Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Complete Season 1 [DVD] [1998]

12 episodes of (in general) one-shot stories. Even though they are one-shots the continuity they set up is pretty well adhered to throughout all 7 Seasons of this marvelously crafted show.

This first season introduces us to the mainstays of the series. Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Willow Rosenberg (Allyson Hannigan), Xander Harris (Nicholas Brendon) and Rupert Giles, Buffys Wathcer (Tony Head). These 4 make up the Slayer and the Scooby Gang who foil various nefarious plans for evils domination of the world.

Also introduced in this first season are Cordelia Chase (Charisma Carpenter) and Angel (David Boreanaz) who were, along with others, mainstays of Buffy for the first 3 seasons before Angel got his own eponymously titled show which also saw Cordelia as an important supporting character.

This season sets up the world which Buffy will exist in for 7 years. Sunnydale was built on a Hellmouth (an area of mystical convergence) and so sees more than it's fair share of 'funny goings on' and monsters/demons, particularly Vampires.

During this Season the main 'Baddie' is the Master, an ancient Vampire, who is trapped in a church which was sucked underground in an earthquake. The Master was a superb villain who sets alot of things in motion for future seasons, such as the calling of another slayer after he kills Buffy (temporarily) in the finale of this first season.

If you are a fan of Buffy you must own this first Season as it sets everything up for the future. If you are not a Buffy fan then you should start here and this will set the groundwork for the rest of your life as a Buffy fan.

There are many strengths to this show: Joss Whedon’s vision, commitment, and talent; sharp writing by all concerned with different writers all moving seamlessly in a fictional world larger than themselves; excellent special effects; a genuinely unsettling atmosphere wrapped around a seemingly bright and sunny one; etc. The greatest strength of the show has to be the actors, though. Sarah Michelle Gellar is gorgeous as well as exceedingly believable in her role as the Slayer; Alyson Hannigan is captivating as the quiet, demure Willow Rosenberg; Nicholas Brendon brings an incredible amount of humor and teen-based reality to everything that happens as the Chandler Bing-ish Xander Harris; Charisma Carpenter is the quintessentially vain prom queen whose character Cordelia Chase really only begins to belie her stereotypical image toward the end of the season. Topping them all, though, is Anthony Head in the role of Rupert Giles, the Watcher whose job it is to train and prepare Buffy in her role as the ordained Slayer. His aura of professionalism, commitment, intelligence, and kindly authority injects a necessary dose of believability into an unbelievable world. I’m rather ambivalent toward Angel (David Boreanaz), as I tend to share Xander’s feelings of dislike for this mysterious man in Buffy’s life.

One feels as if one knows these characters from the very beginning, identifying a great deal with some if not all of them. Buffy just wants to be a normal sixteen-year-old girl, sometimes resisting her destiny as the one and only Slayer standing between the world and the apocalypse. Xander is simply brilliant and hilarious to me as the normal guy trying to deal with impossible things as well as his undisguised and unrequited love for Buffy. Willow is the smart and geekily unpopular kid who possesses a greater strength that she realizes, pining silently over Xander in the final ring of a weird little love triangle. Eggheads like me, of course, celebrate the efforts of the scholarly Giles and identify with many of his old-school feelings and arguments. It is not often that we are blessed with a librarian hero.

Season One has two dimensions to it. First, it lays out the vague history of Sunnydale’s newest student Buffy Summers, introduces the responsibilities and functions of the foreordained Slayer, and exposes us to a wide cross-section of the dangerous monsters that one would expect to converge on a place referred to as the Hellmouth. Second, it assembles Buffy and her gang of friends into the first dream team of vampire slaying and other miscellaneous demonic extermination. Buffy does most of the work, of course, but everyone plays a part in thwarting the incredibly threatening things that seem to rise up continuously in a town somehow still referred to as dull and boring. At this time in Buffy’s slaying career, her enemy is the ancient vampire named the Master; his attempts to free himself from his underground tomb and return to the surface serve as the backdrop of most of the major action of the season, leading up to a direct confrontation between him and Buffy in the final episode.

Perhaps no other show on television has given us so many great zingers and one-line catch phrases, digging deeply into the world of popular culture. It also provides an impressively realistic look at youth and some of the issues young people confront in the normal, non-vampire world. Buffy is about much more than slaying vampires, vanquishing demons, and the like. Buffy, Xander, and Willow in particular deal with problems each of us have faced before alongside the type of evil threats that can be found only in Sunnydale, and it is this aspect of the show that truly connects with many of its fans.