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. "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).
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