Buffy the Vampire Slayer Episode Inca Mummy Girl Turns 29

Part of why the streaming model of television is flawed is that so many shows get canceled after just one short season. If that had always been the policy, we would not have received most television classics. 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 improved once William Riker, played by Jonathan Frakes, stopped showing up to work clean-shaven.

In the case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, early-installment weirdness lasts for the 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.

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

In addition to vampires, Buffy and her crew spend half of the first season and part of the second season working their way through a lineup of classic Western monsters. That includes witches in “Witch,” a gender-flipped Invisible Man in “Out of Mind, Out of Sight,” species-flipped werewolves in “The Pack,” Frankenstein’s monster in “Some Assembly Required,” and a killer mummy in “Inca Mummy Girl.” If Buffy was a 2026 Netflix original, it is 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,” which is season 2, episode 4, is the second and final Buffy episode written by Matt Kiene and Joe Reinkemeyer. They subsequently left to work on Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda. It is also one of the last episodes in the informal monster arc, as well as 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, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, expects 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 jewelry off an ancient Incan mummy and instead breaks its protective seal. The mummy wakes up, drains his life force, and takes the place of Buffy’s exchange student under the name Ampata, played by Ara Celi from From Dusk Till Dawn 3.

Unusually for Buffy antagonists, Ampata is not particularly interested in random carnage. She is already fluent in English because she listened to people while her sarcophagus toured the United States. She immediately strikes up a romance with Xander, played by the late Nicholas Brendon. Left to her own devices, Ampata probably would 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 forces her to drain life from others to stay alive. Eventually, she grows hungry enough to try to kill Willow, played by Alyson Hannigan, but Xander offers himself instead. Ampata cannot bring herself to feed from him and reverts to her original mummified state. Buffy pulls her off Xander, and Ampata is brittle enough that she shatters on the floor.

The two biggest impacts of “Inca Mummy Girl” on the series are the introduction of Oz, played by Seth Green, who becomes Willow’s love interest, and fuel for a running joke about Xander having a type for dangerous women. The show is only 16 episodes old at this point, and Xander has already dated a monster twice. He will not stop.

The tale of the (mummy) tape

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

To some extent, that is not fair. A number of early Buffy episodes get downranked because they predate the show figuring itself out. They are not bad television, but they are not the kind of Buffy episode the series eventually built its reputation on. This feels 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 is a lot here that Buffy quickly abandoned over the course of Season 2, mostly to its benefit.

It is hard not to feel for Ampata, who serves as a deliberate contrast to Buffy. Both characters were chosen from obscurity for divine tasks they dislike, and both would rather live ordinary lives. The main flaw in the script is that it underexplains Ampata in favor of focusing on how her presence affects Willow and Xander. The episode would be stronger with more interaction between Ampata and Buffy, alongside more clarity about what Ampata is actually supposed to be. As aired, viewers are given just enough information to wonder whether Ampata’s death caused more problems than it solved.

As aired, “Inca Mummy Girl” is forgettable, which is a poor look for an episode of such an influential show. If you are a new viewer, it is not terrible, but like most of the first half of Season 2, it mostly exists to kill time and slowly build out the cast.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is streaming on Hulu.

Source: Polygon