Weekly Watchlist: October 1st to 7th, 2017 [Pt. 1]

Well, this Halloween sure is off to a slow start for me. I'm watching horror movies when I can (which is, as always, not as often as I'd like), reading some spooky stories before bed, working on some seasonal writing projects both solo and with my pal Rik (proprietor of The Cinema 4 Pylon, and my partner in We Who Watch Behind the Rows and Visiting & Revisiting), but still it just doesn't feel like Halloween yet. Partly that may be due to the weather, which has turned unseasonably warm once again after a few refreshing weeks of near-autumnal cool in September (well, Autumnal for Southern California, which isn't really very cool at all). The biggest factor, I feel, is that this year I'm not working the Halloween Horror Nights event at Universal Studios, which I did for the last three years.

Halloween Horror Nights worked as a great jumpstart to the season, beginning my Halloween in mid-September when I would begin spending four nights a week down at the Bates Motel, in the open night air surrounded by Walking Dead zombies the first year, Purge killers the second year, and killer clowns the third. It was without a doubt the most fun thing I've ever been paid for. My first year I was a new hire, but my second and third years I went back as a team lead in charge of the Bates Motel. I loved it each year, even the third year, when various managerial frustrations became so bad that I almost walked away from the event and rejoined day operations in the park. Even though I would come home with a laundry list of complaints every night, and I really was annoyed and frustrated, part of me also still loved it. Just to be in that location, seeing and hearing people getting scared all night, spending time with my coworkers who were uniformly great, eating lunch at a table packed with zombies, was great. It relaxed me in a way, though I spent each night on my feet and running back and forth putting out fires (figuratively, of course). 

This year I am without that framework that would normally get me into the Halloween spirit, but on top of that, I am fully unemployed. I don't necessarily mind that part, as it has been allowing me to spend the last few weeks as a stay-at-home dad, taking care of my kids and preparing meals and trying to relax. but it does have some very real drawbacks. And lets not even get into the socio-political landscape we live in, which seems to become more nightmarish with every passing day. I want to say that I am not actively depressed, and am generally in a pretty good mood every day, but all of these things together have left me feeling less seasonally festive than normal.

All of that will hopefully explain why I got a bit of a late start on my Halloween viewing this year. While I usually begin the month of October with a vague framework of movies and books set aside to watch and read, this year I've been playing it by ear. What follows is the list of what films and television shows I've been watching so far to get into the Halloween mood.

The Television Shows:

I want to briefly discuss a show I did not watch this week, but that more or less started the ball rolling in my Halloween preparations. Stan Against Evil,  the horror-sitcom from comedian Dana Gould that is about to begin its second season on IFC. If I were to be strictly objective about the show, it would in no way convey how much I actually enjoyed watching it. If I were being brutally honest, I would say that much of the Stan Against Evil is overly familiar, the jokes all seem a bit too easy, and the gore is primarily of the digital variety, but I would also say that I didn't mind any of that and had a lot of fun watching the show. A lot of that lies in the casting, with John C. McGinley as the title character, a recently retired sheriff in a town where, due to a witch's curse in the 1600s, every sheriff has been killed violently on the job. Stan is in fact the only sheriff ever to make it to retirement age, for reasons that are revealed in the pilot episode. Actress/comedian Janet Varney plays Stan's replacement, brought in after Stan violently assaults an elderly woman at his wife's funeral. Don't worry, the woman was a witch threatening his life, so he's not entirely unhinged.

If the show works, it's generally due to John C. McGinley's performance as the gruff ex-sheriff. The character was modeled after Dana Gould's own father, and the specificity adds a lot to the character's general appeal. I wouldn't say he has charm, because he's never less than insulting or intentionally offputting towards every other character we meet, but it's hard not to like McGinley in the role. McGinley specializes in verbose macho jerks, and it would be easy to just slot his Dr. Cox character from Scrubs into this series, but McGinley turns down his normal energy for a much more grounded New England stoicism.

