Welcome Back to the Hellmouth: “When She Was Bad”

PREVIOUSLY, ON BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER… all of season one happened, Buffy died, the Master died, Buffy didn’t stay dead, Angel and Giles made some dubious choices about trying to protect Buffy, and it’s all better now, because did we mention dead Master?

PRESENTLY, ON BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER … If life were “normal” in Sunnydale, is this what Willow and Xander would do? Walk around quoting movies and not quite flirting? (This season’s first appearance of me yelling WILLOW NO came impressively fast.) Buffy’s been AWOL all summer, apart from a few postcards. It was the most boring summer ever, according to Xander.

It the real world, it wasn’t, not really. The summer of 1997 was the summer Princess Diana died, and even when we didn’t want to, we saw her on TV: footage from the accident, footage of those kids, footage of her funeral. Robyn had a hit that summer—a far cry from her hits of today. The Spice Girls were definitely a thing. So was Meredith Brooks’s “Bitch,” which somehow people still quote. The Fifth Element came out at the start of summer ‘97, just as Buffy’s first season was ending. Movies were often very bad (Con Air, Batman & Robin) but we also got Contact, which still has some things going for it. In the UK, readers had just met a young fellow called Harry Potter.

Looking back on pop culture often feels weird because so many things are built to make you remember the big stuff. It’s as if life was one big Remember This Wacky Thing from Before We Existed! post on Buzzfeed. The little stuff was there, too. I listened to That Dog’s Retreat from the Sun incessantly. My mix tapes were full of Jawbreaker, Helium, Velocity Girl. I had already met people from The Internet for the first time—the first few times.

In August of 1997 I moved into an apartment on St. Mark’s Place where I would live for the next five years with a rotating cast of roommates and questionable futon situations. I had not yet officially graduated from college because I had been in no state to finish my required colloquium at the end of senior year. I spent the summer reading books about fairytales, identity, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and I passed, somehow. My memory of that is so faint, like it barely happened. What did I say to those advisors? How did I wrap anything up after the year I’d had?

I didn’t graduate on time because my stepfather had died, suddenly, in November of 1996. I was ten days shy of 21. The story of that year—of years after that—is the story of me, shocked, not knowing how to grieve, or even how to be. I made mistakes. I did very stupid things. I was cruel because I didn’t know how to be anything, needy because I didn’t know how to fill that space.

You can see, maybe, why “When She Was Bad” cemented Buffy as something that was mine.

Season 2, Episode 1, “When She Was Bad
Written and directed by: Joss Whedon
Original airdate: September 15, 1997
Rewatch date: September 15, 2017

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Continue reading “Welcome Back to the Hellmouth: “When She Was Bad””

Welcome Back to the Hellmouth: “When She Was Bad”