The Big Damn Buffy Rewatch, S02E20, “Go Fish”

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The Big Damn Buffy Rewatch, S02E20, “Go Fish”

In every generation there is a chosen one. She alone has still not learned her lesson about buying Cheez-Its to keep in her office. She will also recap every episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer with an eye to the following themes:

Sex is the real villain of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer universe.
Giles is totally in love with Buffy.
Joyce is a fucking terrible parent.
Willow’s magic is utterly useless (this one won’t be an issue until season 2, when she gets a chance to become a witch)
Xander is a textbook Nice Guy.
The show isn’t as feminist as people claim.
All the monsters look like wieners.
If ambivalence to possible danger were an Olympic sport, Team Sunnydale would take the gold.
Angel is a dick.
Harmony is the strongest female character on the show.
Team sports are portrayed in an extremely negative light.
Some of this shit is racist as fuck.
Science and technology are not to be trusted.
Mental illness is stigmatized.
Only Willow can use a computer.
Buffy’s strength is flexible at the plot’s convenience.
Cheap laughs and desperate grabs at plot plausibility are made through Xenophobia.
Oz is the Anti-Xander
Spike is capable of love despite his lack of soul
Don’t freaking tell me the vampires don’t need to breathe because they’re constantly out of frickin’ breath.
The foreshadowing on this show is freaking amazing.
Smoking is evil.
Despite praise for its positive portrayal of non-straight sexualities, some of this shit is homophobic as fuck.
How do these kids know all these outdated references, anyway?
Technology is used inconsistently as per its convenience in the script.
Sunnydale residents are no longer shocked by supernatural attacks.
Casual rape dismissal/victim blaming a-go-go
Snyder believes Buffy is a demon or other evil entity.
The Scoobies kind of help turn Jonathan into a bad guy.
This show caters to the straight female gaze like whoa.

Have I missed any that were added in past recaps? Let me know in the comments. Even though I might forget that you mentioned it.

WARNING: Some people have mentioned they’re watching along with me, and that’s awesome, but I’ve seen the entire series already and I’ll probably mention things that happen in later seasons. So… you know, take that under consideration, if you’re a person who can’t enjoy something if you know future details about it.

CW: Rape

I’m looking forward to this recap, because this is an episode that I actually haven’t watched all that much. It’s nothing personal against the show, it’s just that it’s another one of those monster-of-the-week episodes that isn’t interesting enough to stack up to the episode before and after it. You get to this part of your rewatch and go, “You know, I can just skip over this one, because the two-part season finale is next.” So, let’s see how I feel about this one after not having watched it for probably ten years.

It’s night time on the beach, and the Sunnydale High kids are throwing a victory party for their swim team, despite the fact that’s a) cold outside, b) prime vampire chow hours, and c) again, it’s night time in Sunnydale, what is the matter with you people? (#8) Xander objects to the cold and to the idea of the swim team being an actual team, and Cordelia accuses him of being jealous. Xander cops to that, saying it’s unfair that guys previously considered dorks are suddenly the star athletes of their school.

Cordelia: “Well all I know is my cheerleading squad wasted a lot of pep on losers. It’s about time our school excelled at something.”

Willow: “You’re forgetting our high mortality rate.”

Xander: “We’re number one!”

Cue sad music, so we know that we’re cutting to Buffy. At this point in the season, while I know why she’s sad and what purpose it’s serving in the narrative, I can’t help but laugh when the party mood suddenly goes all morose piano and Buffy staring longingly out at the ocean.

Because she’s on her own, separated from the heard, that’s when the male pounces, sputtering bullshit about the ocean:

Buffy: “It’s just so…”

Swim Team Guy: “Eternal. A true mother giving birth to new life and devouring old. Always adaptable, nurturing. Yet, constant. And merciless.”

Buffy: “Boy. I was just going to go with big and wet.”

The swim team guy, whose name, we learn, is Cameron, tells Buffy that he sometimes trains in the ocean so he can swim against the current. Buffy is more receptive to this than his vaguely sinister ocean poetry, and tells him that she feels like she’s swimming against the current, too, but in a metaphorical type way. Cameron flirts and Buffy seems to be into it, until someone calls for help. It’s Jonathan, the kid who basically gets bullied and has a bum life until it ends in season seven. He’s getting his head dunked under water by some of the swim team athletes, who seem to be interpreting their win as a license to be a-holes.

