2.10 What's My Line II

[Clare]

2.10 What's My Line II - Episode #022
Buffy meets Kendra - the 'new' Slayer

Review (also post a score out of 10) and discuss this episode.

[cyclica]

This one wasn't as good as the first one, but it was still enjoyable.

I liked kendra, the way she bonded with giles, the way she saw a vampire as a vampire, I even learnt to love her accent (which apparantly the actress was only told to do at the last minute, and didn't have time to practice). But along with kendra comes a whole load of slayer related stuff thats gonna effect the show completely from this point onwards. Like how buffy isn't the only slayer anymore, yet she still acts like she is.

And then there's the issue of kenrda being trained to be a slayer since she was young, even though buffy was called as a teenager (ok so they didn't actually say she was called as a teenager until becoming, so its not a contradiction yet at this point, but viewers probably saw her called in the movie and assumed it was true of the tv buffy too). Why was kenrda trained and buffy wasn't, and which one of them is a typical slayer in that regard? Kenrda said training to be a slayer was very important among her people. What people? Her family? Or does she come from some country with a large number of slayers in its past? Either way clearly a lot of people know kendra's secret identity, but she still gives buffy a hard time about having friends who know her secret.

This was also the first episode in which the scooby gang fight vampires one on one without any difficulty. At the big fight at the end, willow even initiates a fight with a vampire, and won.

And since when was oz an expert on computers? He like willow got picked for working for that computer company because he scored well on the test.. but this side of oz was hardly ever seen again.

Dispite all my complaints (which are fun to write) I did enjoy this episode. I give it a 6.

[jennf10]

The pointless hell of Career Week looms over the Scooby Gang, and Buffy is reminded once more that her career is likely to be unpaid, antisocial, and short. Angel suggests the two of them go ice skating to cheer Buffy up. Well, she'd skate, he'd brood. Spike and Dru are planning something big, but they need to keep Buffy occupied, so they send for the Order of Taraka, deadly semi-human assassins. Oz and Willow meet, over canapés. The first assassin attacks Buffy and Angel at the ice rink, but is stopped by a Buffpowered ice-skate to the jugular. The second is a man made of bugs, who is let into Buffy's house by Cordy, while she and Xander look for Buffy. Angel tries to beat information on the Tarkans from Willy the Snitch, but Kendra appears and locks Angel in a cage, with the sun rising fast. She then attacks Buffy, and the episode ends with her telling Buffy "Me name is Kendra: The Vampire Slayer."

My Review:

As I said in part 1, very good episode.

Some things I forgot to mention, Kendra almost kills Angel in this episode. He is only saved because of Spike.

Also, Xander and Cordy start to hook up during this episode. Very interesting to see these two together.

Overall score: 9/10.

[cyclica]

I'm bumping this one up to a 7. Everything here was great- the story was interesting, every scene between kendra and buffy was fun to watch, and xander and cordy become, well, xordy. I especially loved the over-the-top musical sting every time they kissed.

There's also a nice ending where the formerly weak drucilla picks up the injured spike, a clear role-reversal from earlier in the season. I loved that scene the first time I watched it, but now it just looks cheesy. It was clear that falling into a piano wasn't going to be enough to kill a vampire, and in the last scene there's an obvious green screen when she's walking away holding him.

It seems those wrist stakes used by angel on his spin-off were actually invented by the cop in this episode, because we saw her use them during the fight at the end, only hers were knives not wooden stakes.

Nitpicks!
- So kendra did research on angelus before coming to sunnydale, yet she didn't know he was cursed? You'd think if she was going to reseasch someone she'd look up their recent activity as well as their history.
- When angel was trapped in the cage, the indirect sunlight seemed to make him weak. How does that work? In every episode before and since, when a vampire is exposed to sunlight they either burst into flames, or it's not enough light to make any difference. There's no halfway where a little bit of light only makes them weak.

I'd also like to retract a nitpick from my last review- its clear in this ep that angel could't have shielded himself from the light because there was a window he couldn't get to when he was trapped in the cage. I either didn't notice it or couldn't tell because of the way the scene was shot, but either way, I was wrong.