I began watching Stan Against Evil on the night of the day I got fired from a new job that I had been very excited and hopeful about. In general I was in an unproductive malaise for a good week or two after the firing, and Stan Against Evil was a great help during those first few days. The night I began watching, I was sitting like a lump on my couch, while my wife worked on some cross stitching next to me. I couldn't think of anything to watch that I wanted to expend the energy to concentrate on, so after a few minutes of scrolling through Hulu and Netflix and Amazon, I settled on Stan Against Evil. I recognized straightaway the problems with the show that I've already mentioned, but it also completely won me over from the opening scene. It was visual comfort food, a supremely silly and lighthearted series that required little investment on the part of the viewer. I could start it up whenever I felt like it and for 22 minutes just let the goofiness wash over me. Owing to my lack of a cable package, I'll have to wait awhile for season two to make it to Hulu, but when it does I'll most assuredly be binging the entire thing. In fact, I may squeeze in a rewatch of the first season just to keep myself sated.

More pertinent to the topic of this piece, which is ostensibly about movies and shows I watched during the first week of October, is the seventh season of The Walking Dead, a show which should need no introduction from me, and if I'm being honest I don't have a ton to say about. I wasn't a huge fan of this show at first, which started with one of the best pilot episodes in recent memory, but then became a little less interesting with each subsequent episode. I stuck around the dismal second season more out of stubbornness than anything else. The show was not only boring, but it was too easy to see the hands of the writer guiding every character. Characters would do idiotic things not because that was in their nature, but because the writers needed to spice things up, or move pieces into position for a planned confrontation. Characters would behave inconsistently from one scene to the next, motivations would change or be forgotten, and it became more and more embarrassing that the show would only add a new black character once the previous one had been killed. Season three showed marginal improvement, mainly by getting characters out of the farmhouse that killed momentum in the previous season, but it still suffered from many of the same writing problems that plagued the previous two seasons. Season four started to really come together, and although it still wasn't great, it was consistently improving to the point that even the episodes I didn't like I at least appreciated for the way they were trying to course correct. At this point, I look forward to each new season dropping onto Netflix, and my wife and I usually burn through the season in a couple days.

When this latest season premiered I was actually working in the Walking Dead attraction at Universal Studios. Since I watch the shows on Netflix, I'm behind the times and have to make sure I leave the room when people start talking about the show, which I knew would be a must once the new season premiered. If you remember season six, it ended with a cliffhanger where we knew someone in the main group had just been killed, but we had no idea who it was. Amber and I had already planned on purchasing the episode on Amazon so we could watch it quickly and discover who had died before it could be spoiled for us, but unfortunately we just didn't act quickly enough. The season premiered on a Sunday, and I had no time to watch the episode due to conflicting work schedules. I showed up to work early Monday morning to set up the venue for the day, planning on watching the show as soon as I got home. I was the second person in after the supervisor, and my job was to get the place set up, do safety checks and equipment checks, and prepare daily paperwork. My plan was to get through the day without engaging in discussion of the television show, and I was already prepared to shush people who wanted to talk to me about it. I arrived at work, grabbed the daily meeting paperwork the supervisor had printed out, and right there taking up half the page was a picture of two prominent Walking Dead cast members and the large-type caption "Rest in Peace [names redacted]." Shit. Surprise ruined. I'm not overly sensitive to spoilers in general, although I do try to avoid them, but this struck me as a bit cruel. Of course, I was able to keep my mouth shut for the rest of the day and not ruin it for Amber, although when we watched the episode later that night most of the tension had been removed from the long buildup to revealing who had died.

The show has become remarkably consistent over the past few years, and I find myself more and more engaged with the characters on screen, even characters I had previously not enjoyed. The widening of the scope of the show that started with season six's introduction of additional communities continued with this season, with the introduction of the incredibly entertaining Kingdom, the inscrutable trashpeople, and an isolated community composed of only women survivors of The Saviors. I know everyone loves Negan, the larger than life leader of the Saviors, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan is really chewing the hell out of that part, but I was actually a little flumoxxed by how inconsistent he was as a threat. He's introduced beating two main characters to death, and then continues to terrorize everyone who crosses him in truly horrific manner. And yet, each time Rick's group defies him, his punishments never live up to what he's promised, and he spares the lives of people who have done far worse than others he has punished brutally.

I think the thing that keeps me engaged with The Walking Dead at this point, despite the continued flagging of my interest in zombie entertainment, is that the show learned awhile back how to inject a bit of humor, and that the point of the show should be hopeful rather than nihilistic. Sure, death comes to characters beloved, hated, or unknown, and it often comes at seemingly random intervals. Sure every few steps forward seem to come with a commensurate step back, but those steps forward are being taken. No matter how dire the situation gets, the takeaway is that we can regain our humanity, we can find a way forward.

