29 Years Ago, 'Buffy's Worst Episode Ever Paved the Way for TV Greatness

Thankfully, the show moved on from episodes like this one

Part of why the streaming model of TV is flawed is that so many shows get canceled after just one short season. If that had always been the policy, we wouldn't have gotten most of the classics of television, as every show usually needs at least a few episodes to work out its early kinks. This process is sometimes referred to as "growing the beard," a reference to Star Trek: The Next Generation, which only got good once William Riker (Jonathan Frakes) stopped showing up to work clean-shaven. (That was probably a coincidence.)

In the case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, its early-installment weirdness lasts for its first 18 episodes. While there are a few standouts, such as "Nightmares," "Angel," and "Prophecy Girl," early Buffy relied heavily on a monster-of-the-week format.

It's important to remember here that Buffy began its run as a mid-season replacement. All that was really being asked of it early on was to fill a hole in the network schedule. The show was initially made as a throwaway, and many of Buffy's early episodes are deliberately disposable.

In addition to the vampires, Buffy and her crew spend half of the first and part of the second season working their way through a murderer's row of classic Western monsters. That includes witches ("Witch"), a gender-flipped Invisible Man ("Out of Mind, Out of Sight"), some species-flipped werewolves ("The Pack"), Frankenstein's monster ("Some Assembly Required"), and a killer mummy ("Inca Mummy Girl"). If Buffy was a 2026 Netflix original, it’s hard to imagine it lasting past its first eight-episode season, and “Inca Mummy Girl” is a good example of why.

Parallel lives

"Inca Mummy Girl" (season 2, episode 4) is the second and final Buffy episode written by Matt Kiene and Joe Reinkemeyer, who subsequently left to work on Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda. It's also one of the last episodes in Buffy's informal monster arc, as well as (not entirely justly) one of the worst-regarded episodes of the show as a whole.

When "Inca Mummy Girl" begins, Sunnydale High is warming up for its annual cultural exchange program. Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is expecting a Peruvian student to room with her for a few weeks.

During a field trip to a local museum, another Sunnydale student tries to steal some jewelry off an ancient Incan mummy and instead breaks its protective seal. The mummy wakes up, drains his life force (as mummies are wont to do), and takes the place of Buffy's exchange student under the name "Ampata" (Ara Celi, From Dusk Till Dawn 3).

Unusually for Buffy antagonists, Ampata isn't particularly interested in random carnage. She's already fluent in English, as she couldn't do much besides listen to people while her sarcophagus was touring the United States, and immediately strikes up a romance with Xander (the late Nicholas Brendon). If left to her own devices, Ampata would probably have lived out a normal American life.

The only problem is that she has to kill people. Ampata was chosen as a divine sacrifice, which forced her into her current state, where she must drain the life from others to stay alive. Eventually, she gets hungry enough to try to kill Willow (Alyson Hannigan), but Xander offers himself instead. Ampata isn't able to bring herself to feed from him and reverts to her original mummified state. At that point, Ampata is brittle enough that when Buffy pulls her off of Xander, she shatters on the floor.

"Inca Mummy Girl's" two biggest impacts on Buffy as a series are the introduction of Oz (Seth Green), who becomes Willow's love interest for a while, and fuel for a running joke about Xander's thing for dangerous women. The show is only 16 episodes old at this point and Xander has already ended up dating a monster twice. He will not stop.

The tale of the (mummy) tape

Whenever someone ranks Buffy episodes, "Inca Mummy Girl" reliably ends up somewhere near the end, hanging out with hater-bait like "Beer Bad" and "Doublemeat Palace."

To some extent, that's not fair. There are a number of early Buffy episodes that later fans like to downrank because they're from before the show figured itself out. It's not that they're bad TV, but rather that they aren't the kind of Buffy episode the show eventually built its reputation on. It's particularly jarring in Season 2, which is defined by the evil-Angel plot in “Surprise” to an extent that makes every other story beat feel irrelevant.

Worse, "Inca Mummy Girl" is a Xander-heavy episode, built around the early Xander-Buffy-Willow love triangle. There's a lot here that Buffy would quickly abandon over the course of Season 2, mostly to its benefit.

It's hard not to feel for Ampata, however, who's a deliberate contrast to Buffy. Both characters were chosen from obscurity for some divine task that they aren't happy about, and both would rather be living an ordinary life. If there's one big flaw in the script, in fact, it's that it underexplains Ampata's whole deal in favor of focusing on how her presence affects Willow and Xander. It’d be a better episode if it featured more interaction between Ampata and Buffy, and more clarity as to what Ampata actually is supposed to be. As it is, we’re given just enough information that it’s hard not to wonder if Ampata’s death at the end of the episode might not have caused more problems than it solved.

As aired, "Inca Mummy Girl" is forgettable, which is a bad look for an episode of such an influential show. If you're a new viewer, it's not terrible, but like most of the first half of Season 2, it's mostly here to kill time and slowly build out the cast.

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer is streaming on Hulu.