Continuing the season-by-season revisit of one of the seminal and most influential TV series of the past 20 years. Turn on any drama series – from Who to Breaking Bad — chances are you’re seeing some traces, however oblique, of the Slayer right there. 

In the first part of this blog series, I argued that the first (half) season of Buffy, essentially took most of its time to find its feet. There are some weaker, less consistent, episodes as it struggled with tone and theme but bit by bit it found its strengths, began constructing its own mythology. And by the time we got to the season finale, it had founds its voice. It knew exactly who it was. And where it wanted to go.

Now that that groundwork was laid, season two could have a lot more focus. Sure there’d be misfiresf, the occasional filler episode, the idea that didn’t quite work but far, far fewer. What we have instead is a real sense of momentum, of confidence. What we see what could be described as the textbook example of the season arc. It’s by no means the first example, but it’s the most groundbreaking, I’d argue, and the one that popularised the concept for a great deal of mainstream, and not necessarily genre, TV. Bad Wolf, The Sound of Drums, Silence Will Fall, they all have their birth here.

As this is a full season of 22 episodes, I won’t do an ep-by-ep breakdown. Rather I’ll look at some of the key themes of the season, doing on a character-by-character basis. (Some key characters will be left out but I’m not neglecting them. Just waiting for a later season where I believe they come most into their own.) So, let’s start with:

BUFFY. Buffy’s key struggle will remain consistent throughout the entire series. The balancing of the desire for a ‘normal’ life against her calling as a Slayer. It will manifest itself in many different forms through subsequent seasons, but in season two it is dealt largely through Love. And more specifically her love for Angel.

It’s a testament to the writing of the Buffy/Angel romance that it seldom gets too angsty and OTT – and when it does, the writers are smart enough to realise that it has and are willing to poke fun at it themselves. Joss’s name rightly dominates any discussion of Buffy but it sometimes overshadows the contributions made by other writers to the show’s success. (The influence of David Greenwalt in the development of Angel’s character, for example.) And here a lot of the kudos to the Bangel arc must be given to both Marti Noxon and Jane Espenson.  The romance deepens neither too slowly nor too quickly. (It also speaks volumes that Stephanie Meyer was able to basically photocopy it for her Twilight novels with outrageous success, unfortunately forgetting to transfer the irony and humour of the Bangel saga while she was at it. Don’t get me wrong, I kinda like Twilight. But at the same time I sometimes found it almost comically po-faced and I definitely lost count of the times I found myself saying ‘didn’t Joss already to this’?)

And the Buffy/Angel partnership is mirrored and emphasised by numerous other romantic couplings throughout the season. Xander/Cordelia. Willow/Oz. Giles/Jenny. Even Dru and Spike — with The Judge commenting disdainfully on their feelings for each other. These all inform and are affected by the tortured lovers at the heart of the arc. Romance is always a key element of the show but here I think all these couples are there to highlight the theme of the season. Even Joyce gets paired off briefly, albeit it with psychotic robot.

But at the heart of it is Buffy’s troubled relationship with Angel. It’s done so well that we feel for Buffy every inch of the way, even if we ourselves are well past our first high school crush. But we totally sympathise with Buffy as she falls for Angel, we feel for her betrayal by Angelus (and indirectly by Jenny) and we understand how destroyed she must feel when she has to kill Angel in the season finale.

ANGEL. In the first season, I don’t think David Boreanaz had quite figured out Angel yet. He’s too cocky, too jokey. Not quite got the full mope on yet. And in Season Two, he’s not quite there yet either. But we don’t notice it as much because he spends much of his time as Angelus, who has much of the same jokey side to him. I don’t think we really see the Angel character that we’d recognise from his own spin-off TV show until season three, when DB and Joss have more of a handle on the character, possibly informing the more brooding persona  on the guilt he feels for the murder of Jenny and the tortures of Giles and Buffy and all those years spent in a hell dimension.

Having said that, I don’t really buy DB’s performance as Angelus either. We’re told how much of a legendary evil Angelus is but there’s no real sense of that in his portrayal. And I think this remains the case in the Angel TV series too, although it does improve somewhat. But there are too many better instances of badass evil on show. Brian Thompson, making a welcome return from season one (this time as The Judge) has a more malevolent presence. And James Marsters as Spike and even Juliet Landau as Drusilla come across as more effortlessly and charmingly evil. I hate to say it, but they upstage Boreanaz in every scene they have together.

But we’ll return to Angel in Season Three.

GILES. @PhaseShift pointed out that Antony Stewart Head’s portrayal of Giles was his entry point into Buffy. And for me too a little, I think. As said before, Joss pointed out that ASH brought something out of the ordinary to Giles, something a little funky, a little quirky, and actually more than a little cool to the part. There’s actually something quite Doctor-ish about him at times and it’s no surprise that he was one of the names considered to play the Doctor in what would become the McGann movie. Personally, I’m glad he didn’t get it. Because then his role as Giles would have been cut short and we wouldn’t have got McGann’s great eighth Doctor.

