David and Sarah’s cameos

David Boreanaz and Sarah Michelle Gellar had cameo parts in each others’ season premiere episodes. In The Freshman, Buffy notices someone who looks like Angel in the Bronze (we see David for a split second). In the Angel episode ‘City Of’, a lonely Angel calls Buffy’s house. She answers the phone (seen in The Freshman when she goes home to her mother) but he rings off. We briefly hear Sarah’s voice on the phone in ‘City Of…‘.

In the script…

The following are script directions for the episode The Freshman:

• UC Sunnydale library is described as “unbelievably gigantoid”.
• Riley Finn is described as “a junior, tall and good-looking, with an open, honest face”.
• When Buffy makes an idiot of herself when she and Willow first meet Riley: “Riley smiles politely at this lamest of comments. Buffy trails behind the other two, awed by her own ineptitude.”

Lindsey as Riley?

Christian Kane, who played Wolfram and Hart lawyer Lindsey McDonald on Angel, originally auditioned for the role of Riley Finn. He told EW.com, “I auditioned for Buffy, for the role that Marc Blucas has”.

Marc and Riley comparisons

Marc Blucas has spoken about his character Riley, and how they compare:

Mean Professor

Joss said the following at the Posting Board about the scene in The Freshman when Buffy’s kicked out of class: “As to the Prof in Buffy ep 1, I freely confess that he’s based on an old prof of mine, Joe Reed, who kicked my friend David out of the class day one in front of 200 kids. Joe is cool.”

UC Sunnydale

Exterior shots of UC Sunnydale (where Buffy, Willow, Tara and Oz went to college) were shot at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in Westwood. After season four, the outdoor scenes were shot at the CF Braun Business Park, 1000 S. Fremont Avenue, in Alhambra. The move was made as UCLA was getting too crowded and it was difficult to film there.
In The Freshman, Buffy and Willow go to UC Sunnydale’s library, which is actually the Powell Library on the UCLA campus.

Very most of geek

The following line was deleted from the episode The Freshman:

Dagney Kerr

Dagney Kerr played Buffy’s college room mate Kathy Newman in The Freshman and Living Conditions. She has also been in Two Weeks Later, One Man’s Trash, Six Feet Under and George Lopez. Her real name is Michelle Kear. Dagney is an instructor in the Windor Pilates videos.

Heath Castor

Heath Castor played various characters in the episodes Dead Man’s Party, I Only Have Eyes For You, The Freshman, Living Conditions and Beer Bad. He was in the Angel episode ‘Untouched‘.

Katharine Towne

Katharine played the vampire Sunday in The Freshman. She has also been in Easy Six, Scream at the Sound of the Beep, The Anarchist Cookbook, Evolution, Mulholland Drive, Go, What Lies Beneath, But I’m a Cheerleader and The In Crowd. Katharine had a cameo in She’s All That, as did Sarah Michelle Gellar. Katharine was married to Charlie Hunnam. They met on the set of Undeclared and married 3 weeks later. Charlie is best known as Nathan in the British Queer as Folk and he was in Nicholas Nickleby. The two divorced in 2002.

Lindsay Crouse

Lindsay played the tough Professor Maggie Walsh in season four. She was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Places in the Heart in 1984. Lindsay’s full name - Lindsay Ann Crouse - is a pun: her father, Russel Crouse, was one half of the successful Broadway writing/producing team of (Howard) Lindsay and Crouse. Lindsay has also appeared in House of Games, All the President’s Men, The Verdict, Daniel and Desperate Hours. She carries on the weird Buffy tradition of having connections with Little House on the Prairie - she starred as Caroline Ingalls in Beyond the Prairie: The True Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Lindsay appeared in the 1995 movie Bye Bye, Love with Eliza Dushku and Amber Benson. Her TV work includes parts in Alias, Dragnet, Frasier, Providence, NYPD Blue, Millennium, ER and Batman: The Animated Series.

