There's a particular storytelling trope that I find maddening,
sometimes called the ‘Not Now Kiddo’ or the 'Cassandra Truth'.
The name of the trope comes from mythological seer Cassandra.
Cassandra’s prophecies were always accurate but due to a curse from Apollo, never believed.
It’s fairly common for writers to name a precognitive character after Cassandra as a result,
but the Cassandra truth is VERY common in contemporary television and movies.
It’s prevalent in nearly EVERY Disney movie.
Some young heroic character tries to warn everyone of impending danger and is ignored so he must sack up and handle it himself.
Personally, I find the trope either endurable or maddening depending on how justified everyone is in ignoring the warning.
Take for instance, C-3PO coming into the cockpit trying to warn Han of impending danger.
Han ignores him because
C-3PO has PROVEN himself to be a babbling idiot.
It just happens that in this particular case his babble included the information that the hyperdrive had gone offline.
An example of the unjustified use of the trope would be everyone ignoring Buffy in 'Ted'.
It's pretty much for that reason that I haven’t seen this episode since I ran through 'Buffy' the first time.
That I can’t see John Ritter without hearing…
['Three's Company' theme]
[Come and knock on our door]
[(repeat) Come and knock on our door]
[We've been waiting for you]
[(repeat) We've been waiting for you]
[Where the kisses are hers and hers and his]
[Three's company, too]
Things have quieted down a bit in Sunnydale.
“Yeah, with Spike and Drusilla out of the way we’ve really been riding the mellow."
Until Buffy comes home to find Joyce lip smacking with..
['Three's Company theme]
[Come and knock on our door]
[(repeat) Come and knock on our door]
I’m sorry.
That’s gonna be a real problem for me this episode.
Joyce asks Buffy if she's OK with her having a boyfriend and Buffy says suuuuure...
...then spends some extra time beating a vampire senseless.
“It's-It's staking time, really, don’t you think?”
Over mini-golf, Ted makes an awkward remark about Buffy’s grades
and Joyce explains she told Ted about them.
Buffy cheats and Ted sees her doing it, getting a bit uptight about the whole thing.
"It's just a game?"
"Well, I'm not wired that way."
Ha-hah.
Wired.
GET IT?
Buffy resists his tutelage and Ted threatens violence that everyone else conveniently misses.
Buffy tries to tell Joyce that Ted threatened her and Joyce ignores her (not now Kiddo)
and says be home in time for Ted’s dinner.
Buffy brings her reservations to her friends asking them to investigate Ted and they likewise ignore her, unjustifiably.
Cordy and Xander are continuing their forbidden makeout sessions:
“Do you wanna go to the utility closet and makeout?”
"Okay."
Buffy investigates Ted at work, who is apparently a kick-ass salesman.
“Nobody beats the Machine…”
And Buffy she finds out even more unnerving news
“Thank God he’s taking off for the wedding.”
"The wedding?"
Buffy confronts the two over dinner and they both deny it.
Again, Joyce completely allows Ted to supplant her in this scene and Ted patronizes Buffy from the table.
Buffy gets sent to her room and leaves to go vampire hunting.
When she returns home
Ted is waiting for her.
Ted has discovered her secret and threatens to show her diary to her mother:
“...and you’ll spend your best dating years behind the wall of a mental institution.”
Then they trade blows and Joyce shows up just in time to see Buffy beat Ted to death.
Buffy begins a downward guilt spiral
while the gang tries to dig up dirt to prove that she was validated.
Giles goes to cover the slaying for Buffy and Jenny shows up to apologize.
Buffy gets tired of her own sulking and tries to go out slaying...
...but her window is nailed shut.
['Three's Company' theme]
[Come and knock on our door]
[(repeat) Come and knock on our door]
DAMN IT. Sorry.
Buffy and Ted fight and Ted turns out to be a robot.
The rest of the gang find Ted’s lair and his first four wives in the closet.
Ted begins to scare Joyce finally and makes a telling statement about his motives:
"You left me once, but I keep bringing you back."
Buffy gives Ted a frying pan uppercut
and we get a shot of his real face.
Buffy takes down Ted
and the episode ends with Jenny and Giles finally making up.
