Buffy Anne Summers, aka

Of and about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, much has already been written — by fans, by TV critics, by grad students and professors. As such, one approach to this blog that would have proved tempting to your author only a few short years ago would have been to work up considerable skull sweat and set out to compete with, or top, what has already been said.

Who knows? Old habits die hard, and I may attempt that effort eventually. Yet the years have been somewhat less than kind to me, and Buffy has been a dear friend to me, and I have no desire to turn my friend into foe, nor to turn what has been a great pleasure into a great labor. I would much rather rekindle, and then nurture, that initial sense of joy I (and perhaps others?) felt when a television show became, for the first time in my (our?) life, not merely an idle pass time, but one of life’s necessities.

As I’ve mentioned previously, when I first started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I was recovering from surgery. At that time it was airing at about six in the morning every weekday.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, my timing was extraordinary. Without planning on it — without even being aware of it — the very first time I tuned in to Buffy, it just so happened to be the first episode. Initially, the show struck me as interesting in an odd sort of way, and, for the next few days, that combination kept me coming back — and I now prefer to think that being unable at the time to do much else but sleep, eat, and read or watch TV had little or nothing to do with it.

I had never before been a fan, or a fanatic, of or about anything. In youth, when most of my friends and acquaintances were screaming or swooning or obsessing over this or that sex symbol, pop star, actor, musician, fad, or TV show, I knew better. Life was just life, people were just people, so what was all the fuss?

But then into my life came Buffy.

Refugees from the mundane, residents of an altered dimension, soldiers for and against the supernatural, implicit and explicit lovers throughout, the significant, and often mythic, efforts of the writers and actors and characters of Buffy rarely failed to dazzle me with witty dialog and constantly surprised me with their respective depths. As it gradually dawned on me that I had discovered a near-perfect marriage of superficiality and complexity, comedy and passion, text and subtext, romance and reality, character and plot, I felt very –

– Welcome to the Hellmouth.

Luke (Brian Thompson), disciple of the Master, upgrades Jesse (Eric Balfour) to bait status.

First in a two-part series opener, I suppose Welcome to the Hellmouth is in most respects a typical introductory episode, familiarizing the viewers with the premise and introducing the main characters. I believe it was loosely based on an unscreened pilot episode shot by Whedon.

It does not in and of itself make a particularly great impression, and certainly does not hint at the brilliance to come in later episodes and, especially, in later seasons, but it gets the obligatory job done.

We are introduced to Buffy, a high school student who has recently moved to Sunnydale. She is a reluctant hero as are many heroes in myth, struggling with her destiny as the Chosen One — she who must defend humanity from the forces of evil. Anthony Stewart Head is the British Watcher, Rupert Giles, who seems so eager and fascinated by it all as to fail to recognize what a great burden such a calling must be, especially for a teenage girl with boys and fashion and popularity and the pressure of peers on her mind.

When Buffy goes to the school library for a book, Giles scares her away with an unrequested tome on vampires. Given the responsibility of teaching and training Buffy as the Slayer, Rupert pursues her out of the library into the hallway, convinced that something of great evil is afoot in Sunnydale and that she must not shirk her Slayer duties, and so the inevitability of her destiny begins . . .

 The Master (Mark Metcalf) rises from what appears to be a pool of blood.

 

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