Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 2, Episode 5: Reptile Boy Review

Reptile Boy

Original Airdate: October 13, 1997

Writer: David Greenwalt

Director: David Greenwalt

Continuing the theme of Buffy’s desire to live a life like other girls, Buffy wants to get out and have some fun. Unfortunately, Giles is putting on too much pressure for her to train and perform her slayer duties and Angel is patronizing her because of her age. So she tries to find some fun elsewhere, and she’s supposed to learn a lesson. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite work as well as hoped, making this episode feel more like an uneven season one episode than a progressive second season episode.

Giles comes off as rather aloof this episode. Despite his feelings that Buffy may be slipping, she clearly isn’t, as she has no problem blocking his practice attack, nor springing to action to save herself, Cordelia and Callie from Machida. His behavior would’ve been a better fit early on in the series, when Giles didn’t know Buffy as well.

Angel isn’t helping much either. Obviously, being a vampire is a major problem when it comes to his relationship with Buffy, so introducing this problem of age difference seems rather insignificant. The bigger problem is that he will never age, whereas Buffy will eventually get old and die. It works slightly because Angel is not known for his social skills.

Considering how the romance between her and Angel is bad news, it makes sense for her to try to find another boy that doesn’t carry so much drama. So Tom seems to be a reasonable fit for that role. Of course, she would be wrong with whoever she picked. It is slightly interesting that the one nice guy in the frat, Tom, is that way only because he was saving the slaughter for his master.

Usually, when the writers attempt to do a message episode, in this case it “don’t lie to your parents/guardians and go to a party and drink or else you’ll be fed to a monster”, it doesn’t work well. While the metaphor could’ve worked to teach Buffy not to drink open containers at frat parties because someone there could’ve slipped her a roofie, the episode serves more to teach Giles a lesson that he can’t push Buffy so hard because the episode showed him as the one who made the bigger mistake. It also underwrites a major point in their relationship; Buffy lied to Giles so she could go to the party. By the end of the episode, what should’ve been a rift creating moment for the two is a throwaway moment.

This situation affects neither as much as it does Willow, who finds herself having a hard time trying to cover up for Buffy’s attempt to enjoy herself. Obviously, before Buffy showed up she was very much an introverted goody two shoes. Of course it was easier to justify bending the rules before because of the stakes involved, but this time it is pure indulgence. Her breakdown to the clueless Angel and Giles is one of the high points of this episode.

As “Buffy” is often seen as a sort of feminist empowerment piece, this episode decides to have her face off with an evil misogynistic frat. They drug young impressionable women and sacrifice them to the serpentine Machida. And of course, any time anyone refers to our title character as the “b” word (not her name), the sexism is clear just like Buffy slicing Machida in two is symbolic of females toppling male oppression. While it does work, it is a little easy to do the evil frat thing.

Cordelia gets a good amount of screen time this episode. While I won’t complain about seeing more of her, knowing her character arc makes me a little antsy for when we see more of her depth. It seems that they’re prolonging her integration into the gang for the sake of it being easier to write for.

This episode is an interesting mess. It could’ve been either a good episode to establish the characters in the first season, or to go with the theme of Buffy balancing her “normal” life with slayerdom. Instead we get an episode that has qualities of both, but as a whole doesn’t pack a significant punch.

Overall Score: 6/10