Home after her three month hiatus in L.A., Buffy unpacks back in her room.  She goes in to let her mom know she'll be going out to go hook up with Willow and Xander, and they share an awkward conversation as Joyce hangs a primitive looking mask on the wall.  They try to get back into the groove of their mother-daughter relationship, but are obviously both uncertain in their roles now.  Walking out on the street, Buffy hears an noise coming from the alley and investigates.  She sees a man walking away from her and follows.  Hearing her behind him, Xander turns, brandishing a stake...which she quickly takes away from him in their short scuffle.  Xander, shocked, backs away from Buffy (even though I dislike him now, after Becoming pt2, I thought this was actually a touching moment.  Obviously he had missed her, as is evident by the expression on his face) as she admonishes him for playing with pointy sticks.  Suddenly a vamp jumps out at them, and the rest of the gang comes running.  In the course of the fight, Buffy kills the vamp while the others all end up on their backs on the ground.  Cut to outside Giles's place, where the gang has convinced her she needs to let Giles know she's back.  When he answers the door, it's a similarly sweet moment as he welcomes her home.  While Oz informs Buffy of how she's not wanted for murder anymore (see Flaws, below), Giles goes into the kitchen to get the tea that's boiling on the stove, and almost breaks down out of relief that Buffy's okay and is back (aw, Giles!).  Recovering himself, he rejoins the others in the living room, and tries to keep the group from grilling her too much about where she went, and why.  Buffy expresses the desire to just get back to school and slaying, and mindless fun.  She tries to make plans with the gang, but everyone's already got something to do, although Willow changes her plans when Buffy asks her to.  Buffy notes that she and her mother have an appointment with Principal Snyder the next morning, so try to get her back into school. The next day, in Principal Snyder's office, the troll won't let Buffy back in school.  In anger, Joyce tells him that this isn't over, and drives Buffy to where she's supposed to be meeting Willow, who never shows up.  Upon walking home, Buffy meets Pat...a woman in Joyce's book club who got really close to Joyce while Buffy was gone.  Inside, Joyce tells Buffy that Willow called to say she got held up, and that she (Joyce) invited Willow, Xander and Giles over for dinner the next night.  While Buffy's in the basement getting out the "company plates", she discovers a dead cat that she and her mom bury out in the garden.  That night, while Joyce sleeps, the mask on her wall glows with an eerie light...and the earth over the recently buried cat begins to move, and the cat rises from the grave.  In Buffy's dream, she's walking through the deserted school alone.  She finds Angel there, and tells him she's afraid.  Angel tells her she should be, and Buffy wakes up.  Joyce tells her that she talked to the superintendent of schools, and she might be able to get Buffy into a private girl's school.  Buffy gets upset, seeing it as punishment.  Joyce argues, telling her that she made some bad choices, and now she might have to suffer some circumstances.  Joyce opens the door to take the garbage out, and the cat they buried the day before comes running in.  Buffy calls Giles, who comes over with a big cage he puts it in.  He then notices the mask Joyce has nailed to her wall, and leaves with the cat after informing Buffy she can't go with him because she's not allowed on school premises.  In the library, the gang tries to vamp up the gathering that night by arranging for Oz's band to play and inviting more people....none of them really wants to open the wounds Buffy created by leaving them for three months and making them all worry, so they think that by having a bigger party none of them will really have to talk to her too much.  At Buffy's house that night, Pat is the first guest to show up that Buffy didn't know about, and gets on Buffy's nerves before going off with Joyce.  Dingoes Ate my Baby shows up next, and soon the big party is in full swing.  Buffy wanders from friend to friend, and basically gets the brush off from each one.  As she begins to feel unwanted there, the mask upstairs glows brightly.  We cut to an accident outside somewhere, and a recent corpse lying on the ground opens its eyes.  