Episode Report Card Demian: C+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Suddenly Katya!
By Demian | Season 7 | Episode 18 | Aired on 04.23.2005
Over in Fuck You, She's Not Buffy's now-demolished dorm room, Phoebe materializes alone in a cloud of orbs and frantically calls out Piper's name. Piper presently pokes her head out from behind a battered armoire as the goggle-eyed Not Buffy creeps to her feet from somewhere below. "Who is she?" Phoebe bleats. "Meet Hope," Piper offers, overemphasizing the P in Hope's name, "the real guardian of the Box." You can tell Phoebe's about to launch into a round of the dismayed hooting and yodeling, but Piper cuts her off with a snarkily bright, "Too bad she doesn't have anything left to guard!" No, Piper, it's too bad the crackheaded monkeys on the typewriting staff named the character "Hope," because I am now literally spewing vomit from every orifice in my head, including my ears. The least they could have done was disguise it as "Nadezhda" -- hell, I'll even take "Esperanza," for fuck's sake -- and then hidden that within an easy-to-pronounce yet not-easily-identifiable nickname like "Nadia," and then had an anvilicious reveal at the end of the hour when this Juicy-Couture-swaddled fluffball finally accepts her stupid fucking Destiny, but NO. They had to name the skinny, blonde, Unto-Every-Generation-A-Guardian-Is-Born bint "Hope." GOD, I hate this show, but what I hate even more than this show is the fact that it still might get renewed for an eighth season despite its having sucked mind-boggling amounts of ass for the last three god-awful and endless years.
AAAUAUUAUUAAUGH.
So the three women eye each other before vanishing into the commercials. Haaate.
Hey! There's an idea.
Back from the break, we plunge instantly into a suspiciously familiar scene in which the annoyingly named and suddenly magical innocent receives the short version of the entire history of Good Versus Evil from Piper and the Feebs. It's well paced, and the dialogue is both written and delivered engagingly enough, so, you know, massive props to Cameron Litvack and all three actresses involved, but I swear to God, I've seen this schtick at least forty times over the last seven years -- most recently in January, for the sweet love of Christ -- and come on. Enough already. Anyway, after much persuasion and an unusually effective pep-talk from the shockingly sympathetic Feebs, Haaate agrees to travel back to the Manor with the Glamorous Ladies -- who, by the way, are feeling increasingly "bummed" because of that first wave of sorrow Haaate unleashed earlier. And...scene.