Marc Blucas

Marc played Riley Finn. Marc was born in Pennsylvania on January 11th, 1972. His full name is Marcus Paul Blucas. He played basketball during high school, and at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Marc also played for the Manchester Giants in England for a year. Marc later got a basketball-playing roles in the movies Eddie and Pleasantville. Since leaving Buffy, Marc has starred in View from the Top, I Capture the Castle, The Alamo, First Daughter, They, We Were Soldiers and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (with Eliza Dushku who plays Faith).

Pedro Balmaceda

Pedro Balmaceda played Eddie, the student in The Freshman who was lost with Buffy before being turned into a vampire. Pedro played Greg in Undressed, and has been in Hermanas and NYPD Blue.

Phina Oruche

Phina played Giles’s on-off girlfriend Olivia in season four. She appeared in the episodes The Freshman, Hush and Restless. Phina and Anthony Stewart Head were in acting class together in the past and he suggested her for the role in Buffy. Phina has also appeared in The Forsaken, How Stella Got Her Groove Back and Sabrina, as well as episodes of Charmed and Diagnosis Murder.

Walt Borchert

Walt Borchert, who played the newly-turned vampire in The Freshman, also played a demon in Living Conditions. He appeared as Jeff in the Buffy episode Crush.

Eddie

Eddie was a freshman at UC Sunnydale who met Buffy when they were both lost on campus. He always kept a copy of Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham with him as a comfort blanket. Eddie was turned into a vampire by Sunday’s gang and staked by Buffy in The Freshman.

Olivia

Olivia was an English woman who had a casual relationship with Giles. She flew over from England to stay with him on two known occassions (The Freshman and Hush). Olivia encountered the Gentlemen and sketched them for Buffy to know what she was facing. Decided to end her relationship with Giles after the Gentlemen incident, as she felt his world was too scary for her. Olivia appeared once more in Giles’s dream in Restless.

Professor Maggie Walsh

Maggie Walsh was a bossy psychology Professor at UC Sunnydale. Walsh was also joint head of the secret government organization the Initiative, which trapped and tested demons. Riley worked for Maggie at the Initiative, and posed as her TA. She designed, and was in charge of secret Project 314 - a hybrid monster called Adam. Walsh invited Buffy to join the Initiative, but tried to have her killed when she felt the Slayer was a liability to her secret project. Maggie was skewered through the heart by Adam in The I in Team, who later reanimated her body to work in his secret laboratory, seen in Primeval.

Sunday

Sunday was a blonde, goth, bossy vampire whose group ruled over UC Sunnydale, killing and siring new students and pretending they had left college due to stress. Sunday’s gang stole the student’s belongings and had a competition of student posters: Monet vs Klimt. Sunday fought and beat Buffy when she was still shaky about starting college, but Xander gave Buffy new confidence and the Slayer staked Sunday in The Freshman.

Award breaking

Sunday breaks Buffy’s Class Protector award, presented to her at The Prom, in The Freshman.

Fabulous Ladies Nightclub

Xander’s summer road trip (first proposed in Choices) after he graduated from Sunnydale High ended shortly after the engine fell out of his car in Oxnard, California. He ended up doing the washing up at the Fabulous Ladies Nightclub, where he had to fill in for a male stripper who had called in sick. Xander related this story to Buffy in The Freshman.

Funny aneurysm

In The Freshman, Buffy says “I hope it’s a funny aneurysm” referring to how her mother will react about the cost of her books. This is a foreshadowing of Joyce’s actual death in season five - she died of an aneurysm.

Little piggy

Buffy seems to have a thing with pigs, as her stuffed toy Mr. Gordo (first seen in What’s My Line? (Part 1)) is a pig, and she manages to capture the school’s mascot - a piglet - in The Pack. Mr. Gordo was stolen by the vampire Sunday in The Freshman, but was eventually returned to Buffy.

Looking up ol’ Ripper

Olivia calls Giles “Ripper” in The Freshman, which suggests she has known him since college. This was his nickname when he was a badass demon-raiser. We first learnt of this in The Dark Age.

Mom photo

In The Freshman, we see that Buffy keeps a photo of Joyce on the desk in her dorm room.

