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| | Guest Starring: | |
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| | Anthony Stewart Head: | |
| | (Giles) | |
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| | Nathan Fillion: | |
| | (Caleb) | |
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| | Eliza Dushku: | |
| | (Faith) | |
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| | DB Woodside: | |
| | (Robin Wood) | |
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| | Tom Lenk: | |
| | (Andrew) | |
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| | Iyari Limon: | |
| | (Kennedy) | |
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| | Indigo: | |
| | (Rona) | |
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| | Sarah Hagan: | |
| | (Amanda) | |
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| | Kristy Wu: | |
| | (Chao-Ahn) | |
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19. Empty Places. |
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With Buffy ruing her decision to take the potential slayers to fight Caleb, Faith assumes leadership of the Scoobies and takes the potentials out for an ill-fated night on the town. |
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Great quotes: |
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- Xander is still joking despite having lost an eye to Caleb: “I’m still waiting for my other senses to improve 50%, should kick in any day now.”
- Faith: “In this town, walking around after dark is like an extreme sport.”
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Fantastic moments: |
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 | | Caleb confronts Buffy. |
- Spike and Andrew go on a ‘road trip’; although Spike is very insistent that Andrew not use that term to describe their ‘covert mission’. Andrew appears to connect with Spike when discussing the onion flowers that the Bronze produce. Spike later attempts to recover his demonic credibility by threatening to bite Andrew if he ever reveals details of this conversation.
- Nathan Fillion has been cast brilliantly in the role of Caleb, his taunting of Buffy exudes a seething evil. It’s the kind of malice we haven’t seen in a ‘big bad’ since Mayor Richard Wilkins was trying to become a big snake.
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Duff Bits: |
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- Does Sarah Michelle Gellar have a sore throat or something in this episode?
- Despite us seeing the inhabitants of Sunnydale leaving the town in their droves at the start of the episode, the Bronze is still heaving with young people. Strange no? Or perhaps it is a commentary on the recklessness with which young Americans seem to treat their lives.
- The plot regarding the monastery has lots of holes in it. Giles first stated that the monastery had not been attacked, yet all bar one of the monks has been killed. Spike then finds an inscription on the wall with a strange and cryptic message, yet another MacGuffin unfortunately.
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Dean's comments: |
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| |  | | Faith takes the Potentials on a night out. |
And so the plot begins to fall apart at the seams. There is far too much going on in ‘Empty Places’ and none of it connected to anything else that’s going on. Spike looks for the latest plot device, Xander struggles with his disability, Buffy struggles with the fact that she has not earned her power / the politics of winning a war as a democracy and Faith has a rumble with the local constabulary. Does anyone else know what’s going on? What happened to the burden of ‘slayerness’ and the pain and loneliness that comes with great power? Now, all of a sudden, Buffy is being challenged to prove she deserves her power in a very strange intervention by friends and family. I’m not sure this makes a lot of sense; but it does make for good drama as we’re presented with Buffy being effectively thrown out of her own home by the Scoobies. Then there are the continuing MacGuffins of season 7; I’ve lost track of this but I’m sure someone else on the world wide inter-web must have compiled a list somewhere, axe of power, ring of destiny, inscription of conveniently-timed messages, Nikki Wood’s bag of ‘slayer stuff’ blah blah blah whatever. There’s just enough interesting banter between Spike and Andrew to keep it interesting, even the subplot involving Faith is extremely pedestrian. | |
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| | 3/10 | |
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