Drusilla accompanied by a gagged Miss Edith, in good spirits with her floral party arrangement just before her complete flower-shredding breakdown.
Unlucky number thirteen for Buffy. Surprise is full of surprises:
- for Buffy (a sparsely attended surprise party at The Bronze – and later unplanned sex!)
- for Spike (a better attended celebration in the abandoned factory with a special gift of an unassembled über-demon)
- for Miss Carpenter (an unwelcome visit from her curse-ranting Uncle Enios)
- for Willow (an invitation to date from Oz)
- and of course, for Angel and the audience (the return of Angelus).
Drusilla’s wearing flowing black for her appearance in Buffy’s nightmare. Note the party balloons that Sasha has included!
Buffy’s opening dream – now that’s the stuff that Nightmares should have been filled with. It’s truly dreamlike – surreal and scary – with a mostly silent Drusilla all in black, stealthily stalking Buffy as she drifts from one unreal, ominously foreshadowing scene to the next: Joyce’s saucer shattering, Miss Carpenter lifting the veil at Angel’s funeral, and Dru staking Angel into dust.
We’ll see it all come to pass, though not literally. Dreams don’t work that way, not even prophetic Slayer dreams.
I wish Giles would take some more interest in Buffy’s mind! They could head off plenty of problems with some analysis of her dreams, but then Giles can’t even understand the conscious mind of an American teenage girl; delving into her subconscious might set him off into an interminable fit of stammering.
Willow and her monkey companion.
At first I was upset that the lighthearted snippet of Willow speaking French with a monkey at The Bronze never got realized in real life – but it did, of course: the monkey is Oz!
Fitting it is, that Surprise opens with a nightmare as the episode, when taken with its companion, Innocence, is a game-changer of the highest order, setting the series off into darkness and tragedy, but I’ll save that discussion for when I hit Innocence later.
If I have any misgiving about this episode, it’s that The Judge just doesn’t do it for me, which is a pity, since I flipped when the same actor, Brian Thompson, incarnated Luke in Welcome to the Hellmouth and The Harvest. I find The Judge more comical than threatening, all bravado but very little action, with much billowy portent from Giles tomes and such meager follow-through once he’s assembled.
Eric Saiet as Dalton, who left us far too soon, sacrificed to The Judge when there were far more dispensable vampires at the gathering.
The most The Judge can do is fry poor Dalton, the bookish lackey of Spike and Dru? How I’ll miss this bespectacled, scholarly vampire whom Buffy diagnoses as kleptomaniac!
Really, I’m mad at The Judge for robbing Buffy of one of the vampires worthy of being kept on and developed – at least through close to the end of the season. He’s the underworld’s scholarly counterpart to Giles. Imagine if the two had had a face-off!
I’m quite intrigued that Dalton’s thirst for knowledge reads as traces of humanity for The Judge. There was something to work with here, just as there was with Dru’s barely suggested bitterness at Angelus for killing her friends and family, but they shot their wad for an easy means of showing us The Judge’s frying power, and we bid adieu to Dalton with nary a tear. Well, Drusilla did clap and cry, “Again! Again!”
And honestly, do we really need another threat of apocalypse? Are we on a twelve-episode cycle for the end of the world? The Mayans had a much more reasonable schedule.
I guess I see Buffy creating some patterns of overloading finales/mid-season finales when the central storyline suffices. Just as we didn’t need The Old Ones bringing Armageddon in Prophecy Girl, neither do we need The Judge, or we need to him to be less bluster and more might – and considerably less world-ending.
The end of Buffy’s world is enough alone.
Dalton and Judge complaints aside, I really enjoyed the episode, though perhaps not raising it to the legendary status it holds among many fans. Surprise succeeds in moodily on the sexual theme set up in the previous Bad Eggs, and then Innocence blows it up in a spectacular teenage girl living nightmare, the very tip of which we see as the post-coital Angel stumbles out into the rain and changes the course of the entire series. I’m now fighting off the urge to binge through the rest of season two, but I have held strong, even at the conclusion of this episode, which arrived accompanied by the dreaded “to be continued.” Any less restraint and I would have to be locked in the library book cage to keep me from watching the next ten episodes on one cold, winter day.
Dru flips out over flowers. Really, she’s just too excited about the party!
Doris W.
mrlousy
Raúl Zingle
1630revellodrive 
When I was 14 I got really into doo-wop and more specifically girl groups. I ordered one of those Time-Life sets and was hooked. It was a small two-cassette girl group set but it was packed with not only the well-trod He’s So Fine and Loco-Motion but other upbeat ditties by the The Shangri-Las, The Angels, The Shirelles, Skeeter Davis and Claudine Clark that rarely get airplay on the oldies station. I wore those cassettes thin listening to them constantly. I even subscribed to record catalogs to order 45s – the 80’s equivalent or downloading a one-hit wonder song.
