We open with Buffy kicking some major vampire ass in the cemetery.  She sees Parker there, and saves him from some more vamps against some wicked techno background music.  Staking all the vampires, Buffy turns around to find Parker apologetic for the way he's treated her. He asks her for another chance, and Buffy wakes up from her daydream in Psych class.  She's watching Parker flirt with a  girl in the front row, as Professor Walsh lectures about the id, and the pleasure principle.  Buffy then finds herself back in the daydream, except this time Parker's shirt is unbuttoned, and he's holding ice cream and roses.  Out on the quad, Xander informs Buffy and Willow that he's just got a job at the college pub (like there's ever only one), and shows them his fake i.d.  He seems oddly obsessed with the idea of being a bartender, and keeps lighting his lighter in their faces, asking them to spill their troubles.  Before long, naturally, the conversation turns to Buffy whining about Parker.  She's still hanging on to the idea that maybe he didn't mean to be a jerk to her, and that it could still work out.  Willow tells her to move on.  Yes Buffy, move on.  Please.  As the person sitting through all of this again, I beg of you.  At the pub that night, Xander is overwhelmed taking orders at the bar when Buffy walks in.  She sees Parker and the girl from Psych class in a booth in the corner, and is so distracted that she runs right into Riley, spilling his drink on him.  She apologizes, but is still distracted by watching Parker (who is now making out with the girl), and doesn't hear much of what Riley says, beyond the fact that Parker's a girl-chaser.  Buffy looks sad.  At the bar, Xander does his "rough day?" thing with the lighter on one of the girls at the bar. She starts to tell him about her day until some pseudo-intellectual guy comes up and insults Xander's intelligence by using a bunch of big words; basically calling him a loser.  He then orders a pitcher of beer, which the owner of the bar tells Xander to serve him without checking for identification.  At the end of the bar, Buffy is moping.  Xander notices and comes over.  He asks her if she's had a rough day, and if she wants to talk about it, but he's utterly genuine this time.  Buffy tells him that she knows now that Parker doesn't have intimacy issues or anything, he's just dumped her.  Period.  Xander starts to try and comfort her, but the bar owner calls him back to work.  Buffy gets up to go, but then runs into * another * guy holding a beer.  He turns out to be friends with the jerk who insulted Xander.  They, and two more guys, invite Buffy back to their table.  Just then, Buffy sees Parker leaving with the other girl, and takes the proferred beer.  Buffy, Buffy, Buffy.  Did we learn nothing in "Reptile Boy"? At the Bronze, Willow and Oz get a table and chitchat a bit until the music starts. Oz seems oddly fascinated with the lead singer of the band, a woman named Veruca.  We recognize her as the girl he exchanged looks with in "Living Conditions".  As Veruca's gaze seems to keep being drawn back to Oz, Willow is troubled, though she's not sure why.  Back at the pub, Buffy and the four guys are well on their way to getting tanked.  The next morning in the dorm room, Willow's grumbling about Veruca, but notices that Buffy's way too transfixed with the television to be listening.  Buffy's IQ seems to have dropped sharply overnight, due in no small part to the hangover she must have from all of the beer she consumed.  Willow suggests that they go to class, but has to stop Buffy from leaving in her pajamas.  In Psych, again, Walsh talks about an upcoming assignment, and Buffy spies a girl in front of her eating a sandwich.  Overcome by the desire to have the sandwich, she takes it away from the shocked girl, and starts eating it.  Willow is also shocked.   Cut to a bunch of beakers and cylinders and boiling lab experiment stuff in a basement somewhere.  A liquid filters down through some tubes into a keg of the same kind of beer that the guys and Buffy were drinking.  Speaking of Buffy and the guys, they're all at the pub again, drinking their beer at a table.  They all appear to be very drunk, and Xander watches with a  concerned expression from the bar.  At the dorm, Oz catches up with Willow as she leaves her room, and Willow comments on Oz not being in class that day.  Oz invites Willow along to another performance by Veruca's band, but Willow turns him down, in favor of studying.  Things are kind of strained between them.  Back at the bar, Buffy and the guys are at this point reduced to such intelligent phrases as "You stupid!", and Buffy practically attacks the jukebox when Xander starts a song up.  Xander cuts her off and sends her home; after some drunken statements, she does.  Almost immediately afterward, the guys notice Buffy's gone. Cut to some kind of school lounge type place, where Willow sees Parker and goes over to give him a piece of her mind.  She confronts him about the one-night stand, and wants to know how he could treat Buffy like that.  He goes off onto his whole spiel about how he didn't mean to hurt Buffy, but all he'd wanted from her was the one night, etc etc.  