In the hospital, a burn victim dies in the ER, and then comes back to life, escaping the hospital.  In the kitchen, Buffy overhears her mom telling Pat that it's almost worse having Buffy home again.  Buffy goes up to her room and starts packing her stuff up again, crying, while outside un-dead zombies stagger toward the house. At the library, the cat yowls in its cage as Giles finds out that the mask Joyce has hanging on her wall is making the dead rise up as zombies, and that they will all converge upon the mask, killing whoever's around it.  In Buffy's room, Willow has come up to talk to Buffy and finds her packing.  She yells at Buffy for giving up so easily, and tells her that she knows Buffy's going through some stuff right now, but so is Willow, and Buffy left just when she needed her most.  Elsewhere, Giles races to the party, and hits a zombie in the middle of the road.  Only after getting out does he realize it's a zombie, and others converge upon him as he jumps back in his car.  Having left the keys outside, he hotwires the car.  Back in Buffy's room, Joyce comes in and finds Buffy's bag half packed.  She joins Willow in wailing on Buffy.  Buffy, trying to escape the barrage, heads downstairs where Xander joins in, too.  In one of the most annoying and unfair scenes I've ever seen on this show, Buffy tries to defend herself to the criticism from her mom, Xander, and Willow all at once.  Suddenly the zombies from outside break in.  The gang finds itself fighting together again just like old times, except these guys don't go down when they're staked.  Buffy gets Willow, Joyce and Xander upstairs into Joyce's room, and they drag Pat in too, who is dead.  The mask gets knocked off the wall, glowing, and Pat's eyes open.  Meanwhile, the party people (including Cordelia and Oz) downstairs are trying to barricade the house against any more zombies coming in. Finally it quiet's down downstairs, and Cordelia and Oz emerge to find Giles in the house.  He tells them about the mask, and how if one of the zombies puts the mask on, it will become the demon of the mask incarnate.  Upstairs, Pat puts the mask on, and transforms into the demon.  It tries to kill Willow, but Buffy knocks her out of the window, falling out herself.  Giles hears them outside, and tells Oz to let Buffy know to go for its eyes (as Giles is busy fighting a zombie of his own).  Oz runs out, but Buffy has already figured it out, and takes out its eyes with the shovel she used to bury the cat the day before.  Suddenly all of the zombies vanish.  Just as suddenly, everyone seems okay with each other.  Yay. At school the next day, Giles tells Snyder he will make life very difficult for Snyder if he doesn't let Buffy back in school.  Cut to the local coffee shop, where Willow's telling Buffy about her recent dabblings in witchcraft.  Buffy apologizes for not being there when Willow was going through all this stuff, and they are suddenly friends again.Yay. FLAWS:   What the hell's up with the whole "hey, so you're not wanted for murder anymore" thing? They TOTALLY never explain this.  I mean, considering that Kendra was killed by Drusilla, a vampire...what evidence would they have had that Buffy didn't do it? Whatever. THOUGHTS ON THE EPISODE:      This may very well be the WORST episode of Buffy I have ever seen in my life.  I hated having to watch this one again, in order to do this episode guide.  Oh wait, no...I'm wrong.  The worst one was the finale of season four.  But this is a close second.  You will probably never again hear me defending Buffy, but in this, I totally think she got the short end of the stick.  I mean, last season she got kicked out of school, her mom told her not to come back, and she had to send to hell the love of her life.  Forgive her if she might need a little time alone after all that, you know? But Willow and Joyce are totally unforgiving, and Xander is just a pure bastard to her.  This episode sucked. BEST LINE: A couple, amazingly enough.  When Buffy startles her mom hanging the mask in her room, Joyce says she thought she'd hang it to cheer up the room.  Buffy, taking in it's hideous grimace,  says:  "It's angry at the room...Mom, it wants the room to suffer." And Giles, driving to the party after he realizes the dangerous properties of the mask, says to himself (mocking Joyce) "Do you like my mask? Isn't it pretty? It raises the dead...Americans!"

"Dead Man's Party"