In S5 when he gives advice to Buffy, he assumes that it's Buffy's own coldness that is breaking apart the relationship.
Given the fact that Xander doesn't have many guy friends, it's natural that his sympathies would fall on the male side of the relationship. But it often does so at the expense of the girl. This is something I'll discuss more in S5's Into the Woods.
When Willow cries, the whole world cries with her.
She knows something's up. Willow's not stupid. She tries to do what she can to get Oz's attention again by dressing up in snazzier clothing and trying to initiate sex. It doesn't work, though. Because the problem isn't her. It's Oz.
Unfortunately, it's common for the person being cheated on to blame themselves.
At the end, though, Willow is not prepared for Oz to leave. She is willing to try to work through it. However, as I'll discuss in his section, he doesn't give her a choice in the matter.
Let's not also forget that Willow, once again, turns to magic when she can't handle things. She's fully prepared to curse Oz, but she only stops at the last minute. Things are not looking good for her on the magic side of things.
Giles has a horribly awkward scene where he tries to join the group in the Bronze. His midlife crisis ain't pretty.
This episode is all about Oz and the beast within.
The first time he and Veruca get it on, it's in beast form where Oz has no control over his actions. However, he doesn't tell anybody about Veruca being a wolf, and the next night he initiates a physical relationship while still in human form. This indicates that Oz is truly the wolf all the time, as Veruca tells him.
This is also important because on the third night, Oz makes the decision to kill Veruca before he's fully changed. It's a decision he makes as a human. To kill someone. No wonder he feels the need to leave as he's scared of that violent beast that is, apparently, inside him.
Willow is spot-on in her confrontation with Oz where she tells him that he could have told somebody. Oz really does shoulder most of the blame in this episode. Yes, the Veruca situation was bad. But he could have handled it much better.
At the end, he decides to leave her. Like Angel, he leaves for her own good and without giving her any say in the matter. However, unlike Angel, Oz leaves to better himself for her. Therefore, his departure is more like Spike's leaving at the end of S6 in that they both leave to become a man more suitable for the woman that they love.
Oz's mistake, though, is that he doesn't keep in contact with Willow. He expects her to be waiting for him. When he comes back in New Moon Rising, he'll find that things have changed significantly.
Was Oz right in leaving? He had killed a person, which is something Oz had always had a fear of. And he now has a very real fear that he would hurt Willow at some point. He's not sure where the line is between himself and the wolf. As such, he's leaving as much for himself as for her. And it's noteworthy that he does succeed when he returns in controlling the wolf part of himself.
I miss Oz once he leaves. Lack of development aside, every episode was made a little cooler with him in it. I understand the reasons for his leaving the show, though.
Spike has a brief scene at the beginning. Last we saw, he was running away from the sunlight in The Harsh Light of Day (to make an appearance in LA).
But regardless, he's ready now to become the Big Bad again and set himself up as Buffy's major foe.
Until the Initiative zaps him. And Spike will never be the same again.
Note to Spike: Watch your back when you're making grand speeches to nobody in particular.
Nice Guy Riley gets a couple brief scenes. We hear Professor Walsh telling him about the "dog attack". We'll find out the significance of this scene in the next episode when we discover that Riley is part of the demon-hunting Initiative. Walsh's explanation to Riley was probably more along the lines of letting him know what to look for in a patrol.
We do see him later rescuing Willow from being hit by a car. Riley's a nice guy.
There's another werewolf. She wants Oz's bod. Don't really blame her.
Veruca. She draws with her feet.
Not an arc episode. We do see the Initiative take Spike, though. And Buffy finally runs into them outside of Halloween and realizes something's up with them.
A noteworthy episode in that it's Seth Green's last as a cast member. We'll miss him. It does an excellent job building on the "beast within Oz" theme that had been highlighted in previous episodes.
Special performance award goes to Paige Moss as Veruca for freaking eating the mike while lip-syncing.
7 out of 10. The abysmal acting by Paige Moss knocked it down a point. But the stellar acting by Alyson Hannigan and Seth Green bumped it back up.
The final scene between Willow and Oz. Willow is absolutely heart-breaking. But it's a good explanation as to why Oz has to leave now.
I try to do wallpapers different from what I've seen elsewhere. I'd already seen some fabulous walls for the final Willow/Oz scene (With Willow's heart-rending "Don't you love me?") so I didn't want to cover that scene again.
Instead, I focused on the "discovery" scene, which is just as painful to watch. It took me ages to figure out what text to use. Nothing from the scene seemed appropriate for the wall. I'm not sentimental enough to come up with something original. And I had trouble picking out a song to use. Finally, I was going through every album I own and came across Tori Amos' "China" which had some lyrics which seemed fitting.
Credits:
Caps: Screencap Paradise
Textures: OOTM, Misplaced Moments
Fonts: Hanshand (Link)
Brushes: None
Episode 4.05: Beer Bad | Episode 4.07: The Initiative
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