Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered

Two things about this episode: I had to check to see whether this was in fact the first really good comedy episode (quite probably), and then I realised that I couldn’t remember enough about it to start a review. Thanks to the magic of DVD, I have the episode running in a little box in the corner of my screen while I write this, but in retrospect it seems odd of the series to do a comedy episode at this point in the season. The early scenes establish that we’re still dealing with the combined threat of Spike, Dru and Angelus (also neatly getting David Boreanaz’s contractual appearance out of the way), but the central idea of the episode (and all the fun) arise out of the fact that it’s Valentine’s Day and the complicated love lives of Buffy and friends are about to take a new turn.

It all starts when Cordelia, painfully aware of her precarious social position while dating Xander, dumps him at the Bronze after he’s just given her a beautiful necklace. It’s a scene full of a typical Buffy balance of humour and emotion- as we see in the later scene when she pretends to take the necklace from her locker so that Xander doesn’t see that she’s wearing it. So Xander turns to Amy Madison from ‘Witch’, who’s using witchcraft to get out of schoolwork. The spell goes wrong, and instead of winning Cordy’s love back, Xander becomes a babe magnet for every woman in Sunnydale except his ex.

What this amounts to is an opportunity for the female cast to vamp it up and play sexy, which the regulars do with aplomb. Sarah Michelle Gellar starts subtle and turns up the heat slowly, coming on to Xander so convincingly that you can only feel for Xander’s self-doubt when he can’t believe that it’s happening. Alyson Hannigan is equally good, voicing all Willow’s unspoken love for Xander while at the same time remaining in character- it’s easy to see this as the seduction attempt that the ordinary Willow would never dare try to pull. Robia la Morte and Kristine Sutherland also clearly have fun as the older women, but acting honours also to Anthony Head, who holds the thing together; the episode comes dangerously close to unravelling completely when all the female characters are under the influence, but Giles’s determination to understand what’s happening grounds the plot nicely.

The appearance of Angelus and Drusilla (with intentions of turning Xander), and the ratting of Buffy, not to mention the axe-wielding mob, give the episode some sense of peril, but when all’s said and done, this is a fun episode which shouldn’t really be taken as anything else- the nice "nude" scene with Buffy and Oz sets the seal on this. Nothing really horrible happens to anybody, and normal service is more or less restored at the end of the episode. Harmony’s in it, which is always a bonus, but this is strictly lightweight- a few nice character scenes, particularly Cordelia’s "sheep" speech after Harm thinks she’s the bee’s knees because she’s somebody’s third choice for a dance, but also enjoyable enough not to draw attention to the fact that the ongoing story of the season is about to enter its darkest phase.