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This episode is one of the best of the first season and is the first one to focuss mainly on Xander.
The Pack is an episode that shows us the reality of school bullies, but-as allways in buffy-with a weird twist.
On a school trip to the zoo, Xander chases four bullies into a hyena exhibit. Here they all become possesed by the spirits off the hyena's. Like "cool kids" everywhere the five maintain a pack mentalitty. Xander starts acting pretty
weird. One off the best scenes in this episode is when he tells willow he's glad he won't have to look at her "pasty face" any longer. You can truly see the horror on willows face when Xander, the boy she's been in love with for like
forever, starts acting uot what must be her greatest nightmare (even vampires and things like that are not as scary as beeing rejected by the one you love).
Another great scene in this episode is when buffy confront giles with the problem: He pints out to buffy that the three main traits of the "animal behaviour"she says Xander is showing (picking on the weak , spending all his spare time "lounging with imbiciles" and changing clothes and attitude) are all normal behaviour for a teenage boy and thus diagnoses him as such. Yhe "of couse you'll have to kill him" comment is great here. At this point in the show joss has made sure that if you didn't see what he meant to point out in this episode before (the brutelness of bullies),
you'll certanly get it now. The episode also gives us onother look in what Xander wants. When he's possesed by the hyena he try's to "rape" buffy and when he gets unpossesed(is that a word?) the first thing he does is save willow.
To willow this must be confusing: she truly does not know what Xander wants. The viewer knows better though;
the way xander acts shows that he want's buffy and that he cares deeply for willow as a friend, but( unfortunatly for willow) not more than that, at least not at this moment...
This episode also was the end for everyone's favorite principle: Principale Flutie. The death off this character showed us that Joss isnt afraid to kill of a character (as we'll see again in season two....). The death of principale Flutie didn't come as abig surprise to me though, he was just to nice and naive to survive on the hellmouth.

That's all for now.
 

If you have any comments about this episode please feel free to e-mail me