Writers:

Joss Whedon (story)

Ashley Gable

Thomas A. Swyden (teleplay)

Director:

Reza Badiyi

Regulars:

Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy Summers

Nicholas Brendon as Xander Harris

Alyson Hannigan as Willow Rosenberg

Charisma Carpenter as Cordelia Chase

Anthony Stewart Head as Rupert Giles

Guest Stars:

David Boreanaz as Angel

Armin Shimerman as Principal Snyder

Cast:

Clea DuVall as Marcie Ross

Ryan Bittle as Mitch

Denise Dowse as Ms. Miller

John Knight as Bud 1

Mercedes McNab as Harmony

Mark Phelan as Agent Doyle

Skip Stellrecht as Agent Manetti

Julie Fulton as FBI teacher

The obvious influence here is H.G. Wells' 1897 novel The Invisible Man (made into a classic horror movie starring Claude Rains by Universal Studios in 1933), in which a brilliant scientist finds a formula which can turn him invisible, but which also makes him insane. Believe it or not, the assertion that Marcie turned invisible because no one paid attention to her has a precedent in speculative fiction. Sci-Fi author Orson Scott Card considered the question of the extent to which human will can affect the body's physical reality in his novels Xenocide (1992) and Children of the Mind (1996).

Xander: "Research Boy comes through with the knowledge."

Giles: "A vampire in love with a Slayer. It's rather poetic... in a maudlin sort of way."

Giles: "Once again I teeter at the precipice of the generation gap."

Cordelia: "This is all about me! Me, me, me!"
Xander: "Wow! For once she's right!"

Cordelia: "If I'm not crowned tonight then, then Marcie's won! And that would be bad. She's evil, okay? Way eviler than me."

More quotes from this episode...

• "My eyes are hazel, Helen Keller."  Helen Adams Keller (1880-1968) lost both her hearing and her sight to a fever when she was two. With the help of a remarkable teacher named Anne Sullivan, she learned to communicate and even speak, graduated from Radcliffe College with honors in 1904, and went on to be a lecturer and activist, crusading for women's rights and the rights of the disabled. A famous movie about her and Anne Sullivan, called The Miracle Worker, was released in 1962, starring Patty Duke as Helen Keller. (Duke played Anne Sullivan in the 1979 TV remake of the film which starred Melissa Gilbert as Helen.)

• Giles and Angel meet for the first time in this episode.

• The Tiberius Manifesto and the Pergamum Codex are among the more important volumes of Slayer-related lore which have been or are believed to be lost, though Angel is able to find the Codex and give it to Giles.

Brian:

Maybe it's just me, but I don't think that Charisma Carpenter is a very good actress. Thus, any episode centering on Cordelia, as this one does, is going to suffer in my opinion. The story is good, and the inclusion of Angel as a pre-cursor to the season finale which follows is done nicely. But for all the nice touches, I couldn't get away from my dislike of Charisma Carpenter, and so this competes with "The Pack" in my opinion for the rank of the first season's least-favorite episode. (5/10)

Will:

Cordelia becomes human... well, only for a little while. All of the people around her were being bumped off and I found myself wondering if she would meet her untimely end. As evil a person as she is, I was ultimately glad she was not killed off. On the whole I found this episode to be fun and interesting, but it lacked that "punch" that many other episodes have had. (7/10)