By the end of School Hard, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a fundamentally different series to the one that existed the week before. This is a pivotal episode, and in my opinion is the most significant episode of the entire run, because it’s the one that ensures the show’s longevity. There is one simple reason for that: Spike.
Drusilla is an amazing character as well, of course. She veers back and forth crazily between mournful helplessness and pure evil. Like Spike (but in a very different way), her personality shows us a twisted version of human foibles without losing the element of danger. She is also a subversion of childhood, speaking to her dolls before biting into a neck. Continue reading
Amazing that after so many years, I still remembered this episode so clearly. Mostly, that’s because of the punchline. One mistake in my memory was that I was certain the “guide” was named Cadwalader, so when he was introduced as Pip, I was surprised. Not nearly as surprised as I was by the phone that had only 3 characters to select though! I mean, real estate might not have been an issue, by why would you need 2 P’s when you could just use the same one twice? 
When I’d first heard about this story, I had almost skipped it. I think the idea of Holmes investigating a missing horse just screamed “boring” to me. Boy howdy, am I glad I didn’t listen to that initial instinct. Since that original reading, I’ve seen the episode more than once and have loved watching Holmes get the better of the pompous Colonel Ross, played brilliantly by Peter Barkworth. 
It might have been nice for All Our Yesterday’s to be the last episode of classic Star Trek. It’s a very well designed story. There’s an A and B plot focusing on Kirk in a 17th Century time, accused of witchcraft while Spock and McCoy find themselves 5000 years in the past with Mariette Hartley (wearing another of the sexiest outfits in Trek history!) And it has the universe’s most perfectly named librarian, Mr. Atoz. (As in A to Z.) 
What do you get when you cross a bulldog and a shih tzu? No, I’ve got a better one. What do you get when you take The Haunting of Hill House, add a pinch of Doctor Who’s Ark in Space and a dollop of Seeds of Doom? You get The Troubled Spirit.
We have reached the final, six-episode arc in the second full season of Monogatari, and the focus is mainly on two protagonists. Hitagi Senjogahara has been largely neglected as a character for a very long time, her relationship with Koyomi remaining a private matter that the viewers are not privy to, so her involvement is not before time, and is independent of Koyomi. In an attempt to sort out the problem of Nadeko, which reached a crisis point in Otorimonogatari, and save the lives of Koyomi and Shinobu, Hitagi enlists the help of Kaiki. He has only been an occasional character up to this point, but he is the main player in this arc, and we experience events from his perspective. 
There’s something about Nelson Brenner (Patrick McGoohan) that seems familiar: the clothes he wears, the Mediterranean architecture of his home, his career as an “operative”, the regularity with which he says “be seeing you”. Could this be… surely not. For now, he’s not a number. He’s a free man.
We have reached the penultimate arc in the second season of Monogatari, a four-episode story titled Shinobu Time. It is an absolutely magnificent run of episodes, for reasons I will enumerate later in the article, but first I need to start with a warning. I can’t possibly do this one justice without getting very spoilerific, so if you haven’t seen this you’ll want to go and watch it first before reading. More importantly, this is one of the most controversial arcs of the series due to Koyomi’s attraction to the physically youngest female characters. It is so integral to the arc that I’m not going to chicken out of discussing the issue, and the review that follows will contain images that may be considered NSFW, and plot details some readers may find disturbing. 
After a little detour to watch Hanamonogatari, we are back with Monogatari: Second Season for a four-episode arc titled Otorimonogatari. The title loosely translates as “Decoy Story”, although as is often the case there are subtleties in the use of kanji that are lost in translation. But there is a sense of some kind of a deception, and that applies perfectly to Nadeko, who hides her true personality. 
I welcome suggestions and feedback and will consider interesting guest posts. If you would like to email please click on the picture to view contact details.
The View from the Junkyard 