Get It Done (Buffy episode)
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| Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode | |
|---|---|
| “Get It Done” | |
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| Episode no. | Season 7 Episode 15 |
| Guest star(s) | Tom Lenk (Andrew) Iyari Limon (Kennedy) Clara Bryant (Molly) Sarah Hagan (Amanda) Indigo (Rona) Kristy Wu (Chao-Ahn) Lalaine (Chloe) DB Woodside (Principal Wood) |
| Writer(s) | Douglas Petrie |
| Director | Douglas Petrie |
| Production no. | 7ABB15 |
| Original airdate | February 18, 2003 |
| Episode chronology | |
| ← Previous | Next → |
| "First Date" | "Storyteller" |
"Get It Done" is the 15th episode of season 7 of the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. See also List of Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes.
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[edit] Plot synopsis
[edit] Summary
The First Slayer tells Buffy in a dream that "It is not enough".
Principal Wood tells Buffy to go home a concentrate on her "real" job, killing monsters and getting ready to battle the First. Buffy takes him to the house and introduces him to the rest of the crew, including Spike. The tension between Spike and Wood is tangible. Wood gives Buffy a bag that he got from his mother and should have been passed on to Buffy anyway.
When one of the girls commits suicide after talking to the First, Buffy tells everybody in the house off in no uncertain way, insulting both Potentials and Scoobies like Anya and Spike in the process. She then calls an emergency and opens the slayer's bag. Inside is a set of shadow figures that trigger a portal. Against the advice of her friends, Buffy jumps in, sending back an enormous demon that beats everybody up and flees. After Spike recovers, he gets his leather coat out of a trunk, kills the demon, and drags it back to Buffy's house.
On the other side of the portal, Buffy is back in the desert where she once met the First Slayer. There, three men tell her she is the last slayer to guard the Hellmouth, and try to infuse her with the essence of the demon that give all the slayers their strength. Buffy refuses the power, telling the men that they were wrong to have created the slayer line in the first place. As a parting gift, they give Buffy a vision: An enormous army of Turok-Han just waiting to be unleashed on the world.
After struggling with the incantation, Willow manages to reopen the portal by sucking energy from Anya and Kennedy. Spike throws the dead demon in, and Buffy returns. Later in bed she tells Willow about the vision, and admits that the First Slayer was right: What they have will not be enough.
[edit] Expanded overview
Buffy walks through the living room littered with sleeping potential slayers and also checks upstairs on the rest of the girls sleeping in the various bedrooms. She spots Chloe crying in a corner of the hallway before she's tackled down the stairs by the First Slayer and then wakes up from her dream. Anya rants to Spike about being human and the overcrowded house as they walk to a bar to get drunk. Anya's sexual comments finally get to Spike and he asks her to stop cause it's not going to happen. A demonic minion of D'Hoffryn attacks and Spike knocks it down, then decides to be safe and run away with Anya.
At the school, Principal Wood and Buffy talk to a couple of students caught fighting and once the boys are gone, they talk about the increasing violence and strange occurrences around the Hellmouth. He and gives Buffy a "Slayer Emergency" bag that belonged to his mother. He hopes it will help her deal with the First and asks her to call him Robin. At his request, Buffy brings Robin to her house, introduces him to Andrew, then takes Robin outside to see the Potentials. Outside, Kennedy is roughly guiding the other Potentials through some fight training, but she has a bit too much fun with the job and yelling at the other girls. Buffy and Robin talk about their preparation efforts when Willow comes outside with an armful of weapons.
Buffy brings Robin downstairs to meet Spike, who's arguing with Anya over his efforts to save her life the night before. Knowing what Spike did to his mother, Robin questions Spike's good intentions and Spike gets a bit upset when he finds Buffy has told Robin about his soul. While Buffy gets sleeping bags set up on the floor, Dawn updates her on the progress with studying the contents of Robin's mother's Slayer bag and then jokes about not doing her real homework. The girls proceed into another bedroom to prepare more bags but stop when they find Chloe hanging from a sheet around her neck, dead. More potentials pile into the hallway and see the sight as the First in Chloe's body appears and teases them about the death. It uses Buffy's own words--and her voice--against her to make the point that it's going to win and they're going to lose.
