So, Buffy returns for a full season. The first scene sets things up perfectly- in Buffy’s absence, Xander and Willow have been hanging out. Willow seems to have changed conditioner and accepted Xander’s feelings for Buffy, although she hasn’t entirely given him up for lost, and they very nearly kiss before normal service is resumed. The culmination is, however, Buffy’s "Hi guys...miss me?" delivered to camera. It’s done with such confidence and panache, and promises that the show is going to be playing with that fourth wall a bit more this year; the later scene where Giles meets Jenny Calendar again while Principal Snyder complains about lust-crazed teens shows that the show hasn’t lost any of its sense of humour. The title sequence has been re-edited slightly with some shots from this episode and a swooshy crossbow noise- Joss Whedon’s commentary on ‘Welcome to the Hellmouth’ reveals that Nerf Herder re-recorded the theme after the first season, so the opportunity was taken to update some of the shots.

The episode is ostensibly about how Buffy copes or fails to cope with the fall-out from the events of ‘Prophecy Girl’. She’s particularly harsh on Angel, lying to him about having been woken up from a really good dream when she was having a nightmare about the Master and taking their relationship back a stage to a time before they had feelings for each other. And then there’s that dance. It’s another classic Buffy big emotional moment. Buffy dances very close with Xander and starts leading him on, purely to get back at Angel. Angel gets hurt and so does Willow. Emotional complexity on this scale would become one of the series’ characteristics, but this is probably the first time it’s attempted in quite this way. The only thing the sequence misses is the look on Willow’s face as Buffy grabs her coat and walks out, but it leads into a nice sequel to Buffy’s scene with Cordelia in ‘Out of Mind, Out of Sight’. This time, it’s Cordelia who wants to get under Buffy’s skin- she knows from experience that Buffy’s course of action is going to cost her her few remaining friends and particularly Angel- but again Cordy’s mask slips and we see that she knows exactly what she’s doing and she knows how to play that part. Of course Buffy doesn’t pay any attention, and her insistence on doing things her way nearly gets her friends killed, although it shows attention to detail to remember that Xander fought his way into the school with Buffy and Angel when the Master died rather than being with Willow and Giles, so he isn’t wanted for the ceremony.

There’s not much else to say about the plot itself- in a lot of ways it could have felt like warmed-up leftovers, but it manages not to. It deals with a few loose threads- like what happened to the Anointed One and all those vampires- but the incidental characters don’t stand out. Absolom is our first speaking black vampire- Sunnydale is, I think, intended to be a stereotyped white-bread small California town, but there’s nothing in the way the character is written to suggest that the character needed to be one race or another. It’s just unfortunate that the vampire makeup doesn’t really show to the best advantage on a black actor- you don’t get the same contrast of light and shade on the forehead- although Mr Trick would later prove that a black vampire could be very effective. And yet again, after an episode of playing Buffy as really quite unpleasant, towards the end Sarah Michelle Gellar finds the vulnerability- the couple of sniffs as she picks up the mallet to crush the Master’s bones make all the difference. At the end of the episode, normality is restored- Buffy’s friends are still her friends and they can make light of the previous night’s adventure knowing that Buffy has put it behind her and exorcised that particular demon. It’s interesting that the final scene with the Anointed One is ultimately a red herring- at this stage I imagine the production team had decided that the character had limited mileage and had a better idea. Altogether, then, a solid if unexceptional start, with the emphasis on character rather than spectacle, Joss Whedon on form as writer and director and the cast doing what they do best.