Which leads us to the theme of this entire episode, which is #11: Team sports are portrayed in an extremely negative light.

Buffy chokes the swim douche and saves Jonathan, who isn’t so thrilled to be rescued by Buffy. Cameron, however, tells the swim douche he deserved what he got. Another member of the team leads swim douche away from the party to cool off. Swim douche is mid-complaint about how creepy he finds Buffy when he stops, seemingly hypnotized by the ocean. He disappears, and his friend goes for help.

Then we cut to this pile of still-steaming, empty skin:

Then we see the vague form of something creepy slink down a drainage pipe.

Back at Sunnydale High, Willow is still teaching the computer class. My head canon is that there’s a teacher shortage in Sunnydale on account of how they always die, and no one from other districts will accept the job because it’s too high risk.

Anyway, one student, Gage, isn’t doing his assignments. He’s playing solitaire with naked lady cards that I don’t recall coming standard with Windows 3.0. As the bell rings, Principal Snyder comes in and congratulates Gage on the victorious swim meet. Then Snyder sets his sights on Willow. He asks her how class is going, and tells her that they’re having a hard time finding a new computer teacher (see, told ya). He asks her to cover through finals. When she accepts, he praises her for being a “team player”:

Snyder: “A team player wants everyone on the team to succeed. Wants everyone to pass.”

In other words, Snyder wants Willow to pass Gage despite the fact that he refuses to do any classwork or even bother to show up for tests. Snyder is angry that Willow has given him a failing grade so close to the state championships. Willow argues that she’s just trying to grade fairly, and Snyder tells her that since Gage is such a great athlete, he’s under more pressure than everyone else.

You know, putting a student in a place of power over their peers is a bad idea. If Willow wasn’t Willow and wasn’t concerned about being fair, she could academically ruin any classmate she wanted to.

Unfortunately, this also means that she can be manipulated by an administrator who has power over her, which is exactly what Snyder is doing, though he never explicitly tells her to change Gage’s grade.

Xander is as outraged as anyone should be to hear that a classmate is getting special treatment from teachers:

Xander: “That is wrong. A big fat spankin’ wrong. It’s a slap in the face to everyone one of us who studied hard and worked long hours to earn our D’s.”

Cordelia doesn’t agree:

Cordelia: “Xander, I know you take pride in being the voice of the common wuss, but the truth is, certain people are entitled to special privileges. They’re called winners. That’s how the world works.”

There’s brief banter about Thomas Jefferson that kind of makes Cordelia the winner of the debate, even though she’s taken a morally repugnant stance: because Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, Xander’s citing of “All men are created equal” isn’t a very solid argument.

Xander laments that Buffy isn’t at school to back him up, and we cut to Buffy and Cameron driving up to school. And Cameron is still talking about the ocean. Buffy is visibly bored, and interrupts him by telling him how great it is that he hasn’t been romantically pressuring her. Cameron responds by sexually harassing her and trying to lock her in his car. Then she slams his face into the steering wheel twice, which is the appropriate response in a situation like this. Unfortunately, this unfolds just as Snyder walks past.

Hey! In season three don’t they make a big deal about how seniors can go off campus for lunch? Buffy is a junior. Why doesn’t she get in trouble for cutting class?

In the nurse’s office, Cameron is getting his broken nose iced while Buffy argues with Snyder. She tells him that she was the one being attacked, not Cameron, but Cameron says Buffy led him on and suddenly changed her mind. He uses the way she’s dressed as an example of her slattern ways. The swim coach comes in and diagnoses Cameron as not having a broken nose on sight. Uh…the nurse is like, right over there. Anyone want to ask her opinion, since she’s a medical professional and not the coach of a high school swim team?

Snyder’s only concern is whether or not the team will still have a chance in the championships. The coach tells him that he needs Cameron to get better right away, since one of their other swimmers is missing. Buffy asks what happened to him, but Snyder tells her to butt out. The coach tells Cameron to go to the steam room to keep his sinuses clear, then tells Buffy she should stop dressing the way she does. And Buffy makes this face:

In the library, Buffy vents to the Scoobies, who aren’t listening and are actually annoyed by her ranting. It’s played off humorously, as though Buffy’s anger at the unfairness of being slut shamed by a school staff member after being sexually harassed by a smug little shit who’s going to get away with it is somehow self-absorbed and trivial. (#6), (#27)

Come on guys. You’re supposed to be our friends.

