Here is the Hellmouth Podcast for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series, Season 3 Episode 2 – Dead Man’s Party. (mp3 version here)

Podcast Promo is for Knights of the Guild, find their podcast here.

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HMPC 0302 “Dead Man’s Party”  – Buffy The Vampire Slayer

• Hello Sunnydale and welcome to the Hellmouth Podcast for the Buffy The Vampire Slayer Series, Season 3 Episode 02 titled “Dead Man’s Party”
• For those of you who may be new to the podcast, here are all of the ways that you can be a part of the show.
  • Twitter @hellmouthcast
  • Facebook page – search for Hellmouth Podcast
  • as always you can email me at hellmouthpodcast@gmail.com
  • www.hellmouthpodcast.com
• Reminder about Facebook fans and iTunes reviews.
• Podcast Promo – Knights of the Guild
  • The knights of the guild podcast folks is the real deal this podcast is straight from the set of the Guild.
• Clear up my error in the last episode regarding continuity and the time space continuum in Ken’s half-way house.
  • I’ve just caught your Anne edition and, by now, I expect you’ve realized your error regarding the relative time-flow between this world and Ken’s realm.  But I’m wondering if anyone has ever done the math.  Hang on – this’ll get silly.
    Taking Ken’s declaration about One Hundred Years passing below for just One Day above as a precise equation, the ratio breaks down like this:
    100 Years is 3,155,760,000 seconds.
    1 Day is 86,400 seconds.
    Thus 36,525 seconds will pass below for every single second that passes above.
    That’s 10 hours, 5 minutes and 25 seconds for each Earthly second.
    if we total up the time below from when Buffy arrives at 31:11 to when she passes through the membrane back up to L.A. (at 41:50) we get a total of 1253 seconds of hell-time (just shy of 21 minutes).
  • His email breaks it all down with events and time estimates, etc.
    On Earth, while Buffy was below, how much time passed?
    0.0343 seconds.
    She’s lucky she didn’t trip over herself on the way back.
• So let’s get to the episode recap finally, shall we
• 2 minute Buffy
  • Buffy’s back in Sunnydale after a Summer ‘not-so vacation’ in LA.
  • Joyce is having to adjust to having Buffy back in the house and the wall is feeling the pains of that adjustment as Joyce hangs an angry looking mask on the wall, oddly reminiscent of a vampire’s face.
  • Buffy wants to go find the Scoobies to let them know she is back in town.
  • Buffy finds Nighthawk prowling the streets. Xander almost stakes her as she sneaks up on him.
  • The gang is happy to have Buffy back but it’s not all sunshine and dales in Sunnydale.
  • The Scoobies take Buffy to see Giles
  • Giles is relieved to have Buffy back, but realizes that he isn’t going to rack up as many frequent flyer miles now on the council’s dime.
  • Buffy’s no longer wanted for murder but she is still expelled from school so she and her mother have to meet with Snyder to plead for readmission.
  • Snyder is tingly at the idea of keeping Buffy out of school despite her meeting the ‘not a murderer’ requirement for enrollment.
  • Willow stands Buffy up at the Espresso pump a new locale in Sunnydale.
  • At home, Joyce has invited the Scoobies over for dinner.
  • While getting the dinner plates Buffy finds a dead cat.
  • They bury the cat in the bushes and I don’t blame them, do you have any idea how much money the city charges for picking up dead animals?
  • While Buffy and her mom argue about Buffy’s school options, a surprisingly animated dead cat runs into the house.
  • Giles is called to come pick up the re-animated dead cat because God knows what the city would charge for that pickup.
  • The Scoobies decide that dinner at Buffy’s is going to go down as a hootenanny.
  • A mob of students and some peach schnapps show up for the quiet dinner at Buffy’s house.
  • Buffy realizes that all her friends are avoiding her and don’t seem all that happy she is back in town.
  • Buffy decides that maybe it would be best if she just left again.
  • Willow catches her packing and then Joyce walks in.
  • Everything blows up into a big confrontation between Xander, Willow, Joyce, and Buffy. One of the most cringe-worthy moments of the series so far.
  • In the midst of their argument the house is attacked by a small army of re-animated zombies.
  • The Scoobies spring into action, filling their roles in the survival effort as if they had never parted.
  • Buffy saves the day by planting a shovel in dear Pats face.
  • The Scoobies and Joyce reconcile and all is well in Sunnydale, except there is a huge after-party mess that needs to be cleaned up.
• So there are quite a few things that I wanted to talk about in this episode. Like I said in the last podcast, for me this episode is about the aftermath of Buffy’s return. All of the Scoobies, and Buffy and Joyce are all wearing a bit of a mask in this episode, that is why I enjoy the mask symbolism in this episode.
• I think that Buffy is wearing a mask in trying to show that she is happy to be back in town. She is putting on a brave face that she is ok and whatever issues she was dealing with are over now. She is still hurting quite a bit but she has returned to Sunnydale for a reason.
• Joyce and the Scoobies are wearing masks as well.
• Now that she is back, there is a huge elephant in Sunnydale that no one seems to want to talk about. Why Buffy left, what happened, where was she, all those questions are being ignored and everyone is pretending that everything is ok.
• Rather than dealing with these issues, the Scoobies and even and Joyce are avoiding Buffy. The scene when Giles comes to pick up the cat is a great example. Joyce insists that Buffy go with Giles to the school and Giles insists she can’t.
• Are the Scoobies justified or does Buffy deserve some leniency?
• I think that the Scoobies are justified in being so irritated with Buffy, she just left without talking to anyone, didn’t call or write or send a postcard. Then she just shows back up in town and wants everything to be like it was.
