Even more interesting is that Jenny was sent to Sunnydale as soon as Angel revealed himself to Buffy and they started getting too close. At this point, her Kalderash backstory wasn’t even written, but the show got the greatest gift of the ultimate timing coincidence. There’s also the coincidence that Calendar has a vague similarity to Kalderash. Jenny arrived just then after being told that Angel’s pain was lessening and to separate him from the Slayer. Her infiltration one episode later from an in-canon perspective is not a coincidence.

At the time of Mutant Enemy finally deciding on Angelus as season 2’s Big Bad after Whedon’s underestimation of David Boreanaz’s ability to carry the role and the Anointed One as season 2’s originally-intended Big Bad not working out at all, the original intent was actually for Angelus to kill the new character of Oz. However, the popularity of Seth Green and the potential for the Willoz ‘ship eventually settled on Jenny being on the chopping block. It also was a greater emotional hit, as Angel had more of a connection to Jenny (saving her life), whereas he didn’t really know Oz at all. The audience also hadn’t known Oz for that long. There’s also the fact that Angel had saved Giles’ life (not to mention Xander and Willow’s) and a much more profound connection to him, even if Angel was also becoming fairly close to Willow before all that was snatched away.

It also gave Giles the most emotional storyline he ever had, on top of the extra cruelty was the fact that Giles actually liked Angel a lot prior to the Angelus arc, which Giles never forgave Angel for. It was Giles who originally told Xander that Jesse was no longer his friend, but rather the thing that killed him, but it becomes Giles who can’t make that separation between Angel and Angelus. And of course, Xander hated Angel long before Angelus ever showed up, as can be seen by his numerous jealous comments well before the reveal in 1x07.

They kept doing research together and Angel was one of the few other “adults” Giles could interact with. Giles was even fascinated by the maudlin romance of a vampire in love with a Slayer. He’s not against the relationship at all.

One of the non-canon tie-in novels even had Angel spending the entire summer saving Sunnydale with Giles and Jenny as Buffy’s replacement while she was at Hank’s house in L.A. That book tells us the probable context of how Angelus got that off-screen invite into Giles’ house.

After Angelus, Giles gave Angel some begrudging credit for having the mature foresight needed to leave Buffy, which was his criticism of Spike in Lies My Parents Told Me, but that is quickly dashed when it is Giles on the phone who Angel is begging for help to save Fred’s life, only to be utterly rejected and insulted with visits by Andrew. As much as I’m loathe to consider the comics canon, one of the few good calls was to have everything that came out of Andrew’s mouth be more lies that never came from Buffy, but unfortunately that doesn’t excuse Giles being on the phone call refusing to help Fred only because it’s Angel who made the call.

Again, as much as I’m loathe to acknowledge the comics, one of the only bright spots, despite the utter character-assassinating clusterfuck of how it got there (including Twilight!Angel killing Giles), was Angel saving Giles from having sold his soul to Eyghon, which also calls back to Angel (or, more accurately, Angelus) saving Jenny from Eyghon.

In later seasons, it’s interesting to go back to these early pre-Angelus interactions with Giles and Angel where they actually had a lot in common (two nerdy, well-educated bookworms, not unlike the relationship that developed between Angel and Wesley) and often had similar perspectives on what would be best for Buffy and Angel’s own impossible situation. Angel broadcast all his misgivings about the relationship in 1x07 and repeated all the reasons standing between them numerous times, so it really wasn’t just hearing it from Joyce (much is made of her having a better relationship with Spike and never getting past Angel taking her daughter’s virginity, despite the fact that they actually have more interests in common, most especially art and collecting, and were in complete agreement that the relationship was never a good idea) and the Mayor (a fellow immortal who lived out the same tragedy) that led to The Prom. It is Giles whom Angel tells concerning why he’s been so absent in Out of Mind, Out of Sight.

Angelus didn’t just destroy any future for Angel having a relationship with Buffy, but also destroyed most of the budding relationships he had in Sunnydale. Angel, Wesley and Cordy were thus the only characters at the end of season 3 who had nothing left to lose by leaving.

