Summary
In this episode, we find out that Cory has a great Doofenshmirtz impression, we hate puritanical ideas around sex, and we looove Emma Caulfield’s performance.
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Myth Taken: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Podcast 
I’m very much not here to give a defense of Xander’s behavior in this episode (behavior which I find utterly ridiculous and yet am not at all surprised by), but since I’ve caught up on your episodes, I did want to note that I do understand his behavior in another recent episode – Hell’s Bells. I fully get why Xander still decides not to go through with the wedding even after he realizes the visions he had weren’t real. Xander’s had reservations about the wedding from the beginning of season six when he kept putting off telling people about the engagement, and they continued beyond there in multiple episodes. It obviously would have been better if he brought up these reservations to Anya at literally any time, but I think he convinced himself that everything he was feeling was normal. But Xander’s family trauma was what reared its ugly head in Hell’s Bells, and trauma (more specifically unprocessed trauma, which I believe is what Xander was dealing with at this point, only just out of his teen years) is the enemy of rationality. Xander’s reaction was purely fear-based, and it shook him more than he realized it would, and no amount of ‘but that was just a trick’ was going to lessen that fear enough for him to actually get married. I don’t agree with the way he did it or with any of his moves after that, but I don’t think it’s at all unrealistic for a twenty year old who has his family history and who’s never been to therapy to be so knocked off balance by that.
His entitlement after Hell’s Bells is a whole different story. I fully agree with both of your points on that front. For some reason, though, I was never as viscerally angered by Xander’s behavior in these episodes as I was with his awful speech to Buffy about Riley in season 5. It could be because I got an even stronger feeling then that the writers really thought what he was saying had merit, or because by this point in season 6 I just had lower expectations for some of the show’s writing, or for Xander in general. I still really like what they do with him and Willow at the end of season six, but generally any take or feeling Xander has on romantic relationships is something I’d just rather not have to see or hear, from how he would often treat Anya (and sometimes Cordelia) poorly, to his gross entitlement, to the way he talks about the trio as if their only problem is not being able to ‘get’ women (he’ll make at least a couple of these remarks in the upcoming episodes). The last of those is such a bad take it still gets me annoyed, because I feel like it slips under the radar in most fan discussions. The trio aren’t committing crimes because they didn’t grow up having girlfriends, and women aren’t prizes for being a decent human being. Ugh, Xander (and the writers). Anyway, thanks for more great episodes!
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