'Welcome to the Hellmouth' and 'The Harvest' are must watch episodes.
The opening of 'Welcome to the Hellmouth' serves as a bit of a mission statement for the show.
This Douche Bigelow sneaks into the darkened Sunnydale High School with Dexter's wife
...and we know she's probably in trouble.
"Maybe it's something." --- "Or maybe it's some THING."
"That's not funny."
Yeah, for serious dude. Not funny.
Darla even plays on that expectation before she's sure the coast is clear.
Then she makes a snack out of him.
Buffy intends to subvert your expectations.
From there it's mostly set up.
We meet Buffy and her mom, Joyce.
Buffy is the Slayer and doesn't want to be.
At first, she walks out on Giles and his big book of the vam-PYRE.
But after discovering Darla's leftovers, comes back in and
flatly tells him why she doesn't accept being the Slayer.
"...prepares her"---"Prepares me for what?"
"For getting kicked out of school? For losing all my friends?"
"For having to spend all of my time fighting for my life and never getting to tell anyone because I might endanger them?"
Go ahead:
"Prepare me."
Being the Slayer sets her apart. It isolates her from the life she wants.
'Chosen One.'
Singular.
It's an important theme in every season.
We also meet Willow,
Xander,
Cordeila
and Harmony.
There's a lot of symbolism in her relationships that just gets explicitly stated later on,
but you can see at play here already.
Lastly, we meet Angel
and the Big Bad for the season:
The Master, played by Mark Metcalf.
"You are all weak."
"You're all worthless and weak."
"Now drop and give me 20."
More on them both later.
The vampires as metaphors for adolescents thing is strong.
Note Darla's catholic schoolgirl outfit
and the out-of-fashion vampire.
"Look at his jacket. He's got the sleeves rolled up. And the shirt? Deal with that outfit for a moment."
--- "It's dated?" --- "It's carbon dated."
They are frozen in time.
The show makes two alterations to common vampire mythology in its
'vamp face'
and 'dusting.' Both changes were made for pragmatic story reasons.
Whedon thought it would look weird to see Buffy killing other high school students
who look like normal high school students.
Vamp face means 'evil'
and the dusting meant that the writers didn't have to come up with what to do with all
the dead vampire bodies at the end of every episode.
All in all it's not a terrible start. There are some rough edges.
The Master's cave looks like a leftover set from a Meatloaf video.
[singing] "And I would do anything
for love...
but I won't do that
No, I won't do that. I won't do...
Both humans and vampires are guilty of some cringe dialogue.
The fight choreography falls into the old problem of only having one bad guy run at the protagonist at a time.
But I still think it's one of the most promising first episodes of a show.
It's a bit like watching an orchestra tune up.
You can see they've got all the proper instruments to make good music.
If you're feeling cynical, consider some of the first episodes of your other favorite shows:
"Norman how's it going? So you got dragged down here too hunh?
"How you doing Fred? Yeah. 'Scuse me."
"Oh. Pardon my galoshes. Hehehe."
"It's unbelievable." ---"Yeah."
"How's the real estate business?"
"It's not bad. It's uh...coming along."
"Why did you need something?"
"You handle any of that commercial...
[Kramer noises] real estate?"
"WHAT?"