The Scoobies tell Buffy that the missing swimmer’s skin and cartilage was found on the beach.

Buffy: “So something ripped him open and ate out his insides?”

Willow: “Like an Oreo cookie!”

I like Willow’s enthusiasm over someone getting skinned, because of what goes down in season six. Obviously this was unintentional foreshadowing (because season six and season seven are so badly fitted to the show as to be an afterthought. There’s a reason why. I won’t cover that until we get to it), but it tickles me anyway.

Buffy says it doesn’t make sense that the creature would leave the skin behind, and Xander agrees:

Xander: “Yeah, the skin’s the best part.”

In the steam room, Cameron the rapist hears a noise, and outside in the locker room, a sinister shadow looms. Cameron is a little groggy, so this should lead to monster goings on, but it’s just the coach coming in to tell him that he’s been in there long enough.

Xander takes a break from research to go and get a soda, and accidentally bumps into Cameron in the hallway. Cameron tells him to watch where’s going and calls him a loser, prompting Xander to mock Cameron for getting his nose mashed in. But he immediately brings it around to how even though Cameron is on the swim team, he isn’t entitled to sex with Buffy. While that’s true, it seems like Xander centers an awful lot of his knight-in-shining-armor behavior around a ha-ha-you-didn’t-get-to-sleep-with-Buffy attitude. It comes off as a twisted superiority complex, like he’s mocking them for falling out of the competition while he still has some kind of chance. (#5)

Cameron says he’s hungry, and Xander tells him the cafeteria is closed. But Cameron gets those sweet, sweet swim team entitlements, so she goes anyway. Once he’s in the cafeteria, he smells something gross. Xander’s still deciding what pop to get when he hears a clatter and a scream. He runs to the cafeteria and finds tables and chairs overturned, but no one there.

Well, except for another skin pile:

And this guy:

A creepy monster with oily looking black skin and rows of teensy fangs.

OMG, are you a xenomorph? I love your movies!

In the library, Cordelia is playing the role of a police sketch artist, while Xander criticizes her for not getting the horror just right.

Can we discuss Cordelia’s hidden talent for a minute? She drew that picture from Xander’s verbal description alone. That’s an incredibly difficult thing to do; there’s a reason some police sketches have you shaking your head when they actually catch the guy. Cordelia doesn’t get any credit for her cool skill in the series. At least Giles cuts Xander off mid-critical rant to ask him if that’s the monster he saw. Xander has to admit that yeah, it’s pretty close.

Giles: “Are you sure?”

Xander: “Well, it was dark, and the thing went through the window so quick, and I was uh, a little shocked when I saw it, and…”

Cordelia: “Go ahead. Say it. You ran like a woman.”

Xander: “Hey, if you saw this thing, you’d run like a woman, too!”

Ugh, #6. I’ve always found it strange how in a show that’s entire plot is about a young woman who is supernaturally strong and brave, fear is often linked to femininity. Especially in reference to Xander, who is arguably the biggest, Shaggy-level fraidy cat of the series and one of our few male protagonists.

Buffy and Willow show up with news. The two students who’ve been killed by this sea monster are the best swimmers on the team. The gang hypothesizes that the reason the students have been killed is that someone who hates the swim team is out for revenge. And the first person they can think of? Jonathan, the official school loser of Sunnydale.

Wait a minute. There’s no doubt that Jonathan has reason to hate the swim team. They did gang up on him and try to playfully drown him. But this is a team that’s going to the state championship, right? Why wouldn’t the very first suspect be someone from the opposing team? Wouldn’t that make more sense?

Jonathan gets blamed for a lot of stuff in this series. He’s the first person looked at when someone is threatening to kill everyone in the high school in season three, but it ends up that he was just trying to kill himself. Like, that’s how bullied he is, that he tries to kill himself because of it. Later, he does a spell to gain Buffy’s approval by basically rewriting reality and becoming Slayer-like himself, at which point the gang shuns him. In season six, he becomes evil, but he’s like, the least evil of the three bad guys in that season. I’m starting to think that Jonathan isn’t a bad guy, but circumstances–and everyone’s assumption that because he’s disliked, he’s naturally going to exact violent revenge all the time–warp him a little.

