I recall reading negative opinions of it on the ATV Club threads (although maybe I'm confusing it with "when she was bad"? But I don't get the sense of Anne being loved in that corner of fandom, although S3 was generally considered the best season (aka, the "we love the early seasons and everything else was shit" faction.)

But if you think about it, the episode also is a statement of where the show is at that point: it's before things get complicated and messy, before the moral grayness of the later seasons. At that point in the series Buffy's confidence isn't broken by abandonment issues, so she can look danger in the eye and say "I am Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

*nods* I've also read comments that AtS was morally greyer than BtVS but they are very different shows; Buffy is a coming-of-age story, and AtS gets to build on the back of that.

In terms of being broken, she's very close, closer than I was aware of at the time. She's utterly distraught when Angel returns in Beauty and the Beasts.

(again, abandonment issues tear our girl apart, thank you very much, Angel and Riley!),

WORD to recognizing Riley's role in her abandonment issues! At the ATV Club he was just dismissed as "boring"; and I don't find a lot of discussion about how he added to her emotional trauma (it's always about Angel.) Angel may have got there first - actually Hank did - but I think that his leaving her had huge repercussions, or much more than generally acknowledged as far as I've seen. Riley is a lot more like Angel IMO than not, in terms of how he regards and treats Buffy (as opposed to exterior looks.)