Nightmares

Sotry by Joss Whedon

Teleplay by David Greenwalt

Directed by Bruce Seth Green

Original Air Date: May 12, 1997

"Nightmares" is just that, an episode centering around nightmares. For its first season, I imagine this was sort of a gimmee topic, and that it was Whedon's idea but someone else's writing shows. Whedon, Buffy's creator, is the series' best writer, but when his ideas are written by someone else, there's a slight edge missing.

For some reason, people's nightmares are coming true. What starts as tarantulas emerging from a book and crawling all over a student evolves into giant flying insects attacking the city. Willow is caught on an opera's stage not knowing the words or how to sing; Giles loses his ability to read; Buffy's estranged father disses her, and then she turns into a vampire; Xander arrives at class wearing only his boxer shorts, and then he is attacked by the knife-wielding clown that freaked him out at his sixth birthday party.

This material basicaly writes itself. It is ham-handed, and it's the only bad episode of the show's first season. Buffy is at its best when it is unconventional, and a gothic-themed show like Buffy using nightmares as a plot device is disappointing.

The common nightmares high school nightmares, they're all there: forgetting about a test, not having enough time to finish a test, showing up to class without any clothing, the fear of abandonment, being put in awkward situations, it's all there. All that was missing was teeth falling out and snakes, but I guess the knife-wielding psychopathic clown makes up for that.

There is the taste question as well. The prelude to Xander and the clown has Xander wandering down a hallway with swastikas graffiti'd on the walls. I was a bit lost on this one, though Xander does earlier make a passing comment that spiders didn't bother him, but were it Nazis crawling all over his face he would be concnerned. Still, I never got the feeling that Xander was literally scared of Nazis, the way he was scared of being naked in front of a class or his fear of knife-wielding clowns.

The show was still young at this point, so theme of the power of a Slayer's dreams had not yet been developed. This is understandable, for the creators obviously didn't know they were going to be able to stock the first 12-episode season with allusions that could be picked up by geeks like me years from that time. Yet dreams, dreaming, nightmares and visions are a part of the Slayers powers, and before Buffy graduates from high school, this power already starts becoming remarkably clear. Maybe this was the natural course of developing a "superhero" (if that's what Buffy could be called), but it's interesting that Whedon set this particular trait so early on, only to mine it repeatedly and to great effect in future episodes.

Part of my bias in this episode comes in the fact of how effective A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET was when placed in its proper context. Freddy Kreuger is a joke figure now, but the original NIGHTMARE was scary as hell when it came out. I'd seen tons of scary movies when I saw NIGHTMARE with my friend Dereck Peery in the fifth grade, and it scared the absolute hell out of both of us. NIGHTMARE, for me, was the end-all-be-all of nightmare fiction, and it's just plain hard to create nightmare fiction without the viewer comparing it to what the child molester Freddy Kreuger did on Elm Street.