Just Kill Me, aka The Killer in Me, a Review.

by Mary

OK, this episode is not even worthy of a full review. I am still kind of stunned that it was an actual episode of the show. "Selfless" and "Sleeper" seem like a really long time ago, but I won't go into detail about all that as I really do not want this deleted. Instead, here are just a few helpful hints to get you through this "episode" of Buffy.

1. Keep a book or knitting or whatever you do when you are bored handy because there are times you are going to want to do anything but watch this show. Got laundry to do? Save it for the show, you won't regret it.

2. Giles is wasted again; he is used for comedy at the expense of character continuity. Very, very depressing to get all excited to see a character return for something like this. Also, why the big set up of him as the First Evil if this is the route they go? Seems like a lot of wasted time to me.

3. The Willow - Kennedy scenes are painful to watch, like nails on a chalkboard. It is hard for me to believe that it is even being presented as a ship. I kept having visions of singing Tara in my head when they were together and that made it all a harder sell. What they are doing here I have no idea, but I do not like it at all.

4. Willow/Warren may be one of the worst ideas ever. I didn't find it the least bit compelling. Andrew is kind of funny when Willow/Warren first shows up but that is about it. As an aside, why oh why must we have a member of The Troika in nearly every episode? I am pretty sure it is not by popular demand.

5. I was happy to see Amy, although sadly she wasn't around enough. However, she did make this season's SIT storyline seem even worse by providing a glimpse of the interesting characters we are missing out on so we can focus on Kennedy Inc.

6. Buffy seems even more bored than she was last year and who can blame her?

7. Spike is in agony again because the darn chip is suddenly acting up. The drama of this is kind of lost seeing as he has been in agony ALL season for one reason or another. Want to impress me? Have an episode where he is happy, snarky and in no pain at all.

8. When the Initiative shows up to offer Buffy her oh so contrived choice, I kind of got the giggles. The Initiative was lame, the way the story was played was lame, Buffy's choice seemed lame, it was all just kind lame. I have dreamed of him getting that chip out for years, but never like this. This is like really bad fanfiction; I was waiting for Buffy to suddenly start talking about the magical baby they are having or something. It is not that the scene is oh so shippy mind you, just that contrived.

9. Xander, Anya, Dawn and Andrew are kind of funny, but alas that is it. No real plot development to speak of, still treading that water.

10. Some of the scenes seem oddly lit or something. It was like those season one dvds, something just seems off.

So, there is my highly edited for the network censors review for this new "episode." I feel very bad for giving bad reviews to the last few, because this one was much worse and make them all look better. I would like to close by saying that the story of both Spike's chip and soul have been grossly mishandled this year. I still can't believe this was the whole chip story. Couldn't we have had a little more build up over the course of the season? They could have cut out a few torture scenes and added this story in but NO, must torture Spike for reasons unknown. Swell.

**Reaches for good fanfic to wash the memory of this episode out of my head.**

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Mary