At the house, Buffy asks Riley if he's sure he'll be okay, and he says yeah, it's just a debriefing he's got to go to.  He thinks he'll come out of the whole thing with an honourable discharge, considering that Graham and some other commandos are testifying that he's the reason they're alive.  Riley takes off, after Joyce tells him it was good to meet him finally.  Buffy, Giles, Xander and Willow head into the living room to watch some movies and eat some popcorn.  Before too long, however, everyone has fallen asleep in the living room.  The camera zooms in on Willow, and suddenly she's in Tara's dorm room.  Tara says she's worried that Miss Kitty Fantastico hasn't told them her name yet.  Willow says she will, and continues to paint / draw lettering on Tara's naked back as Tara says that "they'll find out" about Willow.  Willow goes to the window, and outside is a desert, were something seems to be walking through the brush.  "There's something out there", Willow says.  Then there's a really weird, but really cool and cute close up shot of Miss Kitty Fantastico the kitten walking directly toward the camera like a big cougar or something.  It's neat. Willow walks through the hallway at school (the college, not the high school), and rounds a corner to find Xander and Oz waiting for her.  Oz says he heard she's taking Drama, and that it's a hard class.  Willow tries to get into a locker, but the bell rings, and she says she's going to be late and takes off after Xander tells Oz that she does spells with Tara.    At dress rehearsal, Willow runs into Harmony dressed up as a swiss miss girl, or something, and Buffy's there dressed up like a flapper.  Riley's there too, as a cowboy.  Buffy tells Willow that her costume is perfect. Lowering her voice to a whisper, she assures her that nobody will know the truth about her.  Willow's confused. Giles strides in; he's the director.  He says everyone Willow knows is in the audience, including them.  As Harmony prances around and makes biting motions at Giles' neck, and he keeps telling her to stop it, he says they all have to be perfect, and that they're going to be performing "Death of a Salesman".  As he talks, Willow thinks she sees something crawling / walking / lurching through the crowd of actors, but she doesn't get a clear look at it.  Suddenly the sound is all gone, and Willow turns around to see a man who says he's made space for all the cheese slices, which he points to.  Willow walks through a corridor of curtains, where she runs into Tara.  She asks Tara if something's following her, and Tara says yes.  She also says that Willow doesn't understand yet. That the play has already started, but that's not the point.  Out on the stage, Riley and Buffy and Harmony act out a couple bizarre scenes.  Back among the curtains, Tara continues, saying that everyone's starting to wonder about the * real * her, and once they find out they'll punish her.  Willow wants to know what's after her, when suddenly Tara disappears.  Willow turns to look for her, but a knife comes cutting through the curtains, and Willow falls to the floor.  Suddenly Buffy  not in play garb, and not acting a part  pulls her out and into a classroom, telling her to stay low.  She asks what's after Willow, but Willow doesn't know, she only knows she was supposed to go to class, but the play was starting, etc.  Buffy tells her that the play is long over, and why is she still in costume?  She tells her that "everybody already knows", and tells her to take off the costume.  Willow says no; she needs it, but Buffy takes it off of her to reveal season 1 Willow, complete with the long hair parted to the side and the "softer side of sears" look.  Suddenly the classroom is filled with students, including Xander, Anya, Oz, and Tara.  Buffy takes a seat too, and Willow is left alone at the front of the room, holding a book report.  Willow nervously starts to read from her report, as Oz tells  Tara "I tried to warn you," and then starts whispering to her.  Suddenly Willow is attacked by a creature that holds her down and starts sucking the life out of her, or something.  On the couch, in the living room, Willow is still asleep as she begins to choke.  The camera pans over to Xander, who wakes up.  Giles and Buffy are munching on popcorn, watching "Apocalypse Now".  Xander goes upstairs to go to the bathroom, but finds Joyce in a nightgown, clearly coming on to him.  Xander seems to be reciprocating, but still wants to go to the bathroom first.  In the bathroom, Xander turns to find the entire Initiative staring at him.  He leaves to go find another bathroom, but the door he opens leads to his basement.  At the top of the stairs, something tries to open the door.  Xander backs away, and suddenly we're in the park.  In the day light.  Hey, check it out.  The park, in the daylight.  After I only just mentioned that oddity in "New Moon Rising".  Funky.  Anyways.  Giles and Spike are swinging on the swing set, and Buffy's playing in the sandbox.  Spike says that Giles is going to teach him to be a watcher, and Giles smiles, saying that Spike's like a son to him.  Xander says he's got other stuff going on, and looks across the park to see himself in an ice cream truck, serving ice cream to a bunch of rugrats  .....  er, kids.  Back to Park Xander, who asks Buffy if she's sure she wants to play there; it's a pretty big sandbox and she can't protect herself from things.  Pan down to see Buffy's in a desert now, and she says she's okay, because it's not after yet.  She also says "I'm way ahead of you, big brother."  "Brother," Xander repeats, and then Giles and Spike swing some more.  Xander watches Buffy, and from across the park Ice Cream Truck Xander does too.  