Going To College

For the month of October, I’ll once again be paying homage to my favorite television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer by dedicating each post to reflections on specific episodes of the show.

If you’re a fan of the series, I hope you’ll enjoy these looks back, and if you’re not, maybe I’ll incentivize you to give it a shot. If you find yourself someplace in between—e.g., you’re currently watching the show--please note that these posts will include spoilers about the episode(s) they discuss.

And, if you’re just not interested in Buffy, apologies, but these next few weeks aren't for you. I will be back to the routine going into November.

“The Freshman,” the first episode of season four, has a lot of the trappings of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer season premiere. Similar to seasons one through three, as well as season six, we find Buffy out of her element in a new situation, separated--either literally or emotionally--from the people she knows best. This starting place is part of the fabric of a show that features vampires and monsters, but isn’t really so much about vampires and monsters as it is about using them as devices to get at bigger truths about the real world and growing up in it. The emotional truths the show's magical elements get at are key part of what makes the show great, just as a sense of having to come back from losing one’s sense of identity and home is a reasonable starting point for most seasons.

But it’s still kind of annoying.

“The Freshman” is a pretty average episode of Buffy by metrics like humor, action, plot, rewatchability, etc. But particularly on my original viewing, I remember rolling my eyes at it revisiting this trope of Buffy feeling left out, overwhelmed, and lost with the only transition at stake being the start of college. After all, she was staying in her hometown and going to the same school as her best friend Willow. College may have been more academically rigorous than high school and Buffy might miss living with Joyce, but was there really so much reason to feel at a loss?

I didn’t fully get “The Freshman” until I went to college. Or, more to the point, rewatched the episode years after I’d graduated from college and reflected on what that transition to college was like.

Don’t get me wrong—I really, really liked college, to the point that I think my career as a professor is largely predicated on what a good time I had and wanting to emulate the best of what my educational experience was like. Moreover, I was psyched leave home for college, coming out of a not-entirely-happy home life.

But those first months at college were rough. Where Buffy had been crowned Class Protector, beaten her demons, and pretty literally slayed a dragon at commencement, I had graduated with honors, been editor in chief of the school newspaper, and taken not one, but two dates to winter semi formal! Buffy and I alike suffered the whiplash--cliche as it might have been--of going from being a big fish in a small pond, to an at-best-average fish in a frigging ocean. Buffy found her friends better adjusted or not at school with her at all, and an all-business psychology professor awaiting her, just as I found that I wasn’t such a natural at striking up friendships with people who happened to live in the same hallway as me, and my professors weren’t so easily won over by a kid with a big vocabulary who could fill five double-spaced pages without saying a whole lot.

So it is that “The Freshman” resonates with me, and I suspect with so many of us. Because even though we viewers know in our heart of hearts that Sunday is getting the business end of Mr. Pointy by the forty-minute mark of the episode, those of us who’ve lived some life can relate to Buffy’s self-doubt, too, and mourn the parts of life that will never be the same once we leave high school and our childhood homes behind.