Gingerbread - Buffy Episode Review by MikeJer

GINGERBREAD (3x11)

A review by Mikelangelo "MikeJer" Marinaro


Writer(s):	Jane Espenson and Thania St. John
Director:	James Whitmore, Jr.

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This is not a great episode, but as is Buffy tradition the dialog and occasional character insights keep it from floundering. It's still very entertaining and, as a bonus, Amy turns herself into a rat and stays that way until "Smashed" (6x09, aside from that brief moment in "Something Blue" [4x09]). Buffy says, "Maybe we should get her one of those wheel thingies." Kind of like "Go Fish" (2x20), this is a lot of fun if you're in the mood for it.

The episode begins with Joyce finally going out with Buffy to see what she's been doing every night for the last three years. It's sweet that Joyce brings food and drinks for her. While she gets distracted by a vampire, Joyce wanders off and finds some dead kids in the playground. This brings up something that's always annoyed me. People somehow rationalize that a child's death is so much worse than any other person's death. If the person is innocent then it's only slightly more tragic when a child dies (because of age). It should still be extremely tragic when innocent older people die as well. Buffy points this out when talking with Angel.

Later on, after tons of people begin acting strange, Joyce and Buffy have an important conversation about the work Buffy does. Yes, Joyce is under the influence of a demon, but some of her points are still interesting to consider. She tells Buffy that her work is fruitless. On a certain level it can appear fruitless because of the nature of evil -- it will always exist. The fact that she stopped the world from being overrun by demons in "Prophecy Girl" (1x12) and prevented the world from being sucked into hell in "Becoming Pt. 2" (2x22), proves otherwise though. As Buffy said to Angel in "Amends" (3x10, and he reminds her of here), it's not about winning or losing, it's about fighting.

The ending battle scene is hilarious. The way Buffy breaks the wooden pole, bends over, and puts it through the demon's neck, even though she can't see it, is wildly fun. She asks, "Did I get it!?" I also loved how Oz and Xander crash through the vent after all the action is already over. Oz says, "we're here to save you."

There's unfortunately a handful of problems that need to be addressed. The entire episode is simply too inconsequential and irrelevant to the main arc of the season. The fact that the town is just "under a spell" takes the punch out of the story. I would have really enjoyed seeing an episode that really dealt with the way the town's populace looked at Sunnydale, and for some of them to make a genuine attempt at exposing the supernatural threat. Yes, a lot of people turn a blind eye to things they don't understand (or don't want to understand), but not everyone is like this. Some people would be open to and search for the truth.

Overall, though, this is a pretty solid stand-alone which ends up with Amy being stuck as a rat. Combine that with a good number of great lines along with some interesting themes and you have a respectable, but very unnecessary episode in the same arena of "Go Fish" (2x20). Yet another thing I love about BtVS is how only a few of these type of episodes are in each season. That fact makes me able to enjoy them as a one-shot break from the season's primary arc.

+	The awkward tension between Oz and Xander in the lunchroom.
+	The continuing awkward tension between Joyce and Giles.
+	The mislead to make us think Willow's somehow involved with the group that killed the children.
+	Giles yelling at the lone computer in the library because all his books got taken away.
-	How would the stupid old creature, who only makes appearances every 50 years, know how to use chloroform?

XANDER:	Yeah. She's in the bathroom. But the fact that I know that doesn't change that I have a genuine complaint here. Look. I'm getting sick of the judgment, the innuendoes. Is a man not innocent until proven guilty?
BUFFY:	You are guilty. You got illicit smoochies, gonna have to pay the price.

BUFFY:	(holds up the notebook) What is this?
WILLOW:	A doodle. I do doodle. You, too. You do doodle, too.

WILLOW:

Mom, I'm not an age group. I'm me. Willow group!

SHEILA:	You're upset, I hear you...
WILLOW:	(stands up) No, Ma, hear this! I'm a rebel! I'm having a rebellion!
SHEILA:	(smiling) Willow, honey, you don't need to act out like this to prove your specialness.
WILLOW:	Mom, I'm not acting out. I'm a witch! I-I can make pencils float. And I can summon the four elements. Okay, two, but four soon. A-and I'm dating a musician.
SHEILA:	(disgusted now) Oh, Willow!
WILLOW:	(thickly sarcastic) I worship Beelzebub. I do his biddings. Do you see any goats around? No, because I sacrificed them.
SHEILA:	Willow, please!
WILLOW:	All bow before Satan!
SHEILA:	(leaves the room) I'm not listening to this.
WILLOW:	Prince of Night, I summon you. Come fill me with your black, naughty evil!

JOYCE:	It's not your fault. You don't have a plan. You just react to things. I-i-it's bound to be kind of fruitless.
BUFFY:	Okay, maybe I don't have a plan. Lord knows I don't have lapel buttons...
JOYCE:	(exasperated) Buffy.
BUFFY:	...and maybe next time the world is getting sucked into Hell, I won't be able to stop it because the Anti-Hell-Sucking Book isn't on the approved reading list!

