This week on Buffy and the Art of Story: The Pack, Season 1, Episode 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This episode includes how to build the character of the victim to make the loss greater while misdirecting the audience regarding who the victim will be.

As always, the discussion is spoiler-free, except at the end (with plenty of warning).

Story Elements in The Pack

In this podcast episode we'll look at how The Pack handles:

All major plot points

Creating a victim the audience likes

Misdirection regarding the victim

Characters' responsibility for what they do while possessed

Highlights from the Buffy Season 1 DVD commentaries by Joss Whedon are also discussed.

Story Structure

For more on the 5-point story structure the podcast covers, check out Super Simple Story Structure: A Quick Guide To Plotting And Writing Your Novel.

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The Pack Episode Transcript

Hello and welcome to Buffy and The Art of Story.

If you love Buffy the Vampire Slayer and you love creating stories or just taking them apart to see how they work, you're in the right place.

I am Lisa M. Lilly, author of suspense, mysteries, and supernatural thrillers, and founder of WritingAsASecondCareer.com.

This Week: The Pack

This week we'll cover Season One, Episode Six: The Pack. It's a standalone episode, so we'll talk about all the major plot points, as well as interweaving storylines, and building the character of the victim to make the loss greater, or more serious, for the audience. We'll also talk about the use of misdirection as to the victim.

Okay, let's dive into the Hellmouth.

Prologue

We start with Buffy at the zoo alone. A group of four mean kids teases her.

And one of them says, “Were you this popular at your old school before you got kicked out?” This particular line feels to me like a backfill for the audience. Not the, ‘were you this popular at your old school?’ because I feel like that works, but the ‘before you got kicked out,’ seems like something thrown in there, to remind the audience or inform a new audience member, that Buffy was kicked out of her old school.

I say that because these four kids don't seem like ones who would mock Buffy for being kicked out because they appear to always be on the edge of being kicked out themselves.

It seems more like they might think she was cool for that. I could be wrong, but that's just my feeling from it. It's one of the rare times, or I guess first time so far, that I felt like the opening dialogue back and forth was a little bit obvious in being there to fill in the blanks. However, I do really like that these kids are teasing Buffy because we see that she feels bad that she doesn't have the social network or the friends or the standing that she had in her old school.

Opening Conflict in The Pack

We then see the main kids picking on Lance, who I noticed as I watched this time is in a red shirt. Which I think is kind of fun and might or might not be a reference to the red shirts in Star Trek who always end up getting killed.

This scene is part of what initially makes us think that Lance is going to be the real victim here. And certainly these students do victimize him, but he survives the episode, which I did not expect.

The first time I watched it, and even this time, um, my initial thought was, ‘Oh yeah, this is the kid. They're gonna throw into the hyenas and kill him,’ which doesn't happen.