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S02.E08: The Dark Age

Lisin

By Lisin
in Buffy The Vampire Slayer

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Lisin

Lisin

  Quote
Haunted by his dark past when he was known as Ripper, Giles confronts his old crony Ethan Rayne in an attempt to save Jenny from the lethal consequences of possession by the demon Eyghon. With Giles and the Slayer slated as its next victims, demon-ridden Angel forces Eyghon to possess him instead.

 

I don't hate this one, but I don't have a huge love for it either. For me this is a kind of meh episode. I suppose I do like that we find out more about Giles and Ethan and Ripper etc. but on rewatch this just isn't a favorite. 

DAngelus

DAngelus

"i'm not fickle like you two;  I am constant in my affections.  Amy Yip at the waterslide park."

 

"Wow, a bonus day of class plus Cordelia!  Mix in a little rectal surgery and It's my Best Day Ever!"

 

"Why is everybody always yelling my name?  I'm not deaf, you know!  And I can take a hint!"  (Pause, then, defeated) "What's the hint?"

 

"Honesty. Nice touch."
"One of my virtues." (pauses, considers)  "Not really."

 

"Now the first thing we're going to do is—Buffy?"

"Wha?  Did I fall asleep already?"

 

"Is everybody okay?"
"Super!  I kicked a guy."

 

"Xander, how do you feel about going through Giles's personal files?"
"I feel pretty good about it, actually.  Does that make me a sociopath?  Nah."

 

"Aha!  It's Etruscan, not Egyptian!  Mistaken for Egyptian because of the Iconology, but any fool can see…"

 

"Don't be sorry, just be Giles!"  (Ed. note:  Awww!)

 

"Aren't we manly?"

"One of us is."  (Oh, Buffy.  You little butch.)

 

"I actually like you, Buffy.  I just happen to like myself a whole lot better."

 

"'Bury a potato!'  No, that's for warts.  Who writes this stuff?"

 

"The hills are, uh, not alive…"  (Ed. note: sniff!)

 

"Bay City Rollers.  Now that's music!"

 

No complaints, no complaints at all.  (Still middle-of-the-pack for me, season-wise, but that's more about the quality of the rest than any indictment here.)

DAngelus

DAngelus

The most blatant, yes, although there's also Giles warning Willow in Becoming, Part 1 (wrt the ensouling spell) that channeling such power into her may be "opening a door" that she can't close.   I think they were going for a general "the supernatural is addictive" vibe though, IMO, since they'd already drawn pretty clear connections between vampires and addicts in Angel ("Just say yes"). 

 

I've never really had a side in this fight, though;  on the one hand "magic addiction" is corny, ham-fisted, and turned Giles (retroactively) into the neighborhood pusher (endorsed by the whole Watchers' Council, no less!), but OTOH, it's what saved us from the early S6 "Willow was EEEEEEVIL all along!  Beware of 'the quiet ones', pretty people! Nerds are scum!  Thank heavens Buffy has Spike!" stench, so I was actually pretty glad of it when it happened.  Wrecked is still working some good will from me for shutting Anya up on this matter, to be quite honest.  So it doesn't bother me here.

 

Besides, maybe it was just the 5-guys-1-girl orgies that Giles found so addictive?  Oh, my poor Jenny, you never had a chance with him, anyhow.  (Unless the boys never touched each other and Dierdre was just really flexible and resilient, that is.)

Joe Hellandback

Joe Hellandback

(edited)
  On 6/20/2014 at 5:06 PM, Lisin said:

 

I don't hate this one, but I don't have a huge love for it either. For me this is a kind of meh episode. I suppose I do like that we find out more about Giles and Ethan and Ripper etc. but on rewatch this just isn't a favorite. 

Expand  

I think the special effects really let this one down, the story is ok. 

  On 6/21/2014 at 4:29 AM, DAngelus said:

"i'm not fickle like you two;  I am constant in my affections.  Amy Yip at the waterslide park."

"Bay City Rollers.  Now that's music!"

 

 

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According to the comics Buffy and Willow's fantasies have now changed to;

  Reveal spoiler

I wonder what Xander's would be now? Although frankly as he was dating;

  Reveal spoiler

 The Dark Age;

The Good; Buffy's training although as Will later comments isn't she just naturally buff? Willow coming through with a great idea, Cordy tripping Ethan

The Bad; The melting effect is a little lame. The demon seems quite insignificant compared to the threats we later see.