I recently found this set on CD at the used record store. I still love some of these songs – they’re so bright and buoyant! But what I have been ruminating is the content. With a few exceptions of just wanting to have fun – Claudine Clark’s super spunky Party Lights is still terrific fun – nearly all of these of these songs are about boys and most of these are bad boys. These girls want to be with a boy, are crazy in love with a boy or are trying to hang on to one. And these boys are the leader of the pack, crazy and lazy, you just don’t know what he’s like when we’re alone ok? He’s soooo sweet when it’s just us. Until he stops. And he becomes a total jerk. But he used to be so nice to me. Maybe if I… Even the girls savvy enough to wonder will you love me tomorrow still throw caution to the wind and themselves into the love fray. These girls are fucked.
I get it. I too continue to be a sucker for the Misunderstood Loner and still kind of believe in the Love of a Good Woman. I have casually wondered when I was indoctrinated into this belief system and how far back it goes. Where did it come from? Jane Austen for sure – what is Mr. Darcy if not the pin-up boy for dick turned sweetie by the power of love? Ophelia driven mad trying to figure out an unstable Hamlet? I don’t know enough Greek plays to go back that far. I can say opera is littered if not built on doomed relationships.
And so with all this swimming in my head I am watching S2 of Buffy. Angel was bad once but he’s good now. Why is it so shocking to learn he still has it in him? As the episodes continue – and I know I’m jumping ahead several episodes – it becomes apparent that Angelus wasn’t a bad guy. He’s The Bad Guy. We’ve long since become used to the violence on Buffy. But we’ve never seen this cruelty. Raul I haven’t gotten to your posts about those episodes yet and I assume you address this so maybe I’m jumping the gun here. But his violence is really the least of it. The relish he takes watching Buffy and Willow learn of Miss Calendar’s death, the taunting illustrations which contrast the creepiness of being watched with the delicacy of the hand – it is the worst kind of attack. He hits you where he knows it will hurt most because this guy knows you so well.
But what did we expect? That he really wasn’t that bad before? That it wasn’t his fault? Someone made him kill all those people and torture Drusilla into madness. The Gang knew about all Angelus but it wasn’t until they experienced it themselves that they really believed it. With the exception of Xander there wasn’t any serious campaign to keep Buffy from Angel. And by then of course it’s too late. You’ve already seen his good side and his bad side just seems too unbelievable, too incongruous. Surely, this can’t be true.
As much as this and later episodes hit on the teen girl experience with their first love gone bad I think most women would tell you it is indeed the first time with others to follow. But why is that?
I once saw an Oprah – I know – about a woman who was born a man in a small town in I believe North Dakota. She was heading back for her 20 year reunion. Never popular, bullied this was a defiant act, not a homecoming. Growing up male, this person had suffered greatly. Oprah asked if she wished she’d been born a girl. She said no. Oprah asked her why? She said even with her horrible childhood and teen bullying she was glad to have been raised as a boy. Girls are raised differently and she never would have survived with the tools of a girl, would not have had the strength. Huh.
So what’s the deal? Are girls doomed to fall for Angel even after they find out about Angelus? And to have fallen for Angel so hard that they can’t bear to even have Angelus out of their lives.
Something else I wonder is why is the onus on the girls? If you go to any self-help section the number of books telling women how to get a man is staggering. I don’t even know if the equivalent exists for men. Women fixing or figuring out men. Women having to know better, learning from their mistakes or exercising caution around the big bad. As if they didn’t control themselves. All these songs, these books, these episodes ostensibly have the girl in the driver’s seat. But why is the man always the car?
How is this Time-Life girl group revelation only now coming to light? I had a somewhat similar experience in high school with a compilation album called Teenage Tragedy, which had all stories in song of, well, teenage tragedies. The LP had a cut out with a tissue coming out of it for weeping. The Shangri-Las factored in multiple times. I have to hunt for that record! There is no way that I ever got rid of it.
I’ll hold out on some commentary because I think it might be applicable in a later post. But I can say that I don’t believe anyone had ever considered the possibility that Angel would lose his soul and revert to Angelus. They did give us numerous suggestions of his cruelty through the lore in Giles’ books, but I hold that Drusilla recalling the sadism through a haze of madness was the more powerful glimpse at Angelus, who we would soon meet in the soulless flesh.
Note: Buffy will meet considerably more resistance from the gang regarding Angel once it’s revealed that he’s back in s3. I just watched that one.
I can’t really speak to the bad-boy phenomenon or the just-needs-the-right-woman female wish fulfillment. I don’t really get it, though I imagine it has to do with seeking freedom and breaking norms. I wonder how this ties into the character of the femme fatale and their male dupes in noir. Ideas?
Note on the Oprah – I think the guest she had on was from the movie Prodigal Sons, which I think is streaming:
http://www.prodigalsonsfilm.com/
I’ll leave you to ponder the quandary of the girls in control of their uncontrollable boys…
In the meantime, I plan to check out Claudine Clark’s Party Lights!