Back at the bar, Xander tells the guys to pay up and go home, and one of the guys pulls out his wallet even as another one scampers off to the bathroom.  The guy with the wallet throws a whole wad of twenties down on the table, and give the whole thing to Xander.  They all hear a ruccus in the bathroom, and the guy who just went in a minute ago comes back out misshapen.  Indeed, he looks like a neandrathal.  He attacks Xander, and the other three guys suddenly undergo their own transformation into cavemen.  They convene upon Xander, but he pulls out his lighter, and they're all frightened enough by the flame to run away.  Xander runs back into the back room and tells the guy who owns the bar that some of his patrons have turned into cavemen.  The owner does not look surprised.  Out on the campus, the four neandrathals run around acting like apes, as back in the bar the owner reveals to Xander that that particular brand of beer is what changed the guys, he did it to them to get back at them for their attitudes, and Xander realizes that Buffy drank it, too.    Back out on the quad, one of the neandrathals gets hit by a car, and the other three surround it and start whacking at the car with impromptu clubs, such as tree branches.  They see a couple girls walk by just then, and take off after them, leaving the wounded one in the street.  Cut to Xander and Giles entering Buffy's dorm room to find her colouring on the walls. Back at the lounge place, Parker and Willow have moved to a couple couches off in a corner.  Parker is doing his whole sensitive routine on Willow now, and she appears to be falling for it, until she asks him just how gullible he thinks she is when he puts the moves on her.  She kinda tells him off, but then suddenly the cavemen come running in with their captured girls, and knock both Willow and Parker out.  Cut to the dorm room where Buffy starts sniffing Xander because he smells good.  Xander mentions the beer and Buffy perks up until Giles tells her she can't have any.  She shoves him against the wall and runs out.  Giles and Xander run into the hallway, but she's already gone.  Back at the lounge, the cavemen build a fire out of chairs and books and stuff, and prance around beating their chests.  Inevitably, the fire spreads out of control, and the cavemen are spooked.  Outside, Xander catches up with Buffy, but before he can convince her to come back to the dorm room she smells the smoke from the lounge.  Pronouncing "Fire bad!", Buffy takes off with Xander.  Inside, the cavemen pull the girls to a corner that's not on fire yet, including Willow, who's still unconscious.  As the cavemen jump around, befuddled and afraid, Buffy comes in and looks intently at a fire extinguisher.  She throws it into the fire but nothing happens, naturally.  She then spies Willow unconscious on the other side of the fire, and jumps over it to her side.  Moments later, Xander comes down the stairs where Buffy just was, but doesn't see her.  He goes back outside, coughing from the smoke.  Back inside, Cave Buffy realizes that she can't get Willow and the others out through the wall of fire, and her gaze comes to rest instead on a high window, which she reaches by jumping up onto some overhead pipes and going hand over hand to.  She knocks the window out, and the cavemen seize the oppportunity by knocking a bookshelf over in front of the window and climbing out with the girls.  Buffy heaves Willow up on to her shoulder and carries her over to the window, too.  Back inside, she finds Parker just regaining consciousness.  Coughing, he asks her what they should do, and Buffy looks at him for a moment before hitting him over the head with one of the treebranch clubs the cavemen had.  She then picks him up and takes him out of the building too.  Outside, firemen wander around as Parker comes up and basically acts out Buffy's fantasy from the beginning of the episode.  He apologizes to Buffy for the way he treated her, says she was great tonight, and asks for her forgiveness.  Cave Buffy stares at him for a minute before conking him over the head again.  She, Giles, Xander and Willow look down at his prone form for a moment before walking off. FLAWS:    Okay, I'll assume for the sake of the episode that this was indeed magic beer, since the bar owner said his cousin was a warlock, or whatever, and I'll accept that it could induce massive memory loss and trans-mutation of bone structure and musculature. I got all that.  But Buffy never went through a transformation.  She never got the heavy brow, or the hairy torso.  But somehow when Xander and Giles find her in her dorm room her hair is * way * longer than it was when she left the pub.  I know they just gave her some extentions because they wanted her to appear all cave-girly, but it just doesn't mesh. THOUGHTS ON THE EPISODE:   Bah!  Other than being amused at seeing Parker knocked out twice in one episode, there wasn't much about this one I liked at all.  We do get some more set-up for the next episode, in the way that we see Oz oddly fascinated with Veruca, and Willow's growing unease upon observing it. BEST LINE:   Oz:  "Hey, you got a table." Willow:  "I had to kill a man." Oz:  "Well, it's a really good table."

"Beer Bad"