Spike has been captured and placed in an electrified all-white room. Unwilling to accept this state of affairs, he quickly busts out and sets off to take out the Slayer. Meanwhile, Willow deals with the fall-out from Oz's betrayal, Xander and Giles try to make themselves useful and Riley seeks the courage to ask Buffy out.
This really has to be the first five star episode of the season, containing all the elements we've been waiting for, ie Spike back in force, and a degree of explanation about the undercover masked operatives who've been hanging about the Sunnydale High campus. Why this particular episode scores so highly though, is the comedy, with a whole host of laugh-out-loud funny scenes. The only thing the whole story is missing is a plot, which mainly consists of the organization who were holding Spike trying to track and retrieve the vampire.
The writing here is excellent, but the cast know their characters so well now that they manage to obtain maximum laughs just by playing themselves. Alyson Hannigan is fabulous is a depressed Willow with occasional lapses into bubbliness. Not only are her advice scenes with Riley great fun to watch, but her chat with Spike when he is unable to bite her is priceless, particularly the way she suddenly realizes that she's having a heart-to-heart with a vampire and makes a break for it.
James Marsters is at his all-time best playing Spike, playing the no-brained Harmony for all he can get, fighting his way out of the base at the start of the episode, including ditching his ally the second he looks to be in trouble, and finally in the aforementioned chat with Willow. Nicholas Brendon and Anthony Stewart Head also have a couple of rather sweet and funny scenes as they try to make themselves useful, but Brendon shines in the funniest moment this season when he comes across Harmony setting fire to Spike's things on campus. Mercedes McNab has really come into her own since Harmony got bitten, and the hilarious girlie fighting sequence is rolling on the floor funny, exaggerated to the point of absurdity by slow motion. The realization that neither of them is good at fighting is top-notch and beautifully comic.
On top of all this, we finally find out about The Initiative, an underground secret project which seems to be holding all manner of vampires and demons for study. You can bet something major is going to come out of this further down the line, and once again Joss Whedon has proved his ability to carefully build an ongoing story arc through the season without revealing everything at once. Great work, but we need even more Spike, please.
*****
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