• I think that maybe it was just too complicated. There were some who would have been happy to hear the news that Angel was dead, Buffy probably wasn’t really ready to be discussing details. Maybe Buffy didn’t want to talk about it because it wouldn’t make a difference and didn’t want to have to deal with everyone trying to make it better.
• Was I right is Buffy back just to be the slayer and the rest is whatever, or does she really truly care about her friends and family?
  • Andrew – I disagree with your interpretation of the shot of Buffy standing on the platform, holding the ax, ready to kill things.  I don’t think this means that she is returning to Sunnydale just to be the Slayer and giving a “wait-and-see” attitude to her personal life.  I think this is the moment where she accepts finally that she is the Slayer, that this is her destiny she’s been fighting since the pilot episode (or even before) but not to the detriment of her personal life.  The rest of the season shows that she cares a great deal about her personal life. Her distress over her friends’ anger that she left, her relationships with Scott and then Angel again, and even fighting her mom over which school she’ll go to, first high school when Snyder tries to keep her out of Sunnydale High then college when she does well on her SATs, all point to Buffy caring deeply about her social life.
  • More and more she will keep secrets, spend less time with them and really focus on her Slayer responsibilities and issues that directly affect her. She begins to show signs of that isolationism that I talked about.
• Xander begins his infamous, Season 3, Xander is a butthead campaign, which starts in this episode and continues till about midseason or so.
  • Xander seems to really have it in for Buffy this episode, he is clearly trying to avoid Buffy in Giles apartment and in the blow-up at the party he is really aggressive. Which to me seemed a little bit un-xanderly. Normally Xander is passive and often times doting when it comes to Buffy but he is in full on attack mode in this episode. I can only attribute it to being hurt. He was hurt that Buffy left, hurt that she didn’t see fit to discuss what happened and in a small way protecting Willow and Joyce. I think we get a glimpse of that Caveman DNA coming back up but he was really a butthead in this episode and that, for me, is going to carry on through most of at least the first half of season 3.
  • All I can say is that I found myself, whether justified or not, defending Buffy during the party. I really felt like Buffy was the only one making an effort and was getting rejected at every turn.
  • We had the poll on the website for what you would have done in Buffy’s position with regards to leaving and going to LA and a lot of you, and I completely agree by the way said that you would be right there with Buffy on the bus, well I can really relate to Buff… well that’s not true, I have never been in love with a handsome male vampire that lost his soul and then had it restored just before I stabbed him with a sword. But I guess what I am trying to say is I can empathize or sympathize, I always get those backwards. I can em-sympathize with Buffy and like I said, I think she got the short end of the stick.
• Who was the redeeming member of the group in this episode, Giles! It has been too long since we have really had an opportunity to talk about Giles. In this whole mess, it seems like Giles was the only one who had Buffy’s best interests in the forefront of his mind.
• The moment where Giles almost cries in his kitchen now that Buffy is back.
  • His chasing leads, he might have been a little desperate.
  • Giles is the one in this episode who wants to let Buffy ease back into the swing of things.
  • He encourages the Scoobies to keep the dinner below hootenanny or shindig status and stick to a gathering.
• Another Angel dream, I wanted to talk about the Angel dreams a little bit because this is some hard-core foreshadowing about what is going to happen later in this season. Not really the content of the dreams always but the fact that she keeps dreaming about Angel. This time he says something poignant Buffy is at school and says “I thought they’d be here” Angel says “They are, they’re waiting”
  • Waiting for what?
• Lastly I want to talk a little bit about the Significance of the Evil Eye or the dead being reanimated.  This was kind of the villain or the conflict in this episode.
• End Episode.
• Rate the episode
  • Bonus point for Giles making fun of Joyce and her mask as he rushes to save the group.
  • Bonus point for Oz deciding to name the undead cat Patches.
  • Lose a point for Xander and the commencement of the Xander is a butthead campaign.
  • I wanted to deduct a point for all the moments in this episode that made me feel crumby, but then I thought, any show that could evoke that kind of reaction from me is actually a pretty good episode so I am going to have to give a bonus point rather than take one away.
  • Bonus point for the melon-throat moment when Giles is in the kitchen happy to have Buffy back.
  • The episode starts at an 8 for me and ends after all the bonus points with an 11, so we have had a pretty good back to back start for Season 3 and folks it is only going to get better.
• Listener Emails
• Desiree – Concerning the Xander/Cordelia relationship and why it doesn’t seem to have as many die hard fans of it…umm I don’t really know. I know why for me, my reason for not being a die hard fan of X/C is that I’m not a huge fan of Xander or Cordelia separately.Xander I tend to have problems with because he’s rather closed minded about Buffy’s choices in relationships when he himself fell in love with Anya who was a demon far longer than either Angel or Spike and quite possibly caused the deaths of far more people then both of them combined. Which Buffy even brings up in Season 7, during the ep when Buffy is saying she may have to kill Anya and Xander is upset saying that you don’t kill your friends when they go all psycho you help them. Which isn’t exactly the same tune he was singing when Angel went soulless or when Spike was killing people under the influence of the First.

