This interesting episode opens with Buffy killing a demon in the park, in broad daylight.  Afterward, she and Xander and Willow discuss Faith's recent absences, and Buffy seems to be worried.  Then Xander and Willow share their feelings of remorse of hurting Oz and Cordelia.  Cut to Cordelia, who is burning pictures of Xander at her house, listening to all of the messages he's left on her machine.  At school the next day, Cordelia shows up dressed to kill, and Harmony and her friends seemingly accept her back in the fold, only to degrade her and leave...but not before introducing her to Anya, a new student who seems pretty cool to Cordelia.  At Oz's locker, Willow wants to try to make things up to him, and he asks her to leave him alone while he figures things out.  After being the butt of everyone's joke all day for being Xander Harris's castoff, Cordelia kind of bonds with Anya over how much men can suck.  At the Bronze that night, Cordelia flirts with almost every guy she can find to show Xander how over him she is.  Xander resolves not to let it affect him, and seems upset when Willow doesn't join in with his mentality.  Willow still wants Oz back, and is willing to work for it.  Buffy notices Cordelia heading outside holding her side where she got impaled, and goes out to make sure she's okay.  Cordelia actually seems to be listening to what Buffy has to say about letting her friends be there for her, but then a vamp attacks them, and Cordelia ends up getting thrown in some garbage.  She wails on Buffy, saying that all of her problems start with Buffy.  At school the next day, Anya and Cordelia are talking about Xander again, but now Cordelia seems to be really focused on how Buffy started everything.  Anya takes a charm necklace from around her own neck, and puts it on Cordelia, saying that it will bring her luck.  Afterward, Cordelia, in the midst of her rambling, wishes that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale.  Anya turns around with demon face on, and says "Done".   Suddenly the school is drastically changed.  There are very few students running around, and the campus looks a little trashed.  Cordelia realizes that Anya must have been like, a good fairy or something, and goes to class.  She encounters Harmony and her friends, who are all her minions again.  Guys fawn all over her again.  After school everyone bolts out the door to get home, saying that curfew's in an hour.  Cordelia wants to know how Xander and Willow are, hoping they're miserable, and Harmony tells her they're dead.  Out in the parking lot, Cordelia's car is gone, and when she stops a passing janitor where it is, he tells her she needs to hurry up and get inside before the sun sets.  Walking home, she encounters Xander and Willow, who are all leather-clad, and vampires to boot.  They chase her, and knock her out.  Suddenly a van pulls up, and Giles jumps out with a cross.  Larry and a girl jump out too, and Oz holds a crossbow on them from the driver's seat.  They load Cordelia into the van, and speed off. In the library, Giles instructs the others to check the perimeter in case the vamps followed, while he keeps an eye on the unconscious Cordelia.  Cut to the Bronze, where it's Vamp heaven.  Xander and Willow show up, arm in arm, and go report to the master (Yay! the Master!).  He gives Willow a girl he'd been feeding on, and Willow finishes her off.  Xander tells the Master how Cordelia had mentioned Buffy, and how they needed to get her here.  The Master gets upset, saying that the Slayer's arrival could upset his plans, and orders them to kill Cordelia before she can contact Buffy.  In the library, Cordelia wakes up and tries to tell Giles about the Wish, and how they need to bring Buffy there.  He doesn't really understand what she's saying, but she tells him that things were different before; better.  That he needs to call Buffy, and that she knows he's a Watcher, which is apparently something he's never told anyone in this reality.  He goes into the cage to get some weapons, and Willow locks him in.  Xander and Willow then kill Cordelia by simultaneously biting her, while Giles looks on, helpless.  Later, he breaks out of the cage, and Oz and Larry show up to say that the girl who'd been with them before was dead...also killed by Xander and Willow.  They take Cordelia to the incinerator, but not before Giles removes the charm necklace from around her neck.  Back at the Master's, Willow and Xander tell him how they killed Cordelia, and Willow asks if she can go play with "the puppy".  The Master smiles and gives her a key.  In the library, Giles is on the phone with Buffy's Watcher, requesting her to come to Sunnydale.  In the basement of the Bronze, Willow (in her dominatrix like outfit), plays with "the puppy"..who turns out to be Angel, who shivers on the floor and flinches from Willow's touch.  She tells him in a singsong way that today is the opening of the plant.  She reminds him of the plant, and all the people he tried to save, but reassures him that while they will die quickly, it will be slow for him.  