Also, the effects team has really risen to the challenge of coming up with interesting zombie kills. Some really amazing practical effects on that show. That alone would keep me coming back, I'm just glad the rest of the show has caught up.

If you read my previous piece about Fear Itself, the fourth season Buffy the Vampire Slayer Halloween episode, you'll recall that my daughter was interested in the show enough that she asked if we could watch the rest of the series. We started that this week, and due to her spending a day home sick, and the general brevity of the first season run, we finished that on Friday night. It was the first time I'd seen the series in at least ten years, and it was an interesting experience revisiting it with her. In that earlier piece I already briefly went over my history with the show, so I'll skip that for now and just discuss the first season on its own.

Season one of Buffy, like most genre television shows, in retrospect feels more like a dry run for what the show would eventually evolve into. It's the rare show television show indeed that comes out of the gate fully formed and firing on all cylinders, but genre television shows in particular have a hard time in the beginning. I can think of only one sci-fi/fantasy show that has jumped onto our television screens with everything more or less in place, The X-Files, and even that show had its share of missteps in the first season. When it came to Buffy, my thought was always that the show only started to get interesting in season two, give or take a couple of bright spots in season one. Season one just came across as too silly, while much of the humor never quite landed. The actors weren't quite used to their roles, the writing hadn't yet deepened these characters in a manner that made their personal turmoils interesting, and visually the show could be unpleasant to look at. I had thought about starting my daughter off with season two, as the show develops in such a way that a new viewer could pretty much jump in whenever they wanted up until the final season, but in the end we started at the beginning (my completist nature would accept no less), and I withheld my opinions so she could make up her own mind. If she lost interest, I'd just tell her that the show improves and forge ahead.

So color me mildly surprised that I actually found myself really enjoying the first season. Maybe it had to do with the length of time since I had last seen it, and the nostalgia that had built up around the pop culture surrounding me in the late 90s (though I didn't watch Buffy during it's first season, I was certainly aware of it and the various pop culture accoutrements the show dressed itself in), or maybe it was my lowered expectations, but I found myself wondering why I had been so hard on the first season. Sure, the visual look of Buffy is altogether too dark and the film is too grainy, the action is amateurishly staged compared to what the show would be doing from the next season onwards, a lot of the humor falls flat, and some of the threats the gang faces are downright laughable, but it's also not nearly as bad as I remembered.  The show may not have been firing on all cylinders, to reuse that phrase, but you could see the pieces coming together over the season.

Definitely a real low point in the series.

The entirety of Buffy season one was filmed before a single episode had aired, which has some positives and some minuses. One of the positives is that it allowed Joss Whedon and Co. to pepper in some foreshadowing in a fairly organic manner, allowing the season-long arc dealing with The Master and the prophecy that he will kill Buffy to simmer along in the margins for the majority of the season. It also allowed the showrunners to develop a stable of extras so that the high school was filled with faces we would occasionally see again over the course of the season. Teachers would show up in the background, or students would pass by that we had seen before, making the high school feel more like an actual school. The biggest drawback, however, is one that is a danger to all television shows that are developed without audience reaction: they had no idea how the audience would react to the cast or the plot. A lot of shows undergo course correction as they run, as audience reaction can help writers discover what is and isn't working and react to that input. The fact that Buffy was written and directed before any audience had a chance to see it meant that they would not be able to react to any criticisms, they would have to trust that the show was on the right track. So it might count as a minor miracle that the show not only struck a chord with audiences, but found the right track on its own. There's a clear point at which season one seems to find the right balance of humor, horror, and high school dramatics, so that by the end of the twelve episode season a remarkably sturdy framework has been constructed that six future seasons will be built atop.

Currently, my daughter and I are a couple episodes into season two. With school all week we may only get through a handful of episodes by the time my next Watchlist piece goes up, but I'm really looking forward to rediscovering this old favorite.

Note: This piece was originally intended to cover both film and television, but I took so long with my intro, and the television discussions took up so much space, that I've decided to split this article in half. Check back soon for discussions of the eleven seasonally appropriate feature films I watched in this period.