When Buffy couldn’t go to Giles for advice or use Willow as a kind sounding board (without Xander’s judgment), it was always Angel whom she ran to. Angel was whom Buffy ran to whenever what worried her was about her parents’ divorce, wanting to be a normal girl, not getting to live long enough to have a future (or the children Angel can’t have) or why they fight. Gingerbread has the philosophical precursor to the Epiphany speech. Buffy has an interesting history of replacement father figures (Giles being the most prominent) and Angel’s paternal tendencies are a huge part of his arc. He’s a Prodigal Son with another Prodigal Son, after all, not to mention his own often-paternal protector/provider relationship with his team at Angel Investigations. So, when Angel was taken from Buffy (blaming herself for killing the person she loved most, thus the connection of her to James Stanley), she also lost one of her biggest confidants. The whole season is having her relationships and reasons to stay in Sunnydale stripped from her.

Wesley, of course, was written entirely as Giles’ mirror when first introduced. He’s there to make Giles look cool and hip by comparison. He was even more of a bookworm than Giles ever was and had much faster recall, more readily having information without all-night research. The only character who challenges Angel for the character with the biggest eidetic memory database concerning history, languages and demonology is Wesley. It’s often Angel who has all the answers in the first season and a half that Giles often doesn’t (the Hellmouth, the Harvest, the Master, the Pergamum Codex, what the Anointed and his followers are up to, Spike, Drusilla, the Judge, etc…). Witch not only lies about Giles’ spell casting history, but it turns out Giles’ entire tweedy persona is a big lie and that he’s actually more street smart than book smart. Wesley is the exact opposite initially, though ends up so brutal that he gives Angel a run for his head-over-heart, big-picture-thinking tendencies. Wesley and Angel end up mirroring each other as well, and you can see the start of it as early as Wesley’s willingness to sacrifice Willow to stop the Mayor.

In regards to the acting coach’s perspective on Buffy season 1 (last reviewing Witch): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tt5L6IeHT4

Witch was actually the very first episode shot.

Many new shows will film a few filler episodes first while the actors are still building their chemistry, so that the first episodes aired will be even better. This was absolutely the reason why Witch was filmed prior to Welcome to the Hellmouth and The Harvest. Might be worth noting in terms of green performances and chemistry. The chemistry is great already, though this is luckily a very fatherly episode for Giles, so it’s not as jostling as that slightly creepy, personal space-intrusive version in Welcome to the Hellmouth shot later. In Nicholas Brendon’s case with his visible waiting for the next line, outside of the unaired pilot, *this* was actually his first episode.

Obviously, this is one of the cases where the pilot was never aired (for good reason–and not just because of replacing Willow and Flutie) and many times those will have scenes redone for airing. Sometimes things are reshot due to replacing an actor, but without reshooting the whole thing. For example, Smallville had a Martha Kent stand-in due to Annette O'Toole being already cast, but only available at a later date.

In Buffy’s case, the unaired pilot was obviously a lost cause. They were still working out how to do major SFX staples of the show like the dusting effect (they tried stop motion before settling on dodgy CGI with no skeletons until season 3), as well. Even the makeup changed a bit over the first season from Julie Benz being the original test dummy for The Lost Boys prosthetics, as can be seen by the white/purple makeup being made more flesh tone. It was her first scene that coincidentally changed the least in the rewrite and performance (except for a costume change) from the unaired pilot to Welcome to the Hellmouth. She also was originally meant to die in what became The Harvest’s showdown, but was kept for another episode (and then a lot more episodes!) by having her run away (note how often Darla runs away from danger!) from Willow’s holy water.