Mr. Pointy

In Becoming (Part 1), Kendra gave Buffy Mr. Pointy, her favourite stake. Mr Pointy was mentioned in several other episodes: In Helpless, Buffy said, “Or what if I just become pathetic? Hanging out at the old Slayer’s home, talking people’s ears off about my glory days, showing them Mr. Pointy, the stake I had bronzed.” Buffy used Mr. Pointy to interrogate the vampire in the limo in Choices. In The Freshman, Buffy mentioned that Mr. Pointy was her “security blanket”.

No Watcher

In The Freshman, Giles tells Buffy she has no official Watcher, as she quit the Council in Graduation Day (Part 2).

Oakpark Street

Giles’s address, we discover in The Freshman, is 523 Oakpark Street, Apartment B, Sunnydale, CA 90211.

Run away gal

In The Freshman, Willow mentions the time Buffy ran away to L.A., seen in Becoming (Part 2): “Buffy wouldn’t just take off. That’s just not in her nature… Except for that one time she disappeared for several months and changed her name, but there were circumstances then. There’s no circumstances.”

Scooby courses

In The Freshman, we find out that Buffy, Willow, and Oz are taking Introduction to Psychology with Professor Maggie Walsh. Willow is also taking Ethnomusicology.

Vampire uniform

The vampire that tells Buffy she smells in As You Were is wearing the same t-shirt that Sunday’s vampire lackey Tom wore in The Freshman, before he was hit by the Initiative Soldiers.

Xander goes to Oxnard

In Choices, when the Scoobies are discussing college options, Xander asks if Cordelia had heard about Willow getting into Oxnard. Willow quickly corrects Xander’s misfire of the name of the exteemed Oxford University. It is worth noting that Xander headed out on the road after this, and ended up in Oxnard himself (mentioned to Buffy in The Freshman).

David Bowie

Giles is listening to David Bowie’s “Memory Of A Free Festival” (from the album Space Oddity) at his apartment when Buffy goes to see him in The Freshman.

Paul Riordan

Paul Riordan’s song “Freaky Soul” (from the albim Alternative Vol 1) plays in The Freshman as Buffy walks through the dorm.

Splendid

Splendid play their track “Charge” in the Bronze in I Only Have Eyes For You. In The Freshman Splendid perform “You and Me” in the Bronze. Their unreleased song “Tomorrow We’ll Awake” plays during Xander and Anya’s bedroom scene in Forever.
Angie Hart, the lead singer of Splendid, co-wrote the song “Blue” with Joss Whedon. This song played at the beginning of the episode Conversations with Dead People.
Angie’s ex-husband Jesse Tobias, who was also in Splendid, helped Joss and Christophe Beck to arrange Joss’s songs for the musical episode Once More, With Feeling.

Stretch Princess

“Universe” by Stretch Princess plays in The Freshman, as Buffy walks around the UC Sunnydale campus.

The Muffs

We hear “I Wish That I Could Be You” by The Muffs as Sunday and her gang talk about Buffy in The Freshman. The song is from the album Alert Today Alive Tomorrow.

Celine Dion

When Buffy first met her college room-mate Kathy in The Freshman, Kathy put a Celine Dion poster on her wall. This sent shivers down Buffy’s spine as she realised immediately that they were not going to get on. Celine Dion is a French Canadian singer, with hit singles including “I’m your Angel” and “My Heart Will Go On” (the theme to James Cameron’s epic movie Titanic, and many a shameless karaoker). Dion currently performs Lorne-style nightly in her show, A New Day…Live in Las Vegas, at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas.

Dadaism

In Bargaining (Part 1), the Buffybot says a bizarre selection of words, to which Spike says, “What’s with the Dadaism, Red?” In The Freshman, Buffy says to Xander, “Thanks for the Dadaist pep talk, I feel much more abstract now.” Dadaism was the nihilistic artistic movement in the early twentieth century. The movement was based on irrationality, anarchy, cynicism and the rejection of laws of beauty. It was based mainly in France, Switzerland and Germany as a protest over World War I, but it was also in America, where it occurred mainly in New York at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery ‘291′. After 1922, many Dadaists abandoned the movement as they turned to surrealism.