A Very Special Episode: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Fear Itself

Growing up, one of my favorite parts of the Halloween season were the Halloween specials that would air more and more frequently towards the end of the month. Possibly I enjoyed this even more than the act of trick or treating, which was undeniably fun and rewarding in terms of acquiring piles of candy, but also sometimes a chore. Halloween night in Anchorage, Alaska was often not the most pleasant time to be wandering around outdoors. The temperatures would have dipped to the point where I would have to wear my costume over bulky snow gear, if I was lucky, and under the snow gear, if I was not, so that all that was visible of my costume would be my face. That is not to say I ever avoided trick or treating. Some nights I would make multiple trips, never to the same house twice, so that I could head home and warm up for a few minutes and empty my often stuffed-to-the-brim bag of candy. But still those nights are cold, in  a way that can cut through even the thickest jacket, and heading inside for the night would become more and more appealing as the night wore on. Once inside, with my pile of candy in front of me, after my mom had gone through and checked to make sure everything was factory sealed and had no tears or holes in the packaging (Providence Hospital provided free screenings of candy for parents nervous about poisoning or razorblades, but I grew up in a pretty nice neighborhood where we knew a large number of our neighbors personally, and so a cursory visual exam was usually all we needed to make sure things were safe), I would sit on the floor or couch and gorge myself on candy while watching whatever Halloween programming I could find.

Halloween specials started to fall out of fashion eventually, but when I was a kid it seemed every sitcom or procedural drama on the air would do a spooky Halloween themed episode. Sometimes the Halloween trappings would amount to nothing more than some costumes and decorations, though sometimes the showrunners would take the seasonal opportunity to indulge in a little supernatural hijinks, maybe explaining it away as a dream, maybe just letting it stay there, never to be remarked upon again. On one end of the spectrum is a show like Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which does a Halloween episode every year, but keeps it within the reality of the show as the characters indulge in some seasonal shenanigans. On the other end is something like the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror, in which all rules that normally govern the show are thrown out in favor of anthology horror tales where, often, some of the regular cast dies. These types of episodes are usually non-canonical, and take place in a sort of Elseworlds version of the show. The sweet spot for me lies somewhere in the middle; a show where the Halloween episode exists within the show's overall reality, but allows the supernatural to creep in in a way that would otherwise not be possible without, as they say, jumping the shark.

For this Halloween season, on top of my regular viewings of horror movies and my regular readings of horror books, I've decided to revisit some of my favorite Halloween specials. I'll be discussing five of them here this month, and though I'll be watching a lot more than that I think I've already narrowed it down to my desired list. But, of course, things may change. So now, without further ado, allow me to welcome you to the first entry in A Very Special Episode, charting some noteworthy, at least to me, Halloween specials from, (generally) my childhood.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Fear Itself (Season 4, episode 4)

Written by David Fury, Directed by Tucker Gates

Original Air Date: October 26, 1999

This episode is the most recent of the specials I've chosen to cover this year, and the only one that aired after I could be called, legally if not emotionally, an adult. It is also the only show in which the dark supernatural aspects present in the Halloween special are actually part of the normal makeup of the show. I almost saved this one for later, or bypassed it altogether because it slightly breaks the pattern of the rest of the shows I'll be talking about, but then I remembered how great Fear Itself is, and that watching it again would give me an opportunity to introduce my thirteen year old daughter to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I came late to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, mostly missing out on the first two seasons. This was owing mainly to the fact that in the pre-DVR era you were at the mercy of the television schedule, and if something conflicted with that schedule, of you weren't the only one in the house with an interest in the television, you were out of luck. I didn't actually start catching episodes regularly until the third season, when I was in college and my schedule meant that I frequently caught episodes while other students watched it in the common room. And it still wasn't until the fifth season, when I was living in an apartment on my own, that I began to actively watch Buffy every week as it aired. For the rest of its run I would not miss a single Buffy episode, and by the sixth season I was watching it semi-regularly with friends. Also, by the end of the sixth season, I was living with my future wife, who has had little patience for my Buffy fandom over the years. Now, twenty years after the series first premiered, I decided it was time to introduce my daughter to the show, and used this opportunity to start her off with one of my favorite episodes.

