This Year's Girl (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

"This Year's Girl"
Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode
In a park, a terrified Faith crawls towards the camera, the body of the dead Mayor lays behind her on a picnic blanket, as Buffy approaches menacingly holding a knife.
In Faith's second dream, her idyllic picnic with the Mayor is interrupted by a homicidal Buffy.
Episode no.Season 4
Episode 15
Directed byMichael Gershman
Written byDoug Petrie
Production code4ABB15[1]
Original air dateFebruary 22, 2000 (2000-02-22)
Guest appearances
Episode chronology
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"This Year's Girl" is the fifteenth episode of the fourth season of the American supernatural drama television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Written by Doug Petrie and directed by Michael Gershman, it originally aired on The WB on February 22, 2000. In the series, Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is a Slayer, a teenage girl endowed with superhuman powers to fight evil forces. "This Year's Girl" is the first half of a two-part story arc featuring the return of the rogue Slayer Faith (Eliza Dushku), who Buffy put into a coma in the season three finale. In this episode, Faith wakes up to find that months have passed and the Mayor (Harry Groener) is dead. She then exacts revenge by swapping bodies with Buffy in a cliffhanger ending.

Petrie used various scenes to emphasize Faith's loneliness and resentment of Buffy. Faith's arc is also tied in with characters like Riley Finn (Marc Blucas) and Spike (James Marsters), who are experiencing identity crises of their own. The episode features a series of dreams from Faith's perspective which show her being pursued by a homicidal Buffy. Academic sources have interpreted these dreams as manifestations of Faith's feelings of betrayal and fear, as well as her guilty conscience catching up to her. Faith's dreams also include references to past and future episodes.

"This Year's Girl" was watched by 5.75 million viewers. The episode mostly lays the groundwork for the subsequent "Who Are You?", but critics were still excited to see Faith and the Mayor again, with Vox's Constance Grady saying the rogue Slayer's return was a refreshing break from the season's "dull" main narrative.[3] The ending fight between the two Slayers was also praised for its brutal destructiveness.

  1. ^ Pateman, Matthew (2015). "Appendix: Episode Listing". The Aesthetics of Culture in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. McFarland & Company. p. 216. ISBN 978-1-4766-0612-5.
  2. ^ Holder, Mariotte & Hart 2000, p. 233.
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference vox was invoked but never defined (see the help page).