Outside in the woods, Buffy works alone and covers the self-dug grave in which Chloe is buried. Back at the house, Buffy verbally rips into the entire gang and tells the girls that if they want to be killed, to just act as stupidly as Chloe did. Kennedy and Xander stand up to Buffy and her attitude but both are quickly shot down. When Anya speaks up, Buffy questions what it is that Anya actually does besides receive freely provided protection. Spike starts to leave and Buffy takes the opportunity to tell him how weak he is because he's been holding back so much. Later, the core gang plus Kennedy and Robin gather as they open the Slayer Emergency kit. Inside are various weapons, tools, a book written in Sumerian, and a locked box, which Buffy quickly breaks open. The box contains shadow casters and a stand for them to be constructed on.
Dawn reads a story from the text while Xander constructs the shadow casters on a spinning stand. Once everything's in place, the puppets spin and the shadows move on the wall as the text turns to English for Dawn to read easily. It's discovered that an exchange must occur and a blue cube appears in the middle of the room. Buffy realizes she has to go in and jumps through the portal despite her friends' protests and the complete lack of knowledge as to where she's going and how to get back. A demon appears in exchange for Buffy and although the gang all try their hands at beating it up, the demon tosses them all aside and leaves the house.
Realizing they have to get Buffy back, the gang begins to brainstorm the magic they must use to return Buffy. Kennedy pushes for Willow to try whatever magic she can to get Buffy back, but Willow informs her the consequences to reckless magic are beyond Kennedy's knowledge. Anya suggests letting Buffy find her own way home since she's so superior to them all. Dawn gets Willow thinking about the spell needed and Anya adds in some useful information about the type of magic they must perform. They realize they need to make another trade for Buffy's return and Spike volunteers to go out and get the demon.
Buffy finds herself transported to a desert where she finds three men Shadow Men who speak Swahili, and she understands it. They inform her that she is the last protector of the Hellmouth and offer her not knowledge, but power, then one knocks her out with a stick. At the Summers house, a sand circle is formed on the floor of the living room and Willow sits inside of it as she begins the spell. At first, it doesn't seem to work, but suddenly, Kennedy and Dawn are thrown back by a flash of light and Willow lets out a violent scream as her eyes turn black. Buffy finds herself chained in a cave with the Shadow Men and they begin a ritual to give Buffy the power she needs. They produce a box, which contains the spirit of a demon that was used to create the very first Slayer. A black cloud emerges, aimed for Buffy. She protests at the idea of being any less human, but she can't stop the black cloud from reaching her, surrounding and filling her body.
Spike digs his old duster out of some boxes in the basement of the school then proceeds determinedly through the school. He passes Principal Wood on the way, who comments on Spike's coat. Willow continues to try the spell, but as the portal doesn't open, Xander starts to worry she's getting in over her head. Determined, Willow reaches back and sucks the life-force out of Anya and Kennedy, gaining the power she needs to open the portal, and briefly, black hair. Meanwhile, Spike battles with the demon and enjoys the reacquired confidence to kill until he finally snaps the demon's neck and enjoys a cigarette. Buffy breaks free of the chains and yells at the Shadow Men for their attempt to give her the power of a demon. She uses the chains to fight with the various men then breaks a battle staff belonging to one of the men, making them all disappear but the leader.
Buffy asks him to tell her something new and as he silently provides her with information, Spike returns to the house and drops the dead demon into the portal. Buffy finds herself back at the house surrounded by the gang as they all recover silently. Willow tries to apologize to Kennedy and explain what happened, but the magical experience was more than Kennedy ever expected and she's distant. Willow goes to check on Buffy and they talk about Buffy's "pep talk" attitude and what happened with the Shadow Men. Buffy starts to regret her decision to reject the Shadow Men's power, and tell Willow about what she was shown that made her second-guess the decision. Elsewhere in a large underground location, millions of Ubervamp gather and rally for battle.
