Watching this episode on VHS last night, I calculated that the Slayerettes have the situation more or less worked out eight and a half minutes into the episode. They’ve established that Rodney broke the seal, released the mummy and was killed for his pains. Admittedly they don’t know that "Ampata" is the mummy, but they know what they’re up against. In many other series, this would be an excuse for padding or a needless subplot, but this is Buffy. This is a show that knows and respects its audience, so the episode is structured differently- much of the remainder is given over to the Xander-Ampata romance, played and directed in such a way as to make it a real character piece.

It’s Xander’s episode in many ways- in spite of what Buffy says in the opening scenes about not always using violence, she’s mainly here to fight with Ampata and her guardian, particularly as Angel is having a rest this week. But after his infatuation in "Teacher’s Pet", he has a surprisingly mature romance with Ampata- he makes her laugh, and it’s telling that when the time comes, she initially can’t bring herself to draw Xander’s life from him. It’s touching, and it helps us to get underneath her skin too. And in spite of his faux pas in allowing Willow to overhear him saying that he loves her but doesn’t fancy her, at the end of the episode he helps defeat Ampata by challenging her to kill him rather than Willow. He grows a couple of inches here, well on his way to becoming Buffy’s Sergeant Benton- loyal, dependable and willing to lay his own life down for those he cares about and respects.

Ampata is also well drawn- for a villain, there’s a lot of effort put into making her a three-dimensional character, overawed by finding herself in 1990s California and the differences between this and her native culture. As I’ve already touched on, she seems to develop a genuine feeling for Xander, and enjoys his lessons in contemporary American culture. She’s also the first in a line of mirror-image figures for Buffy, which would eventually lead to the likes of Faith; in Ampata’s case, only she could be a worthy sacrifice to the gods- the one girl who could protect her people. She kills in order to survive- or at least to maintain her state- and is eventually defeated when she fails to take the life from either Xander or Willow in time. In many ways a genuinely tragic figure, she believes that she has escaped her fate only to come up against another, equally inescapable, end.

There are also a couple of interesting debuts in this episode- Seth Green as Oz and Danny Strong as Jonathan. The build-up to the Willow-Oz relationship is beautifully done as it’s done scene by scene, week by week, before they eventually talk and find how much they have in common. All we really find out about Oz in this episode is that he isn’t interested in using his position in the band to put notches in his bedpost, and that he’s drawn to Willow’s quirkiness as much as anything else (well, who isn’t?). Jonathan, on the other hand, is a brilliant concept, the regular victim character which used to be part of Cordelia’s role. The fact that the producers found enough potential in the character to keep him going for practically the rest of the show’s run demonstrates how willing they were to run with a good idea- Anya was taken on as a regular character for similar reasons, but it’s true of all Whedon’s shows that they tend to develop an extended cast of semi-regular characters who have lives beyond what we see. There probably aren’t many shows which could have done an episode like "Inca Mummy Girl", and it’s clearly a step on the way to Buffy achieving its true potential.