To begin with, a little context: ‘Reptile Boy’ was the point where the first BBC2 run of Buffy stopped, largely because of the deal the BBC and Sky had, and the fact that if BBC2 hadn’t pulled Buffy in favour of another summer of sport (although what sport I’m not sure, as 1999 wasn’t a World Cup or Olympic year), they would have caught up with Sky within a couple of months.So the episode has negative associations for me before I even start- in fact, I even remember it being shown on an election day, and my irritation at the end of the episode influenced my vote- well, I was in one of my angry nihilistic moods.

Beneath the surface of ‘Reptile Boy’, there’s a straight-to-video horror movie trying to get out. It’s just that there’s never really any attempt to put any sense of danger or suspense into the episode; we know from the first scene that Tom is involved with the demon-worshipping fraternity, however plausible he may seem, and if the form Machida takes is supposed to be a surprise, it just comes across as an attempt to do something different. The disturbing element of the episode comes from seeing Buffy and Cordelia out of their depth, not because they’re mixing with demon-worshippers, but because they’re sixteen-year-old girls at a frat party. It feels like a retrograde step for Cordelia to be so forced and artificial, and you could argue that the point of the episode is that she’s being precisely that in order to make the right connections at the party, but we’re still back with Superficial Cordy who wants to network so she can get cheap cosmetics. Somehow the callous misogyny of the fraternity is more effective than Machida hissing and snarling at the girls, particularly when Tom shows his true colours, as is the idea that a group of young men kidnapping girls would just chain them up and wait for Machida to show himself, rather than use them for their own gratification.

There’s very little humour in this episode- we see a little more of the eight-year-old in Giles as he plays at being a swashbuckling swordsman, and Willow’s tirade at Angel and Giles is an entertaining step outside the character, but apart from that and the Cordelia-Jonathan scene at the end, it’s nearly all done straight except for some character comedy. The early Giles-Buffy scenes are probably the best from a character point of view, but as Buffy says, there hasn’t been much paranormal activity at all in Sunnydale lately, so the episode has a feel of marking time before the big Spike and Dru plot gets taken up a notch. The initial concept of a demon-worshipping fraternity isn’t bad, although it turns out to be somewhat insubstantial when you try to make it into a full episode; in fact, it probably could have been made a couple of years later when Buffy herself is a student, and been better for it, perhaps even including an ongoing character in the fraternity. As it is, in the scheme of things it comes out as a one-shot filler which doesn’t really add anything to the ongoing story until the final scene- and even then it’s just an invitation to coffee.