Season Three Recap

In War Zone, bringing up baby is on the mind of Rupert Giles and his wife Becca, leading the elder watcher to a decision to retire from the Watchers Council.  Meanwhile, a giant sand demon threatens to wipe out U.S. troops in the hostile desert warzone of Iraq.  While Giles pays a call to Alex Neel and is introduced to Lucifer – looking very much like someone from Giles’s past -- a crack team of wiccans and slayers, including Buffy Summers, visit the war-torn Middle East.  In Maternal Instincts, Faith’s past catches up with her as memories of Richard Wilkins stand to help or hinder her in saving her son, Norman, from death’s door as Robin attempts to reconcile himself to a new way of life without his leg.  Meantime, Shannon, a young slayer with a mean baseball swing bonds with the boy while the watchers and the slayers search for a demon horde looking for a surrogate mother.  In Both Sides Now - Rowena learns the hard way that rank has its disadvantages as well as its privileges when she must call Xander, Vi, and Willow before a council tribunal on charges of negligence in the death of several slayers and the fall of the Vancouver Watchers Council.  With Just the Facts, the council meets reporter Robert Devlin who is trying to piece together what happened to a group of young women who died mysteriously in Vancouver. In doing such he stumbles onto the story of the century in the form of the Watchers Council and its work.  Rowena and the other heads of the Cleveland Council must decide whether to work the Tabula Rasa spell and remove Devlin’s memory, or take Devlin into their confidence and hope that he will understand why their story cannot be written.  As Willow and Rowena square off, this time over the moral implications of using the Tabula Rasa, Bonnie, Brell, and the Council heads put Devlin to the test.  In Trial By Fury - Fangs and claws come out for Willow and Rowena, still at odds over the spell Rowena and Kennedy did on Devlin and for Kadin Van Helsing who is put on trial by a special order of werewolves dedicated to living with mankind peaceably. Kadin must relive a painful chapter from her past while proving her innocence in the killing of a group of werewolves from The Brethren.  As Kennedy lends support, Kadin’s life hinges on the decision of the jury of werewolves and the cunning abilities of her lawyer Elana Velmont.  Meanwhile, Rowena and Willow’s fangs are showing too, as their resentments toward each build to a fever pitch while an unsuspecting Skye has a disturbing encounter with the psychologically unstable slayer, Dana. In Luna the Watchers wonder what do James Bond, a stuffed cat named Madame Fliffertop, a lovesick Andrew, and an army of bugs have in common?  Throw in a death squad of laser squirrels, a jump-start to a reconciliation between Willow and Rowena, and a vampire twelve-step program that takes abstinence to a new level.

Lives and love are ‘In the Balance’ when a lost Monarch and Idol and a quest for closure come into head-on conflict.  As Rowena and Willow rekindle their relationship, Kennedy forges a new bond with Kadin Van Helsing and an old man, Gregor Kalderas, a relation of her birth mother’s.  Meanwhile, Dawn must come to grips with the fact the missing Skye may be gone forever.  With the kidnappings of Reteesk and Tracey everyone especially Dawn and Rowena must work together, with a little help from Giles and Brell, to find the balance between the personal and the professional without sacrificing their loved ones nor losing to the new demons in town. In Loves Labours Lost, young Richard Caperlet and his demon lover, Erios Montager, face off against their warring families and an ages-old feud.  Rowena, Willow Robin and Faith must find a way to safely bring the two bitter factions to a truce long enough to keep the star-crossed lovers from fleeing home to wed.  In the meantime, a seemingly well-meaning doctor returns a slightly amnesiac Skye to the Watchers Council.  Willow takes time to look into Giles’ ghost problem of his new house while an unwell Gregor Kalderash tries to hand down generations of their family’s tradition and legacy to Kennedy. In No Mercy, Gregor Kalderash begins to wine and dine the best and brightest at the Watchers Council as Rowena considers adding him to the group.  But when he makes a dire prediction about Willow’s and Faith’s futures, the two are left with an agonizing decision.  In the meanwhile, the recently returned Skye seems to be less available than she was when she was missing, setting Dawn on edge.  A chance meeting in a bar for Skye and an unexpected face-off for Kennedy and Gregor leave no room for mercy. In Birthright, Kadin Van Helsing finds the mystical ‘other half’ of the medallion left to her by her father and she begins a quest for her Birth Right as the heir of a long line of vampire hunters.  With Kennedy at her side, a trip to a mysterious cave in Amsterdam will test more than Kadin’s hunters’ instincts.  In the meantime, Dawn grows more concerned over Skye’s unusual behavior while Vi comes to grips with having killed Kennedy’s Uncle Gregor to save Willow and Faith. In Rule of Three - A baseball card, a unique friendship, and a bitter lesson in what goes-around-comes-around is in store for Shannon as she struggles with adjusting to the death of her grandfather and becomes the target for more bullying than she can take from another slayer.  Rejecting Dawn as her new Watcher and feeling confused and alone she seeks comfort in befriending a deranged creature and a newly returned Ethan Rayne only to find that neither is quite what they seem and that the Rule of Three doesn’t always hold true the way one expects. In Roses are Red a fight with a necromancer and a bloodstained knife wreck havoc on Xander and Vi via a little ghost-girl named Rose who begins to haunt Xander and the Council.  Fearing for the lives of his friends and colleagues and with no super powers of his own, the all-too-human Xander must play along until he can elicit help from Willow.  But there is no way to defeat the ghost unless Xander spills Vi’s blood in a dark ritual to kill the slayer.  Meanwhile, Skye kills Bonnie and Slayer Dana, which ends up putting Faith and Kennedy in a knockdown, drag-out fight…as well as Faith leaving the council without so much as a goodbye.