Darla’s costume change became the Catholic schoolgirl look (she was just wearing a floral ‘90s grunge dress before) that got an explanation in 1x07. Darla doesn’t know she’s trying to jealously scare off a Slayer (she doesn’t know until the mausoleum scene) with the dead guy in the gym locker, but she knows Angel is in Sunnydale and has been following a schoolgirl. Darla later mocks Angel for this, but also exposes her insecurity and jealousy, all the way later in Dear Boy on his spinoff. Angel, of course, is Catholic, so that’s another pointed jab. A lot of viewers don’t even pick up on the Catholic schoolgirl uniform, which was worn prior to Darla knowing Buffy’s secret identity, being that meaningful. The other thing viewers don’t pick up on in regards to 1x07 is the in-hindsight meaning of Angel having human blood in his fridge after two decades eating rats and how that potentially affected his ability to socialize with humans and why he knew about delivery day at the hospital in The Dark Age, despite Whistler mentioning blood from the butcher. Something as simple as a costume change got a whole character-building backstory in a later episode. That layer of storytelling was absent in the pilot.

For continuity reasons that weren’t because of anything being performed badly like Buffy’s hair color and the school library becoming a set (Torrance High’s spiral library staircase would’ve clearly become a hazard for Tony Head!), the footage had to all be redone. Buffy had a slightly longer dialog in the library scene, for example, that is actually something of a loss because it goes into more depth about what happened to her in L.A.

Xander’s tour of the school isn’t strictly necessary for the plot, but was a chemistry-building scene, and perhaps a remnant of Joss Whedon’s intent for him to be the every man who wins the fantasy girl who is out of his league, rather than the female protagonist instead winning her unattainable, forbidden fruit fantasy (the male gaze vs. the female gaze).

Whedon was still being talked into having the Angel character at all back then, originally intending for Xander (notoriously known for being Whedon’s not-so-nice “nice guy” self-insert) to be the love interest. David Greenwalt, Marcia Shulman and Gail Berman were Angel’s biggest cheerleaders and the latter two (rather degradingly described as “puddles of drool”) outvoted Whedon during casting. The WB also only agreed to renew the show (they were actually quite disappointed by season 1) if season 2 contained more Angel and the Bangel romance, which was heavily promoted (look at any of the WB’s ad campaigns) and brought in the show’s highest ratings (the entire show’s ratings peaked at Surprise/Innocence).

Not only was Whedon against casting David Boreanaz, comparing him even to the jocks who beat him up in school and talking about how he hated making a spinoff about a white Alpha male lead as a hero, but he was reluctant to have any good vampires at all. Come season 2, Whedon was also pushing James Marsters up against a wall and threatening to fire him because he was getting too popular. Whedon made the remark that Marsters had it easier than him getting laid because of how he looked (that was on Marsters’ second day of work well before School Hard ever aired!). Whedon didn’t like it when he ended up with a good vampire sex symbol the first time, then ended up with two sympathetic vampire sex symbols on his show.

Coincidentally, both characters weren’t meant to stick around and survived intended final death scenes, as well. Angel was never meant to be more than a cryptic messenger for a few episodes (before he became the love interest or a vampire), then wouldn’t have come back from hell if it weren’t for the spinoff (which the WB wanted–it wasn’t just Whedon being finally impressed by Boreanaz’s performance as Grace Newman). Spike was originally intended to be killed by the church organ falling on him. Faith was originally going to hang herself after staking Finch.

For that matter, the original villain of season 2 was meant to be the Anointed One (hence the absurd build-up in season 1 that goes nowhere) until it was apparent that Collin’s actor had grown up too much and wasn’t that successful (cue Spike flash-frying him in a cage), with Whedon reluctant to believe Boreanaz could carry the Big Bad role. Angelus arguably turned out to be the Buffyverse’s greatest villain and Buffy’s most personal. The most subtle foreshadowing was undoubtedly the fact that the production didn’t feel the need to hire Mark Metcalf for a silent performance of the Master in When She Was Bad, so it’s actually Boreanaz (look for his wider mouth shape) beneath the Master’s prosthetics. Buffy’s having nightmares of the Master, but it’s really Angel underneath! When She Was Bad also teases what would happen if it came down to a fight between Buffy and Angel.

Whedon’s intentions being outvoted so forcefully by other writers, producers, the network and audience is mirrored by the likes of Sera Gamble attempting to villainize and kill off Castiel (whose Little Mermaid-esque arc arguably overshadowed the Winchesters and created an unintended third lead, no matter how much he was nerfed of his powers and left out of Monster of the Week episodes due to him making human hunters irrelevant) on Supernatural, only to fail with a massive audience outcry and was forced out of the show herself. Shows occasionally get away from their creators or showrunners.

