Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Pack Rewatch
January 29, 2015 7:44 AM - Season 1, Episode 6 - Subscribe
Something's up with Xander after confronting a group of bullies in the hyena enclosure on a zoo field trip. He's acting differently, dressing differently, hanging out with a new crowd and being downright mean. Is this just normal teenage behaviour or is something more supernatural at work?
I actually enjoy this one a lot, although I must admit to only half paying attention while watching it this time around.
It's stupid and silly and gross both monster-wise and Xanderwise. I wonder how the pack ate a pig and a principal with bare hands and teeth without getting covered in blood, but we can handwave that away. I don't like how the episode handwaves Xanders attempted rape... at the end we're supposed to feel a little wistfully bad for him because he has memories of the events, Giles even gives a little boys will be boys smile as Xander walks away. Let's not even consider how Buffy might feel. Ugh.
The zookeeper is silly and that blue getup really takes on new hilarity in a post-Tobias Funke world.
Alright, so that's complaints. Why do I like this episode? I think I identify with the metaphor a lot. It's spelled out by Giles maybe a bit too obviously but it's still effective. Teenagers are awful. Teenagers are pack animals. I definitely had a few friends around that age who did about faces, deciding I wasn't cool enough for them anymore, or that if another group accepts them burning bridges with previous friends is just the thing to do. The callousness of teenagers in shifting social dynamics is brutal, and I think that is well depicted here. And that dodgeball scene has to be one of the most emotionally painful scenes the show has done, and accomplishes that without dialogue.
So yeah, stupid episode but for me it works a lot better than it should. And it paves the way for Armin Shimerman's brilliant Principal Snyder to come in a few episodes down the line. No disrespect meant for the dead, but it's a good trade.
posted by yellowbinder at 9:01 AM on January 29, 2015 [4 favorites]
It's stupid and silly and gross both monster-wise and Xanderwise. I wonder how the pack ate a pig and a principal with bare hands and teeth without getting covered in blood, but we can handwave that away. I don't like how the episode handwaves Xanders attempted rape... at the end we're supposed to feel a little wistfully bad for him because he has memories of the events, Giles even gives a little boys will be boys smile as Xander walks away. Let's not even consider how Buffy might feel. Ugh.
The zookeeper is silly and that blue getup really takes on new hilarity in a post-Tobias Funke world.
Alright, so that's complaints. Why do I like this episode? I think I identify with the metaphor a lot. It's spelled out by Giles maybe a bit too obviously but it's still effective. Teenagers are awful. Teenagers are pack animals. I definitely had a few friends around that age who did about faces, deciding I wasn't cool enough for them anymore, or that if another group accepts them burning bridges with previous friends is just the thing to do. The callousness of teenagers in shifting social dynamics is brutal, and I think that is well depicted here. And that dodgeball scene has to be one of the most emotionally painful scenes the show has done, and accomplishes that without dialogue.
So yeah, stupid episode but for me it works a lot better than it should. And it paves the way for Armin Shimerman's brilliant Principal Snyder to come in a few episodes down the line. No disrespect meant for the dead, but it's a good trade.
posted by yellowbinder at 9:01 AM on January 29, 2015 [4 favorites]
Hey, remember the time a bunch of kids tore a man to pieces and ate him, and the fact that they weren't allowed to show any blood just made the episode that much more weird and terrible? Man, good times.
At least this led to Armin Shimerman.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 9:02 AM on January 29, 2015
At least this led to Armin Shimerman.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 9:02 AM on January 29, 2015
Watching this episode again, I was struck by how boring it is. The episode seems to present at times the 5 being posessed by hyenas as a mystery, but as the audience it's fairly obvious what has happened from the start. They hang out in front of a hyena cage, their eyes glow, the 5 start laughing like hyenas.
There's at least ten minutes of scenes which could be cut from this episode. The slow motion glaring. The hot dog scene. The dodgeball scene. It all adds up to very little. It doesn't help that yet again these bullies are brand new characters who never appear again (maybe they were carted off to therapy for their memories of eating the principal alive!) and they just aren't very charismatic. Most of them don't even have any lines. We're really only interested in Xander, and the best scenes are the ones where he is being cruel to Willow: the experience of having your friend turn on you when they hang out with a new crowd is something I've certainly experienced, and it's not nice at all.
The sexual creepiness scene I think is fine in that it's clear that
a)Buffy is never under any particular threat
b)Xander is absolutely not Xander at this point (I appreciate that you could build a line between his behaviours before and his behaviours now, but I don't think the show is going for that).
But all in all it adds up to a really boring episode, and the worst so far (and possibly of all, but it's going to take a rewatch to demonstrate that).
