Your Guide to Help: A review

by Mary

This episode should be just terrible. There is no scary Monster of the Week, Spike and Anya (my favorites) have little to no screen time, and there is a whole lot of Buffy the counselor. But I kind of liked it. Why you ask??? I loved Kate Hudson I mean Cassie, a student in distress, so much I found myself rooting for all the plentiful spoilage on this episode to be totally wrong. Well, that did not work out for me at all as the only thing missing is a whole Anya scene I could have sworn I read for this episode. Maybe my copy is defective but I had NO ANYA at all! This does not please me but it was still pretty good. I will now give you the play by play to help you through the maze.

It opens with Xander, Dawn and Buffy taking out a very lame vampire in a funeral home. They hide in coffins to do so which may or may not be some kind of foreshadowing. If you are a little late for the episode or your popcorn is not quite done, don't worry about it. Not much to see here. Note to Mutant Enemy: we got that these 3 worked together like a little family over the summer in episode 1. Time to move on as this dynamic is getting a little tired.

The next scene shows us Buffy in action, spreading her wisdom to the school kids of Sunnydale High. ***Snert*** This is endlessly fun to Mystery Science Theater if you know what I mean. Then we flash to Willow, still wearing the plain makeup of redemption, and Xander going for a walk and talking about this and that. They even mention "from beneath you, it devours" one more time in case we missed it in episode 2. Make your jokes fast though because they are really visiting Tara's grave and the scene with Willow saying hello to her is very well acted and I was all sad and missing Tara when BOOM the scene ends. What the hell??? I really thought this would be much longer, we got more chit chat about Buffy's education than actual Tara mourning.

To make matters worse, we then go back to Buffy at school!!! How am I supposed to make top quality jokes so fast after seeing Willow at Tara's grave for 2 whole seconds??? I give it my best shot when suddenly a student named Cassie comes in and says she is not going to graduate because she is going to die. Cassie is an intensely likeable lass and Buffy does not want her to die and so she goes to the Principal with her concerns and he is no help. He is so little help it is kind of suspicious and it makes me mad. Help Cassie darn it!! What is wrong with you?? ***Smap*** Snyder would have shown more concern.

To get me even madder at Principal Wood, his inaction gets Buffy to recruit Dawn to help her out by getting to and befriending Cassie. Suddenly I flash to Xander trying out for the swim team in "Go Fish" and I realize that Dawn is trying out for the role of Xander in the spin-off this week. I can't wait to see her try to be a watcher later this season. I guess her audition for Willow did not work out for her because the next scene involves good old fashioned Scooby research, with Willow helming the computer like the good old days. Turns out my girl Cassie was a good student until lately. Is it depression?? Is it Psychic visions? Did she just finish watching the last half of Buffy season 6? Who knows? Her website is full of sad poems that sound a little like Dru's speech to Spike in "Crush" and I want to teleport in and save her myself, especially when the scene starts to drag. Thankfully, they finally get a lead that her dad might be a a drunken lout and potentially responsible for Cassie's imminent death so Buffy and Xander run off to check this out.

Buffy and Xander go to the poor man's house and start giving him the 3rd degree about his parenting skills. Why he does not call the cops I don't know, I sure would have. Then it turns out he is not going to even see her on the day she is supposed to die so Buffy and Xander look not so smart here. My girl Cassie meets them outside and tells them "hello, it is not my dad" and some back and forth leads her to make this heartrending speech about wanting to live that makes me think of Buffy in Prophecy Girl and it is an especially effective scene. Save Cassie darn it!!! After this brilliant scene, we finally get an indication of some kind of actual evil in this episode, with a bunch of guys in robes doing some ritual with a picture of Cassie featured. I thought Buffy took them out in "Reptile Boy" but I guess not.

After we get a small scene which shows us that Cassie is not only pretty and tragic but a seer too. So she might just know what she is talking about with this whole death thing. Grrr. Buffy, at a loss as to what is happening, does what she usually does in these situations, she goes to crazy Spike in the basement for help. They play the scariest music here I kept expecting something horrible to happen the whole time. Much to my surprise, Spike tells her he is not going to do a thing for her until she apologizes for calling him smelly. Or did I throw that in? At any rate, Spike is so out of it here he is just as tragic as Cassie. Seriously. He starts pounding himself for "hurting the girl" and says all sorts of distressing things. Buffy stops him from hurting himself and briefly holds his hand and tries to get him to calm down. He seems to know nothing about what is after my new favorite seer but is really distraught and begs Buffy to stay with him. Guess what she does. Her motives are kind of murky though, as she seems both in a hurry to save Cassie and to sincerely think that things are worse for Spike when she is there. I bet this scene is going to be interpreted in a lot of different ways, but I am taking it in a positive light (shock breaks out) because you know she had to save Cassie and she did hold his hand and all.

After that, we gets some Scooby investigating at school which is really dull. Fast forward to the evil robed guys trying to offer my girl Cassie to a demon. As if. Buffy surprises them and tries to save the day with a series of quippy comments. When that does not work, she throws a cleaver at Skip's Doppelganger who is unimpressed with this effort. But then my man Spike shows up with a flaming torch to help as he does not want them to hurt the girl. Throw your undies at the screen here as Spike rocks. He and Buffy start beating up on other things for a change and it is must see TV. He beats up this one guy, chip be damned. I have been waiting for this for years, La la la the good guys win and Spike frees Cassie and she looks at him like she has known him for ages and says, "Someday she'll tell you." Spike sort of freaks out about this and it is a very intriguing scene and it is wide open what "she" might tell "him". Nothing is ruled out by the way it is said, although her tone of voice implies that is it something he wants to hear. More details to come I suppose.

Buffy and Cassie leave and an arrow from a booby trapped door almost hits Cassie until Buffy catches it like a bad ass. The tough chick moment ends though when, after telling Buffy she will make a difference, Cassie falls dead. Foreshadowing alert. But Cassie is so dead and no one comes to save her the spoilers were right and darn darn darn. She was not even vamped so I don't get the treat of Vamp Cassie showing up later on in the season. If they are going to kill characters off that fast, they should cast less likeable characters. I have not liked a one shot character so much since Sunday in "The Freshman" and we all know how that turned out. The episode ends with the Scoobs feeling sad about Cassie dying from an inherited heart condition. I kick up a chair and join them as I am really sad about this myself. I ignore a scene with Buffy being a brave little trooper and going back to her job. It is best that way.

So you see, this episode actually did very little. We had the smallest amount of foreshadowing, no one saved anyone, Anya was not even there. the Big Bad did not show up, and no slayers in training were killed. But I got to meet an interesting character named Cassie who then dropped dead so it was a first-rate episode. Whendonverse is a strange, strange place.

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Mary