Greenwalt had to also create the soul/curse mythology (massively to the franchise’s benefit!) to explain how Angel was the first gray-area exception to Whedon’s black & white world-building where vampires and demons are always bad and only there to be allegories for human problems. This is in stark contrast to today’s vampire mythologies that are no longer default-evil and mostly about “choosing boyfriends, the movie”, whereas the Buffyverse ended up taking most of its vampire archetypes from Anne Rice, despite Whedon absolutely hating “that crap”. Ironically, Rice’s vampires are all sexually impotent and murderously evil, despite Louis feeling guilty and eating rats in alleys (sound familiar?). Come the spinoff, it wasn’t just Angel, but characters like Doyle and Lorne (not to mention Wolfram & Hart’s human lawyers) further muddying that original intent. The Buffyverse was straddling two eras of genre fiction in regards to the development of the evil-to-sympathetic/misunderstood-to-good monster.

The pilot definitely felt like it was a better set-up for Xander to not be so easily friend-zoned, but the friend-zoning is complete here in Witch. That one scene here in Witch actually turns out to be a significant one, and it’s especially significant in an episode that was shot first and doesn’t contain Xander’s rival. By the time that Witch was filmed, it appears the writing staff were aware that Xander wasn’t going to be the love interest. The next few episodes also are aware of it, even when Angel doesn’t or barely appears. Earlier drafts for Never Kill a Boy on the First Date and The Pack didn’t have Angel juxtaposed against Owen/Xander (this episode got the heaviest rewrites of all) or the scene of Buffy (wearing Angel’s jacket) and Willow discussing Angel in the Bronze + Xander’s jealousy under the hyena spell at all.

Only 25 minutes were presented of a full-length pilot script (dated January 1996) that even contained Angel (back when they hadn’t even decided he was a vampire yet and you’ll notice the bigger Angel episodes were all the last episodes written and shot with scenes dropped into earlier scripts that didn’t contain him before) as a mysterious motorcycle guy who stakes a vampire outside of the auditorium showdown. Boreanaz even mentioned shooting the motorcycle scene in the 20th anniversary special that probably confused anyone who hadn’t read the unaired pilot script (which is only a minute fraction of the franchise’s older diehards who even know where to get a hold of it!)!

Despite Boreanaz being already cast with a cut scene, it is only Mercedes McNab who is in both the unaired pilot (yet not Welcome to the Hellmouth) and Not Fade Away. Boreanaz is the only actor in both Welcome to the Hellmouth and Not Fade Away. He’s also in the most episodes by a far margin. Angel is in 167 episodes, with Willow coming in at 147 and Buffy only 146.

it’s kind of amazing that every single episode that directly tackles fundamental identity issues and other vs self perception in buffy is so inundated with gay subtext. the writers really saw xander, willow, faith’s difficult relationships to masculinity, control, and violence respectively and went “we’re gonna make this gay as hell” huh. 

i have a deep attachment to angry, guilty women embodying angry, impulsive men, expressing awful repressed emotions that they don’t feel like they have the right to feel through a veil of Boy Rage while waving around guns, which is why the killer in me and i only have eyes for you are the two most underrated buffy episodes 

but no like seriously

both the killer and me and i only have eyes for you come off of heavy bombs of episodic pain, i only have eyes for you in the form of operating after the trauma of innocence, surprise, and passion, and the killer in me operating after the trauma of seeing red, two to go, villains, and grave. these episodes were a powder keg finally going off, the burn and the explosion and i only have eyes for you and the killer and me are the initiators of that burning sitting in the wreckage looking at what they’ve done and somehow - trying to deal. 

