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| | Guest Starring: | |
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| | Azura Skye: | |
| | (Cassie) | |
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| | Sarah Hagan: | |
| | (Amanda) | |
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| | Zachery Bryan: | |
| | (Peter) | |
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| | Glenn Morshower: | |
| | (Mr Newton) | |
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| | Rick Gonzalez: | |
| | (Thomas) | |
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| | Kevin Christy: | |
| | (Josh) | |
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4. Help. |
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A schoolgirl who has forecast her own death insists that she is beyond help. |
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Great quotes: |
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- Xander: “Poems, always a sign of pretentious inner turmoil.”
- Xander: “Love poems?” Willow: “I’m over you now sweetie.” Xander: “Love poems!”
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Fantastic moments: |
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- Buffy and Dawn each insist that the other is their sister, not the other way around.
- Buffy, in her new role as counsellor, is approached by a kid who thinks he is gay “Why don’t you go on a date with me so I can be sure?” He says with a remarkably straight face.
- Buffy threatens a whiny kid with violence; come to think of it she’s quite a handy person to have around in a US state school.
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Duff Bits: |
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- In possibly the lamest scene ever to remain in an episode of BtVS, Buffy, Xander and Dawn hide out in coffins in order to catch a new vampire. Tacky, cringe worthy and full of irritating dialogue, it has nothing to do with the episode’s themes and is only there to give the audience a ‘previously on’.
- The direction at the end is particularly bad when Buffy confronts the ’hell-raising’ boys. It looks like an episode of ‘Charmed’.
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Dean's comments: |
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| |  | | Cassie. |
‘Help’ is an episode which tries to make a point about the fact that sometimes one person can’t make a difference, the fact that even Buffy – with her supernatural powers – is often powerless in the face of something larger and ultimately uncontrollable. This message is entirely undercut by the excessively hollow self-loathing of Cassie, the brooding teen, the symbol of the eye-liner wearing narcissistic manic depressive culture that does nothing to breed understanding for the youth of America. What is wrong with these depressed teenagers? The rich kids who post poetry about death on the internet, the privileged middle class obsessed with their own pointlessness and mortality; do these people have nothing better to do? Add to this the fact that in ‘Help’ there are another bunch of US teen stereotypes trying to raise demons (at least Buffy acknowledges how lame the whole faux demon worshipping heavy metal crowd is) and we have an irritating group of unsympathetic teenagers, why should we care that Buffy is powerless to help them? When anyone dies before their time it is a tragedy; when Cassie begins her speech about how she’ll never be able to do all the wonderful and stupid things that people are meant to do it begins to pull at the right heartstrings. But then we cut to the ridiculous shot of goth-teens summoning demons and the moment is lost. Trite, unsympathetic and dull, ‘Help’ is the worst episode of BtVS for a long time. | |
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| | 2/10 | |
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