I Robot, You Jane

Summary

In the Middle Ages, a young man approaches a horned demon, who smiles at him and asks him for love.  The man tells the demon  he has his love and then the demon promptly breaks his neck. Meanwhile, a group of monks are trying to stop the demon Moloch and perform a ritual which sucks the demon into a book, it’s pages now filled with writing.

Back in the persent, Buffy opens a crate in the library and finds the long forgotten book.  Along with Xander and Willow, two computer adept students are helping scan books: the menacing looking Fritz and Dave, a geekier kid. Also present is Ms. Calendar, the computer science teacher, who teases Giles about his fear of technology. As Willow scans the ancient book, the characters disappear from its pages. When she looks away, words appear on the screen: "Where am I?"

A week later, Willow tells Buffy about Malcolm, a boy she's having an online romance with. Buffy is concerned but Willow doesn’t listen to her and is just upset that Buffy isn’t happy for her.  Buffy, worried about her naive friend, enlists Dave's help to try to find out more about Malcolm. Dave tells Buffy to leave Willow alone.  Not knowing what else to do, Buffy decides to follow Dave to see what he’s up to.  She follows him to a place called “CRD”.  Moloch is not impressed by Buffy’s snooping as she is too close to working out what’s going on.  Moloch tells Fritz to kill Buffy.

The next day, Buffy discusses what she saw with Giles and Xander.  Xander tells her it’s a computer research lab that closed down the year before.  Not knowing what Dave was doing there, Buffy and Xander decide the best option is to break into the building and see what’s going on for themselves.  Xander and Buffy make a hasty exit when Ms. Calender arrives.  Ms. Calendar stumbles upon the ancient book and asks Giles about its blank pages. When Giles notices the horned demon on the cover, he suspects trouble.

Meanwhile, Dave tells Buffy to look for Willow in the girls' locker room.  When she gets there, Fritz has rigged up some wires in the shower to try to electrocute her. A puddle reaches the exposed wires and Dave shouts at her to get out.  Buffy is sent flying into the locker room, the soles of her shoes smoldering. A shaken Dave tells the computer he can't kill Buffy. Angry at his disrespect, it types up a suicide note for him.

Back in the library, Giles explains to Buffy and Xander that, in the Dark Ages, the souls of demons were sometimes trapped in certain volumes of books. Here they remained harmless until the pages were read aloud.  He shows them the empty book and between them they realise that when Willow scanned the book, the demon, Moloch, was unleashed into the computer.  Now Moloch has access to any computer in the world through the internet. Moloch preys on impressionable minds, which makes both Fritz and Dave vulnerable to his power. Buffy tries to delete Willow's files, hoping to get rid of Moloch along with them, but Moloch appears on the screen warning Buffy to stay away from Willow.

Looking for Willow in the computer lab, she finds Dave's body hanging, with the suicide note pinned to it. Fritz goes to Willow's house, chloroforms her and takes her to CRD where Dave had been spotted earlier.

A desperate Giles asks Ms. Calendar for help and discovers she has extensive knowledge of the mystical realm. She helps him repeat the spell the monks had chanted while she links up a configuration of different computers around the world.

Meanwhile, Buffy and Xander try to save Willow at the warehouse. By the time they arrive, Moloch has left the computer and appears as a robotic incarnation of the horned demon that was back in the Dark Ages. He breaks Fritz' neck and is about to break Willow's when the spell takes hold, immobilizing him.  Buffy, Xander and Willow make a run for it.  However, the spell has not put Moloch back in the book.  He has been bound and is no longer in the computer but bound to the robot body that was made for it.  He lunges at Buffy, but she ducks and he punches a high-voltage junction box and is electrocuted to death.

The next day at school, Willow is upset that the only boy that has ever liked her turned out to be a demon robot.  Xander and Buffy comfort her by reminding her of their own love-life disasters and the three of them decide that they are all doomed.

Additional Notes

·        The episode features the first appearance of Ms. Calendar (played by Robia LaMorte). Though her first name, Jenny, is never used in this episode, it was originally to be "NiKki" and was later changed to avoid confusion on set with actor Nicholas Brendon, whose friends call him Nicky.  Ms. Calendar was not in BTVS again until the final episode of the season, "Prophecy Girl".  

·        This is the first time we see the inside of Willow's house, and her bedroom.

·        Buffy's assertion that Xander is jealous of Willow's new "boyfriend" ("Yeah, but you got used to being the belle of the ball") implies that Xander is aware of Willow's unrequited crush on him, and that his awareness is common knowledge among his friends.

·        In the scene just after Willow is chloroformed where Giles is listening to the radio, the announcer is voiced by none other than BTVS creator Joss Whedon.

Consistency and Mistakes

·        Moloch looks up Buffy's school record on the computer.  While the screen is still green and lists two other students below her, her birthdate is shown as 10/24/80, her status as senior, and her GPA as 3.4.  When the full profile comes up, her status is shown as sophomore and her GPA is shown as 2.8. Seconds later, when Moloch sends the information to Fritz, her birthday is shown as 05/06/79, and her status is back to senior again. Buffy is a sophomore at this point in the series.  A couple of episodes later in “Nightmares”, Giles sees Buffy’s gravestone and her year of birth is shown as 1981.  We find out that both birthdates in “I Robot, You Jane” are way off the mark when Buffy celebrates her 17th birthday in January 1998 ("Surprise"), which means that she was born in January 1981.  Ok, so maybe they hadn’t decided on her exact date of birth yet but to have two totally different dates within a matter of seconds is a pretty big mistake!   

·        In this episode, you can see that Willow has a picture of herself and Giles pinned in her locker, which implies she might have a bit of a crush on him.  In S4 episode "Where the Wild Things Are", Willow hears Giles sing for the first time and comments "Now I remember why I used to have such a crush on him".  

References

·        The title of the episode is a combination of two references: "I, Robot" is the title of a famous 1950 collection of short stories about robots by Isaac Asimov, and "Me Tarzan, you Jane," was a catchphrase made popular in the 1930's by the series of movies based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Tarzan" novels.

·        "My spider sense is tingling."  Marvel Comics' Spider-Man, in addition to his physical powers, has a "spider sense" that tingles when danger is looming.

·        "Well, it looks like suicide." "With a little help from my friends?"  "With A Little Help From My Friends" is the name of a song from the Beatles' 1967 "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album.  Joe Cocker recorded a popular cover of the song in 1968 which was later used as the theme song to the television show "The Wonder Years".

The Best bits and the Worst bits!

This is Willow’s first episode as the main point of focus and she does a great job!  The worst part of this episode was the character of Fritz: appalling acting, terrible lines and just annoying in general.

Willow's 'relationship' with Moloch was very sweet.  She fell for him very quickly and it was nice to see her paying some attention to someone who isn't Xander.  Shame this one didn't work out for her, but paves the way for future relationships, when hopefully she can put her unrequited love for Xander behind her.

This episode also sees the introduction of Ms. Calendar.  I actually didn't like her all that much in this episode, I found her kind of annoying, though her flirtations with Giles were amusing.  I did grow to like Jenny when she became a recurring character in S2, but in this episode, I was not a fan at all.          

Quotes

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