Observations
-What in gods name was the zookeepers plan for after he became hyena man? He's just going to get shot by a police officer, surely
-Those bars on the hyena cage do not seem sufficient
-Principal Flutie is the first recurring character to be killed
-Giles knocked out count up to 2! (First time is in Witch)
-The zookeeper is about to kill Willow, and then just decides not to. I guess the hyena-kids leaping on Buffy counts as enough of a predatory act, but its a bit of a cheap escape.
posted by Cannon Fodder at 12:16 PM on January 29, 2015
There's at least ten minutes of scenes which could be cut from this episode. The slow motion glaring. The hot dog scene. The dodgeball scene. It all adds up to very little. It doesn't help that yet again these bullies are brand new characters who never appear again (maybe they were carted off to therapy for their memories of eating the principal alive!) and they just aren't very charismatic. Most of them don't even have any lines. We're really only interested in Xander, and the best scenes are the ones where he is being cruel to Willow: the experience of having your friend turn on you when they hang out with a new crowd is something I've certainly experienced, and it's not nice at all.
The sexual creepiness scene I think is fine in that it's clear that
a)Buffy is never under any particular threat
b)Xander is absolutely not Xander at this point (I appreciate that you could build a line between his behaviours before and his behaviours now, but I don't think the show is going for that).
But all in all it adds up to a really boring episode, and the worst so far (and possibly of all, but it's going to take a rewatch to demonstrate that).
Observations
-What in gods name was the zookeepers plan for after he became hyena man? He's just going to get shot by a police officer, surely
-Those bars on the hyena cage do not seem sufficient
-Principal Flutie is the first recurring character to be killed
-Giles knocked out count up to 2! (First time is in Witch)
-The zookeeper is about to kill Willow, and then just decides not to. I guess the hyena-kids leaping on Buffy counts as enough of a predatory act, but its a bit of a cheap escape.
posted by Cannon Fodder at 12:16 PM on January 29, 2015
Watching this episode again, I was struck by how boring it is. The episode seems to present at times the 5 being posessed by hyenas as a mystery, but as the audience it's fairly obvious what has happened from the start. They hang out in front of a hyena cage, their eyes glow, the 5 start laughing like hyenas.
It's only not a mystery to us because we see it happen; the scenes you're complaining about are for the benefit of the other characters, and for the benefit of the theme. They play up the horror of watching somebody you know and trust become somebody awful that you don't recognize.
posted by Pope Guilty at 4:41 PM on January 29, 2015 [1 favorite]
It's only not a mystery to us because we see it happen; the scenes you're complaining about are for the benefit of the other characters, and for the benefit of the theme. They play up the horror of watching somebody you know and trust become somebody awful that you don't recognize.
posted by Pope Guilty at 4:41 PM on January 29, 2015 [1 favorite]
I don't like how the episode handwaves Xanders attempted rape... at the end we're supposed to feel a little wistfully bad for him because he has memories of the events, Giles even gives a little boys will be boys smile as Xander walks away. Let's not even consider how Buffy might feel. Ugh.
It's possible Giles doesn't know about the attempted rape. We never see a scene where Buffy tells Giles. She tells Willow, but in such a flippant, minimizing kind of way that I think it's plausible she didn't think it was something Giles needed to know about.
Not that this means I think the attempted rape was handled well in any way whatsoever. I really think they shouldn't have gone there if they wanted to do an episode that ends with a reset button setting all the friendships back to normal again.
My favorite part of the episode is when Xander tries to manipulate Willow into letting him out of the cage, and Willow doesn't buy it for a second.
Other than that, I find this episode pretty dull. A lot of time is spent on some fairly awful guest actors playing completely uninteresting characters.
posted by creepygirl at 5:35 PM on January 29, 2015 [1 favorite]
It's possible Giles doesn't know about the attempted rape. We never see a scene where Buffy tells Giles. She tells Willow, but in such a flippant, minimizing kind of way that I think it's plausible she didn't think it was something Giles needed to know about.
Not that this means I think the attempted rape was handled well in any way whatsoever. I really think they shouldn't have gone there if they wanted to do an episode that ends with a reset button setting all the friendships back to normal again.
My favorite part of the episode is when Xander tries to manipulate Willow into letting him out of the cage, and Willow doesn't buy it for a second.
Other than that, I find this episode pretty dull. A lot of time is spent on some fairly awful guest actors playing completely uninteresting characters.
posted by creepygirl at 5:35 PM on January 29, 2015 [1 favorite]
Ditto on the semi-dullness here. Oddly enough, I still think this was the first episode that really honed in on the show's central "horrors of adolescence" metaphor in a substantial (and perhaps transparently obvious) way. It's the sort of thing that BtVS would start to handle in a more assured way later, but this is the first episode that truly gave me junior high/high school flashbacks. I can recall with razor-sharp clarity times when friends who I'd known since first grade turned unexpectedly cruel, and this episode really captured that feeling for me.
