watch, and mock, and laugh…at.

Season 1 — Episode 10. The Puppet Show

In this show, Buffy and the gang are pressed into the talent show, which Giles is directing. There are hideous murders, and Buffy has to track down demon in human form and also contend with a ventriloquist’s dummy which seems to be alive. Turns out that the dummy is a demon hunter who is also tracking down a demon, one of seven demons that take human form and who cursed him into his current form. But, for the first 3/4 of the show, we don’t know the dummy is good, we think he is evil–which is actually true, dummies and dolls are EVIL. Okay, that’s just me, all dummies, dolls, toy clowns, those things all terrify me. Which makes me not that different from Buffy, who is also creeped out–and rightly so–by dummies.

The first thing I noticed about this show on this viewing is the title. The title is called the “puppet show” but in fact, the episode is about a talent show–the only puppet show is, in fact, a sham, a real puppet pretending to be controled by a boy with not a lot of talent. The talent show is kind of like the puppet show in that there is a surface show going on, one that the principal thinks he controls, but it is only a mask for the real story underneath.

This is the first time we meet Principal Snyder, who, like Cordelia, heightens that play between metaphorical highschool evil (which Buffy can’t fight) and real demony evil (which she can fight). Several times the sudden appearance of Principal Snyder in a dark and creepy situation tells us that he is going to make life very hard for Buffy and her friends–as he proves by forcing them into the talent show.

I think I already mentioned that dummies are scary, and I was going to talk more about them, but lets move on. Let’s just say that the fact that this particular dummy is in fact a good guy in no way mitigates their natural scariness. But it does show us that the assumptions that we have about what is evil and what is good–assumptions that are in our heads thanks to a long tradition of horror movies and TV–are disrupted to great effect by Joss Whedon. In the first two seasons in particular, playing against our assumptions worked really well.

The other thing I really liked about this episode and felt that it reall captured was the feeling that all of the characters had a whole lot of things going on in their lives that we just didn’t see. The richness of their lives contributed to the poignancy and the relationships between characters–it was something that just couldn’t be created by a line or two of dialogue–but the highschool crowds and throwaway lines from not constantly but only partially recurring characters gave that highschool feel to the show.

And finally, as a warning–and something that I learned from Encyclopedia Brown–magicians always have sleeves to hide their slight of hand devices. If you see a magician with no sleeves–look out, he’s probably the bad guy.

the Puppet show is the fourth to last episode and I think that these last four episodes start to hang together to develop a unifying theme. I think it is from this point that the show takes on (good) soap opera qualities of a continuing storyarc instead of just the “monster of the week”. The reason I include this episode in that–when in terms of plot it really only starts with Nightmares–is because the presence of Principal Snyder as an unresolved menace and also Buffy’s admission of being afraid of dummies lend these four episodes a cohesiveness that is centered on fears and nightmares and unreality becoming real. I’m not sure why Principal Snyder is so important for that, it might just be the coincidence of his presence in the last 4 episodes–actually, I don’t even think he shows up in the last episode, so it’s probably just my overactive imagination or else the benefit of hindsight, knowing from the 2nd and 3rd season that the principal really does know more than we think he does.

Okay, next episode is Nightmares, where we find out what everyone has nightmares about.