He then goes forward into the cab and starts pseudo-driving as Anya talks in the passenger seat.  She says she's thinking about getting back into vengeance.  They're interrupted by giggling in the back of the truck, however, and Xander looks back to see Willow and Tara all vamped up with hardly any clothes on, sending out the sex vibe.  They invite him to come back with them, and Anya tells him he should.  He says he doesn't have to, but she tells him to go ahead.  He goes back and climbs up into the back of the truck, climbing climbing until he pushes through near the roof of his basement again.  He hops down to the floor, still looking for Willow and Tara.  At the top of the steps, something's still trying to open the door.  Suddenly it starts pounding. Xander starts to leave, but runs into the same guy Willow saw earlier.  He's holding a plate full of cheese slices, and tells Xander that they won't protect him.  Xander leaves through the lower door in the basement just as something breaks through the door at the top of the stairs.  Xander finds himself in the hallways of the university, which are all lit up with a green light.  He finds Giles eating an apple, and asks what's after him.  Giles says it's because of "what we did", but then only speaks to him in french.  Anya shows up and speaks to him in french too, but he doesn't understand them.  They grab hold of him and drag him away.  Next scene, he's being led by a guy with a guy in a jungle, and is then brought before  Principal Snyder, who asks him where he's going, and then tells him he's  a whipping boy, and set on a sacrificial stone.  Xander gets up and finds himself in the little courtyard thingy outside Giles' apartment.  He looks up to the top of the stairs and sees a creature / person thing snarling and stalking him.  He turns and enters the apartment, telling Giles it's here, but Giles is standing in the living room with Buffy and Anya, saying "It's more serious than we thought", and they're all standing over Willow's convulsing body.  Xander heads back toward the bathroom, but suddenly finds himself in Willow and Buffy's dorm.  He walks quickly down the hall into Buffy and Willow's room, and calls out for Buffy. Hearing a snarl behind him, he ducks into their closet, which is actually an alley way, which he goes through until he ends up back in his basement again. I've gotta give props to this scene:  I like the long continuous shot of Xander walking uninterrupted from outside Giles' apartment, to inside, to the dorm, to Buffy and Will's room, to the closet, to the alley, to the basement again.  That was very smooth. Back in the basement, Xander stands at the bottom of the stairs as something pounds on the door.  Suddenly it swings open, and Xander's father comes down the stairs, accusing Xander of being ashamed of them.  "That's not the way out," Xander whispers.  His father comes down and punches his fist through Xander's chest, much as Buffy did to Adam in "Primeval", pulling out his heart.  In the living room, Xander starts to convulse in his sleep, and the camera zooms over to Giles, asleep in an armchair.  He and Buffy are in his empty apartment; Buffy's sitting on a chair and Giles swings a pocket watch in front of her in a pendulum fashion.  He tells her that this is how women and men have behaved since before time, in response to Buffy's question as to whether or not it's old fashioned.  Buffy laughs.  Cut to an outisde scene, at a fair.  Giles and Olivia are led by Buffy, who's dressed up like a young girl, with her hair in pony tails.  Olivia is pushing an empty stroller.  Buffy stops to play a training game, and turns to Giles for approval when she gets it right.  He tells her he hasn't got any treats, and she turns back to the operator to receive some cotton candy.  Giles says she's going to get it all over her face, but when Buffy turns around she's got a clay-looking stuff smeared on her face.  Giles looks startled, but also like something has just occurred to him.  "I know you," he says.  Spike comes out of his crypt and calls to them, beckoning them.  Inside, Olivia sits crying next to the stroller, as Spike (in black and white) tells Giles he's hired himself out as an attraction.  He poses dramatically for photographers.  Giles wonders what he's supposed to do "with all of this".  Spike tells him he has to make up his mind, and that he's wasting time. Giles comes across the cheese man, who says he wears the cheese, it does not wear him.  Giles walks through a back entrance to the crypt, and enters the Bronze.  Willow and Xander are sitting on a couch with books in their laps, and Xander's still got a hole in his chest.  Giles apologizes for being late, and says there's a lot going on.  Willow says she knows; that she's near death's door, and Xander points out his sucking chest wound.  On stage, Anya tells a lame joke, and Willow tells Giles that there's something after them.  Some kind of primal force.  Giles starts singing, and walks up to the stage and grabs the microphone ("It's strange, it's not like anything we've faced before.  But it seems familiar somehow.  Of course, the spell we cast with Buffy must have released some primal evil that's come back, see.  I'm not sure what; Willow, look through the chronicles, for some reference to a warrior beast.  I've got to warn Buffy.  There's every chance she might be next. Xander and Willow, and try not to bleed on my couch, I just had it steam cleaned."  - heh, sorry.  This part was actually funny enough to include verbatim  ;) Suddenly the microphone spits some feedback, and Giles drops to his hands and knees and follows the line back to figure out where the problem is.  