But the writers were clearly aware of the potential ASH brought to the part and that they wouldn’t be able to keep him confined to the library as their chief exposition monkey. We see a great deepening of Giles’s character here. We see his great compassion, and love (again) for Buffy, as well as his more conventional romantic feelings for Jenny. Indeed, after Jenny’s death I don’t think we ever again see a Giles who is not a bit darker, a bit more damaged, than the version of season one and the earlier episodes of season two.

And we also see Ripper. I’ve always loved the Ethan Rayne episodes and find it a real shame that he didn’t play a bigger part in Buffy mythology. There are still a few repeat visits for him to make but he never makes the impact on Sunnydale that I would have liked. But as @pedant points out, Rayne is essentially a second-fiddle bad guy, not really a Big Bad. He’s essentially a trickster, an enabler of mischief and a Lord of Misrule with no over-reaching aim in mind except to cause trouble. We’ll this essentially run out of steam but these early Rayne/Ripper stories of season two are among my favourites.

It’s also a pity that the Ripper spin-off (described by Joss as ‘Cracker with ghosts’) never got off the ground. I’d have liked to have seen ASH and Robin Sachs squaring off against each other on a more regular basis.As I said above, the ‘trickster’ aspect of Rayne did not have mileage in it but I think there could have been other places for the character to go. Ripper and Ethan have a real Doctor/Master, Holmes/Moriarty vibe to them and Sachs does great work as the gleefully malicious Rayne. Even in their one brief scene together, the sparring between Sarah Michelle Gellar and Sachs is delightful.He would have been a great ongoing nemesis for Giles in a spin-off

XANDER/WILLOW/CORDELIA/JENNY – Another one of the show’s key strengths is that never neglects its second-fiddle characters. Willow does not remain just the cute nerd and we start seeing some of the groundwork for the considerable – and significant – character arc she will embark upon. But now is really not the time to go into that.

Similarly, Xander does not remain just the comic relief guy and his character undergoes significant development also. The show is also unafraid to show their main characters in an unfavourable light. Giles has dark, possibly psychotic, past. And Xander is quite happy to let Buffy kill Angel. It’s a credit to the show’s increasing depth that we can have a feckless, comedic Xander in Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered to a really quite angry and slightly underhand one in the finale.

Cordelia too undergoes the transformation hinted at in last year’s See No Evil episode. She’s no longer just the generic Queen Bitch of the school. More than once we see her (reluctantly) compassionate side come to the fore, as her relationship with Xander becomes more and more serious. And it’s notable that for all her selfishness and bitchiness, Cordelia is someone the Scoobies always feel able to turn to in a personal crisis.

In conclusion, season two of Buffy is possibly one of the most influential of any genre series. The show had arrived by now. And it quickly set out to show that just because it had high school kids and vampires, it wasn’t afraid of the big drama beats, it wasn’t afraid to deal with emotions and fundamental human themes. It also showed it wasn’t afraid to tackle season arcs, develop character across multiple episodes and subsequently across multiple seasons.

And just because it had found its formula, that didn’t mean it was content to never deviate from it in order to grow. This is the first time we see that Joss Whedon has absolutely no problem with punching the viewer squarely in the face and making them cry. But it won’t be the last. There are a number of big ‘fuck me’ moments in this season as the show pulls you mercilessly into its grip. They range from the reveal of Kendra, the second Slayer, to the arrival of Angelus, to the murder of Jenny, to Buffy having to kill Angel. More than once an episode off this season had left me gasping for breath or with a tear in my eye. And I suspect I wasn’t the only one. I suspect people like RTD and Steven Moffat were thinking exactly the same thing.

Another tangential pleasure is watching Joss Whedon, now a major Hollywood player, slowly, and visibly, learning his craft as both a writer and a director. Particularly enjoyable is the confidence shown in ret-conning his original movie and assimilating it into the vision of his TV series. Is it an accident that we get a deliberately uncool version of Buffy’s first Watcher? A sideswipe at Joss’s antagonism to Donald Sutherland’s interpretation of the role.

(On a personal note, I also enjoyed the all-too-brief appearance of Homicide: Life on the Streets’ Max Perlich as Whistler here too. It’s a shame we never saw more of him. I believe (though am willing to be proved wrong) that the original plan was for him to take the Doyle part in Angel but that a drugs bust by (ironically) Balitmore PD put an end to that idea.)

Season Two of Buffy showed firstly that genre shows didn’t necessarily mean ‘just for kids’ and that they could talk about things like love and sex and death just as well (and frankly often much better) than the grown-up shows. And secondly, they showed that now that genre shows had done that growing up, they had to learn to evolve, to constantly progress. You couldn’t just serve up the same story every week, with the characters reset, not changed by what they’d witnessed. Because that’s what makes for the best drama.

It’s a lesson that Who has also learned these days (although sadly not all of the fans have yet caught up) and it’s a lesson that a hell of a lot of other TV practitioners were wising up to also.

Right, I think that’s quite enough on Season Two. Season Three to follow presently. Please leave your (non-spoilery if at all possible) thoughts below. I’ll look forward to reading them.