Before I go any further, I’d just like to say that thanks to my now owning the wonderful 39-disc 7-season complete Buffy box set, all my reviews from henceforth will be sharper with fewer dropouts- and I can have the episode playing on the eMac as I’m writing. It’s a wonderful combination, and the only thing which could make it better would be having the tech to do screen captures. At slightly less than a pound an episode on Amazon, it’s practically essential and I still haven’t worked out how to watch it all.

‘Phases’, then. It’s a curious episode, which starts out as a fairly routine attempt at doing "the werewolf episode", and ends up as an uplifting little tale concerned with finding out the truth about people, and how we react when we do. The pre-titles scenes do a wonderful job of setting up exactly where the main characters are in their respective relationships; while Willow and Oz have just been on a date, Willow also has to help Buffy through her loss of Angel. Meanwhile, Xander and Cordelia are parking in lovers’ lane and while his lips may be in it, his heart isn’t. And then there’s the werewolf, introduced in the classic situation from a hundred monster movies, attacking the couple as they misbehave.

At the heart of ‘Phases’ is quite a clever but simple and effective duality. Oz and Larry both hide secrets; Oz is the cool, sensitive musician who turns out to be a savage potential killer, while Larry maintains a boorish and obnoxious front because he doesn’t think he can afford to be known as gay. There’s a nice symmetry to it, which is only improved by the fact that Larry turns out to be another of Joss Whedon’s clever supporting characters who keep popping back, and the way in which he ultimately starts to accept that he’s gay- and becomes more comfortable with himself as a consequence. It’s another example of Whedon’s mission statement for Buffy’s first couple of years- that roles in high school (and life, for that matter) aren’t prescriptive, and there’s no law that says you can’t be gay and a quarterback (although it might explain why he doesn’t seem to have dated Cordelia). Oz, by contrast, is a difficult character to evaluate, precisely because Seth Green plays him in such an understated way- his best moments are the small, intimate character scenes with Willow, and it’s easy to believe in them as a couple, although the phone conversation where he finds out that little Cousin Jordy is a seven-year-old werewolf shows a comic talent as well.

If the episode has a weakness, it’s probably Kane the werewolf hunter, written and played as a caricature, who serves his dramatic purpose and nothing more- he doesn’t fit into the structure of the rest of the story, so having established himself as an added threat, there isn’t much else for him to do. But otherwise, it’s a good episode rather than a brilliant one, strong on character, and with the beautiful final moments where Willow accepts Oz for what he is. Positive messages in abundance- it’s OK to be gay, it’s OK to be different, it’s OK to have problems, because once you can accept yourself, your real friends will too.