I Only Have Eyes For You

We’re back in Brooklyn for a week or so and this is where the complete set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer discs live. So that’s our comfort show in Brooklyn, like Murder, She Wrote is our comfort show in Maine.

We’d left season 2 in the DVD player, so we picked up there when we got back into town. Tonight, we watched I Only Have Eyes For You, a ghost/poltergeist episode with a pair of lovers from 1955 whose love affair ended tragically when the male student, James, shots and kills the teacher he was in love with, Grace Newman. (We’ll just put aside how no one in the show really addresses how inappropriate a love affair between a high school teacher and her sixteen or seventeen year old student is, even in 1955.)

Anyway, James and Grace, as ghosts, possess a couple of people (a pair of students who are dating and a teacher and a custodian who aren’t) and reenact their final scene when James shoots Grace. The Scoobies try to exorcise the ghosts but fail and a whole fuckton of wasps flood the building, chasing them away.

Until Buffy is drawn back and James possesses her, and Angel (who’s lost his soul, you may recall if you’ve watched the show before) shows up because “fun fact about wasps: they have no taste for the undead.”

Grace possesses Angel and Buffy and Angel now reenact their final scene, only in a gender-swapped twist and Buffy/James shoots Angel/Grace. Only, since Angel is already dead, the bullet doesn’t kill him and he’s able to go find James/Buffy in the music room, where he/she’s morosely listening to 1955 sad music and about to kill himself/herself.

Grace/Angel tells James/Buffy that she forgives him and loved him until her dying breath and that gives James the closure he needs to move on to whatever the afterlife has for him.

I read somewhere once that it was this scene that convinced Joss Whedon that David Boreanaz could hold his own in his own television show. Which he does two years later.

I really like this episode. Better than the next episode in the lineup, Go Fish, the Xander-joins-the-swim-team episode, which would be a lot better if it weren’t for all the threatened rape in it. Sigh. It was the 90s, I suppose.