Faith’s own faith in herself is put to the test in The Night In Question. The senior slayer finds herself magically plucked from the highway as she flees her life and career with the Cleveland Watchers Council only to be transported to a place where she never became anything more than a rogue slayer. Here new surroundings are all but a wonderful life as Faith battles with herself in an alternate reality had the Mayor ascended. Next, with the Watchers Council searching for the escaped vampire Skye, Andrew and Tracey aren’t certain whether they’ll ever be able to spend some private time in A Road Trip To Remember. They are thrilled when they are cleared for a Valentine’s getaway to Orlando, only to find themselves pressed into service. A harrowing trip on the Everglades, a cryptic message about good-guys and bad-guys, and proof of the existence of angels turns their romantic vacation into something more sinister, while in Cleveland, Kennedy must search for Skye and for some inner acceptance of the beating she herself took at Faith’s hands. With the capture of Skye, Buffy Summers must accept that her little sister Dawn has grown up as Dawn struggles to accept that Skye is lost to her. In 59:23, less than an hour is all it takes for the Council to be put to the severest test of its strength and its weaknesses. In a race against time, the entire Cleveland Council must stop the detonation of a mystical bomb -- with the destructive force of cataclysmic proportions -- hidden somewhere in Cleveland before the hour runs out. As they disperse throughout the city, the Watchers, Slayers and Wiccans, and the maverick vampire Skye, must work in small, unusual teams under a new kind of pressure – incompatibility. In the next episode, beauty’s only Skin Deep – but there are some wounds that go even deeper as Willow, Ro, Ken and Faith all discover. Reaching a crossroads in their relationships, Willow and Rowena must come to terms with the inherent differences in their perspectives on life and the Council, while Kennedy and Faith must choose to either strengthen their friendship or abandon it entirely. As Xander and Vi finally settle back into a comfortable rapport, Willow befriends a woman whose life has been spent trying to escape her own demon and Rowena gains two quiet new friends to help her get through some lonely nights, two cats she names Marco and Polo. In Strange Bedfellows, Kadin’s testing days are never over, it seems, as the Watchers Council tries to determine if she is cut out to be a member of their force. Quick to act first and obey orders later, Kadin’s hunter reflexes are proving to be a sticking point for the Watchers leadership and slayer patrols. While Dawn and Jeff search tome after tome for a spell or a curse that will help to restore Skye’s soul, Kennedy is pressed into service to test Kadin’s ability to adapt from loner to team player. The hunter and slayer’s trust of one another is also put to the test when they are sent to exterminate a nest of vampires, unaware of the two queens at the center of the nest are Harmony and Luna; the strangest of Strange Bedfellows any hellmouth ever saw. With Very Bad Ideas, more than one person has come up with Very Bad Ideas as Dawn discovers a way to re-ensoul Skye, a Fellowship of less than Tolkien-esque ideals begins to spread its reach into the city of Cleveland, and Andrew gets the gang involved in the home version of the Newlywed Game. Jeff’s urging leads Dawn to begrudgingly seek the Coven’s help in retrieving Skye’s soul, while the Fellowship of Shadows retrieves a she-wolf from confinement and Marsha the dragon sniffs out Ethan Rayne in his usual place – in the middle of all the trouble. But things stand to get worse when Rowena receives a missive from the other Councils. The Watcher chooses love over duty and looks for a replacement.

