Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 4, Episodes 15 and 16: This Year's Girl/Who Are You?
This Year's GirlWritten by Douglas Petrie; Directed by Michael Gershman
Who Are You?
Written and Directed by Joss Whedon
One of the things Buffy did very well at this stage was foreshadowing. You definitely got the sense that everything was being planned out months, or even years, in advance, working towards an ultimate goal. This Year's Girl, in the dream sequence between Buffy and Faith, has the first cryptic mention of Dawn. There will be other, similar ones in Restless. There's also a lot of foreshadowing for the Buffy/Spike relationship of Season 6 in Faith-as-Buffy's conversation with Spike at the Bronze.
Anyway, I get the impression that the writers realised the Initiative plot wasn't working out particularly well for them, which is why they decided to shake things up. And who better to shake things up than Eliza Dushku, who, even in the worst episodes of Season 3, never failed to electrocute any scene in which she appeared? Faith comes out of her coma and is out for blood in the first of what is essentially a four-part arc that spills over on to Angel. The first two episodes are on Buffy, and it almost works without watching the Angel episodes, but it's not something I would recommend. The Angel episodes will be reviewed in due course, but tonight I'm focusing on the Sunnydale side of things.
As is so often the case with Buffy two-parters, the second half is noticeably better than the first. This Year's Girl is good, but it takes its time to get going, and there is a lot of padding going on. The Willow/Tara scene, for example, was thrown in late in the game because the episode was running short. I don't mind - it's a good scene, after all - but it doesn't advance the plot sufficiently. Who Are You?, meanwhile, might seem somewhat unambitious given the two other Joss Whedon episodes which flank it (Hush and Restless), but look a little closer and you have some very interesting things going on. The most obvious, naturally, is the notion of Sarah Michelle Gellar playing Faith and Eliza Dushku playing Buffy (in the opening credits, Dushku is even credited "as Buffy"). The two actresses nail the roles, perfecting the characters' very different body language and Gellar even including little quirks like Faith's pronunciation of "out" as "oat". Dushku has a tougher time "being" Gellar given the Buffy character's lack of distinctive speech quirks, but she does an impressive job nonetheless, and when she's speaking it's clear that something is different. As I understand it, Baron Scarpia, whose views of Season 4 I hope to be reading before too long (wink, wink), isn't a big fan of "mistaken identity" episodes, but personally I love them. Those and "alternate reality" episodes. They really give the actors a chance to stretch themselves and help break the monotony that occasionally slips into a 22-episode season.
Other miscellaneous comments. I love Faith-as-Buffy's faces to the camera/mirror. I also like how Tara, who has never met Buffy before, immediately twigs that she isn't "really" Buffy, and how Faith, who has never met Tara before, is the first person to work out that Willow, as she puts it, isn't "driving stick any more". Oh, and I have to wonder, after this episode, how anyone seriously couldn't have worked out that Willow and Tara were lovers rather than friends. Watch the episode, particularly the locator spell scene, and you'll see what I mean. Those are some sexy magicks! Hey, it's even intercut with a sex scene between Buffy and Riley... for at least the second time. How obvious does it have to get?
8/10 for This Year's Girl, 10/10 for Who Are You?
Next time: Superstar.
3 Comments:
Alas, you may be waiting a while longer for a season 4 review, but it will come.
And yes, mistaken identity plots usually irritate me because I hate being so far ahead of the characters in knowing what's going on. If I find a story in which we find out at the same time as the characters - say, in a murder mystery, when the hero is finally explaining everything - I much prefer it.
By Baron Scarpia, at 11:46
How do you feel about films like Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder, where we essentially see things played out backwards, with the villain explaining how he intends to carry out his crime, and then waiting to see if he will be caught by the requisite authorities? Joss Whedon is no Hitchcock, of course, but I do think the same principle is at work.
By Whiggles, at 11:50
Because in such cases - the Columbo effect, as it were - the emphasis is more usually more heavily on 'How will the villain be caught?' which, of course, nobody in the cast knows (or if they do know, they aren't telling!). Typically this is more well done than mistaken identity plots, in which the emphasis is on what has occurred (two people have been confused) than what will occur (how the situation is resolved).
Incidentally, I'm very fond of Columbo.
By Baron Scarpia, at 13:37
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