First off, a bit of a foreword, because this marks the beginning of an extended foray into sci-fi/fantasy works that aren't Doctor Who. Whereas Doctor Who is largely episodic, with every serial being largely a self-contained story that you can watch without needing any background information, most of the other shows I'll be looking at aren't. Buffy can at least pretend to be, even though it does have overarching season-long arcs. Angel can't, or at least it has increasing difficulty doing so; it can in Season One, but it certainly can't by Season Four. Firefly can, but only because there are only a handful of threads that got established in its first and only thirteen episodes. The good Dollhouse episodes are arc-centric. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is largely on the fence, especially as the majority of episodes I want to look at come from the last three seasons. Battlestar Galactica is arc-driven. For this reason, a lot of these reviews, simply as a matter of necessity, won't restrict themselves simply to the content covered in neat 45-minute chunks. In general, these reviews are going to be a lot more tangential than the Doctor Who reviews have been. Likewise, the scoring system is going to be largely scrapped; neither Firefly nor Dollhouse generated enough episodes to really establish a baseline, Angel gets too arc-driven, and I'll be reviewing BSG episodes before I even finish the first season (and it's heavily arc-driven anyway). Therefore, Buffy and DS9 will get numerical scores, Firefly, Dollhouse and BSG won't, and I haven't decided what to do about Angel yet. I'll probably score Seasons 1-3 and 5, and do something different for Season 4. I'll cop the SFDebris line and mention that all scores are relative to that series and that series alone; a Buffy episode that gets an 8 is not automatically better than a Doctor Who episode that got a 7, and vice-versa.
For my first foray into Joss Whedon's most famous and influential show, I've picked an obscure episode from the middle of Season Three. I've chosen this episode because I think it's actually the darkest episode of the show, ever. That may be a high claim considering there was an episode in Season 1 with overtures of child abuse, a few episode of Season 2 that were all about sex, and the entirety of Season 6, which was largely about drugs, but also had gunplay, torture, grisly murder and the infamous attempted rape.
But for me, "Gingerbread" is the darkest Buffy episode for two main reasons. One, the plot is kicked off by the discovery of two dead children. When I reviewed Doctor Who's "Curse of the Black Spot" and complained about how obvious it was that the kid wasn't dead, this episode was one of the first things I thought of. Now, you might be wondering, since I've brought up the issue of dead children, what about the Anoited One? To which I respond, 1) the Anointed One was turned offscreen. 2) It was a very legitimate plot twist - the horrible ubervamp was not the religious nutball but instead the innocent little kid. 3) the Anointed One's death - his permanent one, near the beginning of Season 2 - is there both to establish Spike as the real threat and to dispose of a child actor who was aging when his vampiric character couldn't (strange that this was never a problem for David Boreanaz, who looks remarkably different even in Season Three than he did in Season One, never mind the weight he gained by the time Angel wrapped).
Now, yes, the notion of a demon walking around in a kid's body is creepy as all hell, but really, that explanation of vampirism pretty much left town in the middle of Season Two and never came back. Besides, the Anointed One was still mobile, and his body simply vanished when he was killed a second time. The whole "dead child" angle was not a plot point, not like it is here.
The second reason I think "Gingerbread" is Buffy's darkest episode is because by the end, Buffy's mother is pretty much perfectly willing to burn her own daughter at the stake. Top that.
Anyway, here's the plot in a nutshell: Buffy's mother (who, remember, only found out that her daughter was the Slayer at the end of the last season) watched Buffy fight some evil. They have an awkward conversation - because at this point, the show is still trying to make a point of balancing Buffy's normal life with her Slayer activities, something that either goes out the window or is just done wrong after a certain event midway through Season 5 - and then they discover two dead children with a mysterious mark on them.
It transpires that the mark is related to witchcraft, and so The Adults band together and form an anti-occult group. Problem is, Buffy's best friend Willow is a budding witch. '
I don't know how much of this was planned from the beginning, but here goes: Angel, the vampire with a soul and Buffy's love interest for the first three seasons, was originally created to be the main villain for Season Two. As the second half of Season Two - the "Angelus" arc - got underway, it became obvious to Joss Whedon that David Boreanaz deserved his own show. This much is known; I can only speculate as to whether Angel would have been killed for good at the end of Season Two if they weren't planning on spinning him off. It does seem to me like Willow's magical abilities come out of nowhere, and I'll go into more detail when I actually get to the "Becoming" episodes, but I'd be willing to guess that this episode is at least partially a means of payment for how that arc ended. "Okay, Willow restored Angel's soul and we're seeing the consequences of that for Buffy and Angel... what are the consequences for Willow?"
At any rate, this episode does look at those consequences. At this point in the show, magic is not a metaphor for lesbianism or drug abuse, and this episode would no doubt have been considerably different had it been made after Willow and Tara became an item. Here magic is a stigma all its own, and Sunnydale engages in a literal witch-hunt. And because Buffy has supernatural powers, she's dragged into it, too. That's it. On the supernatural end, there's not a lot of metaphor going on, which is rare for this show. (Well... maybe. The show occasionally reminds us that Willow is Jewish...)
On the adults' side, however... It seems to me like this is a satire of those parents' groups that want to outlaw violent video games and the like - or it could be an analogue to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which would at least make it more serious. It turns out that the "dead children" are actually ancient demons who thrive on creating these sorts of witch-hunts (and originated in Germany...). Buffy and the gang stop them, "evil" witch Amy gets stuck as a rat for the next three seasons, and everything just kind of eases back to normal. If Buffy ever calls her mother on the whole "you tried to burn me alive thing" after this, I can't remember it.
So the kids aren't really dead, because ha ha, you can't actually kill kids on TV (stay tuned...) It's interesting to note how the show treats dead children as such serious business, and then nods and winks as it reveals that actually a couple of demons are just playing on people's fears. That the adults could be driven into such a frenzy that they're willing to burn three (admittedly troublemaking) teenagers alive does make for some really compelling drama. And to get there, it does need the "a demon made me do it" oomph. The anti-violent-game lot may be a bunch of riled harpies, but they're not going around demanding human sacrifice. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this is one of the last "Buffy vs Adults" stories - she's still got her confrontation with the Mayor at the end of the season, and a nebulous government organization after that, but from then on it's either personal crises ("The Body," almost all of Season 6) or direct supernatural threats (Glory, the First).
"Gingerbread" features a threat that I wouldn't have minded seeing more of; a corruptor, a threat that can turn the people you trust against you. I don't mean outright mind-control a la "Bad Eggs" or the entire Jasmine arc on Angel, but rather psychological manipulation, a la the Joker to Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight. I mentioned earlier that maybe "Gingerbread" was a payoff for Willow's sudden magical aptitude in "Becoming." Much more obviously, it's payoff for the Buffy-Joyce plot in "Becoming." Joyce felt betrayed by Buffy because Buffy kept her secret lifestyle from her; in this episode, Joyce betrays Buffy. It's an extra little bit of denoument, crammed in the middle of a season, yes, but it shows that the writers really were thinking about the consequences of every single thing that happened on the show.
"Gingerbread" gets a 6 out of 10. That doesn't mean that it's only 60% good; I like it a lot, but 1) there are many other episodes that are better, and 2) it doesn't have many special qualities. It's dark as all hell, and it's a payoff for stuff that happened earlier, but that's about it.
Thursday: BSG miniseries
Friday: DS9: "In the Pale Moonlight"
Saturday: Buffy: "Becoming"
Sunday: Doctor Who: "The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People"
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