  Cordelia was never a favorite character of mine. I was teased by a couple of girls in middle school and high school who were very Cordelia-esq. So immediately when I started watching she had that against her. Plus I tended to sympathize more with Buffy because of my own experiences and what I was dealing with during the time I began tuning in to the show. Now even though I grew to like Cordelia and as I get further away from my high school experience I don’t hate her as much when I watch the high school episodes as I did when I was in high school but she’s still not my favorite character So that’s my reason for not being a huge die hard fan of X/C.

• Beth -  In this episode, you really do see how Angel’s death has driven home the reality of what it means to be the Slayer.  Buffy sees clearly that her dreams of a normal (Buffy Summers) life, are impossible.  She can never have a normal, romantic day on the beach, out in the sun, with the man she loves — because she doesn’t love a man, she’s been forced to kill the “person” she loves, and she can never be normal.  Who wouldn’t try to shut down, isolate, and run away from that? The paradox of whether Buffy can best protect herself ( and the world) by emotionally isolating or, instead, by maintaining emotional connections begins now and continues until the very end of the series.  Her pattern of isolating in the face of traumatic events is a constant, even before this.  After the end of season 1, and her betrayal by Giles and brief death, she is emotionally absent during her summer in LA (as Hank tells Joyce), she is out of communication with the Scoobies, and she acts out in order to isolate and push people away when she returns to Sunnydale.  She does it here.  And she keeps doing it — by retreating into catatonia, or death, or depression, or the role of leader, or by not permitting herself to feel romantic love for another.

• New Listeners
• Shelly – I don’t like most main-stream type movies or TV and so I refused to watch Buffy when it originally aired because I thought it was a silly teen show. [Her daughter] loved Buffy and Angel and gave me all her dvds last August.

I “struggled” through Season 1 (took about 2 months) but persisted at

my daughter’s urging.  And like many others it grew and grew on me and

I was completely and utterly hooked by the middle of Season 2.  I

proceeded to watch every episode in order including alternating with

Angel when that show began.  While I was watching I discussed  every

episode with my daughter, who was re-watching along with me and really

having a great time with my first impressions

And when I was done…I immediately started re-

watching EVERY episode, which I have NEVER done before.

While watching for the first time, I stayed away from anything Buffy

related on the net, because I was afraid of spoilers. Now I read lots

and lots of Buffy stuff on the web and I have recently discovered

several Buffy podcasts.  It makes me so incredibly happy that there’s

still so much current content and discussion about Buffy and Angel out

there even though it’s been 7 years since Buffy went off the air

• Voicemail
  • Kevin
• Weekly Poll – Don’t forget to vote in the weekly poll, remember that I said in the last podcast I was going to leave it up for two weeks because we are deciding the fate of the Angel podcast in the weekly poll on the website right now. Last time I checked it was actually pretty close in terms of what we were going to do so if you haven’t already please go to the website and vote on what you want to happen with the Angel series at the end of Season 3.
• Thanks to everyone for tuning into another episode of the Hellmouth Podcast.
  • See you guys next time for the episode titled “Faith, Hope and Trick”, Stay Classy Sunnydale.

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