I have to admit that I'm kind of surprised to see people really letting Xander have it for his behavior in this episode. I'm not going to argue that the awful murderous/rapey stuff that he did under the hyena-influence wasn't 100% reprehensible. But all the same there was magic soul-switching and personality-changing going on here, and I think this episode and those previous do a good enough job of drawing a bright line between Xander's baseline hapless/misguided schmuck behavior and the truly horrific stuff he gets up to post-hyena. Xander definitely has some dark and twisted shit mixed up in his id that absolutely requires the moderating influence of his ever-developing superego, but no more so than any other character does on this show. The very existence of Evil Vampire Willow should prove that.
posted by Strange Interlude at 7:30 PM on January 29, 2015 [2 favorites]
I have to admit that I'm kind of surprised to see people really letting Xander have it for his behavior in this episode. I'm not going to argue that the awful murderous/rapey stuff that he did under the hyena-influence wasn't 100% reprehensible. But all the same there was magic soul-switching and personality-changing going on here, and I think this episode and those previous do a good enough job of drawing a bright line between Xander's baseline hapless/misguided schmuck behavior and the truly horrific stuff he gets up to post-hyena. Xander definitely has some dark and twisted shit mixed up in his id that absolutely requires the moderating influence of his ever-developing superego, but no more so than any other character does on this show. The very existence of Evil Vampire Willow should prove that.
posted by Strange Interlude at 7:30 PM on January 29, 2015 [2 favorites]
Xander totally ate someone
posted by The Whelk at 8:31 PM on January 29, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by The Whelk at 8:31 PM on January 29, 2015 [2 favorites]
It's only not a mystery to us because we see it happen; the scenes you're complaining about are for the benefit of the other characters, and for the benefit of the theme. They play up the horror of watching somebody you know and trust become somebody awful that you don't recognize.
I get that, I just don't think they're very effective at it, to the point that they seem to be driving the same point home again, and again, and again, and again. As creepygirl mentions, the guest actors are pretty bad, which really doesn't help.
posted by Cannon Fodder at 12:03 AM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]
I get that, I just don't think they're very effective at it, to the point that they seem to be driving the same point home again, and again, and again, and again. As creepygirl mentions, the guest actors are pretty bad, which really doesn't help.
posted by Cannon Fodder at 12:03 AM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]
Re: Xander as well, the show is fairly consistent about letting people off for actions they take while evil: Angel and, later on, Spike, spring to mind, but if you started calling everyone out on what they did while enchanted/desouled/possessed by a hyena spirit/enraged by the loss of a loved one and powered by dark magics you'd really have no-one left you could like
posted by Cannon Fodder at 12:05 AM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Cannon Fodder at 12:05 AM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]
Xander and the attempted rape actually bothered me less than Xander spying on Buffy changing. It's clear that it's the hyena behaviour. What bothers me is how easily they go back to normal, nothing to see here. I mean, have you ever had a dream in which someone you love does something awful and you wake up and know they didn't really do it but you feel mad at/upset with them anyway? This was worse than a dream because people (well one plus a pig) actually died and yet they just seem to forget. I know Buffy is not big on trauma effects but they could have at least stayed weirded out till the end of the episode.
Anyhow. Willow not being taken in by Xander is definitely the high point. The meaningful gazes are just dumb for the most part. On the other hand, I thought the 4 bullies were convincingly animalistic and creepy when they were going after Flutie. The music, however, was not, especially in the climax zoo scene. It sounded like bad porno movie music.
Definitely not the best, but actually not bad at portraying the horror that lurks under the teenager (and arguably adults in packs too).
posted by Athanassiel at 3:04 AM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]
Anyhow. Willow not being taken in by Xander is definitely the high point. The meaningful gazes are just dumb for the most part. On the other hand, I thought the 4 bullies were convincingly animalistic and creepy when they were going after Flutie. The music, however, was not, especially in the climax zoo scene. It sounded like bad porno movie music.
Definitely not the best, but actually not bad at portraying the horror that lurks under the teenager (and arguably adults in packs too).
posted by Athanassiel at 3:04 AM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]
Spike and Angel weren't staked for their actions while soulless, but they faced considerable amounts of suspicion and hostility after getting their souls. They also spent a lot of time feeling bad about the things they did when they didn't have their souls. I think Athanassiel explained it better than I did. Xander's actions while possessed could leave some lingering distress for both him and Buffy, even if they both truly believed that Xander wasn't responsible for them. If the show wanted to have everyone instantly back to normal at the end, they probably shouldn't have had things get so dark and potentially traumatic IMO.
posted by creepygirl at 7:21 AM on January 30, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by creepygirl at 7:21 AM on January 30, 2015 [2 favorites]
Spike and Angel weren't staked for their actions while soulless, but they faced considerable amounts of suspicion and hostility after getting their souls.
Xander, on the other hand, never faced any of that for any of the many, many bad things he did while under various influences (or the bad things he did just because he thought they would be neat). The more remove I have from the original airings, the less I like Xander.
posted by Etrigan at 7:38 AM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]
Xander, on the other hand, never faced any of that for any of the many, many bad things he did while under various influences (or the bad things he did just because he thought they would be neat). The more remove I have from the original airings, the less I like Xander.
posted by Etrigan at 7:38 AM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]
The full-on face shot of Buffy's stunt double (the fight with the zookeeper) was amusing.
posted by Ik ben afgesneden at 8:34 PM on February 17, 2015
posted by Ik ben afgesneden at 8:34 PM on February 17, 2015
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I wonder how many times during the making of "Beer Bad" did someone think, Wait... this sucked the last time we did it....
posted by Etrigan at 8:18 AM on January 29, 2015 [4 favorites]