It’s been a while since I last did one of these reviews, but then I’ve been busy. If it hasn’t been taking in four Tranmere games before the end of September or starting a Russian class with a very cute teacher, it’s been meeting Fred Trueman and trying to organise a formal dinner. But back to Buffy...

After a little excursion into the darkness, ‘What’s My Line’ feels as if Joss Whedon remembered what the show was meant to be about, and pulled it back to Buffy as a sixteen-year-old girl, worrying about her place in life and how it compares with her unique destiny. It’s also the show’s first two-parter since the very beginning, and it feels as if the production team raised their game to put together a story worthy of the longer slot. So we have Spike and Dru back on the offensive, with some extra villains to add flavour, plus some interesting developments in the series’ own mythology- at this point the show was starting to take itself a little more seriously and understand that if you’re going to be a success and attract loyal fans, you need a consistent set of rules.

The real innovation is, of course, Kendra- but any discussion of her origins or place in the Slayer mythology should really wait until the next episode. At the end of this episode, she’s just Kendra the Vampire Slayer- it’s a brilliant trick to play, as the episode up to this point has tried to make the audience believe that Kendra is one of the Order of Teraka. It’s a "huh?" moment, and although the more observant viewers may have suspected that it had something to do with Buffy’s biological death in ‘Prophecy Girl’, at this point nobody knew whether the show was as clever as its viewers. Much has been made of Bianca Lawson’s occasionally comprehensible delivery, but she deserves the benefit of the doubt- having seen Lawson in the flesh, she’s very Californian and apparently only found out at very short notice that the character was meant to be West Indian. She looks the part, though, and has a toughness missing from Buffy- she has no reservations about beating up the airport baggage handler in order to effect her escape from the hold, and believing Angel to be evil, locks him up in a room facing the sunrise to give her time to find Buffy.

The other touch of brilliance in this episode is surely Norman Pfister- a collection of worms which form themselves into something vaguely resembling Jim Broadbent. It’s a departure from the series’ usual conception of villains- something which breaks up the human body and does something very disturbing instead. Spike and Dru are, well, Spike and Dru, except that they show themselves as capable as our heroes of using research to achieve their ends; the Teraka assassin despatched by Buffy and Angel at the ice rink is more from the standard Buffy villain mould. But there’s a definite effort with all the guest villains to make it feel special, a bit like one of those superhero comics where the villains team up against the hero to mark an event of some kind. It feels as if Buffy has remembered what the main thrust of the series is about, and gone back to it.

And the payoff? It’s interesting that at the same time as watching this, I’ve been watching ‘The Sontaran Experiment’, which plays a similar structural trick. So full steam ahead for Part 2...