Well, here's the thing. For a little while, I called Seasons 5 and 6 my favorite seasons, but, even though I love them, I suspect it was because I tended to watch a couple episodes from them a lot, and also I have some contrarian tendencies. Just before watching Season 2 this time around, I told my buddy Kirk that Season 2 was my favorite, by a hair. After watching it again, I'm willing to go even further. I think Season 2 is objectively the best season of Buffy. You may have a different opinion if you like, but you would be wrong. It's a great, great season of television. Lets talk about why.
First of all, it has easily the best cast of characters of any season. Besides the 3 principle cast members, it has Giles, Cordelia, Oz, Angel/Angelus, Spike, Drusilla and Principal Snyder. The only great characters from later seasons that it's missing are Anya and The Mayor, but that's more than made up for by our sensational villains. Lets talk for a second about how great Spike and Drusilla are, because they are so, so great. From the first moment they arrive in "School Hard", they're completely different than any vampire we've seen so far. I love how it looks like The Anointed One is set up to be this big villain, but Spike just dispenses him without any ceremony. James Marsters just exudes cool as the punk rock baddie, both deliciously evil and hilariously witty. I knew Spike was cool, but I'd forgotten how great Drusilla is. She's the best example of Joss Whedon's propensity for writing crazy people actually working. He's done it in all of his series' (Fred in Angel, River in Serenity, A variety of people in Dollhouse), but it never worked as well again. The craziness is played for laughs, for example, this exchange:
Dru: I'm naming all the stars.
Spike: You can't see the stars, love, that's the ceiling. Also, it's day.
Dru: I can see them. But I've named them all the same name, and there's terrible confusion
But the craziness also makes her extremely scary. Juliet Landau plays the part in a delightfully unhinged way, I don't think Buffy ever had a scarier recurring villain. We don't actually see her kill often, but there's a sense that she could do anything, that even she doesn't know what she will do next. She just feels dangerous.
The next thing that makes this season so great is the consistently great quality of the episodes. That's not to say there aren't some duds (we'll get to that in a bit), but overall the season is really consistent, and contains some of the best episodes the show ever did. "When She Was Bad" is one of the show's strongest season-openers. The aforementioned "School Hard" is a great introduction to Spike and Drusilla. Halloween and The Dark Age introduce us to "badass Giles", fleshing out a darker past for our straight-laced librarian. Then, starting at episode 13, "Surprise", and running all the way through the finale the show has one of its absolute strongest runs, with just one sub-par episode, and a ton of classics. Because there are so many great episodes, I want to take some time to talk about a few individual episodes:
Lie To Me: It's a great episode about jealousy, how our pasts come back to haunt us, and how often the thing you want most is the thing that is worst for you. Mostly though, I wanted to include this great exchange from the end of the episode.
Giles: What do you want me to say?
Buffy: Lie to me.
Giles: Yes, it's terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true. The bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats and we always defeat them and save the day. Nobody ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after.
Buffy: Liar
Surprise/Innocence: This marks the spot where this season gets amazing. That Buffy and Angel sleeping together would trigger his transformation back to Angelus is absolutely genius. It's that classic high school trope of "he was different after" writ large. The scene where Angel, now without a soul (unbeknownst to Buffy), comes back to talk to Buffy is absolutely brutal. It's painful to watch as he hurts her more than any punch ever could. Even more brutal is that it comes up again and again during the episode, as first Willow and then Giles and Jenny realize, without it being said, what triggered Angel's change, each time reminding us of Buffy's pain with the look on her face. What I had forgotten about these episodes is that this is also the time where Willow finds out about Xander and Cordelia's relationship, which is another heart-breaking moment even in the midst of Buffy's pain ("Remember? The 'We Hate Cordelia' club, of which you are the treasure!"). It's just an amazing 2-parter. Honestly, the weakest thing about it is The Judge, who is kind of perfunctory and easily-dispatched. Doesn't matter though, it's such a powerful and emotional story.
Passion: My favorite episode of the season, and my 2nd favorite episode of the whole series. I'm not going to say too much about it because I could go on and on, I just want to hit on a couple points. It's hard to overstate just how shocking Jenny's death is. Even though the show had killed off some characters before, Jenny had become a pretty major character, and things were just mending between her and Giles. Not only that, but it came right in the middle of the episode. Even as she's running away, even when Angel catches up to her, you're just waiting for Buffy to show up and save her. Then Angel just snaps her neck, and in an instant it's over. It's this episode that gives Buffy the resolve to kill Angel. The way Angel not only kills Jenny, but then sets up her body for Giles to find...It's just brutal. Up until this point, we've heard about how evil Angelus was, how he terrorized people everywhere he went, but in this episode we see that. The show delivers on how evil its been telling us Angel's dark side is.
Becoming: Joss Whedon, you're a cruel, cruel man. Poor Buffy. There's a lot to love in this episode (Angel torturing Giles, Drusilla killing Kendra, Spike and Joyce), but it's all about that ending. That devastating ending. Even knowing that it was coming, that look on Buffy's face when she rams that sword through Angel...so painful. Also, the song playing over the end is perfectly pitched. It's the first of many great season finales, and it might be the best.
This season is defined by how high the emotional stakes are. No other villain is nearly as compelling as Angelus (except for perhaps a few episodes of Season 6, but we'll get to that in time) because there's a vested emotional interest in him. We aren't only concerned for our heroes, but we're concerned for the villain. We want to see his soul restored, but it also hurts every time we see this character that we had grown to love destroying his former friends.
Now, the season isn't perfect. Near the beginning of the season, it's got a few monster-of-the-week episodes that aren't great. "Some Assembly Required" is ok, but "Inca Mummy Girl", "Reptile Boy" and "Bad Eggs" are pretty sub-par. Also, they unfortunately put the below-average "Go Fish" right before the season finale, which puts a speed bump in an otherwise fantastic run of episodes (to be fair, "Killed By Death" is a pretty great stand-alone). Also a weakness, Kendra the vampire slayer, who mercifully appears in only 3 episodes. Introducing another slayer is not a bad idea (as Faith will prove next season), but she's kind of a flat, uninteresting character, and the less said about her terrible accent, the better.
Still, even in the worst episodes of this season, there's plenty to like, and despite its weak spots, Season 2 is packed with incredible highs. Even though I love later Buffy seasons, I don't think the show ever again had the same emotional stakes over the course of a whole season, which is why it's my favorite.
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