Inca Mummy Girl

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"Inca Mummy Girl" is episode 4 of season 2 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Plot

Sunnydale High students are on a field trip to a museum exhibiting a mummified Incan girl. A joker stays behind after hours to steal the seal that the mummy has in her grip. When he accidentally breaks the artifact, the mummy girl pulls him into the casket and sucks up his life. After overhearing about the foreign exchange student Buffy is expecting, the mummy goes to the Sunnydale Bus Depot to assume his identity. The 500-year-old girl becomes Ampata. Xander falls head over heels for the Latin beauty. Ampata tells Giles that the man on the seal with a knife represents a bodyguard. When Xander and Ampata are hanging out, the bodyguard appears again. A shaken Ampata urges Giles to destroy the seal. She is attacked in the ladies' room but sucks the bodyguard dry. Xander takes her to the dance, but she starts to shrivel again. She runs off mid-dance to look for another life to suck. Xander tracks her down and kisses her; he passes out. Meanwhile, Buffy and Giles finds out the truth. Giles goes to the museum to reassemble the seal while Buffy races to the dance. At the museum, Buffy saves Giles, Xander saves Willow. Ampata crumbles.

Continuity

• Inca Mummy Girl introduces Oz, who will be a regular character until Season 4.
• This episode also introduces Jonathan, a recurring character throughout the remainder of the series. Jonathan becomes part of the main villainous trio in Season 6.
• In later episodes characters will allude to "Inca Mummy Girl" (as they call her), as one of several examples of evil supernatural women Xander has fallen for (others being the demonic Ms. French and Anya).

Reception

“Inca Mummy Girl” pulled in an audience of 3.2 million households.

Quotes and trivia

• There is a black and white oval sticker labeled by the letters "WP" seen behind Xander when he says to Ampata, "Why'd you run away?". The letters stand for the southern jam/rock band Widespread Panic. The same sticker appears in a number of episodes : "Halloween", "Bad Eggs", "Surprise", "Phases", "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered", "Becoming (Part 2)", "Dead Man's Party", "A New Man", "Wild at Heart", "The Yoko Factor", and "The Replacement". Later, starting in Season 4, Buffy and Willow have a Widespread Panic poster in their dorm room.

• David Boreanaz (Angel) does not appear in this episode.

• Xander's costume for the exchange-student dance references the Man with No Name, the character that Clint Eastwood plays in "The Dollars Trilogy". When Buffy asks about his costume, he explains that he is from "the country of Leone, it's in Italy, pretending to be Montana"--a further reference to the Spaghetti Westerns directed by Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone.