(Season 1, Episodes 9-12)

If the girls in my high school were allowed to wear dresses and skirts anywhere near as short as Buffy’s generally are, I think I might have flunked a few times to stick around longer.

9 – “The Puppet Show”
(Original Air Date: May 5, 1997) Damn, I should have given Whedon more credit. When Sid the ventriloquist’s dummy started talking I was all “Oh great. Another possessed dummy story. I guess it took Buffy awhile to find a unique voice. God, how many times have we seen this.” Heh. Yeah. Well–

What a great twist on the cliche. There was also some brilliant misdirection. Armin Shimmerman will always be Quark (Star Trek: DS9) to me, though I’ve seen this buttoned down side of him on Boston Legal before. Once Sid was cleared, my finger pointed at Quark.

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(Season 1, Episodes 1-4)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and subsequently Angel, are two of those television shows that I never really got the chance to get into. In the college town I lived in when it premiered, the only unaffiliated local station had chosen to align with UPN rather than The WB when the opportunity came.  That left me able to watch Star Trek: Voyager from the beginning, but no Buffy.

I’d remembered the original Buffy film with Kristy Swanson in the title role, and had been hearing good things about this new iteration, but by the time I was able to catch it several seasons had past and I couldn’t bring myself to jump on board the show after having missed so much of what had gone before. I have a shamefully long list of series like this. And all of this was before the days of online streaming of episodes and readily available DVD sets.

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