Giles and Buffy talk as though Buffy has a responsibility to be here in Sunnydale - a responsibility which Faith might relieve her of, though at the end of the season that option will have vanished, and so Buffy does in fact stay here. The idea of such a responsibility is brought up again in seasons 6 and 7, and ultimately relieved only through the extreme expedient of destroying Sunnydale entirely.

But it’s weird, right? There was no Slayer here before season 1, and no other Slayer we’ve heard about was fixed to Sunnydale. The Chosen One brief is “you must battle the forces of darkness”, not “you must relocate to Southern California.”

I think the best is a way to reconcile these two sides is through the idea that a hellmouth can be dormant or more or less active (or, in the extreme, open). In “Welcome to the Hellmouth”, Giles says:

“It’s getting worse! The influx of the undead, the supernatural occurrences, it's been building for years. There's a reason why you're here and a reason why it's now!”

This suggests that maybe up until the 90s, Sunnydale was just a regular town — which kind of fits with the way that the Harvest and all these other prophesied big deal events seem to be on some sort of calendar? The stars align, the hellmouth begins to open, and that’s when you need a Slayer on it.

Of course, in the same episode Giles also says:

“Dig a bit in the history of this place. You'll find a steady stream of fairly odd occurrences. Now, I believe this whole area is a center of mystical energy,that things gravitate towards it that, that, that you might not find elsewhere.”

The language of “steady stream” seems initially in conflict with “it’s been building for years”, but I think both can be true. Suppose the baseline level of vampires and supernatural shenanigans across the world is pretty low (as is required for homicide and missing persons statistics to be anywhere near their actual levels). Maybe even a dormant hellmouth leads to, say, ten times that level - enough for a “steady stream” of odd occurrences, but still one that only becomes apparent to those who “dig a bit” into local history. Maybe that’s the situation in Cleveland.

But in the few years leading up to season 1, Sunnydale has stopped being that: it’s gone from being a dormant hellmouth to being an active one, which means a rate of supernatural stuff that, by season 1, is, like, a thousand times higher than normal - enough that the steady stream is now noticeable to any high school student or concerned parent who pays attention.

(In “the Harvest” Giles says:

“Some sixty years ago, a very old, very powerful vampire came to this shore, not just to feed. [Buffy: He came 'cause this town's a mystical who's it.] Yes. The Spanish who first settled here called it 'Boca del Infierno'. Roughly translated, 'Hellmouth'. It's a sort of, um, portal between this reality and the next. This vampire hopes to open it.”

This suggests that the activity level of the hellmouth has been high before - high enough, at least, to attract the notice of the Master and some Spanish people. But that might be an “every 50-100 years” sort of thing?

Anyway, the upshot would be: while the hellmouth is in this highly-active state, it maybe does sort of need a Slayer on it? Consider that Kendra had to visit Sunnydale twice in a 6-month period, and she still missed a potential apocalypse-level event (the reassembly of The Judge). That does sort of suggest that if you want to keep the world really safe, boots on the ground is best practice for an active hellmouth - and the Sunnydale Hellmouth, for whatever reason, has stayed active for multiple years in a row now.

You might ask, why would anyone live in a place like this? Which brings us to…

Question 2: Is the mayor really on top of everything?

The mayor talks casually about how, when Spike was around last year, they were keeping tabs on him, and holding back from intervening into his various “shennanigans”. (The deputy mayor’s reponses seem to suggest he remembers this, so I guess that answers my question from back in E5 about how long he’s been in the know.)

M’learned colleague @coraniaid suggests that this “doesn't really hold water”, especially given what we see next episode in the Wishverse timeline. And it certainly doesn’t seem like everything was "under control” in the last two years, what with the hellmouth briefly opening, the Bronze being taken over for the Harvest, the Judge attacking a shopping mall and Acathla almost sucking the world into Hell. Those all seem like things that you’d expect the mayor to have done something about.

But I think there might be a way to thread the needle? In a previous post about local and global apocalypses, I suggested a scenario roughly as follows: if necessary, the mayor (and probably other shadowy figures around the world) could have probably closed the hellmouth, or reversed Acathla’s portal, etc. But doing so would be costly and dangerous would require revealing themselves (to other shadowy forces, to the Slayer, etc.) in a way that they’d rather avoid. So they take a gamble: hang back and monitor the situation, and see if someone more heroic fixes things first. If they do - great, you’ve kept your hands clean. If they don’t, well, some large number of people have probably died by the time you manage to resolve things, but they’re not you so who cares?

