Overall Rating: 3.0
If you liked this episode, in the words of Tracey Forbes: "You stupid."
Plot Synopsis:
Full details on this incredibly dumb plot may be found here courtesy of BuffyGuide.com.
The Skinny:
Beer bad. You stupid when drinking beer. Tracey Forbes have too much beer while making stupid script. Ugh ugh.
OK, so I get that the beer is cursed with a spell that turns its' drinkers into cave-people, but who are we kidding here? The point of this episode is to lampoon underaged binge drinking at college as a major social problem, and hey...I agree that it is! And yet, when I watch this episode, I just cannot help but laugh at how horribly written this stuff actually is. There's no question that beer turns people into idiots, but has Tracey Forbes never seen what people act like when they're drunk? Because...they certainly don't act like THAT! LOL Or even a less exaggerated VERSION of that. We could have done with a much...much more subtle transition from just plain drunk to de-evolved. And we could have done without the message that beer explains (and excuses) idiotic behavior. As a matter of fact, just being drunk does not cause you to de-evolve and act like cave people. All it does is impair your ability to make decisions based on reason. We shouldn't have seen people very coherently saying incredibly stupid things. We should have heard people getting less and less coherent...and THEN turning into cave people.
I would also like to raise an objection to the notion that devolving (the monstervision stand-in for ordinary binge drinking) necessarily begets violence. Not just a few of the patrons consuming the beer...but MOST of them...literally devolved into gang lords with a monkey's IQ. a) I don't think alcohol necessarily leads to violence in all men (the ring-leaders of the violent gangs) or an easy lay from all women (their followers) and b) even if you want to assume that this is the purpose of the magical spell and that the writer wasn't trying to make some point about alcohol abuse in college (which would be naive, IMHO), there should have been a wider variety of devolving behavior. Some sign that the writer wasn't standing over me with a club screaming "beer bad!!!! men secretly animals that get unleashed when drunk, take advantage of drunken women!!!" I'd like a bit more creativity in my message episodes if I must endure them.
Now to be fair, I think a lot of the problems in this episode also come from the acting. SMG puts on perhaps the worst performance I've ever seen from her...I have to wonder if she has ever seen herself while drunk...I'm sure the paparazzi have plenty of footage...because she made the least convincing drunk I've ever seen on any screen. Most of the other guest stars were unimpressive to say the least (especially Adam Kaufman - Parker, who is not up the task of portraying the guy trying to convince Willow of the philosophical correctness of his one-night-stand policy). This one is just...bad...in every way.
Writing: 0.0
Was there a redeeming value to this script? If so, I couldn't find it. UGH
Acting: 4.0
Alyson Hannigan is about the only bright spot this week, I'm sorry to say. Her rebuking of Parker's pseudo-intellectual rubbish was entertaining.
Message: 5.0
The message I don't entirely despise, but I feel it was delivered with way...way too much simplicity and clumsiness to merit a par rating.
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