Everyone's nightmares seem to be coming true at Sunnydale high — Xander goes to class in his underwear, Giles loses the ability to read, and time flies during Buffy's surprise test. Buffy keeps seeing a young boy around campus and begins to make a link when one of the students is attacked by a strange monster who keeps saying lucky nineteen. Buffy discovers that the boy she sees is actually lying in a coma in hospital after being attacked. Buffy, Willow and Xander try to find the boy to help him wake, and discover that the monster is a nightmare projection of the boy's baseball coach, who put the boy in the coma. Buffy makes the boy face up to his fears and all returns to normal, with Xander stopping the coach from avoiding the law.
For a longer synposis of this episode, you can read one here.
Buffy's fear of parental abandonment will play an important role in later episodes.
This also isn't the last time that we'll see an alternate version of Sunnydale.
This is the only episode in which we will see Buffy as a vampire, but not the last time we'll see one of the Scoobies as a vampire.
Episode Goofs:
In Becoming when we see a scene where Buffy's parents are fighting, she's in high school. However in this episode she tells Willow that her parents got divorced when she was in freshman year but had been long seperated before that.
As well within season one continuity where Buffy's birth year has already been given as either 1979 or 1980 (according to I Robot, You Jane, the dates on Buffy's tombstone read 1981-1997.
Notes & Trivia:
If you take a closer look when Willow opens her locker, you'll see a Nerf Herder bumper sticker on the inside of the door.
Nightmares pulled in an audience of 2.4 million episodes.
Buffy Pop Culture:
"Why is she so Evita-like?" is a reference to Evita Peron, the wife of Juan Peron, who became president of Argentina in 1946.
In Willow's opera sequence, she is dressed to play the role of Cio-Cio-San, the title character from Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly, and the part she is supposed to sing is from the famous love duet from the end of the first act.
Surprisingly enough the Master quotes Walt Disney's Cinderella when he says a dream is a wish your heart makes. As well Billy also references The Wizard of Oz when he says I had the strangest dream, and you were in it, and you."
Memorable Dialogue:
The Master, looking at a cross: "We are defined by the things we fear. This symbol, these two planks of wood... it confounds me, suffuses me with mortal dread."
Xander: "I'm not worried. If there's something bad out there, we'll find, you'll slay, we'll party."
Links of Intesest:
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Next Week:Out of Mind, Out of Sight (aka Invisible Girl)