Suddenly Xander shows up and lights a match, flicking it onto Angel's bare chest, which already shows many scars of their torture.  Even in this reality, Xander hates Angel.  Back at the library, Giles has looked up the info on the pendant Cordelia had been wearing, and traces it to the patron saint of scorned women, Anyanka.  Giles and Oz try to figure out what it was that Cordelia had wished for, and Giles remembers that she'd said the slayer was supposed to have been here already, and that things were better.  He leaves to go home, but encounters some vamps preying on some humans and stops to help.  He releases the humans, but gets attacked by the vamps until Buffy Summers shows up and slays them.  She looks drastically different...with long, braided hair, and a scar on her face.  She's also much more no-nonsense, and has an intense hatred for vampires.  She's like a mega-slayer.  At Giles's house, he explains what he's learned so far about Anyanka, and how they need to destroy her power center in order to return the world to what he thinks it was supposed to have been like originally.  Buffy doesn't really seem to believe him, but perks up when he mentions the Master, and she heads to the Bronze to take him on. At the Bronze, Buffy finds Angel in the cell downstairs.  She turns away, not interested, until he calls her by name.  He tells her that he waited for her there in Sunnydale for her, that he was supposed to help her, but Buffy never came.  The Master rose, and kept Angel alive to torture.  Angel says that he kept hoping she'd come...his destiny.  He tells her that the Master's at the Factory, where they're going to "start tonight", and tells her that he can take her there.  Buffy starts to free him, but realizes he's a vampire when he cringes away from the cross around her neck.  She starts to leave him there, but he convinces her that he's sincere by showing her the scars on his chest.  At the factory, the Master is about to unveil his invention, mass production of blood for vampires.  A machine that will kill humans and take their blood for mass distribution.  At Giles's house, Giles has summoned Anya in her demon form, and asks what Cordelia wished for.   Back at the factory, the machine starts taking its first victim, while Oz and Larry and some other humans in a cage watch helplessly.  From the shadows, Buffy and Angel watch.  The mingle with the crowd, and separate.  Buffy sends a crossbow out to the master, but he pulls Xander in front of him, and it lands harmlessly in his chest.  Buffy starts fighting, and Angel races to the cage to free the humans.  Oz grabs some wood and starts staking.  In the course of the fighting, Buffy fights both Willow and Xander.  Angel sees Xander coming at Buffy with an arrow while her back is turned, and runs out to stop him, shouting "Buffy look out!".  He knocks Xander down, but gets staked with the arrow in the process, turning to ashes.  Buffy walks right through them without a second's thought on her way to the Master.  Everything slows down to slow motion, as Anya tells Giles that this is the real world now, this is the world we made.  In slo-mo, Buffy kills Xander and moves on.  Oz pushes Willow back against a board sticking out, and impales her on it, turning her to dust.  Buffy and the Master head toward each other from across the room, shoving and pushing people out of their way.  Giles manages to subdue Anya, and realizes that her power center is her charm necklace.  Just as Buffy and the Master meet and begin to fight, Giles raises a stone above the necklace, about to crush it.  "You fool!" Anya hisses, "how do you know that world was any better than this one?" We see the Master kill Buffy by breaking her neck, and as she begins to fall Giles answers "Because it has to be", and smashes the necklace. We flash to Cordelia's wish.  Anya turns around and says "done", but nothing happens.  Cordelia remarks "that would be cool!", and wanders off, making more wishes.  The camera pans around to show Buffy, Willow and Xander sitting by the fountain talking and laughing together.  Everything is back to normal. FLAWS:       None found, and that's pretty cool considering some of the stuff they had to remember in order to do this episode correctly. THOUGHTS ON THE EPISODE:        I liked it.  This was an interesting "what if" episode.  Some of the qualities of the episode were intriguing, such as destiny.  It's almost like it was Destined for Buffy to eventually come to Sunnydale.  It was destined that Xander and Willow should be together at some point.  It was destined that the Master would kill Buffy.  There was some stuff I didn't like, like Angel dying for Buffy, and she didn't even care.  I think there should have been SOMETHING there between them, as Angel still seemed to be in love with her (from when he saw her in L.A.), but it just didn't happen.  All in all, though, a good episode.  We got to see the Master again, which was awesome, and we're introduced to Anya for the first time.  Also, this lays some ground work for "Dopplegangland".  BEST LINE:        None.

"The Wish"