In Rules of Engagement, a nest of Strieaufix demons is in the slayers’ sights. At the same time, Buffy Summers is brought to the Watchers Council by Rowena to man her chair while Dawn strikes out on her own in a bid to get Skye’s soul back. An unexpected meeting with an old acquaintance and a dire warning may not be enough to keep Dawn from a path that could have future repercussions. In the meantime, Faith, now stripped of her Council duties, goes head-to-head with a barroom full of demons, unaware of the insidious presence of the mysterious Dr. Wagner. More -- and now highly visible -- attacks against the citizens of Cleveland and a demon’s odd comment about an impending battle stand out in warning to the Watchers. In Foucault’s Pendulum, an encounter with a harbinger of a doomed future for the Watchers and Slayers along with an alliance with Council members destined to be born three hundred years from now, are at the epicenter of Foucault’s Pendulum. Buffy has gone on a trip to help lay the groundwork for bringing all the world’s Watchers Councils together in one big dialogue. But a dialogue of another sort is going on between Rowena and a mysterious time traveler claiming to be the last of the Watchers and who brings with him a message of three devastating wars that pit slayer against slayer. There is only one slayer in all the world who can counter the pendulum of history’s never-changing course. But will it be enough to counter all the tragedies that lie ahead for her friends and for the Council? In the next episode, The Secret Life of DJ Trace, What do vampires juiced on juiced-up victims, freelance slayers playing by their own rules, a computer professor with a knack for robotics, Darth Vader, Reteesk, Romeo and Juliet, and a chorus line to end all chorus lines have in common? They’re all part of just another ordinary week at the Watchers Council as Tracey’s college radio show turns into more than just background noise for studious geeks in the Secret Life of DJ Trace. With less than a little prodding, Tracey fights for a strange little boy, her grades, and her listener’s attention as she takes her audience on a magical mystery tour, Watchers-style. 

In Ouroboros, a strange temple is unearthed on a construction site and the Watchers Council is called in to investigate the unlikely archeological find. The appearance of two sets of lawyers, whose interests in the Temple are both strong but unspecified, puts the Council on notice. Needing brains more than brawn on the case, Willow and Giles begin to unravel the mysteries of the Ouroboros only to find themselves trapped in the collapsed ruins. As each minute passes, Giles’s life fades while family and friends tearfully gather about the elder Watcher. But Giles’s mind and soul follow the lead of a surprise guide through a temple out of time and space. Will the Watchers Council be doomed to devour itself or will the Watcher of the last Chosen One be able to pass on the lesson of the Ouroboros? In Shomer an angel appears…“For behold, I bring you tidings of great. . .” Doom. That’s what’s in store for the world as the Council members are caught off-guard by a hidden herald and a smart-mouthed lawyer who just may be right about one thing – that the world is not better off for the presence of the Watchers Council, but just the opposite! As Faith is allowed a unique revelation about slayers, the Cleveland Coven, with the help of Skye, calls Gaia – Mother Nature – for help. Buffy and Faith try to save the Council itself as Cleveland and the world at large are suddenly rent by the worst combinations of demonic and natural disasters ever seen. The Watchers Council’s last act may prove to be that of the ultimate Shomer, paying for its negligence to the world and the greater good. In the season finale, Megiddo, the world won’t listen. And what begins in Megiddo, Israel, may end in the suburbs as well as the back-alleys across the world as Hellmouths crack open with a vengeance. In spite of their best efforts to prove there are such things as monsters to the world’s citizens, the Watchers Council faces the worst enemy they have ever met: human apathy. As a pregnant Becca fights for the life of her unborn child and baby Elizabeth, Vi and the other slayers suffer losses too horrible to imagine. A temple, in the lost city of ‘Atlantis,’ holds the key to winning the fight. A devilishly tempting bargain is offered to Rowena while winged demons ravage the earth. But not all winged creatures are demons, the Council finds out when angels appear to lend a hand. Faith begins to fill a role and accept a fate that may turn the tide for all mankind and good demons everywhere but not without paying a price. (CLICK HERE to Read the Season 3 Episodes)