The Puppet Show (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

"The Puppet Show" is the ninth episode of season 1 of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The episode aired on The WB on May 5, 1997. It was written by story editors Rob Des Hotel and Dean Batali, and directed by Ellen S. Pressman.

Sunnydale High School's annual talent show serves as a backdrop for murder when Buffy must catch a knife-wielding stealer of human organs. Meanwhile, the new principal is a discipline-loving brute who forces Giles to run the talent show and orders Buffy, Xander, and Willow to perform.^[1]

Unseen, someone watches a ballet dancer, Emily, stretching backstage. On the stage, Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) sings off-key while auditioning for the Sunnydale Talent Show. Giles (Anthony Head) interrupts her, eager to put an end to her singing. Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Xander (Nicholas Brendon), and Willow (Alyson Hannigan) tease Giles as he complains that Snyder (Armin Shimerman), the school's new principal, put him in charge of the talent show to have more contact with the students. When Snyder overhears the Scoobies making fun of Giles, he punishes them by forcing them to participate in the talent show, making it clear that he's far different from Mr. Flutie because he's not interested in making friends with his students. The next audition is Morgan and his ventriloquist's dummy, Sid, and Buffy confesses to being freaked out by dummies. Morgan's act takes a sudden turn for the better when Sid suddenly develops a personality and starts making sarcastic comments about the act.

Alone in the locker room, Emily hears a noise. She screams as a demonic voice whispers, "I will be flesh."

The talent show rehearsals continue with Marc (Burke Roberts), an unsuccessful magician. Buffy, Willow, and Xander debate what to do for the talent show and settle on a dramatic scene because it does not require any actual talent.

Snyder explains to Giles that he will run a safer, more disciplined school, only to be interrupted by the discovery of Emily's body. Her heart has been cut out with a knife, and the Scoobies debate whether the killer is a demon or human.

Buffy, Willow, and Xander 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, Principal 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.

When Buffy goes to sleep, Sid waits until the lights are off and sneaks into her bedroom. When she hears his footsteps, she wakes up and sees him sitting on her bed. Buffy screams and Joyce rushes in, but Sid escapes before he is discovered. The next morning, Buffy has a hard time convincing the Scoobies that Sid broke into her room. Giles mentions a group of demons that need human organs to maintain their humanity, or they will revert back to their original form.

After a teacher confiscates Sid for disturbing class, Xander steals him so Buffy can talk to Morgan alone. She searches for Morgan backstage, and Snyder is again displeased with her being where she does not belong. In the library, Willow finds references to another possible explanation — animated dummies might harvest organs to become humans. Suddenly, Xander notices that Sid is missing.

Buffy finds Morgan's body, missing his brain, just as a chandelier falls on her. When she tries to stand up, Sid attacks her with a knife. During their fight, they realize they both have the same goal: to stop the demon.

In the library, Sid explains that he is a demon hunter, cursed to dummy form. To break the curse, he must kill the Brotherhood of Seven, a group of demons that harvest organs to maintain their human form. He's killed six, and only one remains. Sid reveals that he will die when the curse breaks, something he accepts. Realizing the demon has what it needs, they theorize it will be moving on and will be whoever is missing from the show. Sid suggests Giles form a "power circle" to find out which student is missing, but everyone is present.

Buffy discovers Morgan's brain, and the Scoobies learn 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 evening, Buffy, Xander, and Willow perform a scene from Oedipus Rex with a remarkable lack of talent. After Xander forgets his line, Willow runs off the stage.

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]

Cordelia sings "The Greatest Love of All," the song made famous by Whitney Houston.

Xander says, "Does anybody else feel like they’ve been Keyser Söze'd?" This is a reference to the 1995 movie The Usual Suspects, in which Keyser Söze was the name of a legendary master criminal.

Willow's stage fright is also observed in "Nightmares," in "Restless," in "The Yoko Factor," in "Real Me,"and to a lesser extent in "Once More, With Feeling," when she was the only main character not to sing a great deal.

"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]

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• "The Puppet Show" at IMDb