Best line; Buffy; "Have I ever let you down?" Giles; "Do you want me to answer that or just glare?" but also Xander; "An extra day in school plus Cordelia? Mix in a little rectal surgery and it's my best day ever"

Questions and observations; Who's Gavin Rossdale? . Very much Giles' episode and adding a lot more depth to his character. Great stuff between him and Ethan, you wonder if ASH and Robin Sachs have worked together before, they really do come across as old friends. Why does Eoghan wait all these years? Drunk Giles for the first time.  The Bay City Rollers were late 70s and a little cheesy for a teen rebel like Giles. Jenny knocked unconscious and goes evil, Buffy knocked unconscious and tied up.Here Xander disparages computers but Nic Brendon will go on to play a computer expert in his recurring role on 'Criminal Minds'

  Reveal spoiler

6/10, good ep but not brilliant

Edited by Joe Hellandback
Halting Hex

Halting Hex

Gavin Rossdale is/was the lead singer for Bush. 

  Reveal spoiler

He may be best known nowadays as the ex-husband of Gwen Stefani, one of the stranger celebrity divorces of recent times.  But that's probably a bit OT…

Joe Hellandback

Joe Hellandback

  On 6/15/2018 at 12:07 AM, Halting Hex said:

Gavin Rossdale is/was the lead singer for Bush. 

  Reveal spoiler

He may be best known nowadays as the ex-husband of Gwen Stefani, one of the stranger celebrity divorces of recent times.  But that's probably a bit OT…

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Lucky him!

Halting Hex

Halting Hex

And Conservative Judaism (less strict than Orthodox, but not all barely-Jewish like Reform) still technically has the strictures against working on Saturday, but it's not as if people don't cheat. 

  Reveal spoiler
Halting Hex

Halting Hex

Well, at least that fits his age better than that silly story

  Reveal spoiler

Would people really mistake Etruscan for Egyptian?  Yes, contemporaneous and they both start with "E", but the two cultures were rather apart, geographically, and the Etruscans had an actual alphabet (derived from Greek) where the Egyptians were using hieroglpyhics.  Not hard to differentiate, I wouldn't think.

Well, Willow does say "any fool can see…" I guess that isn't hyperbole, after all.

Joe Hellandback

Joe Hellandback

  On 8/26/2018 at 6:48 PM, Halting Hex said:

Well, at least that fits his age better than that silly story

  Reveal spoiler

Would people really mistake Etruscan for Egyptian?  Yes, contemporaneous and they both start with "E", but the two cultures were rather apart, geographically, and the Etruscans had an actual alphabet (derived from Greek) where the Egyptians were using hieroglpyhics.  Not hard to differentiate, I wouldn't think.

Well, Willow does say "any fool can see…" I guess that isn't hyperbole, after all.

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True, they're a Cambridge group and he went to Oxford. Unless his pseudonym was Sid Barret?

  On 8/26/2018 at 5:19 PM, lembergwatcher said:

Something tells me Giles played in Sex Pistols in the wild days of his youth...

Buffy_Giles_as_Ripper.jpg

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Not the Bay City Rollers?

Halting Hex

Halting Hex

  On 6/21/2014 at 4:29 AM, DAngelus said:

"Now the first thing we're going to do is—Buffy?"

"Wha?  Did I fall asleep already?"

Expand  

So Xander has dreams where not only he, but also Willow and Cordelia and Jenny all "do" Buffy, is that it?  Dang, Imaginary!Buffy is quite the machine. 

  Reveal spoiler
Joe Hellandback

Joe Hellandback

  On 9/28/2018 at 12:07 PM, Halting Hex said:

So Xander has dreams where not only he, but also Willow and Cordelia and Jenny all "do" Buffy, is that it?  Dang, Imaginary!Buffy is quite the machine. 

  Reveal spoiler
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I'm sure there's a fanfic somewhere. 

Halting Hex

Halting Hex

If Giles had been living in the Library, vampires wouldn't have been able to enter it uninvited, be it Angel in Out of Mind, Out of Sight, or the randoms in Prophecy Girl, or Walt, Bob, Ned and Jane in When She Was Bad.

My question is…if Giles had been living in the Library and vamps couldn't enter without permission, what happens when Buffy throws the Master through the skylight in Prophecy Girl?  Does Fruit-Punch-Mouth bounce off of the force-field?

More seriously, we do see Giles arriving at the school in Teacher's Pet, so that at least implies he lives off-campus.

  • Love 1
Loandbehold

Loandbehold

  On 12/7/2018 at 3:41 AM, Halting Hex said:

If Giles had been living in the Library, vampires wouldn't have been able to enter it uninvited, be it Angel in Out of Mind, Out of Sight, or the randoms in Prophecy Girl, or Walt, Bob, Ned and Jane in When She Was Bad.

