Plot
Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Xander (Nicholas Brendon), and Willow (Alyson Hannigan) tease Giles (Anthony Stewart Head) about Snyder (Armin Shimerman), the new principal, making him run the talent show to connect with students. When Snyder overhears them, he forces them to participate in the talent show, making it clear that unlike former principal Flutie, he isn't interested in befriending students. The next audition features Morgan and his ventriloquist's dummy, Sid. Buffy admits she's creeped out by dummies, but the act takes a surprising turn when Sid suddenly develops a sarcastic personality.
Emily, a ballet dancer alone in the locker room, hears a noise and screams as a voice whispers, "I will be flesh." Talent show rehearsals continue with Marc (Burke Roberts), an unsuccessful magician. Buffy, Willow, and Xander discuss their own performance and decide on a dramatic scene because it requires no real talent. Meanwhile, Sid watches and makes sarcastic remarks as Morgan explains that the voice is an imitation of his father.
Snyder tells Giles that he intends to run a safer, more disciplined school, but their conversation is interrupted by the discovery of Emily's body, her heart removed with a knife. The Scoobies begin to suspect supernatural involvement and discuss whether the killer is a demon or a human. They split up and begin interviewing students from the talent show to find the killer. All of their interviews point in the direction of Morgan and his dummy. After school, Buffy breaks into Morgan's locker and finds Sid's case empty. Suddenly, Snyder appears and admonishes her for being in the school after hours. Morgan and Sid are hidden behind a door, watching. In the auditorium, Sid insists that Buffy is "the one," citing her strength as evidence. When Morgan tells him that he "can't do it," Sid says he will.
That night, Sid sneaks into Buffy's bedroom after she falls asleep. She awakens to find him on her bed and screams, causing Joyce (Kristine Sutherland) to rush in, but Sid escapes undetected. The next day, Buffy struggles to convince the others that Sid was in her room. Giles suggests the killer may be a type of demon that requires human organs to maintain its human form.
After a teacher confiscates Sid for causing a disturbance, Xander steals the dummy so Buffy can speak with Morgan alone. As she searches backstage, Snyder again questions her presence. In the library, Willow uncovers references suggesting that animated dummies may harvest human organs in order to become human. Meanwhile, Xander realizes Sid has gone missing.
Buffy finds Morgan's body with his brain removed and narrowly avoids being struck by a falling chandelier. She is attacked by Sid, but during their struggle, they realize they are both hunting the same demon. Sid explains he is a demon hunter cursed to live as a dummy until he kills the last of the Brotherhood of Seven — demons that harvest human organs to remain in human form. He has already killed six and accepts that he will die once the curse is broken. Believing the demon has both a heart and a brain, the group assumes it is planning to escape and is disguised as someone in the talent show. Sid suggests Giles form a "power circle" to identify who is missing, but everyone is present.
Buffy discovers Morgan's brain, and the gang learns that Morgan had brain cancer, which is likely why the brain was discarded. They suspect the demon is still looking for another intelligent human to harvest.
At the talent show, Marc convinces Giles to strap himself into a guillotine, pretending it is a magic prop. Buffy, Xander, and Willow rush to rescue Giles, and with Sid's help, they kill Marc — who was the demon all along. Sid drives a knife through Marc's heart and collapses as his soul is freed. Buffy takes his dummy body into her arms just as the curtain opens. Confused, the audience assumes it is part of the show.
Later that night, Buffy, Xander, and Willow perform a scene from Oedipus Rex . After Xander forgets his line, Willow runs off the stage.
Production
Vox notes that, during the closing credits, it has "Buffy's first and only tag scene, which sees the Scoobies doing the world's worst staged reading of Oedipus ." [2] The only other time the closing credits were altered was in "Once More, With Feeling," when the dance of the road sweepers was played instead of Nerf Herder's usual theme music.
Nicholas Brendon ad-libbed Xander using Sid the Dummy to reference Stephen King's The Shining with his exclamation, "Redrum! Redrum!" (i.e., "murder" backwards). [3]
This is the fourth episode of the series without any vampires, after "Witch," "The Pack," and "I Robot, You Jane."
Broadcast and reception
"The Puppet Show" was first broadcast on The WB on May 5, 1997. It received a Nielsen rating of 1.9 on its original airing. [4]
Vox ranked this episode at #113 out of the 144 Buffy episodes, in honor of the 20th anniversary of the show's ending, calling it "a weird, weird episode... [Sid] spends the first half of the episode skittering around creepily, and then in the second half he turns out to be secretly heroic and gets a poignant death scene. It's goofy and fun and not quite coherent, and always leaves me feeling a little like the newly introduced Principal Snyder: 'I don't get it. Is it avant-garde?'" [5] Paste Magazine , in a similar list, ranked it at #84 and wrote, "A standard MoTW episode for much of its duration, 'The Puppet Show' is actually a nice bit of misdirection, and Snyder's appointment of Giles to oversee the talent show and his insistence that Cordelia, Willow, Xander and Buffy participate certainly helped them solve the mystery and slay the demon." [6]
Noel Murray of The A.V. Club gave "The Puppet Show" a grade of C+, calling it "a reasonably entertaining, better-than-average piece of horror-comedy, even as it recycles the hoary old 'killer dummy' routine." He praised the twist and the comedy, but felt that its problem was that it "has nothing to offer beyond a few laughs and a few shocks". [7] DVD Talk's Phillip Duncan wrote of the episode, "It seems like standard fare until the plot nears the end and the truth is revealed. It's another reversal of roles that keeps the show's format interesting." [8]
A review from the BBC called it "a very inventive episode, and one of the best of the first season". The review praised how the direction was ambiguous in showing whether Sid was really alive, and praised the running joke of Buffy, Willow, and Xander having to participate in the talent show. [9]
Rolling Stone ranked "The Puppet Show" at #127 on their "Every Episode Ranked From Worst to Best" list, calling it just another "super weird Season One episode that falls a little flat," and writes that the "premise is fun, but it doesn’t come close to sticking the landing." [10]
"The Puppet Show" was ranked at #84 on Paste Magazine's "Every Episode Ranked" list [11] and #79 on BuzzFeed's "Ranking Every Episode" list. [12]
