Doppelgangland

Plot

Anya’s attempt to get D’Hoffryn to give her demonic powers back fails. Principal Snyder pressures Willow into tutoring Percy West, a basketball player. Willow hacks into Mayor Wilkins’s files at Giles’s request, but Faith discovers this and tells the Mayor. The Mayor gives Faith a fully furnished apartment and reveals he intends to have Willow killed. Percy expects Willow to do his homework, and she doesn’t correct him. Feeling frustrated and rebellious, Willow argues with Buffy and Xander, saying she might change her look and behavior, then leaves. While helping Anya with a spell to find a lost amulet, Willow’s magic goes wrong and pulls in a vampire version of herself from an alternate reality created by Cordelia’s wish that Buffy never came to Sunnydale. Neither Willow nor Anya understands what they’ve done.

Vampire Willow finds Sunnydale peaceful, with more humans than vampires and no fear or corruption. She goes to the Bronze, fights Percy, and throws him across a pool table. She encounters her former lover Xander, who is alive, and sees Buffy, whom she hates. She shows her vampire face to them. Two vampires sent by the Mayor attack her, but she convinces them to join her. Buffy and Xander tell Giles that Willow is dead and turned into a vampire, but the real Willow shows up to prove them wrong. No one knows where Vampire Willow came from.

Angel and Anya go to the Bronze, where Oz is playing with his band. Vampire Willow and her new followers arrive and take the crowd hostage. Angel escapes to get Buffy. Anya realizes what happened and offers to send Vampire Willow back to her world if she helps retrieve the amulet, suggesting they capture the other Willow for the spell. Angel, Buffy, and Xander head to the Bronze, but Willow goes back for a tranquilizer gun and is grabbed by her double. Willow manages to shoot the vampire with the tranquilizer. The others return to the library after learning Vampire Willow is at the school, and they lock the unconscious vampire in a cage. Willow swaps clothes with her to impersonate the doppelganger, and they go back to the Bronze.

Reception

When "Doppelgangland" first aired on The WB on February 23, 1999, it pulled a Nielsen rating of 4.1 and became the network’s second most-watched program that week. The episode puts Willow front and center, and series creator Joss Whedon ranks it as his fifth favorite episode of the show, explaining that "one Willow is certainly not enough." Malinda Lo of AfterEllen.com also placed it in her top ten, and Alyson Hannigan—who plays Willow—has called it one of her personal favorites from the series. Billie Doux gave the episode a perfect 4 out of 4 stakes, praising how the well-worn evil-double trope was handled with exceptional cleverness and humor, noting that the one-liners came fast and everyone stayed perfectly in character. She highlighted Hannigan’s superb work as Willow, vamp Willow, and Willow pretending to be vamp Willow. On TV.com, the episode holds an average score of 9.5 out of 10 from 658 user ratings. Vox ranked it number 13 out of all 144 episodes, remarking that watching Willow grapple with an alternate-reality version of herself is even more rewarding with knowledge of later seasons—specifically the "Hands! Hands!" moment—and calling it an understatement to say Hannigan shines in both roles. The review also noted the first appearance of Anya after losing her powers, describing her as impatient and frustrated, unable to order a beer, and endearing even as she nearly derails the gang’s plan. Noel Murray of The A.V. Club called the episode terrific on many levels—dialogue, plot twists, and character moments—but emphasized its greatest strength as showing how the writing staff remembered and reused earlier elements of the Buffyverse, binding the series together with elements that still had plenty of life left in them.