You know what? Jonathan is getting a number on our list. #29: The Scoobies kind of help turn Jonathan into a bad guy.

Buffy decides that since the two best swimmers on the team have already been murdered by a sea creature, she should probably keep an eye on the third best swimmer. She’s not very covert about it, and Gage, the dude she’s trying to protect, definitely notices that she’s watching him. Meanwhile, Willow interrogates Jonathan. We learn that Jonathan tried out for the swim team in the past and never made it, because he has asthma.

Willow: “So. You delved into the black arts and conjured up a hell beast from the ocean’s depths to wreak your vengeance…didn’t you?”

Jonathan: “What? No. I snuck in yesterday and peed in the pool.”

In the hall, the coach is lamenting to Snyder that the deaths are affecting the team. Snyder wants that championship, so he says that of course the two dead boys would want the team to go on and win, but the coach tells him that unless they get another swimmer by that afternoon, they’re not even eligible to compete. Xander, who currently has no task in the supernatural investigation, overhears this.

That night at the Bronze, Buffy is watching Gage like a hawk and HOLY FUCKING DICKBALLS, THAT IS WENTWORTH MILLER.

Buffy is one of those odd shows that has a lot of guest stars, but not a lot of guest stars that went on to bigger and better things, so it’s worth pointing out when one of them does. And he didn’t even go on to bigger, better things in the Whedonverse, like a lot of Buffy guest players did. He got his own show and writes movies and everything.

Gage confronts Buffy about following him, and she tells him she’s just into banging dudes who swim. He doesn’t buy it, so she tells him the truth, that swim team guys are being killed and he’s probably next. But Gage believes everything Cameron said about Buffy, and doesn’t want anything to do with her.

As Gage leaves the Bronze muttering about how Buffy is this huge bitch, Angelus comes out of the shadows and sympathizes with him, trash talking Buffy until he can catch Gage off guard and bite him. Buffy runs out after Gage, because even though he’s a huge bag of dick-flavored brussels sprouts, she still has to do her duty. She finds Angel spitting out Gage’s blood, and he hurls the poor, helpless swimmer into Buffy to knock her down so he can make his escape.

Rather than pursue Angel, Buffy stays with Gage. He asks Buffy if Angelus is the thing that killed the other swimmers:

Buffy: “No, that was something else.”

Gage: “Something else?”

Buffy: “Yeah. Unfortunately we have a lot of something elses in this town.”

Gage is suddenly real interested in having Buffy protect him. He asks her to walk him home.

This is another example of #8. How do you attend Sunnydale High and not realize that the school has an unusually high mortality rate?

Buffy, Willow, and Cordelia are at swim practice to look after Gage, who checks to make sure Buffy is there and even gives her a little wave. Not so cocky now, huh, Gage? Cordelia and Willow can’t figure out why Angel wouldn’t want to drink Gage’s blood, but Buffy has a theory that there was just something about Gage’s blood in particular that Angel didn’t like. She thinks it’s steroids, and the other girls think it makes sense. After all, the team suddenly did start winning out of nowhere, and they’re all being hardcore jerks constantly. Willow thinks that the monster could be attracted to the steroids in the swim team’s blood, but their theorizing about all of this is interrupted when…

And of course the hormone-enflaming slow upward pan reveals that it’s really Xander, who, upon seeing his lady friends watching him, grabs the nearest floaty board and uses it to shield his modesty.

Xander: “I’m undercover!”

Buffy: “You’re not under much.”

Xander explains that he tried out for the swim team in order to figure out what’s going on from the inside. Cordelia is gripped by a powerful mix of status and lust as she realizes that she’s dating a guy on the school’s most successful sports team, and Willow tells them that her interrogation of Jonathan was a bust. She explains that he peed in the pool, just as Xander jumps back into the water.

This scene is a fan favorite, probably because hey, how many television shows aimed at teen girls in the ’90′s gave us a much crushed-upon male character nearly naked? In fact, it does so more than once, as we frequently see Angel, Riley, and Spike shirtless throughout the various seasons. And while the guys are always pretty ripped, they’re not bulked up hyper-masculine versions of what men think women like to look at. So I’m adding #30: This show caters to the straight female gaze like whoa. Let’s all stop to take a minute to appreciate how rare it is for a show to blatantly objectify the male character’s bodies for the gratification of a straight female audience, while never (that I can recall), filming sequences of female nudity in the same way.