buffy and willow lost someone they love, dramatically, painfully, and the idea of forward movement, buffy refusing to blame herself for angelus, willow finding someone else to be with, they treat as morally reprehensible because the two girls are inundated with bearing it - the notion that they must bear it, that sins and pain and grief are for their backs, all the time. and both times, a masculine presence forces its way in to articulate what the two cannot say in their own sacrificial unhappiness. warren tells willow, and us, that willow cannot deal with kissing kennedy, with being with anyone, because tara’s memory is too fresh and too beautiful and willow is at too much fault to try and move on. james tells us that buffy unknowingly unleashed a monster and in her efforts to put it down she refuses to acknowledge forgiveness beyond the horizon. james and grace dance. willow screams at kennedy in the garden with a gun. 

the two of them become someone they fundamentally are not, warren creeping his way into willows mind and james borrowing buffys body for a ride, to elucidate what the two have been feeling and suppressing and suppressing for so long and to illustrate quite plainly how the future needs to be. 

warren tries to gun kennedy down and willow knows that she has to be with kennedy to make the vengeance go away. james and grace tell eachother that it’s okay, that it can be better, and buffy understands quite plainly that she needs that betterment for herself

idk man feelings i have them

Tara: I like it when girls roll up their sleeves so you can see their forearms.

Willow, looking down and realizing she only has two arms: Fuck.

Buffy Rewatch Season 3 Episdoe 15 “Consequences” Fuffy Angst to the MAX

-Horrifying opening with Buffy’s ‘Faith’s drowning me’ nightmare’. Poor girl.

Wesley and Cordy meet for the first time! OMG! Angel feels! So weird that they were into each other at first. Don’t blame them though, they’re both so pretty.

-“But you can pretend Angel’s good when you have to protect him” Faith is jealous of Buffy’s ex. And Buffy wants to help her so bad. Poor Buffy.

-POOR SCORNED WILLOW. Willow-Buffy-Faith triangle vibes are so powerful here.

-Faith shows her humanity is still there. Buffy tries to understand and Faith gets defensive again. Oh boy. The tension.

-“that’s not your real face and i know it. I know what you’re feeling because I’m feeling it too”. WOWSA.

-This debate is so fascinating. Such a discussion of morality. It’s interesting. And speaks to Buffy and Faith’s different senses of morality at this point in the story.

-Faith is Buffy’s shadow self. Buffy tried to kill Ted last season, literally did. Faith does the same here. Losing control of her slayer power.

- 'Since when wouldn’t I understand’ The parallels between this this and Season 4’s Wilara conversation. And the Willow/Buffy feels are strong.

-The 'Faith lied to Giles’ scene HURTS. OMG Faith how could you. Thankfully Giles knows Buffy too well. The situation of how to help Faith too just hurts.

-Ooh Wes you’re about to screw up. I watched Orpheus recently. OMG WEs. You complicated tragic anti hero. Mistakes were made.

-Poor Xander thinks he has a connection with Faith. LOL Buffy’s “yeah she don’t really swing that way’.

-The Xander and Faith scene is pretty horrifying. Faith needs to learn when no means no. But Angel and Faith starting their epic platonic reformed anti-heroes connection is timeless.

-I forgot that Buffy asked Angel to talk to her! OMG Buffy you are so nice. She even tries to get Faith some stuff. THIS IS THE HARDEST BUFFY HAS EVER TRIED TO SAVE SOMEONE’S SOUL. Even Angel Buffy gave up on quicker.

-"We’re a lot alike, Faith. WE’ve both killed, we’re both cynical, we both love Buffy and long black cloaks. Let’s bond instead of fighting over her’.

-whoops Wesley dammit he was so close. Man this scene hits different after rewatching Orpheus.

-God Buffy is clinging onto the chance that FAith could be saved for so long. So desperate to save her.

-Wes and Angel’s first 'We didn’t save someone right’ fight. It last two seconds. And man I feel bad for Wes this season cause i know him from later years. He did screw up but damn.

- OMG this final conversation. Faith omg you’re losing it. And whoa there’s my girl. That line gets one hell of a callback later on.

- Faith still goes to help Buffy when the create falls on her. Buffy pushes her out of the way. Faith still saves her. Even now theyve got each other’s backs.

-Sweet Buffy and Giles scene where Buffy is still "Faith can be saved!”. But Faith betrays her to the mayor nooo Faith.