Double Vision/The Best Things Come in Twos: I couldn't decide which title was snappier

Hello everyone!

So I confess, I've had quite a bit of difficulty trying to figure out what to write on this episode. I found as I took notes that I was really saying exactly the same stuff I said for "Dopplegangland", and couldn't really think of anything new. I started to wonder, why would we watch two episodes on the same topic? Then I realized duh, their dopplegangers! We have to watch two!

But that's not what I'm discussing here. As I mentioned in my last blog post, there are many instances throughout Buffy that deal with switching bodies, having a duplicate of yourself, or something along the doppleganger/alter ego lines. As we discussed briefly in class, the very nature of a vampire is similar to a doppleganger, as it is an evil and soulless (in most cases) version of the original human being. In the same way, Buffy is also a doppleganger. She is two beings living in one body: one being a regular Cali girl and the other a slayer of things that go bump in the night. This is not true of the slayers as a group, however. Kendra, the slayer who takes over after Buffy's first death, is all slayer, no regular girl. She interacts awkwardly with the male gender, questions Buffy and Giles for letting Willow and Xander be involved in the slaying, and is engrossed enough in her studies of slayer-dom that she can even keep up and joke about it with Giles. Faith, on the other hand, is even more willing to shirk her duties as slayer than Buffy. Her world seems dominated by a regular (I use the term loosely) lifestyle, and she seems to have changed very little since becoming the slayer. Faith's true nature seems so similar to the ferocity of a slayer that when switching between regular girl and slayer is seamless, making it appear she is not two parts at all. Buffy is in this way unique. She manages with varying success to have a social life and a slayer life, and seems to have always been able to. We encounter Buffy very shortly (perhaps a year or less) after she initially learns that she's a slayer, so we see essentially all of her character development since her life changes so drastically. The bubbly Cali girl dies down and the slayer begins to take over, but there are always remnant of the Buffster. Like her crazy bright clothes, for example. Similar to Jekyll and Hyde, Buffy is two beings battling within one body. While it may at times seem like one is winning, she does have a good deal of control over both halves and can be one or the other whenever necessary.

The last thing I'd like to say in this post is, I never particularly liked The Replacement. When I saw it on the syllabus I was surprised, because it struck me as a very silly episode with no more purpose than to make Xander look like an idiot. But after discussing it in class, I have a new respect for the episode. This is a smaller scale version of how I feel about this course overall: I've loved Buffy since I first saw it, but I've never been able to fully appreciate it. It really is an absurdly intelligent show, that's not afraid to pick on itself or its genre and subject matter. I hope everyone else agrees that, just like Jekyll and Hyde, Dracula, and all our other Gothic characters, there is far more to the Buffy series than meets the eye.