In the steam room, Xander starts cracking wise about what steam rooms even are, while monster claws come up through some grates. Afterwards, he tells Buffy that Gage is in the locker room, and it’s her turn to keep an eye on him. Buffy’s wandering the hallway when she hears Gage screaming. She runs into the locker room and sees the sea monster, then watches as Gage’ s skin splits open and another sea monster comes out of him.

Well, that clears that mystery right up.

Buffy fights the monsters, but she gets clawed. It gives the slimy duo a chance to escape down the aforementioned grate while the coach helps her.

In the nurse’s office, legendary character actress Conchata Ferrell tells Buffy that she probably doesn’t need stitches. Wow, there is a lot of talent in this episode that I didn’t notice on previous watches. Probably because I didn’t watch it that often. Giles is there, too, because again, nothing weird about the middle-aged male school librarian having an unusually close relationship with a young female student, especially when we just saw an episode in which an inappropriately close relationship between a teacher and student led to tragedy, but whatever, Sunnydale High. (#8)

Giles asks the coach how he didn’t notice this was going on, but I feel like the whole conversation is kind of unreasonable:

Coach: “How could this happen?”

Giles: “Are you saying you don’t know?”

Coach: “You work so hard, you start to win suddenly. You think it’s just you. You’re inspiring the boys to greatness. But in the back of your mind, you start to wonder.”

Giles: “You never asked any of the boys if they were taking anything?”

Coach: “Maybe I was afraid to.”

Okay, but Giles? What was the coach supposed to ask? “Hey, boys? Are you taking some kind of potion or something that would turn you into a sea monster?” I mean, this kind of thing isn’t a side effect of normal steroids. If it was, professional baseball twenty-five years ago would have been massively weird. Also, we already know that the people living in Sunnydale seem to have no awareness of the supernatural shit happening around them, so why would the coach have even considered the possibility?

In the computer lab, Willow is looking up “school medical records” to see what various ailments the recent sea monsters had. Is this a thing? I can’t imagine that it would be. But it serves the plot, so whatever. They all had injuries and illnesses that indicated steroid abuse, but as Xander points out, turning into a fish person isn’t necessarily a well-known side effect. Buffy sends Xander to find out what his teammates are taking and how, while Buffy and Giles go on a monster hunt with a tranquilizer gun. They’re walking around the sewer when one of the fish things spots them.

In the steam room, Xander is talking way too much to the otherwise silent swimmers. Then he blatantly asks for steroids. The guys tell him that the steroids are in the steam. Then we cut to the pool, where the nurse warns the coach that what he’s doing is wrong and he’s hurting the boys. So they both know what’s going on. The coach decides that now that she’s not on his side, she’s gotta go. So he feeds her to the fish monsters by tossing her into the sewer through some kind of utility room hatch.

In the library, Xander is freaking out because he’s been in the steam a lot. While everyone is worried because Xander might turn into a sea monster and that would be bad for him, Cordelia is more concerned with what it might mean for her social status should her boyfriend transform into a monster. They decide that their priority should be finding out what’s in the steam, so the hospital can come up with an antidote.

Oh yeah. I’m sure that’ll fix everything. A small local hospital will just magically come up with a cure for fishpeopleitis.

Willow says she’ll go talk to the nurse (good luck) while Buffy’s going to interrogate the coach. He evades her questions for a while, then relents. He tells her that the USSR experimented with turning their swimming team into shark hybrid things. The coach is disgusted at Buffy’s lack of school spirit and pulls a gun on her, ordering her to jump into the monster pit. There, she finds the body of the nurse floating in the water, all bitten up.

Buffy: “So what, you’re just going to feed me to ‘em?”

Coach: “Oh they’ve already had their dinner. But boys have other needs.”

In other words, Buffy is now at risk of monster rape? Why is that even necessary at all? Being eaten isn’t bad enough? We have to involve male entitlement to female sexuality in this? How, in the past ten minutes, has this otherwise pretty good episode gone violently off the rails?

