Buffy and Riley spend all their leisure time bed-wrestling in Riley's dorm, and the rest of the time, they fight demons and vampires, who seem to be getting along despite the heretofore unmentioned fact that they are bitter enemies. Adam the Cyborgdemon has brought them together.
And speaking of together, Anya thinks that she and Xander are going to break up, because they didn't get it on the night before. You know, Anya might be a difficult person to have as a girlfriend.
Buffy and Riley are having it better, and appear to be constantly having sex. Everyone else in the frathouse (or whatever it is) is experiencing unusual cold, or ominous visions of the upstairs bathtub, or being caught on fire. Nevertheless, the guys there decide to throw a party, and everyone is invited.
Angry at Xander, Anya heads to the Bronze, where she runs into Spike, who's still powerless. They realise that gives them something in common, besides the fact that they've both fallen in love with people who left them for fungus demons. Oh, except that Xander hasn't done that.*
Speaking of Xander, at the party, he meets a girl named . . . (gotta go look it up) . . . Julie, and she seems to think he's hot stuff. Also hot stuff is a wall in the house that, believe it or not, produces orgasmic effects in whoever touches it.
And speaking of, well, those kinds of effects, after making a token appearance at the party, Buffy and Riley duck upstairs for a little donut-holing.
Downstairs, Willow and Tara get to talking, and Willow puts her hand on Tara's knee. Holy god, folks, it's like my eighteenth year all over again, as Tara royally freaks out, jumping back, tearing into the bathroom, and doing the Alfred-Molina-in-RAIDERS-OF-THE-LOST-ARK dance of disgust. Willow tries to find out what's wrong with Tara, and finds a ghostly boy drowning in the bathtub.
Anya and Spike show up at the party and start mocking Xander. Xander, brilliantly, mentions very loud that Spike is the Initiative's "Hostile 17." Oddly, no one blinks, so Xander goes into another room, where he finds a bunch of folks playing Spin the Bottle, including Julie. He joins in the game and, sure enough, the bottle lands on said Julie, and she jumps on him like Paris Hilton on a prong. Immediately after, it's my twenties all over again, as Julie is mortified by what she's done and rushes off to cut off all her hair.
During all this, Riley and Buffy continue to roll around under the covers, oblivious to everything but each other. The earth begins to quake, ghosts start to appear, Spike's chair attacks him, vines start growing out of the walls, people pretend that the girl from Ugly Betty is really unattractive, you know, crazy things. The whole gang gets out of the house (Spike does it one better and just gets the hell out of Dodge), and decide that they need Giles on this one.
They find Giles at a coffee shop, where he's playing the guitar and singing, dampening the panties of every girl who listens to him. He's also got an earring in and heck, even Tara gawks for a moment. I once spent half of a night listening to Anthony Stewart Head sing, so my own underwear can testify to this effect.
With Giles's help, they do a little research about Riley's house, discovering that it used to be a children's home. They go to visit the old woman who used to run the place and, boy, it's like my Harry-Potter-hating aunt, my teacher who used to preach about the evils of THE LITTLE MERMAID, and my worst roommates rolled into one. And then tripled.** A frighteningly devout woman, she used to punish the children when they were "dirty," by abusing them, cutting off their hair, and "baptizing" them in the bathtub. Giles tells her that she caused poltergeists to inhabit the house by her reprehensible behaviour, that Buffy and Riley's joyriding have awakened them, and that the old lady should sit and spin.
The gang heads back to the house to get Buffy and Riley out before the house saps them of their lifeforce. The magic-users cast a spell to quell the spirits, and Xander and Anya make their way through the vines to get to Riley's bedroom. On the way, a particularly nasty vine thwacks Xander in the face and I thought, "Oh, here it is already, the eyepatch moment." But it wasn't. He does get dragged into the bathtub and almost drowned before Anya pulls him out again. They bust in Riley's door, interrupting the very surprised lovers who, after being told what has been happening, become two very embarrassed lovers.
Now it's sounding like YOUR nineteenth year.
You know, I think I'm going to take a stand and say that this was my least-favourite episode so far this season. I won't go as far as to say that it was a bad one (we're still waiting on that front), but it wasn't my cup o' Nescafe (Taster's Choice for you American Anthony Stewart Head fans). I guess, if I'm to be honest, I get a little heebie jeebied out when Buffy has sex. I don't know why that is, I should want her to be happy, and they say eating chocolate is the female equivalent of having sex, so . . .
Wait, what am I talking about?
Xander runs an ice cream truck now? I guess they're having fun giving him another crappy job in every episode, but it's pissing me off. Nobody else on the show has a job (not even Giles), and it's just a TV convention that characters can get by without going to work (or class, in Buffy and Willow's case).
Very little of this is actual criticism about the episode, but I gotta admit that I liked the "Angel" episode we watched right before this more than the "Buffy." That, I think has only happened once before, but it doesn't frighten me that it happened again. A third time, however, and I'll be nervous.
Rish Sunnydale Outfield
*I don't personally think Anya has been introduced to Drusilla, since we've not been damned by her presence since the second season, but hey, maybe there was a comic book where they met.
**I once had a roommate who said to me, "You know, I hope I don't marry a woman who is TOO attractive, because I might want to, you know, do things to her that are wrong." I guess you can interpret that in several ways . . . which I invite you to do right now.
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