Gutenberg

In Living Conditions, Giles said he had an original demonography printed by Gutenberg. Johannes Gutenberg invented moveable type, which revolutionized the mass publication and circulation of the printed word. The first book to be printed on Gutenberg’s press was the Bible in 1455.

Hugh Hefner

After discovering Giles’s girlfriend Olivia in Giles’ apartment in The Freshman, Buffy said to him, “OK, remember before you became Hugh Hefner when you used to be a watcher?” Hugh Hefner is the founder of Playboy magazine. His decadent lifestyle at the Playboy mansions is well known. Charisma Carpenter (Cordelia) appeared semi-naked in Playboy magazine in April 2004.

Monet and Klimt

We see in The Freshman that Sunday’s vampires have a collection of Monet and Klimt posters stolen from their student victims. There are 18 Monet Water Lillies posters, and 12 Klimt The Kiss posters.

Nazis

Nazis have been referenced a few times in Buffy:

• In The Witch, Buffy says Amy’s mother is, “Nazi-like”.
• In I Robot, You Jane, a student’s essay has been changed by Moloch the Corrupter, “This isn’t my report! Nazi Germany was a model of a well ordered society’? I didn’t write that! Who’s been in my files?”
• In Nightmares, Xander says, “I’m sorry, I’m unruffled by spiders. Now, if a bunch of Nazis crawled all over my face…”
• In Becoming (Part 1), Cordelia says of Principal Snyder, “How about because you’re a tiny impotent Nazi with a bug up his butt the size of an emu?”
• In Gingerbread, Xander says, “Aw, man it’s Nazi Germany and I’ve got Playboys in my locker!”
• In The Freshman, Buffy mentions the Nuremberg rallies, where the Nazi’s held their anti-Semitic rallies from the early 1920s to 1938.
• In the episode The Initiative, Spike is in his containment cell talking to another vampire about who could have captured him, Spike says, “And they are? The government? Nazis? A major cosmetics company?” In the Angel episode ‘Why We Fight‘, we see in a flashback that Spike was captured by Nazis in 1943, who were experimenting on vampires as a means of controlling them for their war effort.

Nuremberg Rallies

When Buffy and Willow first saw the huge UC Sunnydale library in The Freshman, Buffy said, “Yeah, this is great, you know, if we ever need a place for the Nuremberg rallies.” Nuremberg, in the south of Germany, was the place where the Nazi’s held their anti-Semitic rallies from the early 1920s to 1938.

Of Human Bondage

Of Human Bondage is a thinly veiled autobiography written by W. Somerset Maugham, published in 1915. In The Freshman, Eddie tells Buffy the book is his comfort blanket.

Planet of the Apes

During their game of Guess the Movie in When She Was Bad, Xander says to Willow, “It’s a mad house! A mad…” Oz repeated this line (from the movie Planet of the Apes) in the fourth season premiere, The Freshman.

Scarface

In The Freshman, Xander says to Buffy, “Hold on, no, ‘First you get the women, then you get the money, then you…’ Okay, can we forget that?” This could be a reference to the speech made by Tony Montana (played by Al Pacino) in the film Scarface: “In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the woman.”

Star Wars

George Lucas’s Star Wars films are a cult phenomenon. They are referenced numerous times in the Buffyverse. The original trilogy included the movies Star Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return Of The Jedi (1983) and the movies The Phantom Menace (1999), Attack of the Clones (2002) and Revenge of the Sith (2005) were made later on.