CORDELIA:	How many times have you been knocked out, anyway? I swear, one of these times, you're gonna wake up in a coma.
GILES:	Wake up in a... Oh, never mind.

70/100

C+

The main plot is likely problematic and/or hokey, but sharp humor and/or character development and relevance keep it afloat. A couple moments may be over-the-top in a bad way.

Least Important in S3

<< "Amends"

"Helpless" >>

1.	Tobias Drake Jan 11 2007
	I thought Willow's sarcastic line about "Do you see any goats around? No! Because I sacrificed them!" during her angry rant was an interesting piece of foreshadowing, because she does, in fact, sacrifice a baby deer in the first episode of season six, "Bargaining", as part of her spell to bring Buffy back.

2.	da magicman Feb 24 2007
	i thought this episode was a stroke of genius as it brote in stories of many eras and stories such as the fairytale 'Hansel and Gretal' and the phase 'Never again' used by the MOO (Mothers Object to Occult) was used to talk about the burning of witches in the late 1700 and the early 1800 which is a great contrast as they try to burn who they belive are witches

3.	super xander May 14 2007
	it is a hillarious episode just for willow

4.	Austin Aug 23 2007
	Chlorophorm has been around since at least the 1800s, plenty of time for the demon to hear about it. Plus while the demon may have been controlling Joyce, he way have left it to her own problem solving abilities to figure out how to subdue buffy, she knew that she couldn't take her by force like they did Willow, so he had her come up with an alternate plan.

5.	Nix Oct 21 2007
	I find the big burning scene almost too upsetting to watch. Not because of people being staked or anything, no, because they're burning books. Irreplaceable books. Do these people have no humanity in them? (Burning people, OK, it's unpleasant but there are always more around. There won't be more of those books; once they're burnt, they're gone.)

6.	buffyholic Oct 23 2007
	Good episode with very good dialogue and character interaction. But I find the episode a little unnerving.

7.	Plain Simple Nov 29 2007
	@Nix: Well, I won't go so far as to claim that burning books is worse than burning people, but they should have dealt with this and I don't think they ever did, did they? There should have been at least one episode where the Scooby gang can't solve the mystery in time because the relevant books were burned.

8.	jkalderash Jan 29 2008
	I would argue that Earshot is the least important, seeing as it didn't even air until well after Graduation Day Part II and at the time we didn't really notice the difference (except for the lack of resolution to Giles/Joyce in Band Candy). Whereas this episode sets up Rat!Amy, at least. Anyway, I think this episode is just awesome, because I completely fell for the red herring of Willow's spell. OK, perhaps I was not so quick on the uptake, but I was very worried that Willow had somehow killed those kids! And then the Hansel and Gretel twist was brilliant and fit perfectly. It could have been a generic "oh, a bad demon cast a spell" twist, but instead it was an interesting solution that tied into well-known folklore. We also get some great Buffy/Joyce interaction, Giles yelling at a computer, Snyder being a jerk, Willow's mom...

9.	mikejer Jan 29 2008
	Don't forget the relevance on Jonathan giving Buffy the Class Protector award. "Earshot" gives that moment a much bigger emotional pull. Additionally, I simply feel that "Earshot" sports more bits of continuity-based character development than "Gingerbread." Plus, "Earshot" is, quite simply, the better episode of the two -- in terms of execution, theme, and relevance.

10.	Suzanne Feb 28 2008
	I enjoy how the Buffy writers inject Europy things in the all-American atmosphere of Buffy. (OK, to be honest, I suppose they use other cultures as well - the Inca Mummy Girl, Native Americans, Jamaican (or where the hell Kendra was from...) but I recognise the Europy things better, being European (half Dutch, half German, to be precise.) I also like the fact that in this episode, European didn't automatically translate as 'British'- (honestly, wouldn't they have French or Czech Watchers at the Council? Or Romanian? Or do english Watchers primarily deal with english-speaking Slayers? Why do watchers always go punting at their retreats -couldn't they go skiing in the Alps? Or is it primarily the German/Swiss/Austrian/French/Italian Watchers that do this? Funny, I could so imagine Scandinavian and Dutch Watchers going ice skating together - but I digress...) As has been pointed out, the written German seen on the computer screen is faulty, (Apart from grammar issues,I think that Hänsel and Gretels full names would more likely have been Johannes/Hans and Margarethe.) but Giles' spoken German was correct and understandable. (yay!) So far no Dutch things in Buffy yet, but I'm not blaming Joss & co for not having studied every bit of folklore in the history of mankind. At least my German fangirl side has had the opportunity for a bit of a squee, which is always nice.

11.	Nix Feb 28 2008
	One might speculate (without any basis, but that's what comment threads are for!) that the English Watchers staged an internal takeover when the British Empire was at its height, and being such conservative people are still running the place a century after the Empire ended. (Given the degree of their traditionalism they should probably be sited in Rome and speaking Republic-era Latin, but that might be hard for most viewers to comprehend!)

