"Teacher's Pet" is not a good episode. Where "The Witch" [1x03] comes together as a coherent, albeit relatively unimportant, stand-alone story "Teacher's Pet" simply can't completely work out what it wants to be and is further bogged down by blunt exposition. While the episode gives Xander the most screen time he's gotten yet and establishes his tendency to be, as Willow will later say, "a demon magnet," it doesn't really give much new insight into Xander that we already didn't know. So on just about every level the episode fails at what it's trying to do.

The primary structural problem with "Teacher's Pet" involves its decision to split our attention between an overly comical 'fork' vampire and the primary monster of the week: the ridiculous she-mantis. The only purpose of the former is to further add a sense of mystery surrounding Angel while conveniently using the vampire to both expose and locate Ms. French. The predominant purpose of the latter seems to be to highlight the potency of teen sexuality, using Xander as the springboard, while also touching on the subject of female teachers sexually abusing their students. I'll concede that some of this does resonate a little due to both Buffy's rejection of Xander in "Prophecy Girl" [1x12] and S2's focus on youthful romanticism, but the execution, depth, and relevance of these ideas as presented are downright laughable at times.

Where the episode does earn a few points is in its nuggets of deeper insight into the nature of Xander's interest in Buffy. This insight doesn't cast a particularly positive light on Xander's motives. In the opening dream sequence, for example, he sees Buffy as a girl who is significantly weaker and less assertive than he knows she really is. Xander seems to have also given himself a boost of confidence, assertiveness, and borderline arrogance that Dream-Buffy swoons over. While I totally understand how raw sexual desire can easily manifest itself in a dream, what concerns me is Xander's subconscious desire to weaken Buffy so he feels manlier. This is doing Buffy, as a person, a great disservice. At this point in time I'm actually glad Buffy doesn't have any romantic interest in Xander.

Although I feel I've been justifiably harsh on Xander's motives, I'm willing to give him credit for evolving as the series progresses. Even though, after "Teacher's Pet," Xander still has a lot of very selfish traits to work through, he does largely drop the "I'm not man enough" shtick and deserves props for overcoming that instinct as Buffy once again saves his life. "Teacher's Pet" doesn't even seem aware that this bit of growth even happened though, as it's his actions in following episodes that indicate a change.

"Teacher's Pet" has a few half-cooked ideas and a drop of retrospective character growth, but it just completely fails to pull all of these elements together into something coherent, enjoyable, intelligent, and smart. This failure, combined with S1's trademark production values from Joss Whedon's pocket, make for quite a poor episode. It's a broken episode story-wise, theme-wise, and character-wise which all manifest as one of the worst episodes in the entire series.