Guest Starring: 
     
 Anthony Stewart Head: 
 (Giles) 
   
 Tom Lenk: 
 (Andrew) 
   
 DB Woodside: 
 (Robin Wood) 
   
 Iyari Limon: 
 (Kennedy) 
   
 Kristine Sutherland: 
 (Joyce Summers) 
   
 Clara Bryant: 
 (Molly) 
   
 Courtnee Draper: 
 (Annabelle) 
   
 Juliet Landau: 
 (Drusilla) 
   
 
 
  10. Bring on the Night.  
   
  Giles brings the first of the potential slayers to Sunnydale; they’re just in time to see Buffy get beaten up by the uber-vamp.  
   
  Great quotes:  
   
 
The Potentials.
  • Willow: “... with the magic getting all argh and me going all eee and everything getting all rrr...”
  • Andrew is unimpressed the The First’s name: “... evil names should be like Lex or Voldemort.”
  • Giles: “Sorry to barge in but I’m afraid we have a slight apocalypse.”
  
  Fantastic moments:  
   
 
  • The uber-vamp is well scary, more so than the usual BtVS horror fare because it kicks Buffy’s arse. She responds well though, and gives a thoroughly impassioned speech about how she’s the boss and that the Hellmouth is going to choke on her.
  • There’s a great moment where Xander and Andrew click when briefly discussing ‘Wonder Woman’ comic books; Xander is positively disgusted with himself.
  • The appearance of Giles theoretically clears up the matter of the cliffhanger at the end of ‘Sleeper’ in which we saw Giles being attacked from behind with an axe. Although it is infuriating not to get a proper explanation now, the writers are building up to something much better for later.
  • There’s some brilliant double-entendres between Willow and Kennedy (who seems to have instantly worked out Willow is gay), finally ending when Dawn innocently asks Willow if Kennedy wants to eat; Willow’s reaction is priceless.
  
  Duff Bits:  
   
 
  • Couldn’t they have gone to more of an effort to find an actress with a better English accent than Clara Bryant. Her terrible attempt at a Cockney brogue is so laughably bad that it is impossible to take her character seriously.
  • Giles says that The First rarely shows its true face. This is inconsistent with what we saw in season 3 though, The First was quite happy to reveal itself in an attempt to freak Buffy out when it tried to get Angel to kill himself.
  
  Dean's comments:  
   
 
Buffy gets duffed up by the Uber-Vamp.
Although the ‘arc’ of season 7 has been established for some episodes, ‘Bring on the Night’ kicks off a subplot in which turns Buffy from a confident leader into someone who timidly question her strength and power. This is all kicked off when Buffy sees a vision of her mother telling her she can’t be the leader, then it is compounded by the arrival of Kennedy and her ‘I can do that better than you’ attitude. I think that the producers should have been more careful with the number of characters they introduced, the more lines they have to distribute amongst more characters, the less cohesive the show becomes. The series will suffer in differing amounts from this between this point and the final episode. Kennedy is probably the best of the potentials in terms of characters, she is an irritating drama-queen, but that makes a good contrast with Willow and a decent foil for Buffy until-now unquestioned leadership of the Scoobies. ‘Bring on the night’ suffers from an excess of mouths to fill lines with and the fact that the actions of The First are somewhat inconsistent. First it wanted Spike dead, now it is content to hold Spike captive and taunt Buffy, then it appears as Drusilla for no other reason than to give Juliet Landau a guest appearance fee. Too much happening without enough explanation despite some lengthy Giles exposition (he tells us that the girls we saw murdered in episodes 1 and 2 were also potential slayers, but the plot has moved on so much since then that it hardly seems to matter any more), ‘Bring on the Night’ is a rather tame episode.		 
   
 5/10 
 
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