Nursery for Nervous Nellies, basement portion. Dawn sits sulkily on the stairs. Suddenly, my TV screen fills up with a bunch of monkeys, all dressed up in platform sandals, cunning frocks, feather boas, and mascara. They form a menacing circle around Dawn. I think they're all guy monkeys, but y'know, it's a little hard to tell with the simians.

Ace: I'm slapping myself silly, yet I'm still seeing this. That lying pharmacist promised these pain-killers didn't have any "psychological" side effects.
Lead Monkey: You read Couch Baron's latest recap, right? The one with the Typing Monkeys?
Ace: Yeah, yeah, of course.
Lead Monkey: Well, we're here to help you out. We're [strikes a dramatic pose] the Action Monkeys!
Ace: If I stop taking the Vicodin, will you go away? And how, uh, are you going to help me?
Lead Monkey: We're going to bitch-slap the hell out of Dawn every time she annoys you!
Ace: Cool. Carry on!

The Action Monkeys proceed to slap Dawn silly and leave her sniveling. I feel better than I have in days and wave goodbye to the gang as they totter up the Summers's basement stairs in their fancy sandals. Meanwhile, Buffy paces impatiently, axe in hand, and the Junior Misses natter on about who can do the most one-armed chin-ups. My money is on Kennedy. Okay, one of the little twits is missing. The youngest one with the dark hair -- Zoë or Chloe or something. She's quite simply not in the entire episode, and there's never any explanation. I don't really want to get into it, because there's plenty of crap in this episode to bitch about, but to have a character not appear and pretend that the audience won't notice, and not to make even the slightest effort to slip in a line as an explanation, is crappy show-running of the most egregious sort. There's not much more to be said, except that sloppiness like this pisses me off mightily. There are all manner of continuity errors and slip-ups I can accept because I don't think making a weekly TV show is any sort of easy task, but this, my friends, is beyond the pale. Marti, I'll expect your resignation on my desk in the morning.