By Chris Snellgrove
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Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a present that reworked popular culture ceaselessly whereas reworking a few of its stars into family names. The present successfully made historical past, as evidenced by the various prestigious awards it gained, together with a number of Inventive Arts Emmys and 10 Satellite tv for pc Awards. Nonetheless, one Buffy episode made historical past within the worst doable approach: “The Puppet Present” was the collection’ lowest-rated episode ever, and to make issues worse, it broke a franchise custom by taking part in the credit alongside the ultimate scene relatively than individually.
Buffy And The Puppet Present
That is usually the place we’d do a recap of the episode in query, however for Buffy followers, “The Puppet Present” is an episode that lives in infamy. It’s a little bit of a bait-and-switch story wherein Buffy and the Scoobies first imagine that they have to combat a strolling, speaking demonic puppet that sounds virtually as creepy as he appears to be like. It seems, although, that he’s truly a demon hunter who has been cursed to dwell within the doll’s physique till he completes a particular job. Specifically, looking and killing every member of the brotherhood of seven demons.
Whereas Buffy followers consider “The Puppet Present” as (to place it mildly) a lesser episode, most don’t understand that it’s the lowest-rated one of many complete collection. On this case, “lowest-rated” shouldn’t be a measurement of high quality, although the episode does have a deservedly horrible status. For instance, Rolling Stone ranked this episode as #127 of their massive record of best-to-worst Buffy tales. That doesn’t sound so unhealthy till you contemplate there are solely 144 episodes, that means that this one comes dangerously near scraping the underside of the barrel.
On this case, “lowest-rated” means as a substitute that out of all of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes, “The Puppet Present” was the one which was considered the least when initially broadcast. In accordance with the present’s Nielsen Rankings, just one.9 million households tuned into this puppet misadventure when it was first broadcast. The “first broadcast” half is necessary as a result of, as you may think, reruns invariably pull in fewer viewers than their first-run counterparts.
Buffy followers hate “The Puppet Present” for a lot of causes (together with the weird plot and clunky dialogue), but it surely’s price noting that it had much less competitors for lowest-rated episode than you may suppose. Because the present bought extra common in subsequent seasons, even actually unhealthy episodes (taking a look at you, Season 6!) would nonetheless have hundreds of thousands of viewers greater than the typical episodes. Rankings have been lowest for Season 1, and “The Puppet Present” had the doubtful honor of being the least-viewed episode in these tumultuous early days.
Talking as longtime Buffy followers, we’re additionally irritated that “The Puppet Present” made historical past in one other destructive approach by operating the top credit over the ultimate scene through a break up display. Creatively, this was a weird selection that ruined the circulation of what was already a really unhealthy episode. Apparently, the community agreed: after the preliminary airing, this ultimate scene was excluded from future WB airings, however (for higher or for worse) now you can watch the restored scene on DVD, streaming, and TV.
There you have got it, Buffy followers: when it comes to viewership, “The Puppet Present” is the worst episode of the franchise. And the unusual selection to separate display the credit meant that an already-terrible episode failed to stay the touchdown. Happily, subsequent episodes solely bought higher, making this paltry puppet pablum a factor of the previous for followers anticipating extra stalking demons and fewer speaking dolls.