The line leads him back to a jumble of cables, where he finds a necklace.  As the creature / person thing jumps up behind him and growls down at him, he says he knows what it is, and he can defeat it with his intellect.  But he realizes it will underestimate him.  "You never had a Watcher."  The creature / person then jumps down and scalps him.  Giles begins trembling in the arm chair in the living room, and his glasses fall out of his hands.  The camera zooms in on Buffy.  She wakes up in her dorm room to hear Anya making strangled noises from the other bed.  Anya begs her to wake up, but Buffy says she's not in charge of these things.  She then wakes up in her old bed at the house.  Suddenly she's standing by the door, and she tells Tara "Faith and I just made that bed" (nice reference to "This Year's Girl").  Buffy says it's late, but Tara says the clock is wrong and offers her a card.  Buffy says she's never going to use those.  Tara tells her "You think you know what's to come; what you are.  You haven't even begun."  Buffy leaves to go find the others, and Tara says to the empty room "Be back before Dawn." On campus, Buffy looks for her friends, but finds her mother trapped in a wall.  Joyce says she's living in there.  Buffy sees Xander going up the stairs, and follows him, but she finds Riley in a briefing room with a human Adam, planning world domination.  Riley calls her "killer", and Buffy tells Adam that "we're not demons".  "Is that a fact?" he asks.  There's an alarm that all of the demons have escaped, and Buffy notices a bag at her feet.  She says she has weapons, and kneels to open the bag, only to find a cement / clay mixture inside.  She smears it all over her face, and then Riley comes back dressed in his civvies, accusing her of not trying to find her friends.  "All right killer, if that's the way you want it," he says, and walks away.  Buffy stands up and walks away too, and ends up in the desert.  There she finds Tara, who speaks for the creature / person who's been following them.  Buffy realizes she's the first slayer.  She's primal and ferocious, and she insists that they should be alone.  They fight, and roll down a hill.  Suddenly they're back in Buffy's living room, and Buffy tells her it's over; she is not the source of her.  Buffy wakes up.  Later, the gang sits around the kitchen table talking about the first slayer, who tried to kill them all in their dreams.  Buffy says "at least you didn't all dream about the guy with the cheese; I don't have any idea where that came from."   FLAWS:                               none found. THOUGHTS ON THE EPISODE:               Dude.  Honestly.  The best thing about this entire episode was Miss Kitty Fantastico.  That kitten is so cute!!!  Especially that scene where she's walking toward the camera! Oh....you want to know my thoughts on the rest? * projectile vomit, followed by dry heaves * Okay, seriously.  This episode sucked as a finale, I thought, but it did raise a lot of hoopla in the Buffyverse.  A big deal was made over some of the possible hidden, and not so hidden, meanings of the episode.  In particular there were a lot of theories generated around the Xander segments.  In several, he or someone mentions that he's "heading somewhere", and Snyder tells him that he's the "whipping boy", and is to be "set out upon the sacrificial stone".  This led a lot of people to speculate that something big was in store for Xander. I heard theories ranging from him being related to Jesus Christ in some way (especially when he later became a carpenter), to the possibility that he would sacrifice his life to save the gang at some point.  By this writing, nothing like that has happened, nor have I really been able to discern any real meaning from anything else in this episode, that actually ended up having any real meaning, excluding, perhaps, Willow's dislike of her former self.  That actually just got addressed again in s6.  The only other thing that really interested me at all was the sandbox scene.  I've always liked the relationship between the original four:  Buffy, Xander, Willow, and Giles, and the way they react to each other.  For instance the Father / Daughter relationship between Giles and Buffy, and the long friendship that Xander and Willow have in common.  But I've also always enjoyed the interplay between Buffy and Xander.  In the beginning, I wanted him to get the girl.  But then I saw Angel with no shirt on, and I found the error of my ways  ;)  Nah, seriously.  I came to really appreciate the dynamic of that triangle, in s1.  Even up through season 3 I sensed that there's always been something between them. Not necessarily even a romantic connection, but a connection nonetheless.  For whatever meaning it had, if it had any, I really like the sandbox scene.  Xander looks concerned, and asks if she should be playing there.  Because she can't protect herself from"some stuff".  She says "I'm way ahead of you, big brother.", and I think it's the look they share when he repeats "brother" that intrigues me.  I wonder what it means, if anything.  I'm thinking it just kind of symbolizes the type of relationship they've grown into, now. Xander's always wanted to protect her when he could, and be her hero.  And there's an intimacy between them that has nothing to do with romance, but I still like it.  Hmmmm.  We'll have to see if they ever do anything with that.  I hope so.  But anyway, yeah. Death to the rest of this episode.  Bah! BEST LINE:                 Nobody likes Xander's movie selection.  Xander:  "Don't worry, I got plenty of chick and British guy flicks, too." and: Spike:  (to Giles)  "Haven't you figured it out yet with your enormous squishy frontal lobes?"

"Restless"