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Buffy the Vampire Slayer 8 p.m. Tuesdays, WB Angel 9 p.m. Tuesdays, WB Joyce Millman Joyce Millman's column appears every other Monday in Salon Arts & Entertainment. + Biography + Archives

If Sunnydale were the real world, then depicting Buffy as Insecure Freshman Girl would have been the right way to go. But this is not the real world; it's a TV show, and a great one, and it's a bummer watching its energy level sag. The multilayered dazzle of "Buffy" -- aching high-school angst, intense Gothic romance, cheesy horror, zippy humor, gorgeously delineated characters -- has given way this season to sluggish story lines that just can't seem to pick up steam, and college-as-fresh-hell metaphors that barely rise above cliché. So far, we've had Buffy stuck with the dorm-mate from hell, who (no surprise) really was from hell; and Buffy discovering that beer tastes great but makes you stupid, or in this case, devolves you into a caveperson. What's next on the list? An affair with her professor? Please, Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt, don't make it happen (unless, of course, the professor is Buffy's tweedy mentor Giles, but then, that would be a whole 'nother show).

And speaking of Giles (played with still-waters-run-deep reserve by Anthony Stewart Head), the poor man has nothing to do this season, now that Buffy is 18 and he has been relieved of his Watcher duties. He's currently being used mainly as comic relief -- he's an unemployed, overeducated, bookish Brit discovering the guilty pleasures of American daytime television and junk food. The season's malaise even extends to Buffy's plucky pal (and sorceress in training) Willow (Alyson Hannigan), who is also attending UC-Sunnydale. Willow has broken up with her guitar-playing werewolf boyfriend, the unflappable Oz (Seth Green has departed the show), and her grief is bottomless: "I feel like I've been split down the center and half of me is lost," she wails.

OK, life after high school is full of heartache, transitions and dashed expectations -- we get that. But where is the heady thrill of discovery, the joy of being on your own? Buffy and her pals seemed more worldly -- and were a lot more interesting -- when they were high schoolers saving their town from evil. It's not a good sign that the liveliest moments this season have belonged to Spike (James Marsters), the sardonic platinum-blond British vampire, and even he isn't completely himself lately.

Spike was captured by a covert campus demon-hunting group called "The Initiative" and implanted with a chip that prevents him from killing to feed. He escaped, but he's now impotent and domesticated and remains shackled in Giles' apartment, where he's fed pig's blood through a sippy-straw (Willow calls him "the undead English patient"). Spike and Giles watch the telly and snipe at each other like Felix and Oscar in "The Odd Couple," which is, I admit, pretty amusing, but a comedy routine does not a season make.

Maybe this year's slow setup will eventually result in Buffy finding her new place in the world and emerging a stronger, wiser woman. Having sworn off bad boys (maybe), she's now on the verge of a relationship with Riley Finn (Marc Blucas), the blandly cute teaching assistant in her psych class. Alas, she has no clue that Riley is a member of the fascistic Initiative, which is headed by Maggie Walsh (Lindsay Crouse), Buffy's chilly, formidable Psych 101 professor (on the first day of classes, the prof warned her students that all the teaching assistants call her "the evil bitch monster of death"). The Initiative's creepy commando raids, and its vast underground base where demons and vampires are taken for experiment and study, are a bit too "X-Files"-y, too elaborately conspiratorial, for "Buffy" -- they're a far cry from the show's usual agile humor and stealthy plot twists.

I sincerely hope we're being subjected to all this Initiative crap so that Professor Walsh can emerge as Buffy's new nemesis. The instinctual, emotional slayer, who is in love with a vampire and kills the bad demons quickly and without cruelty, vs. the dispassionate, cerebral scientist with her death squads and torture labs -- now that is a rumble I want to see. For the sake of everyone who was ever a college freshman, Buffy ought to kick that self-important, sadistic, grade-deflating academic's ass all over the quad.

Next page | In the arms of the Angel, and other "groiny" pleasures