The first thing I noticed when watching Fear Itself for the first time in at least a decade, compounded by the fact that I was watching it with someone who had no prior information about the world of the show, was how integral the serialized elements of the show were to what I mostly remembered as a standalone episode. A lot of time is spent in the first half of the episodes following the characters as they navigate their daily lives and the problems, mostly romantic in nature, that plague them. Buffy is in a funk brought on by the fact that the boy she was falling for turned out to only be interested in a one night stand, while she also steadily falls behind in her college course work. Willow is experiencing her own romantic strife with her werewolf boyfriend Oz, who expresses concern that Willow is diving too quickly into witchcraft. Xander is still trying to figure out where he stands with ex-vengeance demon Anya, who at this point he has been kinda-sorta dating for a short time, while also fending off strong bouts of insecurity brought about by the fact that he's the only member of the gang not going to college, and without any supernatural abilities. Also lurking around the edges are future Buffy boyfriend Riley, subtle intimations of the health troubles that will plague Buffy's mother in the next season, and the shadowy government agency that's been stirring up trouble in Sunnydale.

All the personal drama takes up almost half of this episode, and there aren't even any intimations of the threat the gang will be facing until 15 minutes in, when Oz accidentally bleeds onto a decorative occult symbol that some frat boys are painting on the floor as part of their Halloween preparations. Unseen by anyone else in the room, a plastic spider within the magical circle becomes a real spider and crawls away. Cut to commercial. And still it takes another ten minutes of interpersonal drama before the gang arrives at the haunted house party (a metaphorical haunted house, the house itself is not normally haunted) and discovers the threat inside. Cut to another commerical. This is an awful lot of screentime to devote when you've only got 43 minutes, minus opening and closing credits, to tell your story, and yet it's integral to not only why the episode works, but why Buffy as a television series was so successful.

A lot of people claim season three to be their favorite season of Buffy, owing to the introduction of some fan-favorite characters and, in the Mayor, the best season villain (or Big Bad in the show's parliance, a term coined by the show that has since entered the common lexicon) the show would ever have. Season three is when Buffy really began to fire on all cylinders. The first two seasons are still great, but season three is when the show came into its own and the humor, scares, drama, and general writing quality all began to work in harmony. For my money, however, season four beats season three in all but one aspect: the villain. It's true, the Mayor is an incredibly charismatic, engaging, and entertaining villain, a man who's aw-shucks Boy Scout demeanor belies a ruthless devotion to the dark arts that has kept him alive for over a century, a perfect foil for Buffy. No other Big Bad quite matches his appeal, but season four suffers for placing perhaps the show's weakest villain so closely to its best. 

Adam also looks fairly silly.

The main villain of season four is, for much of the season, The Initiative, the shadowy government agency listed above. It's a bit of an odd addition to Buffy's mythology, bringing a dash of X-Files conspiracy to a series that had primarily been interested in myth and magic. They don't mesh with the rest of the show, and fail to become very interesting. Eventually the threat of The Initiative leads into the threat of Adam, a Frankenstein's Monster style reanimated corpse being trained as a super soldier. I actually enjoy the performance of the actor portraying Adam, but the character himself is dull by design and lacks the dynamic personality of the Mayor. 

If you look at the season beyond merely its villain, season four shines in every other category. Season four contains some of the series' sharpest comedic writing and its most successful blending of serialization and standalone episodes. The trend in dramatic television these days is towards tighter seasons and an emphasis on serialization, where every episode needs to be about the show itself, and needs to be focused on moving the story forward. This has led to some great television, without a doubt, but I do miss the days of 22 episode seasons, where every once in awhile you would get an episode that was just the characters hanging out together, dealing with one specific threat, without it having to be about only moving the story forward (for the record, I think Breaking Bad is maybe the best-case example of the current trend towards hyper-serialization, as each episode pushed the storyline forward but also kept its focus solely on character). Buffy in its fourth season had the best handle on this balancing act, as even the throwaway episodes that have no bearing on the overarching plot include some incremental movement forward. There's even an episode that hinges on a magical wish changing reality, that ends with everything back the way it began and the episode's events more or less erased from existence, and it still features one major development that sets the course of events for the finale. This has always been my go-to explanation for Buffy's greatness: the show knew when to switch gears and allow the fans to just enjoy these characters being their charming likable selves, but also knew how to weave in more long-form storytelling. 

Fear Itself is written by David Fury, and it's his fourth script for the series overall, but his first after being hired on as a regular writer and producer. David Fury would become one of the most reliable names in the Buffy credits, alongside Jane Espensen, Marti Noxon, Douglas Petrie, and Whedon himself. He would also go on to become an important voice in the spinoff series Angel, helping that show find its footing and grow out of its awkward phase into more than just a Buffy clone. Fury's episodes tended to hit the sweet spot between funny and scary, and showed a deft hand at serving the individual characters as well as the genuine schocks, which is evident in Fear Itself when the gang arrives at the frat party (filmed, coincidentally, in the same house as season one of American Horror Story) to discover that something is making everybody's fears manifest: rubber spiders become real, decorative skeletons become rotted zombies, peeled grapes actually do become slimy eyeballs. Good stuff. All of the personal drama in the front half of this episode may seem in the broad strokes to be a perfunctory attempt to keep all of these running storylines moving before going on to the good stuff, but the two are actually so closely intertwined that it would be impossible to have either section of this episode work without the other. 