OK.
So I GET that Ted was feeding everyone magic cookies and that was making them all compliant and deaf to Buffy’s warnings.
BUT the cookie MacGuffin may CAUSE the Cassandra trope...
...but it doesn’t JUSTIFY it
Remember, C-3PO had proven himself, to us the viewers, neurotic and annoying through his actions that occurred on screen.
Here we have...
...magic cookies.
I still count this episode among the maddening occurrences of that particular trope.
I probably don’t have a lot of constructive criticism to offer about 'Ted'.
Just personal biases and non sequiturs.
'Ted' is a surprisingly interesting episode and does a bit of universe expanding for the show.
For instance, the technology within the universe of the show is a little more advanced than we have now.
There’s also a fascinating look at the Slayer power and the responsibility that comes with it.
Buffy is SUPER powered.
She has the ability to do a LOT of damage
and she went after Ted BEFORE she knew for certain he was a robot.
Of course, on the surface that scene is about an adult man assaulting a 16 year-old
and there is no question that Buffy had the right to defend herself.
But Buffy has superior power
to any normal man and she didn’t react in a manner to simply alter the situation,
but rather reacted as a Slayer would hitting a demon.
The blows to the face that Ted took and his spill down the stairs might’ve been fatal to any normal human being.
You could argue that Buffy sensed Ted was more than human based on the impact of HIS blows and his reaction to hers.
But Buffy herself doesn’t speak to that ONCE the entire episode,
instead saying, "[she] lost control.”
Remember in 'What's My Line' when she told Kendra to use her emotions as a weapon?
Either way, I find the moral dilemma posed by the "loss of control" option much more interesting.
The first time I watched the episode and hadn’t figured out what Ted was
I found Buffy’s expression as Ted is wheeled away in a body bag, heart wrenching.
“Are they really doing this?”
“Are they really changing the entire direction of the show THIS dramatically?
"There’s no coming back from this."
"She just KILLED a guy.”
What’s interesting though is the fact that Ted TURNED OUT to be a robot
doesn’t change the moral problem implicit to the scene where Buffy beats him to death.
For about 10 minutes of this episode, Buffy is a murderer and that is a HEAVY cross to bear.
'I'm the Slayer."
"I had no right to hit him like that."
This is probably one of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s best performances so far.
When she walks into the kitchen and tells Joyce she didn’t meant to hurt Ted,
the guilt on her face is absolutely crushing.
I can’t tell you the level of relief I felt when Ted rolled back into the shot and showed up not dead,
['Three's Company' theme]
[Come and knock on our--]
--because I LOVE Buffy
and was relieved she wouldn’t have to bear that burden.
But that's also my main problem with this episode.
The universe of the show is one of lasting permanent consequences.
Disastrous things occur in Sunnydale from which there is no coming back,
...only moving forward.
Those events in the story arcs tend to be the most engrossing
because that is the way of life and too often TV shows package things up too nicely by the end.
Joss Whedon once very famously said,
“There will never be a very special episode of 'Buffy.'"
"There is no single format breaking self contained episode"
"where a character experiences a death,"
"or deals with a drug addiction,"
"or gets sucked in with a bad element"
"and then everything goes back to normal by the next episode. "
EXCEPT,
that here we get a tantalizing emotional drama
that is totally baited and switched by the end.
Still, there is an interesting question here, even if the episode cheats and refuses to answer it.
What if Buffy really had killed a man?
By what measure then do we judge her actions after that moment.
Can she be forgiven?
There is ONE measure the episode gives us.
When the police ask Joyce what happened she lies to them and says he just fell.
But Buffy says:
“I hit him.”
She takes responsibility for her actions and their consequences.
There are characters through the seasons seeking redemption who have done unredeemable things.
Often our willingness as viewers to forgive them is based mostly on the degree to which we like them,
NOT on whether they’ve earned and deserve that forgiveness.
Does that say something more about the characters,
...or us?
Unfortunately these questions are raised and then mostly ignored here because Ted shows up not dead.
But the show will come back to them again in different forms at some point
and this time not tie everything together with a little bow at the end.
['Three's Company theme]
[Come and knock on our door.}