Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 3 - The Corrupt Politician

And so we get to Buffy Summers' senior year at Sunnydale High School. Personally, this was my favorite season. We meet Faith, Wesley, and Anya this year, Mayor Wilkins is the big bad, Jonathan Levinson gets his first big role, episodes like "Band Candy", "The Wish", and "Doppelgangland" are present, and even the First Evil rears its ugly head for the first time. After one of the shows greatest season finales in Season 2 ("Becoming, Parts 1 and 2" are two of my favorite episodes of the series), everything is in shambles. Buffy left Sunnydale after many important things happened, but here is a short list: her mom found out about her being the Slayer, Giles was nearly tortured to death, the world nearly ended, and she was forced to send ANGEL (not Angelus) to a hell dimension to save it. At the end of her rope, Buffy hopped the first bus to Los Angeles without telling anyone where she was going, and never looked back.

Season 3 begins a few months later. Willow, Xander, and Oz have been patrolling for vampires at night with mixed results; about half of their prey gets away, but they do their best to keep people safe. Giles and Buffy's mom are each separately trying to locate Buffy, who is doing her best to stay hidden in LA. Going by Anne, her middle name, she has been earning her living as a waitress in a seedy diner. She ignores her destiny and lives in a tiny apartment. But when a teenage girl comes to her for help, she is pulled back into her life of fighting the forces of evil.

This year, the Big Bad is the mayor of Sunnydale, Richard Wilkins. He embodies both an untrustworthy authority figure (two new watchers would also embody this idea this season, and one of them is NOT evil) as well as a twisted father figure. Despite his appearance of a hometown guy with an "aw-shucks" demeanor who has the city's best interest at heart, he is in fact a man with a plan to become a pure demon. He is the man responsible for founding Sunnydale. He made a pact with the demons he met near the Hellmouth; in exchange for building a human town on a Hellmouth (thus supplying countless demons with easy prey), he would be granted eternal youth and the ability to transcend humanity and become a demon. Throughout the season, he has various underlings, but none of them are more important than Faith.

Back in Season 1, when Buffy was killed, Xander promptly resuscitated her. However, she was biologically dead for less than a minute, and this led to a woman named Kendra to be called as the next slayer. For the first time ever, there were two slayers, but Kendra's inflexible nature (she could not stray from a "by-the-book" style of slaying) led to her downfall when she was put into a trance by Drusilla and then killed. With her death, Faith was called, and Faith's attitude is the complete opposite of Kendra's. She is the antithesis of "by-the-book"; she is rash, she often gets in fights for pleasure, and completely bucks authority. Buffy shares aspects of both Kendra and Faith. She can be insubordinate at times and doesn't always do things the way Giles would like, but she recognizes that he does know what he's talking about and he often will have good plans.

Season 3 tests how far a lot of the characters will go in the struggle between what is right and what they are told. Giles is fired from the Watchers' Council when he (eventually) defies orders regarding a test that is to be carried out on a slayer's 18th birthday. Buffy constantly has to try to find a balance between defending Angel (who her friends are all weary of, since they experienced him at his worst last year); she knows that Angel is good again, and he is a powerful ally, but her friends never stop telling her about his dangers (and in this case, who is right?). Faith serves as example of someone who lets these choices destroy her; her methods may be rash, but she is ultimately out for good. But when Wesley Wyndam-Pryce shows up to be her new Watcher, everything goes to hell. Wesley is 10 times the uptight prick that Giles was (Wesley's arrival marks the beginning of Giles' transformation to cool older guy). With Wes, rules are rules, and theoretical learnings work exactly the same in the field (he claims to be adept at vampire hunting due to his extensive training... which was done under controlled circumstances). When this man tries to control Faith's erratic behavior, she loses it, and becomes so obsessed with killing the undead that she begins staking everything in sight. This ends with her accidentally killing a human. When Wes calls the Council and arranges to have this rogue slayer sent to England for punishment, she is driven right into the arms of the Mayor, who takes her on as his new assistant. She ironically trades one Watcher for another, but her new one encourages her destructive nature. She is still told what to do, but she is allowed to do it her way.

Season 3 saw the introduction of Anya, a woman introduced as a vengeance demon. She grants wishes to women who have been wronged by men, and when Xander and Willow give in to their urges and betray their respective romantic partners by making out (in their defense, they were being held captive by Spike, and thought that their lives were almost at an end), a hurt Cordelia accidentally invokes her powers and creates a Sunnydale in which Buffy Summers never arrived. After reversing the wish and destroying Anya's power base, the demon becomes human, and develops a crush on Xander. Although at first Xander wants nothing to do with her (she used to be a demon after all), he eventually starts to see that he kind of likes her back.

Another major character introduction involves a character who has been around since the second season. Jonathan Levinson was introduced the previous year as a tertiary character; he never had more than two or three lines and wasn't even named until his third or fourth appearance. This year, he is given a prominent role in an episode that was unfortunately delayed, along with the second part of the two-part finale. Tragically, the Columbine shootings occurred around the end of the season, and Jonathan's episode involved the idea of a school shooting. Fortunately, the episodes eventually aired, and the audience finally saw Jonathan in the forefront. He would go on to have another big episode in Season 4, and became a very important character in the final two seasons.

As I said, Season 3 is probably my favorite season of the show. Strangely, none of my absolute favorite episodes (I'd say there are about 4, but two of them comprise a two-parter), but the overall story is fantastic. The Mayor is one of the best Big Bads because of the way his jovial nature is juxtaposed with his sinister plans, and Faith's fall from grace is such a beautiful tragedy to watch. Sadly, this was the last season in which Angel would be a regular, but he went on to have his own great show as well.

Up next: the shadowy government agency and the folly of playing God with science...