Expand  

I think that would depend on whether Giles had a legal right to be living at the library. A signed lease. If he's just a squatter, then I would say that any vampire could enter just like they could enter the rest of the school. Although, I must admit the idea of The Master bouncing off the force field like it was a trampoline is rather amusing.

  • Love 1
Joe Hellandback

Joe Hellandback

  On 12/7/2018 at 5:33 PM, Loandbehold said:

I think that would depend on whether Giles had a legal right to be living at the library. A signed lease. If he's just a squatter, then I would say that any vampire could enter just like they could enter the rest of the school. Although, I must admit the idea of The Master bouncing off the force field like it was a trampoline is rather amusing.

Expand  

Bouncing off it and being fatally impaled on a nearby tree would have been hilarious 

Halting Hex

Halting Hex

In the hospital parking lot, after Angel's unexpected arrival during the fight:

  Quote

BUFFY: How did you know about this?

ANGEL: It's delivery day. Everybody knows about this.

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So, let me get this straight.  Last episode, Angel insisted on being told whether Buffy loved him, and she said that she did.  This episode…they're both planning on showing up for "delivery day", but neither of them knew about the other's plans?  What, Buffy didn't call Angel up* and ask what he was going to be doing? "Hey, wakey-wakey Angel-kins…did you get a good day's sleep?  So, what are your plans for tonight?  Me?  I'm going to be at the hospital to protect the blood delivery…no, that's nice, but you don't have to come, I think I can handle it.  I mean, unless you want to…"  Doesn't seem like a particularly healthy relationship 😞

*-We know that Angel has a phone and we know the gang knows the number; Giles calls him up to invite him to the Library in Prophecy Girl.

lembergwatcher

lembergwatcher

  On 5/8/2019 at 5:59 AM, Halting Hex said:

Doesn't seem like a particularly healthy relationship 😞

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How dare you question the Love of the Ages??? 😆

  On 5/8/2019 at 5:59 AM, Halting Hex said:

We know that Angel has a phone and we know the gang knows the number; Giles calls him up to invite him to the Library in Prophecy Girl.

Expand  

Maybe Angel is still mostly a 18/19th century kind of guy who's either uncomfortable with using another dreaded machine or unable to figure out how that benefit of civilization works. He clearly prefers coming out of nowhere, be it sneaking into Buffy's bedroom through the window or arriving for blood delivery without warning. Girls like Buffy love surprises, after all.

Halting Hex

Halting Hex

(edited)
  Quote

GILES (on the phone to someone, enquiring about Deirdre):  I-I realize it's, uh, five in the morning there—

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Aww, look, Giles knows how to tell time in England now!  He's learned how to add 8 hours!  (As opposed to Teacher's Pet, where he didn't know what time it was at Carlyle's sanitarium.)  See, he is teachable!  Good show, Giles!

Joseph Harding completely marked out for the G/Jenny kiss in Act I.  He really doesn't know what show he's watching, does he?  Jenny's "lucky" she only got, essentially, raped…if I hadn't started watching later in the series and thus known that she survives the episode, I would have been rather worried for her.

Would Punk!Giles really have been a fan of Bay City Rollers?

Maybe Ripper tried to tell the band they should do Dusty Springfield covers?  (The Rollers did "I Only Want to Be with You", perhaps Giles wanted to cover "Son of a Preacher Man"?)  Hmm.

S!A!T-U-R!D-A-Y! Hey!!

Edited by Halting Hex
Halting Hex

Halting Hex

(edited)

No, the audio's a little muddled at the beginning, but if you check out 2.30, you can see that the "Saturday" spelling chant is punctuated with a "Hey!" and a raised fist.

"Saturday night" is in the lyrics of the actual song, of course, but I guess the lads studied Sondheim and knew that words that end in a "closed" consonant (like the "t" in "night") aren't very good ways to end lyric lines, because they cut off the vocal.

Ma-reee-ah!

Ma-reee-ah!

I just met a girl named Maria!

And suddenly that name will never be the same

To Meeeeeeeeee!

Edited by Halting Hex
Halting Hex

Halting Hex

(edited)

It should be noted that Bay City Rollers' big hit being called "Saturday Night" works well with the episode being (mostly) set on Saturday.  Jenny even says "Saturday night" when setting up her and Giles's date in Act 1.  I don't know if anyone ever made an episode MV set to the song, but the opportunity is there.

Another musical note (pun!) is that Giles's objections to the electronic music Buffy uses for her aerobics is an in-joke;  that's actually the overture to the movie version of Jesus Christ, Superstar, and the original theatrical Judas in that was Anthony Stewart Head's big brother, Murray.  So actually that's ASH getting a chance to throw shade on his brother the big West End star.