[edit] Arc significance
Buffy finds out how the very first Slayer was created, and it disgusts her, foreshadowing that she will bring down the whole system. Like with the decision to remove Spike's chip, she puts morals before what some people would consider common sense. She also finds out that she is the last guardian of the Hellmouth, and we all get to see the surprise that the First is preparing on the other side of the seal.
Spike puts back on his leather coat and with it regains his love for a good fight. Unfortunately, the coat proves to Wood that Spike in fact is the vampire who killed his mother, setting the stage for their battle.
Kennedy finally realizes that Willow is serious when she says that her magic is not trivial or fun. This will briefly strain their relationship, but by the end of the series, Kennedy will have gained a deep respect for her girlfriend. Willow performs a major feat of magic successfully.
[edit] Writing and acting
The slayer bag that Wood gives to Buffy and that contains the tools to the portal was never mentioned by Giles (though there are claims that it is the same one seen in "Restless"). This is a deus ex machina, more of which will be employed in the final episodes.
Suddenly, Dawn knows enough Sumerian to translate a text while just reading it without even a dictionary — if she made notes on the margin, they are too tiny to see. With Giles away, somebody has to read ancient languages to advance the plot.
When the demon jumps through the portal, he immediately renders poor Willow unconscious again — the same device used by the writers as in "Never Leave Me". With Willow's potential powers so great she could win each fight immediately, it is her fate to keep getting knocked out.
Willow's uncharacteristic problems with Latin would seem to show how rusty she has become. However, the fact that she can just order the portal open without having to follow what until now were considered hard rules underlines how great her powers truly are.
When Willow needs energy, she takes it from Kennedy and Anya.
[edit] Quotes and trivia
- "I love this job! Did you see that? I called that girl a maggot!" — Kennedy showing a bit too much enthusiasm for the military life.
- "From now on I'm your leader as in 'do as I say'." — Buffy also showing little grasp of the finer points of command. Faith will echo this when she is the leader in "Touched"
- "I provide much-needed sarcasm." — Anya defining her use to the Scoobies
- "I think I might pee my pants." — Willow showing her reluctance to use serious magic again
- "The first slayer did not talk so much." — One of the three wise men in the desert, giving the complaint that Watchers through the ages have had about Buffy.
- There are at least two references to Winnie-the-Pooh in this episode. Apart from "TTFN" — "Ta-ta for now", which is explained as what Tigger says when he leaves, Spike shows familiarity with the book when he goes away to do "what he does best": This is what Tigger claims about everything until he actually tries it.
- When we see Dawn saying that the book she reads isn't in Sumerian anymore and changes to English, the writing beforehand wasn't Sumerian at all, it was a transliteration of Greek letters in the place of Latin letters in English. For example the word "see" in English in the book was witten as "ΣΕΕ" in the Greek letters; Sumerian is written in cuneiform script, the ancient Sumerian, Akkadian/Babylonian Alphabets, not in Greek.
- In one scene Andrew has been diagramming on his whiteboard when visitors arrive, causing him to exclaim "They'll see the big board!" This is a parody of a line spoken in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove
[edit] Cast and crew
- Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy Summers
- James Marsters as Spike
- Nicholas Brendon as Xander Harris
- Alyson Hannigan as Willow Rosenberg
- Michelle Trachtenberg as Dawn Summers
- Emma Caulfield as Anya
- Juliet Landau as Drusilla
[edit] Other languages
German title: "Das Angebot" ("The Offer")
When Buffy tells the Potentials off, Xander responds to her with a "Jawohl!", an obvious reference to Nazi doctrine of blind obedience. In the German version, this German word is changed to "Zu Befehl" ("As you command"). Though this is still military jargon, the Nazi-reference is lost.
