YMMV / Buffy the Vampire Slayer S4E22 "Restless"

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The Cheese Man, who shows up in all the protagonists dreams, and... offers them cheese. Word of God is that it was meant to be utterly nonsensical.
• Bizarro Episode: The episode starts like this. Eventually what's going on is clarified, as well as the fact that it contains large amounts of foreshadowing.
  Joss Whedon: (*commentary*) It ended up being a forty-minute tone poem, and...I can't write poetry.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The Cheese Man is a minor role, meant to be just another "weird" detail of the dreams, but he still became a big hit with the fandom. The closest he ever got to returning was archive footage of him appearing in "Storyteller" during a dream montage.
• Faux Symbolism: The guy with the cheese slices. When asked about what he represented, Joss Whedon said he was inserted specifically to be a meaningless element of a densely symbolic episode.
  Buffy: Well, at least you all didn't dream about that guy with the cheese. I don't know where the hell that came from.
• Genius Bonus: While to the vast majority of the show's audience the Greek letters Willow writes on Tara's back will be undecipherable, the inscription is an invocation to Aphrodite, which is responded to by the goddess's promise to make whoever the poet desires love her back in return "if she does not love, soon she shall love - even unwilling". The particular verse has special meaning for the pair - Sappho and Aphrodite as representative of their being lesbian and witches respectively, but also on another level because Willow in the future will indeed use magic to sustain her love with Tara.
• Les Yay: Tara, of all people, is Buffy's dream guide. This makes more sense when you realise that her role was originally meant for Angel.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?: According to Joss Whedon, the Cheese Man doesn't symbolise anything; he's just one of those weird things that happen in dreams. Not that it has stopped fans from analysing him and making interpretations that actually make sense within the themes of the episode in particular and the show in general.

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