And, of course, Murray's career would continue to be linked with lyricist Tim Rice, as his biggest success, the #1 hit "One Night in Bangkok", is from Chess, which is Rice working with the guys from ABBA.  (Benny and Björn, the "B" parts of the group.)

  Reveal spoiler

*************************

Back to the episode, it's sad to see all the rape-subtext in the previous episodes (2.02-why are they building a girl?, 2.05-Buffy nearly raped by frat guys, 2.06-Buffy nearly raped by Pirate!Larry, 2.07-Angel implies he raped Drusilla) end up with Jenny getting violated this way.  Riley Lynn was glad Jenny survived the episode (when Eyghon!Jenny kissed Giles, she was worried he would be "infected" as well), but she was sad about the distance between them at the end.

  Reveal spoiler

*******************

  Quote

WILLOW:  It's not Egyptian, it's Etruscan!

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And given that the Etruscans were based in (and lent their name to) Tuscany in Italy, it's appropriate the Willow with her ziti-in-Florence fantasy from the "Anywhere but Here" game, should be the one to discover this.  (There's a big Etruscan museum in Fiesole, right outside of Florence, apparently.)

Too bad for the Xander-fans that Ethan wasn't summoning Amy Yip, I suppose.  Maybe in that case, it would have been Research Boy coming through with the knowledge, again.

8dffd07c747ffb37815b2f75edec081b.jpg

And too bad for some of us for, er, other reasons…

Of course, there's an obvious reason why Ethan wasn't summoning Amy Yip.  I'm just saying.

  Quote

BUFFY (calling as she enters the shop):  Ethan? Ethan? I know everything.

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Hmm, going by that nude male mannequin modeled after Michelangelo's "David", I wouldn't say you know everything, Buffy. As I said…

Edited by Halting Hex
Halting Hex

Halting Hex

(edited)

Because you're never too old to be juvenile…

…what if Giles was known as "Ripper" because of his tendency to cut long and loud farts?

  Quote

GILES:  Now on Saturday, it will be vitally important for us to—

GILES's BUTTHOLE:  BRRRRRRAPPPPPPPPPPPPP!

BUFFY (deadpan):  So noted.  (leaves)

JENNY:  That's it, no more liver and onions for you, England.

Giles buries his face in his hands, ashamed.

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Edited by Halting Hex
  • LOL 1
Halting Hex

Halting Hex

Ew, that pun stinks..

So, Giles is the entertainment, Randall's the conjurer, Ethan and Deirde are the, er, recipients, Philip is the liaison to the Bay City Rollers fan club (that briefcase he had at the beginning?  Samples of the new posters and 8x10 photos, of course!) and Thomas…?

Is he bringing the snacks…or the porn? (Or, possibly, I suppose…both?)

Halting Hex

Halting Hex

(edited)
  On 5/8/2019 at 5:59 AM, Halting Hex said:

We know that Angel has a phone and we know the gang knows the number; Giles calls him up to invite him to the Library in Prophecy Girl.

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And of course, we just saw Willow urge Giles to call Angel three episodes ago, in Reptile Boy.  So apparently the whole gang knows about how Giles spends his evenings on the phone talking to Angel about "occult research".

(Hey, Giles hadn't had a date in 20 years [pre-Some Assembly Required], we just found out! He's tired of blowing his whole salary on the phone-sex lines! And Angel has been going slow so things don't "get out of control" with Buffy…vampires have needs, too, y'know!)

The Review Crew lads wondered if there was more to Jenny's coldness to Giles at the end than merely the possession…perhaps the fact she never envisioned his dabbling in the occult that way played into it, as well.  (Although Mikey noted that as a technopagan, she shouldn't be that surprised.)

Myself, I think the physical sensation of having your body taken over would be enough to make you cautious about being touched, plus finding out your man has four ex-boyfriends and one them has been hanging out in town might spin you, too.  (No matter how wild you got at Burning Man.)  But JMO.

  Reveal spoiler

 

Edited by Halting Hex
Halting Hex

Halting Hex

(edited)

You know, Ripper, it's great that you love Jenny and I completely understand your wanting to save her after  you get that vision of her being in danger and I hardly disapprove of your running off towards Ethan's shop (as opposed to the reasons you may have run over toward Ethan's place in the past…)

…but shouldn't you at least close the front door to your flat behind you?  I understand if you don't want to take the time to work the lock (although many apartments have automatic door locks), but let's close the door so we don't have stray animals wandering in, okay?

  Reveal spoiler

 

Edited by Halting Hex

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