(Not to jump the gun on the Wishverse, but appealing to a mayor of this sort also strikes me as the best way to explain why the Master in the wishverse hasn’t already opened the hellmouth and ended the world - the mayor steps out of the shadows when it’s clear that nobody’s going to stop that happening, and negotiates some sort of truce (at least until after graduation…).)

I mean, obviously the big apocalypse plots of the previous two seasons aren’t written to signal anything like this, but I think they’re just about compatible with it…

(To link this to question 1, Faith in E17 will say “the mayor built this town for demons to feed on”, which suggests the “steady stream” model of abnormally high supernatural occurrences. Just, maybe not as high as these last few years. High enough, at least, for the Spanish to have decided not to settle right on top of the hellmouth! And for that clever decision to have only been made once there was a guy who hoped to profit off a century of people getting quietly snacked upon.)

Question 3: What’s the deal with holy water?

I had forgotten until this rewatch that the one thing Angel and Buffy actually achieve is driving off a large group of vampires by throwing lots of holy water at them. This is, I think, the first time we’ve seen holy water used since season 1? Crosses and stakes have been reliable go-tos, but not holy water, even though it seems to be pretty effective whenever it's used.

The best explanation I can think of is that it’s good for driving vampires away, but not actually for killing them. I think me and m’learned colleague @badwolfwho1 had a back-and-forth a bit earlier in the rewatch about what crosses actually do, and my preferred reading is that their effect is as much mental as it is physical - in the Master’s words from S1E10, they “suffuse [vampires] with mortal dread”, a sort of supernatural terror. And maybe holy water does the same thing, but doesn’t do much to actually kill them (unless drunk, as in E12). We do see (in E16) that Wesley carries some with him, suggesting that it has a valid defensive role, but you can see why a Slayer who’s meant to be hunting vampires down and slaying them wouldn’t have much use for something that will make their quarry run away.

(A deeper question is what holy water is, because the characters clearly don’t act like it’s water that’s been imbued with the power of Jesus Christ the one true God by ministers of the true church that represents Him on earth. The best reading seems to me to be something like: at least some priests and their congregations are sort of stumbling into a fairly basic sort of magical spell, conferring power onto one individual which they can then imbue into water (and, as we see in S2E01, earth). It’s sort of like invitations, in terms of vampires being affected by certain sorts of human socio-psychic-acts, even without the humans involved knowing why? And it makes me sort of want to write a fic where Buffy or Willow or someone tries to figure out what they need to do to start making their own holy water…)

(Is there such a thing as, or a counterpart to, holy water in Judaism? Could Willow deploy… holy oil? Or is it better not to get into that?)

Question 4: What’s the deal with magic shops?

When Jenny went to get her orb, the shopkeeper very clearly differentiated between “tourists” and those who were “in the trade”, to the extent of using different accents with each. This shopkeeper (who will survive approximately as long) doesn’t seem to do that - does she already know that Willow is serious? How long did that take? Has Willow been coming here all year so far? Since the summer?

(Does Amy come here? @badwolfwho1 suggests that Amy’s role in this episode would probably be to advise Willow against doing the anti-lust spell and be ignored - I've been toying with a fic idea that she arrives at the magic shop and finds the shopkeeper, who she’s only recently persuaded to trust her, dead and vampirised, and it reinforces her feeling that she ought to stay as far away from vampire-slaying as possible.)

I’m also sort of curious what the shopkeeper planned to say after “are you sure you know what you’re doing?”, if Willow had confirmed she was planning a love spell. What are the professional ethics here? Are you just selling the equivalent of roofies and firearms to any teenager who comes in?

What’s really disappointing in this regard, though, is that Giles himself takes over running a magic shop in season 5, and does so little vetting that he sells vital magical supplies to a Hellgod! Though I suppose Anya does look over the receipts and identify a problem, implying there’s some level of expected oversight that simply lapsed here, but…

I dunno. This is just an area that I feel like would be really interesting to explore. Presumably to be profitable you need to be running two games at once, selling harmless nonsense to the many guillible “tourists” and rarer high-ticket items to the professionals, but… just lots of unanswered questions.

Question 5: What is involved in “putting together a welcoming committee”?

This isn’t really a big question anyone’s asking, but it just occurs to me that there’s no clear reason to think that all 15 or so of these vampires was already around, contemplating the fact that they can live forever, finding and killing humans regularly and driving up the homicide rate. It’s equally possible that “putting together a committee” means finding a group of, like, outlaw bikers or something and turning them into vampires very quickly, then exploiting their impressionable young minds to send them straight into battle. (I think in Vampire: The Masquerade this is termed a “mass embrace”?)

