Season two is where Buffy the Vampire Slayer became genuinely great. The first season found its footing; this one found its nerve. Twenty-two episodes that start with the arrival of two of the show’s finest characters — Spike and Drusilla — and end with Buffy killing the man she loves to save the world. Everything in between earns that ending.
The season splits neatly into two arcs. In the first half, Spike (James Marsters) and Drusilla (Juliet Landau) arrive in Sunnydale: a vampire couple, dangerous and charismatic and genuinely interesting in a way the Master never quite was. Spike wants to kill the Slayer. He’s failed twice before. He intends to make it three. The second half pivots around the season’s real catastrophe: Buffy and Angel sleep together on her seventeenth birthday, and Angel’s moment of pure happiness breaks his curse. His soul is gone. Angelus is back.
The Big Bads
Spike and Drusilla are the season’s face for its first thirteen episodes — unpredictable, theatrically violent, and completely committed to each other in a way that makes them both more and less dangerous than the Master ever was. Spike in particular is the show’s great accidental creation: intended as a two-episode villain, kept because James Marsters was too good to lose.
Angelus, once revealed, is something altogether colder. David Boreanaz plays him as the dark mirror of Angel — all the same power and intelligence, all the charm stripped away and replaced with cruelty. He knows everyone’s weaknesses. He uses them. His campaign against Buffy and the Scoobies in the season’s second half is personal in a way that makes it more frightening than any monster-of-the-week threat.
What Season 2 Does
It kills people. Jenny Calendar, Kendra, the comfortable structure of the gang’s relationships — all of it is dismantled by the time Becoming Part Two ends. It also deepens every character significantly: Willow begins practicing magic in earnest, Xander’s feelings for Buffy create a rift that lasts, Cordelia becomes fully part of the group, and Giles loses someone he loved and doesn’t get to fall apart publicly about it.
The finale — Buffy killing Angel with Willow’s soul restoration arriving thirty seconds too late — is one of the finest hours of television of the nineties. The season earns every second of it.
Season 2 Episodes
- S02E01 – When She Was Bad
- S02E02 – Some Assembly Required
- S02E03 – School Hard
- S02E04 – Inca Mummy Girl
- S02E05 – Reptile Boy
- S02E06 – Halloween
- S02E07 – Lie to Me
- S02E08 – The Dark Age
- S02E09 – What’s My Line? Part 1
- S02E10 – What’s My Line? Part 2
- S02E11 – Ted
- S02E12 – Bad Eggs
- S02E13 – Surprise
- S02E14 – Innocence
- S02E15 – Phases
- S02E16 – Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered
- S02E17 – Passion
- S02E18 – Killed by Death
- S02E19 – I Only Have Eyes for You
- S02E20 – Go Fish
- S02E21 – Becoming Part 1
- S02E22 – Becoming Part 2