Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 5, Episode 9: Listening to Fear
Written by Rebecca Rand Kirshner; Directed by David SolomonThis is one of those bizarre episodes that mixes its references so heavily that it ends up feeling like something completely different. Here, we get a combination of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Exorcist, as a giant, slug-like extra-terrestrial crash-lands on earth and goes after crazy people... including Joyce, whose tumour is making her say all sorts of weird things. I've said before that science and Buffy don't mix, and to some extent I think that also goes for UFOs, but at least the idea is reasonably novel, and the slug creature is a guy in a suit rather than a dodgy CGI effect.
As I'm rewatching Season 5, it's becoming increasingly clear to me that, whereas the show in its earlier years was about the supernatural with family life serving as an extension of it, this is year year in which Buffy became more about family life, with the supernatural serving as an extension of it. Of course, in Season 6, the show essentially became a soap opera through and through, but for Season 5, I don't mind the increased emphasis on characters' relationships and domestic problems, mainly because it makes thematic sense, and because the seasonal arc is threaded through it so well.
PS. It's at this point that the "previously on..." recaps start to get ridiculously long, given the level of continuity each episode relies on.
Overall rating: 7/10.
Next time: Into the Woods.
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