Oz's fear that he won't be able to control his lycanthropic tendencies and will eventually hurt someone he cares about manifests itself when he begins to change into a werewolf despite it not being a full moon. Willow's insecurity over being always stuck in the sidekick role causes her conjuring of a spirit guide to split off into dozens of separate guides, one for each course of action she can't decide on. Xander feels that he is being left behind by his friends both socially and mentally, and he becomes invisible to them, lost in the house unable to communicate (in a callback to season one episode Out of Mind, Out of Sight). Buffy's fear is the least remarked upon in the episode itself, but also perhaps the most complicated. She finds herself alone as the house separates the group, and it underlines the fear she has that she will never be anything but the Slayer, that no matter how she tries she will only ever be defined by this one aspect of her life, and will never have a normal existence.

If all of this sounds a bit too involved, or possibly even dull, for a series about a bubbly blonde teenager fighting back the forces of darkness, it should be noted that Fear Itself is a legitimately scary hour of television, punctuated by some great bits of humor (Giles' continuing descent into Dad On Vacation mode with his garish Halloween decorations and giant sombrero; Anya's revelation that there is nothing scarier to this ex-demon than bunnies; Giles responding to the mystical forces creating a maze of the frat house by simply using a chainsaw to cut a path through the building). Buffy The Vampire Slayer did two other Halloween-specific episodes over the course of its seven seasons, and while both of them are good fun, Fear Itself is a true classic, aided in large part by its abrupt and somewhat unexpected ending. 

As should surprise no one watching this show, the occult symbol painted on the floor turned out to be part of a summoning ritual, in this case a ritual to summon a fear demon called Gachnar. Gachnar, in the woodcut drawing we see of him, resembles a more feral cousin of Clive Barker's Cenobites from the Hellraiser series, all sharp teeth and long claws and tight leather straps. He appears to be an opponent worth fearing, and in Buffy's rush to avoid a fight she inadvertently completes the summoning spell and unleashes Gachnar on the world. I'm not going to actually spell out the ending of this episode, on the off chance that anyone reading this has not actually seen the episode in question and yet still plans to do so, but it does involve a fantastic visual gag and a terrific punchline of a closing line. 

There was a point about a decade ago where I thought Buffy would eventually join the pantheon of great television shows, shows that illustrate what the medium is capable of while also pushing forward the standards to which a television show should be held. That hasn't quite turned out to be the case, as Buffy's reputation has slightly fallen over the years. To be sure, the fandom behind Buffy, and also Joss Whedon, remains fervent and supportive, but the public conversation has also died down a bit. Gone are the days when fans would organize singalong screenings of the Buffy musical episode from season six, and even Whedon's own longrunning and very popular fansite was recently shuttered. Part of that probably has more to do with certain revelations regarding Whedon's personal life than it does with the quality of his work, but it also coincides with a general lack of interest in his style. Despite creating two of the cornerstones of modern nerd culture (Buffy and his short-lived space opera Firefly), and despite being one of the architect's of Marvel's current cinematic dominance, Joss Whedon's star has fallen somewhat, and the cultural discussion seems to be in the process of passing him by.

For myself, I'm still a fan. He's done too much intriguing and entertaining work for me to ever write him off, and I'll probably continue to check out whatever new projects he has. If it's a little dated, that is unfortunately unavoidable, and something you'll just have to get over if you expect to appreciate anything made more than a decade ago. As an example, I will say that this episode intrigued my daughter enough that she asked if we could watch the rest of the series. We are currently midway through season one, which is not the high point of the show, and she loves it. She wasn't even born yet when the series went off the air, and she's finding herself drawn into the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Not for a minute is she put off by the incredibly dated fashions or odd Whedonesque slang. Beneath all of the cool-in-1999 trappings, beyond the vampires and demons and monsters, Buffy's themes remain universal.

Next on A Very Special Episode: Quantum Leap; The Boogieman