oh, darn.
I was sure it was an “OL” episode.
Course, nearly all of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes are the half-hour ones. I’ve always felt that the full-hour shows didn’t have the impact- the shorter ones were more taut.
But, hey, this is a Buffy thread…
Anyhoo, thanks for the link.
Damn SolGrundy beat me to the frame by frame. But that’s what I get for ignoring the web on weekends.
The person who closed the door had definite wrinkling-- and silver hair brushed (pulled?) back from their forehead. Slight pot belly. Could be male or female.
To nitpick about the alternate universe it wasn’t unmade merely destroyed or relegated to a status of lesser reality. Some aspect of it had to remain in existance as it was possible by time-bending spells to pluck items from it. Namely alternate Willow.
As for the thing that messes with Xander yah they messed that up. I hated that episode for lots of reasons and could rant and rant about it but that’s not important.
Was is important is wild speculation about the thing harassing spike. I’m starting to wonder if it is really the big bad. Maybe it is just the herald of the big bad, or one of its avatars or something.
Ooh, good one. I’d forgotten all about that. Of course, at the time they never thought they’d bring Anya back. Overall, I think they did a pretty good job of adapting her into the show’s continuity. However, this I don’t agree with:
I don’t recall the show ever maintaining that Anya was an incompetent vengenance demon. She’s always bragged about the number of men she taken out with horrible, entrail-removing curses.
SolGrundy: We are, in fact, talking about the same kind of continuity. Events in older episodes are constantly referred to by characters on the show, and are frequently plundered for plots for later episodes. Sometimes, years later. Characters learn and grow from previous experiences (not always, because even real people can make the same mistake twice). Whereas most sf/fantasy TV shows are almost totally static, there are enourmous differences between the plots, characters, and settings of every season of Buffy. They do make mistakes, as Weird_Al_Einstein pointed out, but after hundreds of episodes, that’s understandable and hard to avoid. I still think that they put more effort into continuity than any other show currently on the air.
Didn’t say she was incompetent, just that her wishes were undone, and so all the men she cursed were uncursed, no longer suffering and never “really” had, no matter what she remembers.
As to her bragging, I am sure even as a human she felt that a lot of those guys got what they deserved. And maybe she was right to some extent, I’ll bet a lot of them were scumbags.
About “To Serve Man”…yes I understood the reference, I just didn’t recall a joke about it in the ep, I was sweating, thinking I had seen an edited episode, but I rewatched and was able to find it.
So would there be another continuity error in “Triangle” (Season 5), when Willow and Anya accidentally conjure up Anya’s ex-boyfriend Olaf whom she turned into a troll after he cheated on her? Or was turning Olaf into a troll something Anya did before she became a vengeance demon, one of the many spells she performed on unfaithful men? Now that I thought all that through I think I’m just going to assume it’s the latter.
Yes, brondicon, It is the later. Anyna performed the spell on Olaf, which is what got her noticed by D’Hoffryn (sp?), the demon who gave her the powers of a vengeance demon.
Re: the “Wish/Doppelgangland” alternate universe, I don’t think it was unmade when Anya’s talisman was destroyed. It seems to me that it, and no doubt an infinity of other alternate timelines, exists independent of Buffy’s. When Cordelia made her wish, she was transported into a world where Buffy had never gone to Sunnydale, instead of changing the main timeline…
I think we can dismiss the “all her wishes will be undone” stuff as a simple overstatement either by alt-Giles or the book from which he was reading. I don’t think we were intended to think that a thousand years worth of vengeance was going to be undone instantly. But maybe that’s just me. I don’t care enough about it to make a deal. YMMV.
It seems like having a thousand years of vengeance wishes undone would alter the timeline a whole lot more than having one absent slayer. If the “all her wishes are undone” thing happened, the gang would have returned to an almost unrecognizable reality.