"This Year's Girl" is the fifteenth episode of the fourth season of the American supernatural drama television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

In the series, Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is a Slayer, a teenage girl endowed with superhuman powers to fight evil forces.

"This Year's Girl" is the first half of a two-part story arc featuring the return of the rogue Slayer Faith (Eliza Dushku), who Buffy put into a coma in the season three finale.

Faith's arc is also tied in with characters like Riley Finn (Marc Blucas) and Spike (James Marsters), who are experiencing identity crises of their own.

", but critics were still excited to see Faith and the Mayor again, with Vox's Constance Grady saying the rogue Slayer's return was a refreshing break from the season's "dull" main narrative.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an American supernatural drama television series created by Joss Whedon[4] that ran for seven seasons from 1997 to 2003.

[5] In the series, Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is a Slayer, a teenage girl endowed with superhuman powers to fight vampires, demons and other evil forces.

With her mother Joyce (Kristine Sutherland), she moves to the fictional town of Sunnydale where she befriends Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan) and Xander Harris (Nicholas Brendon), both of whom help her in the fight against evil.

Faith originally joins the Scooby Gang but betrays Buffy to team up with the evil Mayor (Harry Groener).

[8] Buffy discovers a covert military organization hidden beneath the campus called the Initiative that captures and performs experiments on vampires and demons.

She finally awakens from her coma to find that Buffy has killed the Mayor and eight months have passed since the high school's graduation day.

[12] The episode explores Faith's yearning for a family following the death of her father figure, the Mayor, and her resentment towards Buffy for having a loving home.

Even though it was very troublesome for the production to shoot with real fire, Petrie wanted to create a homely atmosphere in the scene to emphasize Giles and Buffy's father–daughter relationship in contrast to Faith's isolation.

Faith also mentions a "little sis coming" in the dream, foreshadowing the arrival of Buffy's younger sister Dawn Summers in the fifth season.

"[17] In their book discussing existentialism in Whedon's works, Michael J. Richardson and J. Douglas Rabb analyzed the episode through the lens of Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of "the Look of the Other",[21] whereby an individual's self-identity is predicated on how others perceive them.

"[21] The original broadcast was watched by 5.75 million viewers, making it the 88th most-watched prime time network television program for the week of February 21 to 27, 2000.

[11][24][25] Even then, BBC Cult TV's Kim still found the episode really fun and credited the writers with integrating a returning character like Faith into the season so well.

Club's Noel Murray said that by showing the audience Faith's point of view at the start, "This Year's Girl" helps build sympathy for the character in a way that is key for the next episode to resonate.

His colleague Steve thought the Mayor's taped message was a standout and praised Dushku's acting in that scene, writing, "[her] silent reactions were affecting and sympathetic in a role that rarely allows for subtlety".

[25] Re-examining the series for its 20th anniversary, Vox's Constance Grady also found Faith's return an exciting break from the boring Initiative-focused plot lines.

[30] Similarly, Alyx Dellamonica of Tor.com deemed the ending fight their "all-time favorite" of the series, saying the tension was heightened by "the familiarity of the setting and the scale of the destruction".