12.	this year\'s girl Feb 29 2008
	-Nix, I feel the same way about the books! I like to think Giles protected them from harm early on with a "magical scotch guard", but we'll never know for sure ;)

13.	Serena Mar 10 2008
	The reason why a child's death is more tragic than an adults is not just because they're more innocent, its because they haven't had a chance to live like an adult has.

14.	Nix Jun 9 2008
	You said 'people somehow rationalize that a child's death is so much worse than any other person's death' but this is exactly backwards. It's not rationality at all: it's raw emotion, and you can see the same behaviour in e.g. female chimps (a really nasty aggressive species) and male and female bonobos and gorillas (much less nasty sorts with males that aren't utter swine): to some extent the whole community mourns dead children and works to protect them, although the parents are obviously most affected. I've noticed this as I've passed into my thirties: in a year or so children have gone, emotionally, from 'bleah, not very interesting' to being emotionally red-flagged as critically important and automatically cute no matter what they're doing or how annoying they are. (My understanding is that if you actually have children, especially if you're female, this effect becomes much stronger.) It makes sense, when you think about it: K-selectors like humans and other primates must consider individual offspring critically important, because we have so few of them and they cost so much to raise. (Actually in current industrial societies it really only matters that we consider our own offspring critically important, but when you consider the environments we evolved in, all visible children were likely to be in our own tribe and thus valuable, because a tribe that shrinks too far is dead: so valuing all children we know about makes a lot of sense). If we were frogs your point might be more valid, but we're not. btw, very nice theme changes (plus your captcha is actually readable now).

15.	mikejer Jun 9 2008
	Thanks for the comment Nix. I'm curious as to what you mean by "captcha" though. :)

16.	Nix Jun 10 2008
	The security code thing at the bottom is called a 'captcha', a backronym of 'completely automated process to tell computers and humans apart'. As the torrent of spam from hotmail and gmail makes clear, it doesn't always do that. (It used to be very hard to differentiate between e.g. P and D and 7 and F in your captchas. It's not quite as hard now.) (As luck would have it I got the damn thing wrong this time.)

17.	mikejer Jun 10 2008
	Haha. Ok, cool. For some reason I wasn't aware of that term. Additionally, if you ever have any comments or suggestions with things like that in the future, please feel free to shoot me off an e-mail detailing it. I might make a change. :)

18.	Nix Jun 13 2008
	To get back on topic: A nice touch in Joyce's nicely-done speech (all of which is true, even though demon-triggered): she says `... plagued by unnatural evils...' at the exact moment that the camera just happens to focus on the Mayor. That demon really did pick the wrong town. It's amazing that it was able to penetrate the choking clouds of Sunnydale Syndrome to whip up any hysteria at all.

19.	WorldWithoutShrimp Jun 13 2008
	I do think there is a perfectly good reason to rationalize that a child's death is more tragic than an adult's. You write off age as only slightly mattering, but the bottom line is that when an eighty-year-old dies, that person got to live eight times longer than a ten-year-old who dies. Eight TIMES. There's also something significant about a person dying before he or she reaches adulthood. When a child dies, every single life experience that person might've been able to have after maturing is gone as a possibility, forever; but when an adult dies, we can always console ourselves by knowing that he or she at least got to spend SOME time messing up in the adult world. All deaths are tragic, but when someone dies extremely young, it is worse because that person was denied the opportunities which even those who die in their forties and fifties managed to have, opportunities which most people take for granted.

20.	Tony Jun 17 2008
	Off topic here, but I am so glad someone else aggrees with the hilarity of Buffy killing that demon. "DID I GET IT! ... DID I GET IT?" Awsome. Also, I found Cordelia really funny this episode too. I'd wish you'd mention her more. She's way to underated. Like when she keeps slapping Giles in the face while unconscience, and still continues when he wakes up.

21.	Tony Jun 17 2008
	Oh can't forget this one line. Cordelia: One of these days Giles, you're going to wake up in a coma. Giles: Wake up in a... nevermind.

22.	Rekidk Nov 21 2008
	I thought this episode was a very funny, mildly creepy, and much-needed break from the emotionally heavy arc that preceded it. No, it wasn't the greatest episode of all time, but it was a lot of fun.

23.	Dale Dec 26 2008
	I quite like this episode. There's heaps of great dialogue, the bit where Joyce mothers all over Buffy's patrol is amazing, and I enjoyed the theme of parental oppression based on paranoia because they're buy into stereotypes and think themselves informed on the matter. And then they end up doing more harm than good in their actions to "protect the children," and they simply can't be convinced that they're wrong. Okay, so it's not being very nice to parents, but it happens. I can say first-hand that there are parents who are like that, and the only reason they're all behaving like this in the episode is because of the demon.

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