f you had to single out one season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer for its originality, audacity and overall consistency, season three would be it. This is the Scooby Gang's final year of innocence: It's the last year of high school, and the last year before the show will take a detour down the Initiative path in season four, and into the spiraling darkness and shadows of death that pervaded the most recent seasons.
It's the last year of high school—but Buffy is nowhere to be found among the crowd at Sunnydale High. After her narrow miss at the end of season two, she needs some time alone to decompress. But as the season opener shows, Buffy can't escape or hide from trouble, and by the end of the episode, the prodigal Slayer returns home to Sunnydale to a host of new troubles—led by Mr. Trick (K. Todd Freeman) and the mayor (Harry Groener).
That's not all that Buffy's up against. There's a second Slayer in town. In "Faith, Hope and Trick," we meet Faith (Eliza Dushku), a kick-ass, bad-seed Slayer who breezes into town and challenges Buffy's ethics and commitment on several levels. Meanwhile, Willow starts to further develop her witchcraft skills.
While not every episode is a grand slam, episode after episode of this season of Buffy is memorable. Multiple elements align to make season three work so well. First and foremost is the witty and provocative writing—which produced such diverse episodes as "Band Candy" and "Earshot." Furthermore, the actors had settled into their roles by this point, adding subtle nuances to the rhythms in their interaction. Topping it all off was this year's terrific cast of supporting characters, including Groener and Freedman; Emma Caulfield as Anya the vengeance demon (introduced in "The Wish"); Alexis Denisof as Buffy's new Watcher, Wesley Wyndam-Pryce; and Seth Green (as Oz, the werewolf). Plus, this season the show goes out with a big bang, literally (see "Graduation Day," parts I and II).
The six-DVD set contains all 22 episodes of Buffy's third season, as well as a host of featurettes (five in all), a season overview, several episode scripts that you can view onscreen and four episode commentaries.
DVD design doesn't live up to the episodes
Some DVD series sets, such as the seven installments of Star Trek: The Next Generation, maintain a consistent approach to the look and feel of the content navigation menus—regardless of whether something can be improved. To their credit, the producers of Buffy's third season have changed the navigation menus so the design is cleaner and easier to read. However, since episode titles appear at the four corners of your screen, with no labels to denote the order, it's hard to know the order to go in at a glance.
We also encountered several other minor, design nits. For example, the image gallery couldn't play back on our three-year-old Samsung DVD player. And watching the original screenplays for episodes like "Faith, Hope and Trick," "Band Candy" and "The Wish" is more tedious than it is entertaining.
Even more concerning is the organization of the discs. First, when you open the box, there's no way to know which discs contain supplemental content—there's no indication on either the included booklet or the discs. Furthermore, once you pop in the disc, you still have to go to each episode's sub-menu to see if there's any extra content associated with it. On some discs, there is a "Special Features" section, but it doesn't cross-reference the content accessed via the individual episode menus. The omission of a decent index and navigation system is maddening—especially if you're the sort to jump straight to the disc's extra features. Furthermore, it means that you won't realize until after you've made your selection that, in at least two instances, two episodes share the same featurette—so if you click on it in each of those two episodes, you'll end up seeing the same five-minute featurette twice.
Or perhaps three times, if you've already seen the Buffy videos and the sound-bite interviews featured on those. There are four distinct four- to six-minute interviews, each labeled as being an interview with Joss Whedon. However, this is a bit misleading, as the canned interviews include less of Whedon, the show's creator and executive producer, than they do of a given episode's writer and even some of the cast members. All of them appear to have been produced several years ago, which would make sense considering when the videos were launched.
Once you find them, the audio commentaries are largely informative and engaging, providing interesting inside perspectives from the episode writers (for "Helpless," "Earshot" and "Bad Girls") and director ("Consequences").
Disc three contains an image gallery and two very informative featurettes. The first, the "Season Three Overview," provides an insightful 21-minute look at the stories behind the stories of Buffy's third season. The second featurette is barely a third of that length, but it packs a tremendous punch, with the show's writers talking about how they come up with "Buffy-speak," the witty turns of phrase and one-liners that the Scooby Gang is known for. On the final disc is a third featurette, a short piece about creature makeups with makeup wiz John Vulich.
