The Weirdest Buffy Episodes Ever

On the whole, Buff the Vampire Slayer was one of the best television shows of all time. It’s chock-full of excellent characters and compelling plot lines that are developed wonderfully over the course of the show’s seven seasons. But in the middle of all that, there are many episodes you want to forget ever happened. I’m not talking about the campy, but fun episodes like the one where the adults eat magic band candy that causes them to turn into their younger selves. I mean the just plain embarrassing, the biology teacher is actually a humanoid praying mantis that attempts to mate with and eat male virgins, episodes. You could say that 99% of season one fits in this category, but really every season has at least one episode that makes you wonder how anyone could even pitch this, let alone write it. This is not a definitive list; there are tons of bad Buffy episodes. These are just a few of the worst offenders.

High School Zoo Trips can Turn you into a Hyena

This is one of the best awful episodes of Buffy as it occasionally moves past being embarrassing and into being hilariously awful which some of these don’t manage to do. Xander and a group of meaner guys sneak into a quarantined hyena exhibit during a school field trip. Why they are still taking zoo field trips in 10th grade is beyond me. There, they have some sort of spiritual, eye flashing moment and bond with the hyenas turning them into human hyenas. They then wreck all kinds of havoc and casually eat their principal. The cure for this of course is some sort of Maasai ritual. Also, they clearly failed to hire a professional hyena impersonator to train the actors. The acting in this episode is worse than your average season one episode making it nearly unbearable. Despite the underlying critique of male behavior, this episode is just absolutely ridiculous.

That Time Xander was in Love with a Mummy

One of many Xander can’t win episodes, this one features another high school field trip. Seriously, every time they take students on a field trip someone dies. You think parents would have stopped signing permission slips ages ago. At this point letting the students out the front door would probably count as reckless endangerment if they were ever actually safe inside the building. Because every small desert town has authentic Incan mummies on display. This mummy naturally comes back to life and falls in love with Xander. This goes about how you’d expect. This episode would be passable, if it weren’t for the abysmal, awkward acting.

Buffy’s Roommate from another Dimension

On my first watch through of Buffy, I could not watch this whole episode. It was so spectacularly awful in all respects that I got too embarrassed to keep watching and looked up the ending on Wikipedia. Forcing myself to watch it on the second time around, the ending was just as bad as I thought it would be. She goes to college. Her roommate is actually an alien. Badly written hijinks ensue.

Beer Literally Makes you a Caveman

Buffy drinks some beer with the boys and they literally turn into cavemen. Need I say more? I will just remind you  that someone actually thought that was a good idea.

The Jacket of Sexual Frustration

I think this one’s mostly filler. It’s by far my least favorite season 7 episode, but as far as bad ones go, it’s not written too badly. It’s another one that is just embarrassing to watch, though. A high school football player’s jacket turns out to actually be a chick magnet. Every woman in the show falls madly in love with him on sight. This of course gets out of hand and they try to murder each other. So it goes. The writers do at least realize this in this case and play around with it. There are definitely funny moments, but mainly this is on the list because they put this in the middle of what is supposed to be the most intense season long struggle with the biggest big bad. But never mind The First, why not do an episode where everyone falls in love with a teenager’s jacket? Perfect!