Question 6: What’s going on when vampires fight? In the big fight scene at the end, Buffy does some staking, and gives stakes to Angel and Spike, but they don’t use them much (I believe Spike stakes one opponent, and only after beating on them for a while). And I sort of realised: if you put two random vampires in front of each and make them fight, there’s…basically no way for either of them to die? They can’t suck each other’s blood, and without weapons they’re not decapitating each other or staking each other or setting each other on fire.

There’s a thing in nature where animals with serious natural weapons tend to have a lot of evolved instincts to let them settle disputes without actually maiming each other, with displays and submission signals and dance-offs and so on. What’s interesting is that vampires seem to be the opposite: because there’s so little they can do each other, they’re very willing to just beat each other up. They probably welcome the fact that they can’t kill each other, since it means they get to spend more time fighting.

(If you’re leaning into erotic metaphors of vampirism then their fighting is mostly just foreplay…)

But they can, presumably, still do various amounts of damage to each other’s bodies, which leads into:

Question 7: Why did they let Spike go? I really wish they hadn’t let Spike go. Sure, have him get away so we can use him again, sure, but would it be so hard to clearly indicate on screen that he is escaping, not just strolling off while the supposed Vampire Slayer watches?

As it is, what’s shown on screen is very ambiguous. There’s one reading, which some of my Spuffy-leaning colleagues will probably prefer, that something in Buffy already has a bit of thing for Spike (she lets him live three times before he's chipped - in "Becoming", in this episode, and again in "The Harsh Light of Day.") I don’t really like this reading, just because it sort of undermines the serious of her mission, (especially with how everyone was so mad about letting Angel live). Spike just turned up and almost killed Willow and Xander!

The other reading, which I prefer, is that Buffy feels she can’t pursue him because she’s worried about Angel. Because while clearly none of these dozen vampires was able to kill him, they did drop a wall on him and run over top of it. Plausibly, all of his ribs are broken and all of his internal organs are punctured? If he has to keep fighting, he might be at risk of collapse - just becoming physically, mechanically, unable to move around effectively. And if she engages Spike and he realises he has no insurance any more (having told her where her friends are), he’s suddenly much more dangerous and might use the stake she just gave him to finally kill Angel.

(Though if I were, say, Xander, given the option of risking Angel to kill Spike, I might make some remarks about bird-to-stone ratios…)

Question 8: Why can Spike drink? I think this is the first time we’re shown vampires eating or drinking human food/alcohol? I don’t really like it - I want my vampires to remember that they’re dead! If they want to get drunk, find a drunk human and feed from them!

But Spike is, at least, shown to be kind of a freak in this regard (see also Season 4 and the weetabix). So I guess the easiest thing to say is: Spike is a freak, and he just kept on consuming human food and drink for years as a vampire, and somehow it eventually altered his stomach so that he’s able to metabolise at least some of it.

Question 9: Why can Spike drive? That blacked-out car thing - what? It blocks sunlight enough that he doesn’t burn and yet still lets through enough light that he can see the road?

Man, I dunno. I guess my answer here is:

Question 10: Why did Angel happen to be hanging around Buffy's house?

Because he's compulsively creepy like that, it's his single most consistently established character trait. Next question.

Q11: Is Spike right about Buffy and Angel?

It’s already been pointed out that “I can fool Giles, I can fool my friends, but I can’t fool myself. Or Spike for some reason” is pretty clearly not true. Giles and her friends were not fooled: Buffy was perhaps only fooling herself. At least, that seems true on the topic of whether she and Angel have romantic feelings, a desire to be more than friends. Spike is clearly right about that, but everyone already knew that (the kissing and almost-kissing sort of give it away).

But Spike's actual claim goes beyond this:

"You'll never be friends. You'll be in love until it kills you both. You'll fight, and you'll shag, and you'll hate each other till it makes you quiver, but you'll never be friends."

And this isn't, actually, true, is it? They are, admittedly, rather miserable and end up in an excruciating half-together-half-not situationship for the rest of the season, but they actually don't fight, or shag, or hate each other. By season 5, for instance, they do seem to be, approximately, friends. And they could both live decades more in which to settle more comfortably into that relationship. So I'm inclined to think that Spike is just flat wrong here.

(What, the drunk pathetic vampire is projecting his own problems onto others? Who'd have thought it!)