Never Kill a Boy on the First Date

Teenage vampire slayer Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) juggles her social life with staking the undead, dating sensitive hunk Owen (Christopher Wiehl) whilst trying to find the Anointed One, who has been prophesied to rise up and release head bloodsucker The Master (Mark Metcalf). Needless to say, holding down a relationship while dealing with vampires doesn't prove all that easy.

Another Buffy episode that doesn't quite do it for me: whenever the Master and his vampiric acolytes are the central villains of the piece, I tend to switch off (mentally, not literally). Lucky for me, then, that—despite the show being called Buffy The Vampire Slayer—vampires are often the least of her worries, with far more exotic demons and creatures lurking in the shadows waiting to bring death and chaos to Sunnydale. Roll on the next episode...

Buffy dates. Or tries! I like this episode a lot because it gets back into the overarching season 1 storyline. Some fun stuff with Giles and with Cordelia as well.

Is it just me or does this Owen guy look like he could be Buffy's dad? Seriously doesn't he look about 35 years old?

It's a fun episode- definitely not a masterpiece but there are still plenty of good lines and jokes. I always enjoy seeing Xander desperately hanging in the periphery!

I really loved the final reveal at the end! I hope the little kid thing gets explored in subsequent episodes.

This episode wasn't awful like Teacher's Pet but it was a pretty slow moving and dry episode, I feel like it also repeats the plot of the first two episodes and doesn't really make anything new out of that. Buffy and her date in this episode just don't really have a good chemistry just making it kind hard to sit through. At some points they just spend a lot of time looking for the vampires, there isn't really much action or fighting until the end which is probably best scene of the episode but overall the plot just isn't really that great.

It's a rare case of Buffy truly crushing on a boy who is not Angel, although there are similarities - Owen is tall, brooding, and likes to read. Buffy tries to make two dates with the guy, but in each case "emergency slaying duties" pop up and she has to not show up at all in the first case and leave suddenly in the second case. Unfortunately, in the second event, Owen decides to follow her.

There's a funny scene in The Bronze where Cordelia, Owen, Buffy, Xander, Willow, and Angel are all gathered around with everybody talking in code about the danger that's going on and where it's going on while trying to not let Owen in on what's happening. There's also Angel looking rather jealous at the Owen/Buffy situation.

At the ending there is a bonding moment between Buffy and Giles with a kind of father/daughter discussion where Giles tells Buffy about how his dreams of being a fighter pilot were destroyed when his own father told him that his destiny was to be a watcher. It's one of the first of many such scenes where Giles becomes the father figure Buffy needs in her life.