Murder, attempted rape, brutal violence and ripsaws. This episode has everything in it. It also ends with the upsetting, shocking death of one my favourite Scooby and a nasty cliffhanger in which our heroine's life lies in the balance and the resurgence of another's bad habit could cause big problems. The episode starts off light enough, just Buffy hunting down the trio, only to be trapped in a house full of ripsaws. It then gets darker and darker and darker when Warren becomes somewhat of a threat to Buffy but aided by Jonathan in one of his more heroic moments, defeats him. Warren however, uses his childish, pathetic, intelligent mind to fly away using a jet pack leaving Jonathan and Andrew to take the fall. Dawn decides to get out the house and give Willow and Tara(who got back together!) some time alone. She stops by Spike's to tell him he's as cruel as he ever was, sleeping with Anya. She tells him that it hurt Buffy bad and Spike takes it as an excuse to reconcile. But when he gets there, he becomes the monster he is and the following fight results in the most disturbing in Buffy history. The only happy thing in this episode is the reunion of Willow and Tara. They spend the episode in the bedroom, making up for lost time, only someone else has other plans for their future. This episode is, in my opinion very dark and heavy. The gun that Warren uses to shoot Buffy and Tara is the most brutal weapon ever used in Buffy. All through the season Buffy has been mentioning that guns are never helpful and here it shows that they're more destructive than any deamon or God Buffy could fight. In it's way, the use of a gun is the most frightening thing on the show: buffy deals with the extraordinary and she always wins, but when the evil stems from human power or illness, Buffy is helpless (Joyce's tumour). 'BTVS' is very demonstrative of the problem human corruption poses and it shows the myriad reasons not to own a gun. This episode is extremely dark, serious, upsetting and disturbing, but this is to be expected when it's the climax of many story lines this season that have been adult and dark.
Review of Seeing Red