I suppose we could look at it as the coach punishing Buffy for her perceived sluttiness when she turned down Cameron and bashed his face into the steering wheel, and this could have been an okay turn if the two incidents had been linked explicitly. But now we’re so far removed from the threatened sexual assault in the first act, it really needed to be referenced here to make it work. Also, it would have helped if Buffy’s friends had been concerned, rather than annoyed, at the outrageous way she was treated by the coach and Principal Snyder earlier in the episode. As it stands now, coach’s off-handed rape threat seems to be thrown in as a way to make Buffy’s predicament “worse” than being killed, as we culturally view rape as an act that removes the sexual value of a woman. I’m tagging this an example of #6, even though it could have been transformed into something better with a few extra lines of dialogue.

It’s worth pointing out that David Fury, despite having some cracking episodes under his belt, has also written other episodes where rape is casually mentioned for shock value or actually happens and is dismissed, as is the case in “Bargaining, part 2″ when a male demon threatens the female Scoobies with death by rape in the most graphic and disgusting terms possible for prime time teen television, and “Gone,” in which an invisible Buffy forces herself on Spike without prior consent.

Back at the pool, Xander is being a hypochondriac over his possible impending fishness. He runs to the locker room to check his neck for scales, and soon a fish monster appears and jumps into the pool. Believing him to be a transformed Xander, Cordelia is beside herself:

Cordelia: “God, this is all my fault. You joined the swim team to impress me. You were so courageous. And you looked really hot in those speedos. And I want you to know that I still care about you, no matter what you look like. And, and we can still date! Or, or not, I mean, I understand if you want to see other fish. I’ll do everything I can to make your quality of life better. Whether that means little bath toys, or whatever.”

Xander appears beside her and tells her that yeah, it’s not him, and the monster leaps out of the water at them.

I like how Cordelia is both selfish and selfless at the same time. She disregards the fact that Xander totally didn’t join the swim team because of her–he was doing it to investigate–but she also takes the time to reassure him that she still cares and wants a relationship with him, even in fish form. This is such good characterization, letting us see another side of Cordelia while staying true to what we’ve seen of her so far. That’s just fantastic writing, because it’s too easy to say, “This character is this way…gotcha! She’s actually this way.” Instead, it’s “This character is this way…and she’s also this way.”

In the library, Giles has rounded up all the swim team members and locked them in the cage. Yet another instance of Giles doing something that, if we didn’t know he was a Watcher, would be extremely creepy. “Yeah, I’m just a male authority figure locking these virile young boys in this cage. Nothing weird about that.”

One swim team member is missing, but Xander and Cordelia know where he is. What nobody knows is where Buffy is, and that is in the sewer with the fish monsters.

Buffy: “Great. This is just what my reputation needs. That I did it with the entire swim team.”

AUUUUGH, why?! Why equate rape with sex? Why equate sex with having a bad reputation? WHY WAS THIS ELEMENT EVEN INTRODUCED AT ALL?! (#6)

The monsters begin circling, and Xander finds the coach watching Buffy in the monster pit. While Xander fights the coach, Buffy fights the monsters, who are closing in on her. Xander reaches down and helps pull Buffy up while the monsters keep clawing at her, thus saving her from rape. That’s right, the character who once tried to rape her and has never admitted to knowing that he raped her is now the hero who saves her from rape. What the fuck is even happening?

Buffy and Xander are safe and gasping for air beside the sewer hole when the coach attacks. He’s not great at attacking, though, and ends up in the hole. Buffy offers to save him, but he tries to reason with the fish guys, who attack him.

Buffy: “Those boys really love their coach.”

So basically, the coach’s punishment for turning the boys into fish monsters is rape. WHY IS THIS HAPPENING? (#6)(#27)

What’s even weirder is that earlier in the episode, Buffy tells the coach that he should be in prison, being beaten by guards. They could have gone for a rape joke there, as they have in the past when prison has been mentioned. I wonder if it was in there and got cut specifically because of all the other stuff?

I also wonder if Fury thought the coach, who accused Buffy of being a slut and suggesting she was “asking for it” was getting a dose of some kind of poetic or karmic justice. That’s a particularly weird notion we have about rape in our culture, that it should also be punished by rape.

But you know, we also do the same thing with murder so I’m not sure why I’m surprised.

Buffy, Xander, Willow, and Cordelia are hanging in the student lounge area, talking about how Xander has to have plasma transfusions to get all the fish monster out of his blood. Cordelia tells him that he doesn’t have to be on the swim team next season, that she would be happy if he was a football player, too. Giles shows up and tells them that animal control weren’t able to find the fish monsters, but Buffy isn’t worried.