BtVS: Some Assembly Required

After burning through the entire first season with my aunt, I realized it would be a good idea to get back to reviewing this show. And since we're getting through one episode a night (usually), it means I'll have plenty of blogging material.

"Some Assembly Required" is the 2nd episode of Season 2, which effectively means it's still Season 1 pretending to be Season 2 because the number has changed (in much the same way that the 50s didn't really become the 60s until Kennedy was dead and the Beatles were popular). Unlike a bunch of Season 1 filler episodes, though, this plot doesn't get re-used later on. So at least there's that.

Here's the plot in a nutshell: two members of the nerd squad have resurrected Nicer Nerd's brother, Daryl (Darryl? Daryll? We see his grave at the end and I remember being confused by the spelling). Now they're busy making Bride of Frankenstien for him. As we'll see in Season 3's "The Zeppo," resurrection is a hella lot easier by magic than by science. There was a car crash recently, and the nerd squad harvested the bodies of the three cheerleaders who died, picking and choosing the best bits. However, none of the heads were viable because the mortuary used formaldehyde, which froze their brains or something. So Evil Nerd wants to take some living girl's head, and wouldn't you know, that just happens to be Cordelia.

So having busted their humps explaining why they couldn't use any of the three dead heads (aside from the possibility that Darryl doesn't share their taste in music), the writers then completely gloss over the fact that Darryl died mountain climbing. I somehow doubt Nicer Nerd got to him before the coroner did, unless it was a family vacation or something. But if he brought him back right away, why would Mom be all catatonic?

Also, the big thing about creating a Bride of Frankenstein is that Darryl is now covered in hideous scars and has a metal plate stuck in his arm for some reason. If his head were caved in from the fall, that would be understandable, but unless a wild bear got to him before the coroner did, I don't understand all the scars. The scarring is the justification for why Darryl doesn't just move somewhere else, take a different name, and find a girlfriend. It's pretty important from a storytelling perspective, but the explanation for it either never existed to begin with, or was left on the cutting room floor, and unlike Battlestar, we don't have the luxury of seeing deleted scenes.

Now because Buffy's relationship with Angel is evolving, you'd think the writers would try to insert some deeper subtext into the whole "mortal/undead" relationship issue involving Darryl, but that never really happens. He decides he wants his zombie girlfriend to have Cordelia's head, because they were dating while he was alive. The fact that she has a complete body and a pulse at the moment is a minor inconvenience to Evil Nerd, who dutifully kidnaps her. She protests that she could just keep her head and stay with Darryl anyway. Yeah, she's probably lying - this is the girl who was more concerned with airbrushing her Prom date's bruises out of their photographs than with her Prom date's health, after all. But Darryl's response is all manner of icky. See, he knows she'll just run away unless she's as hideous as he is.

Whereas Angel seems really hesitant to do what his blood tells him and get involved with a mortal, Darryl's attitude is all "hang the consequences, me me me me me." Wait, what am I saying? Cordy's perfect for him.

But then the lab gets set on fire for no real reason and Darryl nearly kills Buffy but instead goes and jumps on his headless bride and burns to death, thus bringing this bizzare and not-at-all thought-out tale to a close.

There's a sort of b-plot to this episode, involving Giles and Jenny Calendar having their first date, which is all manner of funny. But then, their relationship always seems to be the b-plot in the b-movie episodes (cf. "I Robot... You Jane"). Fortunately, the next episode that involves their relationship ("Dark Age") is good. Whew.

Buffy has a smaller body of work than Doctor Who, so it should be relatively easy to grade each episode on a ten-point scale. The problem is, Buffy also fluctuates drastically in quality between seasons. For a Season 2 episode, especially with "School Hard" just around the corner, this one's pretty lousy and probably ranks about a 2 (and that's only because I don't give out zeroes, and only give ones to episodes that are either pointlessly dumb or blatantly offensive polemics... again, "I Robot... You Jane" springs to mind). But given what Season 1 was like, and some of the awful dreck to come in later seasons, I'll bump this one up to a final score of 3 out of 10.

(As a side note, rating Buffy is going to be easier than rating Doctor Who. For a start, there are only two episodes - "Innocence" and "Hush" - that are getting perfect scores, and only a handful more that are getting nines, whereas in Doctor Who I often had trouble differentiating between an 8/10 and a 9/10 serial. Further notes on my rating system: because I don't give out zeroes, five out of ten means "slightly below average" and six out of ten means "slightly above average." 8 and even 7 generally mean "good, but others are better.")