Best of the best
Noel - Especially great write up this time, really picking up on all the little ways in which these episodes reflect what adulthood is like.

Technical quibble to Dutch Missourian's comment: Angel had been conceived, but not cast, so he (like Joyce) wasn't in the finished presentation-pilot-thing.

Interesting thought, La Pipe. Hey, any DS9 fans? The writer of "Crossover," the only good episode involving a trip to the "Mirror Mirror" universe, said he didn't really intend Mirror!Kira's interest in "herself" to mean that she was bi so much as that she was a narcissist.

Not a bad little show, huh?
It's true that TV doesn't get much better than Season Three of _Buffy_.

Oh, one last thing: Although credited as normal, I do not believe that Seth Green appears in "Consequences." It says something when the presence or absence of a main cast member doesn't register. Without spoiling how the complaint was resolved, Green did occasionally (in his reserved Oz-esque way) express annoyance…

(continued non-specific acting spoilers)

- Alexis Denisof isn't British, but he did live in the UK for many years. Probably one of the best fake accents on the show.

Faith!
I like Faith a lot, and maybe even more so as she incrementally descends into freakiness. That propensity for evil plays on things that were always there, only I'd tried to brush past because she's fun and hot and such. The memory of realizing together with Xander et al that we didn't really know how far over…

Noel has said that he won't be doing any _Angel_ this summer. But as for "the future," we're working on him.

(vague spoilers)

Rowan: Tastes vary. Seriously. Nothing is defined. For instance, conventional wisdom would say that you should watch the teaser of "She" and skip the rest, but I'm one of the very few who thinks that episode is a lot of fun.

I kind of think of "Gingerbread" as being like the 11th episode of the previous season, "Ted." It raises a few questions about Buffy's role as the Slayer, but doesn't fully address them, because the show isn't quite ready to go there yet.

LOVE "Helpless"
A rare instance of BTVS doing straight-up horror movie tropes, when the show's earned it.

Never heard the full story (and I've seen the S3 special features). Do you know anything else about how the episode would have played out originally?

"This is the only BTVS episode by the writer credited for Lover's Walk."

Pez?
Well, since my comment may actually be high enough up to get read for once, let me say something insightful. Um… I'm glad you made that post-Post joke, which I've also done. And, um… I'm glad you used the correct apostrophe-free title for "Lovers Walk." And… okay, this is the episode that really made me…

Nobody's Asian in the movies.

I always knew quality was subjective - people love episodes I hate, and vice versa. That's how it is. But I always thought that saying "no matter what you think of the episode, the commentary track for 'Hell's Bells' is completely worthless" would be the one statement that no one would ever disagree with. It would…

I've heard that there aren't really many black people in Santa Barbara, the town on which Sunnydale is modeled. If we were actually concerned about TV shows accurately reflecting the diversity in small SoCal towns, it would probably make more sense to bitch about the paucity of Hispanic characters.

I always kinda liked the lite-rock song, myself, although it helps that I was the right age to get gooey towards it (see the article months back about love for terrible late-'90s hits). It's "Fire Escape," by Fastball, the second single from their record that got ignored because people were too busy oversaturating us…