It’s a commonplace that bad eggs stink, so it’s perhaps inevitable that this episode should have a reputation as a bit of a clunker. It’s one of the two episodes marking time between "What’s My Line?" and the "Surprise/Innocence" two-parter, so the challenge facing Joss Whedon and the Buffy production team was to create a compelling one-shot without overshadowing the more significant events either side, with their more serious implications for the ongoing storylines. What they needed was an entertaining and suspenseful episode with a good balance of scares and suspense, and I think they more or less got it- that said, there are a couple of elements which don’t really work as well as they might.

First off, there are the Gorches. I get the impression that after creating Spike, the production team wanted to see whether genre vampires would work every time and so created the cowboy vamps to see whether lightning would strike twice. It also bears remembering that in the original gameplan Spike would have died during the course of this season, so perhaps there was an idea that Lyle and Tector would have been recurring villains for the rest of the season. Whatever the intent, the fact is that they just don’t work in the same way- they don’t have quite the same originality as Spike, and aren’t played by actors of the same calibre as James Marsters. And they don’t have the same depth to their characters or unpredictability of approach- they’re just less fun to watch.

As far as the regulars are concerned, the pointless Xander-Cordelia relationship goes from weakness to weakness, only serving to bring Cordy into the narrative on a more regular and natural basis than having her be the incidental victim or witness whenever an act of nastiness is perpetrated. That’s starting to become Jonathan’s place, and we have another good example of that in this episode. The creation of Jonathan as a running gag victim was a touch of brilliance and never less than here, where Danny Strong manages to be not just convincing but brilliantly funny with a couple of lines. Alyson Hannigan is on form again as Willow, looking fantastic in the shirt and jeans that Willow wears once possessed; it’s also good that she plays possessed Willow as slightly off beam but not obviously so.

Then there’s the monster, or rather monsters, themselves. The Bezoar creature itself is suitably unpleasant, although it’s hard to see what more a non-speaking eye could have done, and the parasites are appropriately creepy- although the true gross-out moment comes when Xander cracks open his boiled egg and nearly takes a bite. In some ways, it’s a shame that the episode doesn’t go deeper into the Bezoar life cycle- it would have put a different spin on things if somebody had put forward the point that the parasites are part of its natural way of propagation. And the black blood is good- not only does it enable Buffy to emerge from the final fight looking as if she’s just fought an oil well, but it’s consistently and liberally applied in a way which would never be allowed with the red variety. But it’s the possession which is the predictable part- it seems that people possessed by Bezoar parasites act in much the same way as other kinds of pod people, and it’s only Willow who gets to act reasonably normally for a while.

There are, however, some good comic moments- Xander and Cordelia’s bickering taking over the sex education class and Buffy’s reaction to finding out that she’s effectively a single parent stick in the memory, all the more so because Buffy sees in single parenthood that she’s becoming her mother. But that can’t take away from the fact that in many ways this is Buffy-by-numbers. The funny parts are funny, the suspenseful parts are suspenseful and the monsters are suitably repellent- but there’s no heart to it, and apart from Buffy’s feelings on being a single mother, it doesn’t really advance our understanding of the characters after all. I can’t help coming back to one of my first comments, that this and the previous episode are marking time between bigger events, so effect is everything. It succeeds by its own standards, but because those standards aren’t very demanding, it’s ultimately unsatisfying, like having a packet of crisps for lunch.