Fear Itself - good or bad episode?

I happen to agree that while "Fear Itself" was an entertaining episode, it didn't quite reach the level of wittiness and self-awareness that I have come to typically expect of Buffy episodes. The characters, in addition, do not engage with their fears as much as they could if Joss Whedon were have them personally identifying them instead of just alluding to them -- thereby anchoring to the text possible solutions.

But what I thought was interesting is related to what some other people have brought up in posts already – the physical containment of the characters’ fears. Shouldn’t that make their problems more manifest? Shouldn’t that have the effect of highlighting fears instead of making them more intangible? In fact, I think part of what makes this episode rather gothic is the idea that physical containment – especially that which places characters near just those people with whom their fears are associated – will only make the characters more focused on each other and less on the actual, psychological source of their stress. The fear demon is extremely small but maybe only in the context of what seems like a very large, labyrinthine dorm. In keeping with that idea, one of the characters (I don’t remember who), notes that “No matter how hard you fight, you just end up in the same place.” So regardless of whatever it is they seem to have done throughout the episode to separate out their actual fears from the distractions of what their relationships appear to be, the characters all end up in the same place. They haven’t really solved anything, despite their creepy, sinuous wanderings through the house.