Some Assembly Required

Buffy Episode Review

In which there are school activities.

What Happened

Somebody's building the perfect girl, one corpse at a time, and Cordelia's just been selected to contribute.

The Good

• "Come on. Rise and shine. Some of us have a ton of trig homework." Buffy's little argument with Angel in the graveyard. They do have a couple of issues, don't they?
• "I'm suddenly deciding this is none of your business." Giles being teased by Buffy and Xander when they catch im practicing asking out Jenny Calendar.
• Xander dragging Cordelia out of the fire, gurney and all. He really was much smarter in the early seasons.
• "He gets to see you in the sunlight." Angel 'fessing up he's jealous of Xander. They have a sweet little talk.

The Bad

• Buffy must really like Giles if she skips the chance to give him a lecture on how they can't have normal lives and he has more important things to worry about than getting to the football game so he can meet Miss Calendar. And after all the grief he gave her about Owen.
• "I don't know what it is about football. It has none of the grace of basketball. Or the [whatever] of baseball. At its best, it's unadorned aggression." Okay, that was just a little bit much. We already like Jenny; she doesn't need to show off her vocabulary.

The Cliche

• Why did the bad guys rebury the first two bodies, but not the third one?Besides the script demanded that Buffy had to find her and get interested in their little science experiment.
• So why didn't Angel just say, "Cordelia, is that you?" Again, because if he did, she wouldn't have hid in the dumpster and they wouldn't have found the bodies.
• They spent a little too much time setting up Darryl and Cordi, that his sudden appearance wasn't quite as unexpected as one might think. And from then on, we just know that she's going to wind up strapped down in mortal danger again.

Best Lines

Giles: "But [reanimation is] not doable?"
Willow: "If it is, my science project is definitely coming in second this year."

What Did I Think?

Gruesome subject. Funny lines. Nice scenes between Buffy and Angel. Predictable, but still cute scenes between Giles and Jenny. It doesn't exactly add enormously to the overall show mythology and doesn't count as one of the great stand alones, but doesn't completely suck, either.