• In When She Was Bad, when Xander and Willow play Guess the Movie from the tag line (Willow: “Use the Force, Luke.”,
  Xander: “Do I even have to dignify that with a guess?”)
• In School Hard, Spike told Angel that, “You were my Yoda!” Yoda was the ancient Jedi master who became the mentor and teacher for both Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker.
• A visual reference to Star Wars can be seen in The Zeppo, when Xander runs into the corridor and runs back out with the gang members chasing him. Han Solo does the same thing in Star Wars.
• In Choices, Buffy says that Faith has turned to ‘the dark side’.
• In The Freshman, Xander confuses the Star Wars Jedi code quoted by Yoda in The Phantom Menace. (”Hate leads to anger…no wait…Fear leads to hate, hate leads to the dark side”). Also in that episode, the old frat house that the vampires are holed up in is the Psi Theta house. If you write those two greek letters together, and pronounce them together, you get Sith.
• In Fear, Itself, Xander says to Oz, “Sensing a disturbance in the Force, Master?”
• Buffy using the chain to choke Sobek the snake-demon in Shadow is reminiscent of Princess Leia killing Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi.
• In Forever, Ben calls Glory’s minions “Jawa rejects” after the small hooded and robed creatures in Star Wars.
• In Life Serial, Andrew paints a Death Star from Star Wars on the side of the gang’s van. It’s the Empire’s revised design from Return of the Jedi, which Jonathan says is flawed.
• In the episode Two To Go, Andrew says, “We’ve got maybe seconds before Darth Rosenberg grinds us all into to Jawa burgers and not one of you bunch has the Midichlorians to stop her.” These are all Star Wars references: Darth is a title given to a Sith Warrior (such as Darth Vader); Jawas are the hooded creatures who live on Tatooine, and Midichlorians are micro-organisms which exist in all living things. Andrew says, “Laugh it up, Fuzzball” which is a quote from Star Wars. Andrew also later says in Two To Go, “…in a galaxy far, far away” - yet another Star Wars reference.
• In All the Way, Tara and Willow see a couple dressed as Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker kissing in the Bronze. Willow asks, “Do they know they’re brother and sister?”
• In Smashed, we see that the three nerds own a mint condition (though out of its packaging) 1979 Boba Fett action figure. Though Boba Fett was first introduced in The Empire Strikes Back (made in 1980), the earliest Boba Fett figure was made in 1979, before the film was released.
• In Dead Things, Jonathan and Andrew play fight with green light sabres.
• In Entropy, Warren calls Jonathan “Padawan”.
• In Conversations with Dead People, Jonathan and Warren have the following conversation: Warren: “Come on, “If you strike me down…” Andrew: “I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine…That boy is our last hope.” Warren: “No, there is another.” These are all quotes from Star Wars.
• In Potential, Xander says to Andrew, “Say Skywalker, and I smack you.” He is, of course, referring to Star Wars‘ Luke Skywalker.
• In Showtime, Andrew says, “I’m bored. Episode I bored.” He’s referring to George Lucas’s disappointing movie Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.
• In Never Leave Me, Warren/The First says, “I’m like Obi Wan”. He also says to Andrew, “We’re right in the trench, and the exhaust port’s in sight.” This is a reference to the scene in Star Wars in which the Death Star is under attack.
• In Bring on the Night, Andrew says, “I’m like Vader in the last 5 minutes of Jedi with redemptive powers minus a redemptive struggle of epic redemption which chronicles…” He’s referring to the last scenes of the final Star Wars movie Return of the Jedi.
• In Storyteller, there are two framed Star Wars comics on the wall in Andrew’s opening scene.
• In Dirty Girls, Andrew says, “But like so many tragic heroes, Faith was seduced by the lure of the dark side.”

Seen at 10.57 minutes:

In the scene in which Buffy tries to sleep while Kathy snores, Buffy’s bedcovers are high up her body during close-ups but quite a few inches lower in the longer shots.

Seen at 16.50 minutes:

In The Yoko Factor, Angel cannot enter Buffy’s dorm room without invitation, so how did Sunday’s vampires get in to steal her stuff in The Freshman? This doesn’t count only for Buffy - the vamps are able to access Eddie’s room as well, and presumably they can get into the rooms of the other students they killed. How do they do that?

Seen at 16.52 minutes:

When the vampires clean out Eddie’s room, you can see them reflected in the mirror above the sink.

Seen at 16.58 minutes:

The stoner vamp is packing Eddie’s stuff by the sink. After a quick cut to the stereo that the other vamp is stealing, the stoner vamp is shown sitting at a desk, just finishing the goodbye note.

Seen at 35.23 minutes:

Why are Sunday’s vampire gang living in a house with a giant skylight?

Seen at 40.00 minutes:

Xander stakes a vampire in the stomach, yet the vamp still dies.