A Humble Critique
Among fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, episode 54, "The Prom", is often mentioned as one of the best in the entire series. Indeed, the show does have a lot going for it - Buffy's bittersweet last dance with Angel before he heads to LA, the beginning of Xander and Anya's relationship, and that excellent "Class Protector" presentation. But it has one glaring flaw which is usually overlooked - a very out-of-character peek into Buffy's taste in childrens' television. Writer Marti Noxon generally knows the Buffy characters very well, but she steps way out of line with this episode.

Early on, Buffy dreams she and Angel are getting married, and the priest in her dream looks exactly like George Frankly from the beloved PBS series Mathnet. The priest is an authority figure, granting to Buffy in her dreams the wedding she'll never have in reality. As a policeman, Officer Frankly often helped kids with math-related trouble. Therefore, he is a natural to appear in a dream as a benefactor. It's not natural, however, for Frankly to appear in the dreams of our Buffy. It simply goes against everything we've ever learned about the character.

If Mathnet is still affecting her subconscious a decade after it was on the air, it stands to reason that Buffy was a huge fan. But Buffy simply doesn't strike me as the type of person who would have watched Mathnet regularly. She has always shown very little interest in school, and we can assume this tendency was even stronger when she was a young girl. She's expressed a disdain for the subject in several episodes, and frequently asks her friends to "do the math". She doesn't want to do it herself!

The only way Frankly's appearance could make sense would be if Willow was a fan, and had recently shown Buffy some episodes. Willow, who has expressed a fondness for math on multiple occasions, is a much more likely candidate to have grown up loving Mathnet. The possibility that she and Buffy had been watching it shortly before this episode is slim, however, as much is said in this episode about how hectic the gang's lives had been recently. They simply wouldn't have had time to sit down and watch ten-year-old educational televison.

It's pretty safe to say that Marti Noxon loved Mathnet herself, and desperately wanted to insert a reference into a Buffy episode. But rather than find a place where the reference would make sense, and perhaps even reward long-time fans, she hastily stuck it in the first place she could find room. That's just plain lazy, and Noxon should be ashamed of herself. She did Buffy and its fans a disservice by falling short of the high standards the show usually maintains.