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Exeter is now a stop for a very strange tour bus - and someone on the bus is a killer! The Slayers East find themselves playing Miss Marple for a most unusual group of suspects. Also: Lex Madsen invites Candy on to the payroll! (Air Date: 26 September, 2000)

Regulars:

• Candy
• Cynth
• Zak
• Brian

Other Characters:

• Meryll Stevens-Knight - Candy's mother
• Hubert Cheyne - Candy's new Watcher
• Louis Monagan - entrepreneurial tour operator
• Sophie - Louis' tough-minded young assistant
• The Yang Sisters - three mysterious oriental ladies
• Knussus, and slave - a Halian demon and its box-carrying slave
• Villa Plumridge - fanboy of the supernatural
• Cholastrick and Weckling - rock-eating Pokrin demons
• Laysier - sultry Bastic demon
• Ethel and Sid - two vampires from Florida
• The Ropes - two vampires from Baltimore who only say 'rope'
• Ult - a gigantic Nordic troll
• Cinema vampire - He wasn't staked in the cinema.

Episode Synopsis:

Detailed synopsis here

Different detailed synopsis here

After a visit to an ice show, the Stevens-Knight family stumble across a vampire menacing a young woman. In the process of saving her, she hears that Candy is the slayer...

The whole clan is present for slayer training, too, which makes Candy grumpy. The team decide to visit Mr Pipe to ask him some tough questions. At the Langborn Estate, now a construction zone, Mr Pipe doubles Madsen's offer for Candy to work for him, and puts Madsen's people to work investigating St Aaron's Wort. But Langborn Estate was being watched - by a strange tour bus. And on the bus, the girl from before.

The team set about investigating the bus, and Zak tracks it to an isolated spot where he discovers its a tour of weird and supernatural places - with some weird and supernatural tourists aboard. The team turns up at a haunted theatre and confronts the tour. Louis Monagan, tour organiser, smooth-talks them along for the ride. Surprisingly, one of the tourists, Ult the Troll, is an old friend of Hube! With this contact established, a deal is struck - the tour will keep a low profile and be gone the next day. Zak warns the girl, whose name is Sophie, to be careful - she waves him off.

The next morning, however, as the team heads out to check on the bus, it turns out Zak's warning was prophetic - a young transient has been killed at the scene. As the tour operator tries to get the tour packed up and out of there, Candy and the others investigate the numerous suspects. Finally, the perpetrator is revealed - Knussus, a strange spider-thing that lives in a box, had inadvertantly allowed its hulking slave to kill someone.

The team proposes to Louis that the slave be left behind for the police, to be arrested and stand trial for the murder, while the tour bus goes on its way. But the slave isn't the only one who stays - so too does SOphie, saddened by the loss of life, and given an offer of a place to stay by Candy.

Trivia and Notes:

• Pre-production notes for the episode (.pdf file, 98K)
• This episode was meant to introduce a new regular character, the character of Sophie, but other commitments meant Sophie was scaled back to a minor recurring role. The planned dispute between Candy and Cynth which did not eventuate removed some of the context for this character, who was meant to provide a 'bad' friend for either Cynth or Candy while they were alienated from each other.
• This episode was a murder mystery in the classic Agatha Christie mold - a wealth of colourful suspects, and a complicated series of events putting nearly all of them at the scene of the crime.
• This episode also marks the first appearance in the Buffy mythos of a large blue-skinned nordic troll, here named Ult. This exact type of troll later appeared in the Buffy episode 'Triangle', first broadcast in the US on January 9, 2001.
• Other suspects included the rope vampires, who were personal favourites of several cast members, and Laysier, a Bastic demon like Berrisker from season one's fifth episode, Lion Eyes.
• "Then Brian bought us ice cream and the vampire from the cinema that I didn't get last time attacked this girl outside the 7-11 so I chased him down adn staked him. Then I got to eat the strawberry ice cream and it was all soft and gooey." - from Candy's diary